Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  It has just struck her that she left her child with her parents in the Motzstrasse. Where the aerial mines came down thickest.

  She won’t be held back. She doesn’t even pull on her coat. She simply runs out into the night in her dress. Since I’ve got my eye on her and don’t want her to just vanish into the night, I run after her.

  We don’t get far. At the second corner, where a building is on fire, we are thrust into a bucket brigade. An irate air-raid warden, obviously of great authority, waves a pistol in the air. He sticks it under the nose of a man who declares that he is a doctor and could probably be employed more usefully elsewhere rather than here, in this senseless attempt to pour bucketfuls of water on a blaze that no brigade can bring under control. “You will do your duty like everyone else!” screams the air-raid chief. “You know I have the right to shoot you if you resist my orders.”

  We take the opportunity to short-circuit the bucket brigade. We sheer out, passing a full bucket to the man in front and an empty bucket to the man in back. Pulling off this stupidly simple trick puts us in a good mood. We hold hands as we run through the smoking streets. But it’s a long way to the Motzstrasse, and we probably won’t get through anyhow. Flames are lighting up the sky over the ruins in the next few blocks.

  The girl (she’s so young you wouldn’t guess she had a child; a minor accident, no doubt)—the girl gets tired. Tired and cranky, like the kids in the air-raid shelter. She launches into the same pouty Berlin jargon: “Hey, man, how’re we ever gonna get to Motzstrasse if everything’s cookin’? I’m wreckin’ my shoes—just look!”

  She has an insight of stoic grandeur: “Either they managed to get out alive and everything’s fine and dandy or they’re dead. Either way, I can’t do anything.”

  We briefly reflect whether we should go back to the party. No, we can scarcely expect it to get any better. My apartment—in another highly respectable family rooming house, different from the one three years ago—is rather far away.

  “Well, then, let’s go to my place. It’s right around the next corner.” We hold hands again. You can say what you like, but it’s good to survive.

  1945, near Buchholz, on the Lüneburg Heath.

  The dawn breaks over the black saw-teeth of the pines. The sky turns cold and smooth like polished stone. A hundred yards ahead, the freight cars that have toppled from the embankment are blazing. The air smells of burning rubber—or something of the kind; the smoky flames inundate the potato field with an eerie brownish red. In the ditch a few patches of March snow are melting rosily. A handful of men are working on the tracks—six or seven, guarded by three others. The workers are convicts from Altona who wear prison uniforms with round, rimless, visorless caps. The guards are policemen. In the cattle cars of the train, which is standing by the pines, mainly women are peering out—but in their condition it is hard to tell their sex; they could just as easily be half-starved men. For three days now, I’m told, such trains have been rolling through here nonstop, supposedly to a big camp near Belsen. The strafers have set a couple of trains on fire. Perhaps some of the people have managed to sneak into the bushes, but it doesn’t matter—they won’t get far. They’re too feeble to survive outdoors, and no one will take them in and hide them—it’s too risky. They’re guarded by a single man here, an old geezer with a gigantic rifle—he looks like a home guardsman from the First World War. He carries the rifle on a strap across his back and he props his arm on the barrel like a huntsman. He only casually notices the few figures who have jumped out of the train to take a shit.

  There is something macabre yet idyllic about this dotted line along the dark stretch of the waiting train: a foreshortened row of crouchers facing in different directions with dropped pants or hitched-up skirts revealing naked, lamentably bony behinds. Completely emaciated asses, so sharp they could shit into bottlenecks . . . And one of the men embraces his thin thighs under the knees and peeps back over his shoulder—like a faithful dog that has to shit but doesn’t want to lose sight of its master. And he hops away from his pile, hops like a frog, glancing around with bulging eyes—does he have worms? In his nutritional state, he can’t possibly be constipated—or is he embarrassed? . . . At any rate, he destroys the alignment, breaks out, disrupts the parallel—he is already close to the buffers between two cars, where he probably wants to hide—aha!—where he tries to creep through and vanish in the underwood of the pines on the other side . . . He has turned his skull ahead and peeps under the buffers and is about to take his final leap . . .

  But the home guardsman has noticed something. There’s something wrong. The alignment of shitters is untidily interrupted . . . The home guardsman slowly removes his left arm from the rifle barrel; his right arm reaches for the strap; he pulls the rifle from under his armpit, takes careful aim—he’s probably taking fine sight, the target’s not more than perhaps forty paces off—and the shot sings and lashes onto the train and then across and beyond to the jagged black wall of pines, which catches it and hurls it back, making it echo, across the potato field . . . and the shitting frog simply keels over on his nose; not even his arms let go, embracing his thighs as if they were his most precious possession on earth . . . he merely keels forward, and his naked white backside is turned toward the heavens like a moon howitzer; it suddenly seems tremendous, seems to swell, a gigantic, shiny egg, as in a Bosch painting; it lacks only a huge funnel stuck in it or a crane flying up from it . . .

  1946, in a train compartment between Frankfurt and Würzburg.

  I have a travel order from the British military government, and thus I have the right to take Allied trains. In scheduled German trains—that is, the ones hung with human clusters like bacchanal festoons—I may use the cars and compartments reserved for members of the occupation forces. In the British Zone, such compartments are nearly always empty. In the American Zone, they are moving brothels for GIs riding alone or in tiny groups. Between the main stations on a given stretch, a relay service of Fräuleins has been set up. They climb in with a john at one station, screw all the way to the next station, and then pick up another client for the return trip. Commuter sex, paid for with PX commodities: cigarettes, chocolate, nylons, canned meat, coffee.

  I have come from Bad Hersfeld (from John) and am going to Nuremberg (to appear there as a witness). I have had to transfer several times: from a local to an express, from an Allied to a German train. The trip drags on and on. It is my first one after the war; I am seeing a wealth of medieval images: ruins, lunar landscapes, scattered beaten people. The Germans wear rags on their feet and coffee cozies on their heads. When they come to a railroad depot, they start out from far away, from their caves in the rubble fields. They swarm along like lines of ants, over trodden footpaths that wind through remnants of houses, right through the traces of former kitchens and parlors with nettles luxuriating in the corners.

  I see many folk tableaux: the bare breasts of nursing mothers, grandfathers carried piggyback, silent gaping faces, trembling hands spooning out bread soups, sleepers piled up like logs, waiting rooms in which people cook and launder . . . The Germans are as human as in their fairy tales: a round-eyed, wonder-eyed, thunderstruck humanity, as if they had looked into the face of God.

  The trip has been going on for days. I witness hordes of people swarming onto incoming trains, human surf breaking against the sides of railway cars, foaming up over the roofs and sticking there. Every train is crusted over with people like an old ship’s hull with barnacles. When the train chugs out of each station, it drags along human seaweed, human sludge . . .

  Over all this, there are yellow sunups and red sundowns, pale days, lulled by the rising and falling of telegraph wires. Fluffy, feathery skies. Landscapes screwing into and twisting out of the square of the train window. Furrows in the fields, breaking open with a hum, fanning open. Gliding mountain chains, approaching hills. Embankments that hurl the scent of hay in my face and then are torn away. Black nights, the sickle moon cutting its way through
the darting clouds. Corpses of cities in the silver milk of starlight.

  I begin to settle in to my trip as to a fate that had been dealt me; I learn to adjust, to orient myself, to seize my advantage: I have to find food, occasionally wash and shave, the toilets are stuffed with people, the station kiosks are looted bare, there are fistfights over a rationed herring sandwich. But I am alone in my Allied compartment—until Frankfurt. Then the German railroad service shoves an Eastern European in on me: a Ukrainian, a displaced person en route to Munich (that much is intelligible). We get along on the handful of Russian fragments I picked up in Bessarabia. Our communication remains rudimentary, and besides, he is not very sociable. He gazes out the window and sings, sings tender, preternaturally nostalgic songs in smoky vowels and melting labials: mnyesh-myets khroshtshuy svolyeshtschik, what do I know. Songs about his little pony or his mother, in any case about deep homesickness and a long road . . . Meanwhile, the train lumbers off again, pulling out of the human ooze, out of the desperate tumult, away from the shouts, gliding out of the floury lamplight under the shot-up station roof, heading into the abstractly alive blackness of the switch yard: bars, twisted and torn, the skeletons of charred railroad coaches, engine wrecks magically present. The down-slanting shine of the illuminated train windows wanders on, a gliding chain of yellow rectangles: they tremble over black crushed stone. The first window leaps up a sooty wall and drops back, the others follow. Rectangle upon rectangle they repeat the leap and drop back, stretch, undulate, expand, shoot out into the darkness, contract, throw themselves like folded carpets over a ramp, lose one half of themselves in a pit and pull it out again. This becomes a dance, a grotesque geometrical dance of submission, a Constructivist parody of assiduity. Rectangles squeeze into squares, squares distort into trapezoids, constrict diagonally into isosceles triangles, straddle their legs and do splits, rip apart into hyperbolas and pour into the endless night. And the wheels grind in the tracks, rattling harder and harder, more and more noisily, crackling through switch clusters, shaking and jerking through the cars, wrenching them onto the predetermined track . . . a dinosaur leaps out of the darkness and attacks the train; he is smashed back; the mammoth proboscis of a water pump makes a grab for me, black and huge, run down by the pack of train-window lights; in back of it, red and green eyes flare up, move along, and are driven away, torn into, sucked up by the general falling, receding . . .

  and the Ukrainian sings. Sings mournfully, his head bobbing. His pony weaves a bassinet, his mother waits for him, he is very homesick, and the road is long . . . svysh yaaa schtschlik kasyateee, or what do I know . . . His song has seven times seventy-seven stanzas, it is as endless as this journey, as endless as the night into which the beat of the wheels carries us, faster and faster, banging more and more breathlessly . . .

  I stand up, put out the light, and wrap myself in my coat. I want to sleep, lulled by the Ukrainian’s singsong . . . But the compartment door is yanked open, a cold gust of air smashes in, a black hand switches on the light. A giant Moor in an olive-green uniform coat is standing there, a woolen cap on his woolly skull. “Get outta here, you fuckin’ Germans!” “German yourself!” “I said, get outta here!” “I won’t. I’ve got a travel order.” “Shove it up your ass!” “All right. I’ll call the MP.” “But I got a girl.” “Who cares?” “I wanna screw her.” “Go ahead!”

  He vanishes into the dark corridor. I pull the door shut, turn off the light. He yanks the door open again and pushes the girl inside. She sits down, a ruffled blackbird, her claws holding her handbag in her lap, her face a doughy splotch with two gigantic, dark, sunken eye sockets . . .

  The Negro hangs his coat over the window to the corridor—the curtains were cut away in 1944, perhaps they were made into a child’s dress, the child is probably moldering under ruins somewhere, perhaps a corpse was wrapped in them . . .“Get to the other side!” “You might say please.”

  He bares his white teeth at me, his unspeakably pure, tenderrosy gums. A strip of light from outside sweeps across his black face, he holds out a pack of cigarettes to me. I change from my window corner to the aisle seat of the bench opposite, wrap myself in my coat, pull up my legs, and push the Ukrainian snugly into his corner.

  The Ukrainian keeps singing, unmoved, drawing the notes from his pumped-up chest, squeezing them through his larynx, mashing them into the ooze of the labials: shtcholoy vyzian beshnyevo-o-o-, or something like that . . . His pony can kick the bucket, his mother can go screw the parson, Bessarabia is far away, and homesickness fills him with dismay, like the joy under the frock, and the song is as soft as the cock . . .

  The Negro tips the girl back onto the now empty seat. I pull my coat up over my head. I don’t want to see what’s happening, I can picture it: his black paw between her legs, burrowing through the panties (if she’s wearing any), burrowing into the black fur, the middle finger groping for the wet slit, the other black paw kneading her breast . . .

  I pull my coat tight over my face. There’s a buttonhole I can peep through: monsieur le voyeur, le triste sire . . .

  In the window, the dim reflection of the compartment door through gliding nightland, with telegraph poles whirring past; black agglomerations of bosky hills under the drama of the romantic German sky; shredding clouds, racing patches of mist; and pale and plump the girl’s white thigh, rising, crooking at the knee, the stocking sliding down, the leg dangling, searching for a foothold, helpless, and behind it, in between, over it, under it, the dark mass of the Negro, his back slowly moving up and down, indolently palpitating, an olive-green torso with a black ass cut off by the white stripe of his lowered underwear, the girl’s hand on the back of his neck, as if they were dancing . . .

  Now and then, light flashes overhead: a lineman’s house with a lamp whooshes by, the lanterns of an overpass . . . And the Ukrainian, with dangling head and, no doubt, watery gaze, seeks the moon in the apocalyptic clouds and finishes his song, swallows, begins a new one, even more mournful, more nostalgic. The road is long, the vowels draw the wanderer’s weary feet from the ooze of mashed consonants: vshot-chokhoy kakda tsmyelyshnuyaaaa wayakhoy shtshaluuuy vsho-shoooo . . .

  The air in the compartment thickens, I sweat in my corner, powerless, grim, monsieur le vivisecteur . . . In his buttonhole, the dandy wears the orchid of a white female thigh with a Negro back wedged in . . .

  1946, Nuremberg.

  A treatment to harden the soul. Pastor Kneipp’s method. A ruthless alternating cure of impressions. Boiling baths and icy showers.

  I take part (in a mess-alliance, so to speak) in the glory of the victors, accusers, and judges. I am distinguished, I belong to the supermen. I eat with the Allies in the cafeteria of the Fürth courthouse. In the lascivious lard of shimmering canteen grub, six courses, splotched on a punched aluminum tray. In line. Queuing up with prison guards, tabloid reporters, file rummagers, gonorrheal secretaries—your turn, buddy. The ladle shits: brown cutlets—move along—puke of piercing green canned peas—move along—a pile of pus-yellow corn—move along—lymph of mashed potatoes—move along—a canned pineapple slice, canned condensed milk, coffee, Coca-Cola, a chocolate bar—move along—cookies, white bread, canned grapefruit juice, canned beer, cigarettes galore. . .

  Outside, the people are starving, selling their little sister or their dead son’s Knight’s Cross for a carton of Lucky Strikes. In here, we are showered with music from the loudspeaker can: “Blue moon, you saw me standing alone—without a dream in my heart—without a love of my own . . .”

  Stella. She’s the reason I’m here. Here, justice is being done before World History. Make sure you get a seat next to the black-haired girl with the pale cheeks and dark eyes. She survived the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto. You just wouldn’t believe how much knowledge goes into a pair of eyes, big and dark as they may be—she probably screws like an angel . . .

  and while we stuff our faces here and work on the choreography of mating, somewhere off at an angle, upstairs,
in one of the thousand honeycomb cells of the Fürth courthouse, the main defendants are being tried. When you’ve swallowed your canteen vittles, drunk your coffee and the rest of your canned beer, burped, put out your cigarette, wiped your kisser with the paper napkin, you can go upstairs and watch them being driven through a caged corridor like lions in a circus. The great figures of the crumbled Third Reich: Göring, Hess, Ribbentrop, Keitel, Kaltenbrunner, Frank—twenty-two men in all, accused of crimes against humanity, all kinds of war crimes, crimes against peace, conspiracy . . . Inside, they fill two rows of benches—twenty-two men of the white race, as pale as intestinal worms (they’ve been living under artificial light for nine months) but washed, clean-shaven, with clean hands and brushed suits. Göring in a kind of bridal silvery gray: double-breasted flannel jacket, marshal’s piping on the breeches, Krakoviak boots on his short, fat legs. He’s alert and lively, very interested in everything going on about him, slides around on the bench and peers everywhere. Next to him, Hess’s saurian skull looks as if it had just clambered out of a diluvial ocean, sending a first bewildered glance into the prehistoric world from beneath its overhanging bushy eyebrows—when you encounter that gaze, you are peering down two gun barrels. Ribbentrop’s bank-teller mug: empty, tight-lipped, arranged in dourly dignified wrinkles. Keitel’s maître-d’ skull. Kaltenbrunner’s dripping Aztec profile. Frank’s man-in-the-street mien puffed up with a convert’s remorse. The homosexual scrotum in Funk’s cheeks. Schacht’s Punch-and-Judy head . . .