Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  Outside, in the impoverished vending stalls of the bombed-out city, you can purchase them (with Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels in the bargain) for a handful of marks: carved as ornamental corks for liquor bottles—bottles for liquor that can’t be had anyway, that can be found only by Americans, Englishmen, Frenchmen, in the Arabian Nights bazaar of the PXs (the Russian, in any case, has no home) . . .

  and here, on the witness stand, a man whose secrets are being wormed out of him—grave worms: “So you admit that you actively participated in the mass shootings of thirty thousand Polish citizens, most of them of the Mosaic faith? Fine—now who gave the orders for this action? . . .”

  The grave worms creep through the tremendous Fürth courthouse, crawl through the labyrinth of its corridors, through the chasms of its stairwells, crawl in and out of its thousands of honeycomb cells, creep up the waxed lace-boots and into the machine-gun muzzles and under the grim chin straps and into the nostrils of the massive GIs standing guard at every corridor corner, outside every door, behind which something important might happen: “Our boys—we’re so proud of them. American boys are not like others—only American boys have mothers—that’s why they kicked the shit out of the goddamn Nazis . . .”

  and that’s why the Fräuleins suck their cocks dry. When darkness comes, the streetwalkers ripple out from Fürth to Nuremberg, throng about the railroad station (which still reeks of fire and decay and wet rust), hurry around the old city wall, the garbage-filled moat. No poor lightbulb glows on the shredded ivy of the tumbledown stone wall. There’s smooching and hootchy-kootching in the dark. Sometimes a match flares up and the night sends forth a Rembrandtesque blackamoor’s skull with a Camel in his kisser. Then someone whispers in the dark: “Sir, sir, listen, sir. My sister—sixteen years old . . .”

  But we scoot past in beat-up jeeps, whoosh through the figures, our headlights hurling them into the background of the witch-hunt. The driver’s silhouette is like cast iron, a black, helmet-crowned wedge pushing them apart. He steers the light beams with one finger, his right arm embracing the seat at his side, his left foot propped on the clapped-down windshield, his right foot pressing on the gas . . .

  we streak with the gale toward sparkling lights, a Christmas wonder candle: in a flood of neon, the Grand Hotel Excelsior rises from the German rubble-night like a mescaline vision. In the lightbulb Alhambra of the entrance, the doorman, the big fat uncle of Papa Czar, in a sky-blue admiral’s uniform, woven into the spaghetti tangle of his silver fourragères, assisted by iron men with machine guns, bayonets sticking out like flowers . . . They check the guests’ passes; he pushes them through the revolving door, bowing and scraping. “Good evening, sir! How are you tonight, sir? . . .”

  Inside, fashionable thronging and jostling at the bar. Athletic backs in olive-brown uniform jackets, rugby-player legs in officer’s pinks, bare female shoulders, Chanel No. 5 from the PX in their armpits, Kleenex-cleansed necks under the touched-up hairlines: “I want you to promise me a job in Subsequent Procedures, darling—or where else should I go when this mess is over and they’re all hanged? . . .”

  Britons here and there: a Labour MP with a pimp’s pompadour over the low furrowed forehead of a morning-gazette reader, surrounded by His Majesty’s Own Hampstead Archers: Kitchener mustaches under Semitic noses, ringdove voices, Mayfair accents with a touch of Budapest, Honvéd elegance in khaki: shoulder straps waxed to a mirror shine, discreet little stars on the epaulets. A Foreign Office man: pinstriped suit, striped shirt, striped tie, ascetic scholar’s head, boyish hair . . .

  and Frenchmen: roundly shaped, with rattails under their noses, swift mouse eyes.

  and Russians: in military tunics with board-like shoulder straps, shorn skulls, muzhik movements . . .

  a Texas parrot shriek: “Aaoouuh! so you’re a colonel—don’t tell meee!” And whiskey, bourbon, vodka, dry martinis, Bloody Marys, bloody chips, and fucking salted almonds. “Come on, have one more on me!” and a fanfare from beneath: the floor show is surging, the rumba booming. “And now, ladies and gentlemen, our greatest hit, Miss Rachel Shefczuk of the Frankfurt Stork Club in her dance of the seven veils!” Tipped breasts brought into form by uplifted arms, Grete Wiesenthal leaps ending in a split, the white crotch cracks on the dance floor, a Stars and Stripes reporter snaps flashbulb shots . . . a look around: journalist mugs in officer’s uniforms, Jewish court stenographers, female interpreters, the black-haired girl from the ghetto doesn’t seem to be here. Wonder if anything else is happening—but first something to eat . . .

  The snack bar is on the first floor, the big windows look out on the sidewalk, the room is filled with barrels of lemur food, just help yourself. Hamburgers, cheeseburgers, fuckburgers with mustard, with horseradish, with ketchup, with Tabasco sauce. Beer, tannic Chianti, Coca-Cola, orange juice, grapefruit juice, tomato juice. White bread, black bread, gray bread, milk for teetotalers, apples, pears, oranges, bananas, Japanese dwarf mandarins (canned), Chinese lichee nuts (canned) . . . Gray blobs in the blackness of the windowpanes: Nurembergers standing outside, staring in, hollow-cheeked, round eyed, wide-mouthed, gaping at this fairy-tale abundance. This can’t be real, there’s no such thing, this is verre eglomisé. They stare without expression, without greed, without envy. This is so opulent that it’s beyond their grasp. Movie splendor. The Indian Tomb, The Treasure of the Silver Lake, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. You can look at it and not even dream about it, there’s no such thing, you can’t believe that so much food can just be sitting there, all you have to do is dive in and stuff your mouth—it’s humbug, a daydream . . .

  and every half hour, one of our boys comes along—oh aren’t they wonderful—with a helmet and chin strap and chewing gum between his molars, he sticks his machine-gun muzzle into their backs and pushes them away—wiping the blackboard of the windows like a big, wet sponge.

  The street is empty. Beyond it, shredded ivy hangs on the tumbledown city walls. Where do they go when they are shooed away from here? Not over there? Not in there, behind that wall? . . .

  I’ve been there, I’ve ventured fifty or sixty feet into the necropolis of a smashed Nuremberg—and have fled back as though from a plunge into the deep, found refuge for my soul in the sparkling neon lighting of the Grand Hotel Excelsior, with whiskey, bourbon, floor shows, and Texas parrot shrieks . . .

  never, not even in my most frightening dreams, have I experienced such solitude, such an abyss of desolation. This is no ruin of a city, this is the negative of the very notion of a city. The existential void par excellence. No, they can’t possibly live there, not even a rat could live there now, it would become moonstruck, it would be frightened of ghosts, it would have to see a psychiatrist . . .

  in the daytime, it’s still bearable (although only just). A rubble field, yes indeed, but what a rubble field. Just let someone try to move freely through such a filthy anachronism: a medieval town of gingerbread houses shattered by high-powered bombs and razed to the very foundation walls. It’s almost like a murder in a nursery. Incomprehensible, repulsively brutal. A child’s hair and bloody brain-mush sticking to a smashed rocking horse . . . and crickets are chirping from the steppe grass that has grown out of the crib . . .

  you can spend hours here strolling through the brick dust without hearing any sound other than this ghostly summer chirping of crickets, without seeing anything stir. Aside from the ghostly chirping, everything is deathly silent here in Nuremberg’s old city. You tower head and shoulders above the fragments of old houses and churches. Beyond the rubble cone that gently slopes up into a hill, the castle still hovers, as though placed there from a box of toys. And at its foot (better: at its roots), a few narrow-chested half-timbered walls remain upright, a quarter of a weary old gable roof hangs askew from a chimney pillar, and timberwork torn from the walls is still supporting half of a doll’s room. It is as though in that terrible night when fire and explosives came pouring from the heavens, the tiny Gothic houses of this town tried to flee
to the old stronghold to crowd, panicked, under its protection—and the destruction caught up with them before they could get even halfway there. And the ineffable, inconceivable horror ripped them apart, halving them, quartering them, mutilating them . . . Now they stand in shreds, rooted to the spot as if by some dreadful curse . . .

  I sat down on the defense wall of the castle, letting my legs dangle, and gazing—gazing. It was a splendid day, a day in early autumn, full of misty light, and the demolished town of Nuremberg lay at my feet, flattened into its ground plan. The picturesque, medievally narrow world of nooks and crannies was vast and empty, topograpically marked off, abstractly drawn in two dimensions, like a blueprint. Only at the root of the castle trunk were those three or four ghosts of gingerbread houses still looming, caught by the spell as they fled . . .

  and they set me to thinking: I had already seen them somewhere, once. I knew their contours, sharp as if etched in silverpoint, and this faded coloring, the watercolor in the dusty wall-yellows and old brick-reds of the rubble . . . I had once painfully absorbed all this—but when? where? . . .

  When it came to me, it struck me so hard that I almost fell from my airy perch on the wall. They were the same contours, drawn with a hard pencil and sophomorically accurate, the same faded watercolors as the studies that Private First Class Adolf Hitler (at the time, more artistically than politically engaged) had doodled into his sketchbook in France during World War I: shot-up farms in September light . . . But this cannot be talked about here. Not even with the pretty survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto. This is not the time or place for cultivated salon chitchat. Important things are happening here. History has caught up with itself and is now taking place in the present, is even taking a step into the future. Here, a milestone is being placed in world history, casting a warning shadow into times to come.

  Everybody says this to himself three times a day (at lunch in the cafeteria, at cocktails in the bar of the Grand Hotel Excelsior, at the slow waltz shortly after the floor show in the Excelsior souterrain). Here too we live elevated by the magic of cant. We live in the nimbus of exceptionality. We are witnessing a historic expansion of international law. The Hague Convention of 1926 managed only to condemn war as a crime; it offered no legal sanctions against the perpetrators (much less defined the crime of conspiracy). Here they are now, the conspirators responsible for the last war, sitting as defendants in two fenced-in rows of benches, and we already know how this will end. The milestone in world history will once again be a gallows . . .

  They seem to know this themselves. They act stoic, sharply watched as they are by helmeted GIs, who, as a token of the solemnity of this historic moment, are wearing white cotton gloves on their dangling butcher paws. And across from them, raised up on a platform, enthroned at a long table, as in da Vinci’s Last Supper, sit their judges:

  in the middle looms OUR LORD JUSTICE Sir Geoffrey Lawrence, visible from the elbows to the head, an isosceles triangle (the acme pointing to God). Christian England, the bulwark of Western Civilization, invented by Dickens in his finest hour: graying in the dust of files to abstract, patriarchal justice; learnedly sucking a pencil, discreet harrumphs purging the throat, mind, and conscience; and in the sea-blue eyes under the periwig (here set aside) the eternal boyishness of Britain . . .

  and to his right and left, the apostles. (Not a zodiac describing twelve but one more than half, namely seven, the number of perfection and the completed action; the judges are arranged not dramatically in four trios, as seasonal constellations, but in the four-times-two-makes-eight of eternity.) At the left of OUR LORD’s British colleague, two Frenchmen (their artistic tailor is Daumier) in bat cloaks, vain neck-bands, puffy lawyer-caps: the black brethren of the white cook and the red Communard, gazing with astute Cartesian eyes from behind their thriftily iron-framed glasses, and paper-flower bouquets of éloquence proliferating from their narrow lips. . .

  and to the right, two Americans, Midwestern senator busts: square-shouldered, square-headed, square-faced, square-minded, craftiness in philistine droning, bull-like aggression in the pettifoggery of Civil Law, world potentates in cast-iron self-righteousness . . .

  finally, farther to the right, two Russians in bombastic generals’ uniforms belonging to the people (albeit without the full pomp of medals): over blood-red epaulets the size of meat platters, their stubble heads are as immovable as rocks on which the frail fuss and claptrap of the Capitalist Imperialists shatter . . .

  one of them sheds an occasional Mongolian grin over a piece of paper, on which he doodles motionlessly. He is drawing caricatures of the people called to the witness stand, and whenever he pulls off an especially good one, he feels a childlike joy . . .

  and there, on the witness stand, a man, become emotional in reliving the memory, tells about a mass shooting somewhere in Volhynia. His nerves can’t take it, he weeps, although without tears: the sobbing shakes him dry, his shoulders heave, he can barely get the words out. He goes into agonizing detail about another man who was to be shot in a group. The mass grave was already dug, twenty yards by ten, several rows of corpses were already lying in it. And this man had a child at his side, his son, eight years old, a bright little boy—dry sobs, quaking shoulders . . . OUR LORD JUSTICE soothingly taps a sucked pencil. Would the witness kindly pull himself together and speak more succinctly, the Court’s time is limited, this carrion-smelling nightmare is only supposed to take nine months, long enough to give birth to a legal changeling . . . So the witness pulls himself together and tells about how this child didn’t quite understand what was going on, he spoke confidently to his father, but noticed, by the father’s—how shall I put it?—absent, abstracted expression that something unusual, something ominous was afoot . . . the child suddenly became frightened and began to ask what was happening, why were there so many corpses lying in the ditch. And the father caressed his head and spoke calming words to the boy: It’s not half so bad, my child, there is almost something good about dying young—And then the rattle of the machine guns or the automatic pistols or whatever they used—The witness can’t speak, and OUR LORD JUSTICE clears his throat. This is a private digression, as it were; the witness should confine his testimony to the fact of the shooting alone (if possible with precise data on the number of shooters and victims)—harrumph, yes. The issue here is something more general, that is to say, human rights in the legal sense, i.e., we must accurately establish crimes of such magnitudinous planning and perpetration as to impinge upon international law . . .

  and meanwhile: the voices of the simultaneous interpreters chirp away in four languages like twittering parakeets from the glass cage on the witness stand, secretaries for both prosecution and defense are walking up and down with copies of documents and affidavits for tomorrow and the day after and handing them from one table to another where the testy, frustrated lawyers sit. The court reporters, bored, bang away at their steno machines in a slow-motion estrangement from reality. Defense attorneys scribble away at objections for the day after tomorrow. Prominent guests with earphones in the spectators’ section are deeply moved; they take enjoyment in the drama of what is happening, take enjoyment in themselves, witnesses to an act of World History . . .

  I too cannot escape the magical happening in the tiny courtroom. I have to come. These events are too interesting. I must not miss them. So long as I’m here I at least want to get something out of it . . . I’ve been listed as a witness, true. But I have every reason to doubt that I’ll ever be called: I have only one murder to testify about, whereas here they are dealing with hecatombs. Stella’s death is a private digression, so to speak, nothing to write home about: here you probably won’t be questioned for fewer than ten thousand corpses. (John knew this, must have known it, but it was presumably his last good deed for me: to get me out of the German starvation world and shelter me in opulence among the grave worms.) The great moment will most likely not come: me on the witness stand eye to eye with Göring (after all, he’s the one, the ba
stard)—me, an extra in World History . . . nevertheless, I have to be ready for it, I have to get my hair trimmed every week. After all, you can’t enter World Events looking sloppy, with a gigolo’s mane. (Plus the dark-haired girl from the Warsaw Ghetto said that long, neglected hair reminds her too much of old times—though wouldn’t shaved heads be even worse?) Anyway, it’s fun going to the barber. Way over there, in the farthest wing of the courthouse, I know a barbershop for guards—our boys so prim and proper, aren’t they an example for everybody? Life in the jungle demands such knowledge. At the Excelsior I would have to spend good vouchers on a haircut, whereas here, for a couple of cigarettes, I can get shorn, shaved, powdered, massaged, and Brylcreemed. With the money I save I can buy the most wonderful things at the PX: nylons, for instance, for which certain girls will do certain things, or else quite simply cans: of corned beef, meat and vegetables, pork and beans: the last seven years have pretty much emaciated everybody, even with the Fräuleins you’re not always at the top of your game . . .

  Besides, the barbershop isn’t far from the corridor where the black-haired girl is working on the statistical survey of the victims in the ghetto uprising. You might stick your fragrant and freshly Brylcreemed head in the door and casually ask how things are going (she’s shown me the number tattooed on her arm, a barely legible blue spot on the very smooth skin with tender-blue veins; still and all, it’s a sign of intimacy, an earnest of a burgeoning human relationship). Perhaps you can offer her the happiness of falling in love with her: Love bade me welcome, and the dead soul lived again . . .

  perhaps she’ll sing you something in Polish, something full of yearning, welling up out of mashed labials. Maybe even something in Yiddish (while my Brylcreem-smooth skull lies in her lap), tender Yiddish songs as in Bessarabia long ago. Di bist sheyn in maine oign, sheyner fin der velt—ikh hob on dir nisht kain khazuren, alles mir gefeit. Meyg zain tserrisn dus neyzale, meygst hubn seykhele vi an eyzele; Di bist sheyn in maine oign, sheyner fin der velt . . . That would be nice, that would snuff out a lot, that would be balm for my heart, the old shard . . .