Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  you see, it’s under great stress here, my heart. Pastor Kneipp’s alternating baths make it pound in my tonsils a good dozen times a day. In the barbershop, for instance, they have a shoeshine boy and clown (as a back-court fool, so to speak, a caricature of all the postwar German lemur traits), a little boy they picked up somewhere: a wild, lice-ridden tatterdemalion, an unspeakably repulsive blob of slime, pesky as a blowfly, leechy as a crab louse, a microbe apprentice, pederastically fingered, pickled in gonococci like an eel in green—you must have seen with what democratic openness this basement rat throws himself at the victors—you must have watched it. It goes like this: The door opens, but not far enough for a chief of the Praetorian Guard. He does not merely enter, he towers his way in. Everyone in the barbershop is awestruck (especially me: I’ve been subpoenaed as a witness for the prosecution, but still and all, that’s just a hairsbreadth away from being a defendant—and here I am, frivolously having my hair pomaded). The Praetorian bulks into the room. His skull is wedged in a helmet polished like plexiglass. A helmet of the avenging angels, it almost bangs against the ceiling. The barbers’ razors tremble at the throats of the hygiene-deficient, who, choked by their white towels, peer up at the avenging angel . . .

  and he, the avenging angel, stomps closer in waxed lace-up boots with thick rubber soles. Under his Grail-castle helmet, his kisser floats on the chin strap: T-bone-steak-fed America, sprouting from violent Lithuanian seed in Iowa, Irish madness in the brain, Dutch narrow-mindedness in the blood, Puritanical witch-burning fanaticism in the eyes, chewing gum between the crushing nutcracker jaws. He snorts from his nostrils like a bull of Colchis. His thorax, squeezed upward by a ten-inch-wide motorcyclist belt, is swollen like a barrage balloon over whose tip a truck is accidentally driving. A rubber club dangles from his wrist over the sausage-stuffed white cotton glove . . .

  Yet, the basement rat is not intimidated. It scurries out of its corner and leaps at him, hurls itself at one of his leg columns and embraces it in a perfect tackle—straight out of Yale. A middle linebacker hit like that will shake Congress, will be discussed for decades at the White House . . . but the avenging angel isn’t in the mood today (maybe his Fräulein gave him a dose of the clap, or a superior chewed him out for having a hint of five o’clock shadow or not having the dewy scent of Mennen). He merely swings out his leg (“Fuck off, you bastard!”)—and the rat flies through space with a whine, landing in its corner, crumpling in pain, wrapped up, burrowed up in its rags, and its face peeps up, that blob of slime, and it is the dismayed, deeply frightened face, marked by utter sorrow and utter injustice, of an abused child with huge injured eyes, which comprehend nothing and accuse the incomprehensible—

  and this child says, tonelessly, hopelessly, desperately, in a small, soft, child’s voice, “But it’s you who taught me to be a smart boy . . .”

  1948, autumn, Munich-Geiselgasteig.

  To get the feeling that I live in a dream world, I wouldn’t need the junk and the false magic of this movie world: palaces consisting only of façades, rooms with only two walls, singers interrupted in their singing, dropping their arms in the middle of the most theatrical gesture, closing the mouths that had just been snapping at the air as though hunting an invisible fly—while their voices keep right on singing dulcetly in playback until the sound engineer interrupts and spools them back in a whistling monkey jibber for replay . . . I wouldn’t need the suspension of logic in the lapse of time: the film stories narrated back and forth, a mishmash of events, the end filmed first and the beginning at the end. Or the lack of division between fiction and reality: Robinson Crusoe, Madame Dubarry, and Professor Dr. Sigmund Freud all joining me for lunch at my table in the canteen, each of them totally immersed in his part, whereas, in front of the camera, they are embarrassingly the disguised actors Meyer, Müller, and Lembke. Everyday life outside, beyond this world of shadow and folly, is no less a surrealistic dream.

  The city of Munich is still lying in its mortar dust under the intact Bavarian postcard sky, with buildings broken out of the streets like teeth from a carious mouth. But the gaps now exert a magical lure. The rubble fields are gilded, they once again have a tangible realty value. New buildings are sure to proliferate shortly: business fortresses, office palaces, tenement barracks, twice, thrice, ten times bigger than the houses and buildings that used to stand here and have sunken into debris, ten times more efficient in their use of space, divided up like honeycombs, yielding ten times more rent, so that new capital is quickly created to tear down whatever still survives on either side and replace it with buildings that grow high, ten times, twenty times bigger, roomier . . .

  All at once, we see department stores bursting with all kinds of wares, snazzy places. I can go in and buy an alligator handbag for Christa, or else a plush doe by Frau Käthe Kruse or the war regalia of a Sioux chief for our little son. I thus woefully redeem my guilty conscience for earning money sumptuously and spending it frivolously, indeed irresponsibly and heedlessly, for not husbanding, and certainly not saving, not gathering, but rather acting as if it were still the worthless old money, the trashy Reichsmark, instead of the sound and weighty Deutschmark with which we must shape our future, with which Germany, Europe, Western Civilization must rebuild from a rubble pile into a new efflorescence, with which we must create a new and this time permanent and definitive economic miracle.

  But that’s just it. It’s all too miraculous for me. Too trusting is my belief in the fairy tale of it. Whatever money I earn runs through my fingers like water; for me it’s movie money, dream currency from a dream reality. The very way I earn it is dreamlike and incredible. There’s no fathoming what prompts Stoffel and Associates (my “producer piglets,” as Christa calls them) to grab up every other, often maliciously ironic thought I come up with in order to create a simply great project, which most likely will never be filmed, but which, thanks to some technical bank and tax manipulations I’ve not entirely comprehended, will enable them, as producers, to create a different, even greater and more profitable project, and thus to acquire the capital for newer, bigger studios and even newer, technically ever more perfect cameras (the basis for even bigger projects, in which there’ll be some pickings for me) . . .

  I watch this chicanery and I imagine that things will keep on like this for me too, bigger and faster and more and more lavish. I place my naive confidence in a mysterious auto-functioning and parthenogenetic self-replication of prosperity. After all, that’s what’s happening all around me. The grocery stores are bursting with stuff to feed your face with. The hams, the sausages, the pâtés, meat salads, ragouts fins, the cheeses, the primeurs, the fruits are doubling, tripling, decupling overnight. The shoe-store displays are collapsing under a plethora of shoes; never have there been so many shoes since people stopped going on foot—for hardly anyone walks now; people take cars. You can buy them again; they stand, shinily painted in venomously synthetic candy colors, behind mirror-glass panes at the dealers’ showrooms, bigger and bigger, faster and faster, more and more cars . . .

  •

  The miracle took place overnight. It was a new era, altering “reality” no less than that day in March 1938 that cut off the first half of my life and launched the ten-year Ice Age. This time too it’s a solstice day, if I remember correctly: a bright day on which the sun stood still in the clear heavens (or never even made an appearance). Yesterday, the world was still a gray, wretched world—and a world of timid hope. Today, at one fell swoop, it was all there, everything you could have hoped for—only hope itself was no longer there; hope had become superfluous. Yesterday, people were skulking through the streets, gray-faced, dourly suffering, but occasionally envisioning utopias—futures that would be different from everything that had previously enslaved us and made us wicked, a human society in which at last, at last, the dichotomy between the individual and the herd animal in us would be harmonized. A fantastic expectation? But why not? All possibilities were open. That was one good thing abo
ut the last gray phase of the Ice Age: the total demolition, the annihilation of everything, of all cities, all so-called values, and most thoroughly the state, the social fictions, the image of mankind . . . Yesterday, we were still allowed to dream that we could reinvent everything . . .

  that’s what it was like yesterday. And then, overnight, everything essentially became what it had been before the Ice and Rubble Age, the same corrupt world, the same world of money—only in a cunningly new, brightly promising, insidiously abstract way.

  The same people who were starving yesterday but willing to share a piece of bread were stuffing their guts today and gobbling up their neighbors’ food. The same people who were thoughtful yesterday, willing to have certain embarrassing insights, critical more of themselves than of others, forgot all about yesterday—except for the things that gave them an advantage over the others. The same people who were full of ideas and plans yesterday, who sought new forms, new ways of living, wanting to set up kolkhozy for soil-tilling intellectual workers, wanting to exemplify a redis-covered human dignity—those same people now had no trouble resigning themselves to the perfidiously substituted spirit of possibility, were thoroughly imbued with its presentness, offered no resistance to it, were buoyed and borne by it, soon regarded it as a fresh element in which they could swim like trout in mountain water . . .

  For it was a new promise of a long-promised world, a different Thousand-Year Reich—only this time from overseas. This time not primordially and mythically rooted in the dark precincts of a barbaric past but modern, bright, rationalist, and yet blessed with GOD’s approval. You made a fool of yourself trying to warn against it, like a lay preacher crying apocalypse. It was a reality stuffed with all the values of Western Civilization. It had every kind of freedom and thus every possibility of human dignity. It was merely a question of choice, of the ability to go without. It resounded with lovely cant about democracy, progress, humanized technology that would serve man and not vice versa, fine phrases about racial equality, ecology, protection of animals . . . People could go right ahead and build cities again. Why, they were building the one grand City of Mankind: ANTHROPOLIS, the New Jerusalem, which the Bible-versed pioneers had sighted in the Golden West. The star-spangled banner waved over it . . .

  but alas, the construction of this new promised world from the ruins of the old one came about too swiftly for us, too surprisingly, too much like a magic trick: you couldn’t help suspecting some sleight of hand. You see, it really did occur in the twinkling of an eye, overnight: yesterday, people had been starving or profiteering, their only survival chances in the black market; today, everyone, without exception or distinction, held forty Deutschmarks in his hand and could buy anything he liked and anything he could afford or whatever his common sense bade or forbade. In any case it was all there in an instant, you could gorge yourself, fatten your body, buy new clothes, furnish your home, rebuild your house, found a business or an entire industry, drink as much champagne, whiskey, beer, wine, Coca-Cola as you liked or could stand; you no longer had to feel like a pariah, a subhuman, gleaning the cigarette butts of Allied occupation soldiers from the asphalt and picking through their garbage cans for no-longer-edibles; you now faced those soldiers on the same level, eye to eye, as it were, or at least gullet to gullet. And all this was extremely implausible, though factually documented reality—implausible, yet not to be denied.

  •

  Schwab had come to Munich on behalf of the Northwest German Radio Network (in cooperation with the Bavarian State Radio Network) to put together a nighttime program about the situation of writers in Germany in the first three years after the end of the war. Needless to say, these literati included people writing for the newly emerging film industry—hence, in Schwab’s opinion, myself. We taped my contribution. Then came the day of the currency reform. The next day, I went to the cashier’s office at the radio network to pick up my fee, which had been agreed upon in Reichsmarks but was given to me in Deutschmarks, five hundred Deutschmarks. Every other inhabitant of the three Western occupation zones had forty marks at his disposal. I was the richest man in the country.

  Needless to say, we headed straight for Humpelmeyer’s Restaurant. We couldn’t get over the menu. We ordered brook trout, saddle of venison in cream with lingonberries, omelet surprise. We washed it down with two excellent Franconian wines and a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. At the next table, a man who had eaten his way deep into a roast goose followed our mordant commentary: “It may interest you to know that I am looking for someone to bring charges against parties unknown for mass manslaughter and endangerment of health,” he said fervently. “All this stuff”—he pointed his knife and fork at the filled dishes all around—“ didn’t tumble out of the clear blue sky yesterday. It must have been somewhere; people were hoarding it. For what reason, I ask you, for what purposes? Just go into any drugstore: you’ ll have no trouble whatsoever finding medicine that you couldn’t get for love or money the day before yesterday. Where does it all come from? Something’s wrong here. There’s some vile swindle involved. Somebody must be doing a gigantic business. But tens of thousands had to starve to death. Mothers had to watch their children die because the same penicillin that you can get at any drugstore today for a couple of pennies couldn’t be had for thousands of marks on the black market. We’ve got to get to the bottom of this.”

  We agreed with him and asked why he didn’t bring charges himself. He said, “If I did, it would be interpreted politically. I was Gauleiter of Linz for a while.”

  But it took only a few weeks to dispel any qualms about the new reality. Now it is overwhelmingly present. Like that twelfth of March, 1938, in Vienna, which separated the first half of my life from me, this new reality projects all previous experiences into the realm of dreams. But in this way, detached from the past and having, epiphany-like, virtually turned into its own realized future, this reality is itself becoming unreal.

  Supreme Movie Piglet Stoffel, who demonstrates his patronage by, inter alia, entrusting me with all sorts of missions he considers sensitive and that have nothing to do with my capacity as ideas man and potential screenwriter (he calls them “friendly favors” he “wouldn’t ask of anyone else”), has “approached” me with a “request”: a girl describing herself as an actress (she’s taking lessons with some fluttery mime whose political past has damaged him) is on the cast list of the big new project of Astra Films (A Woman Plays Foul—a story of mine). Sure, it’s a small part, but you’ve got to start somewhere, says Stoffel. (“The company has to think about the next generation. Otherwise, five or six years from now, we’ll be screwed, our stars’ll all be going through menopause.”) Actually, the child (just nineteen) is a younger, wilder Astrid von Bürger: a dark-curled Brunhilde beauty, yet slender and firm. (I suspect it’s not just a cinematic future Stoffel sees in her.) But, unfortunately, she’s “strange,” as Stoffel puts it. “Talk to the kid. I’d like to know what’s with her. She’s not off her rocker, but she’s very weird. You’ll notice it right away.”

  After a dinner in Boettner’s Oyster Rooms (three dozen Limfjord Colossal, with Chablis, black bread and cheddar cheese, then a two-inch-thick filet steak, a carafe of Chambertin, melon sherbet; six weeks ago, they served rationed herring paste and cabbage stew here), she reveals her secret. Her real name is Ernestine (Ernie) Rosenzweig (stage name: Gudrun Karst). Her father, pure Aryan despite the suspicious name, was a traveling salesman in the lovely land of Franconia, the Romantic Road. He was killed by some drunken rowdies (SA) owing to a misunderstanding caused by the unfortunate name. Fearing lest her daughter should fall victim to the same misunderstanding (the family lived in Dinkelsbühl), the mother put little Ernie into a Nazi nursery at the age of three. At fifteen she had a general’s rank as leader in the League of German Maidens. At sixteen (1945) she was commanding a League of German Maidens camp in Allgäu, five thousand feet above sea level, three hundred and sixteen fourteen- to eighteen-year-olds who were being trained
in close combat and the use of bazookas. She says she would have been willing to fight with a razor. Had anyone dared to tell her to her face that the war could not be won, the Russians were in Berlin, the English and the Americans outside Frankfurt and Hanover, she would have scratched out his eyes and torn his throat out with her teeth. But no one dared. Then next thing she knew there came a regiment of Moroccan spahis who, man for man, screwed their way through every last girl in the Maiden League.

  Then Ernie wound up a lieutenant’s prize. He was friendly to her and promised her a career as a nightclub dancer once the nonfraternization rules loosened up a bit. She can’t remember how she lost him (or he her). At any rate, she got to Munich, using some food from the ravitaillement of the French occupation to find shelter in a family rooming house run by an old-time screen star, Erna Morena. Having the same Christian name won the lady’s maternal sympathy. Through her, she gained entry into the movie world. “But you can understand,” she says, “that I usually feel as if I were in an aquarium, where things, people, and events swim every which way, like tenches.”

  She is the right partner for me. (Christa obstinately refuses to leave Hamburg; and after our son’s birth, she bluntly declared that she found conjugal duties more repulsive than pleasurable. But that shouldn’t serve as a pretext for me; I promptly filled the gap in the mosaic of my sensual life.) In Gudrun Karst, I have found my spiritual complement. Together we swim through the aquarium of tenches.

  I make sure that the underwater fauna surrounding her is tropically varied. I’ve rented a place for her with a countess to whom I had access by way of Christa’s relatives. There, Gudrun is getting to know all of Bavarian nobility and the (likewise Catholic) Upper Silesian nobility who have fled here. She already shrugs scornfully at the mention of names from the odd years of the Almanach de Gotha.