Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  and above and beyond this (always there, not simply aroused after years of exile in Vienna) the air of adventure: the sudden stench of carrion in the blackberry thicket of some remote unsupervised corner; the romanticism, true, of the huge cedars along the ramshackle wall crumbling under burdens of ivy, but also the sinister and disreputable quality of the black soil of the creek banks, hollowed out by rats and crayfish under the giant hairy umbrellas of the coltsfoot leaves . . .

  I walk toward it, my park, and, within, toward all the vast, rich safety of my childhood:

  the park receives me and has become abstract: white, rigid, transparent all the way to the far countryside, glassily sparkling under the silky deep-blue sky, tinkling in the frost as if transposed into another dimension, abstracted, its own myth and legend.

  And for the first time I see it, see its framework, the way it is set in the countryside: a landscape garden, a piece of idealized nature within nature (a reality within reality), fanning out into the flatly troughed and then gently rolling and rising terrain, with the first signs of formal severity showing in the now-frosty snowed-in ornamental scrolls of the flower beds, between which the beeline central path leads to the gates with the snow-capped stone greyhounds on the pillars. . .

  and directly beyond, in greater freedom: a spacious English park of goodly proportions between the open lawns and the dense foliage of the summertime trees. To one side, then, toward the dell, a peasant garden full of folk mock-heraldry in the ostrich tails of the black cabbage and the halberd leaves of artichokes, along the parallel rows of fruit trees, whose rounded tops are now dusted with snow and transparent, like the seed tops of dandelions (which my mother used to call “Larousses”). And on the other side, on the rising slope, a game preserve: the small herd of fallow deer that always stood there in the coppice are standing there now, finely drawn in the snow.

  Signs in the snow: it’s still alive, my park. Mystery is still stirring in it, making a frosted branch snap up so that its white fur drops off and sinks into the down of the snow bed, which receives it glitteringly, everywhere the snow bearing the fine script of life so quick and shy that it would almost not have been, but for these traces

  (the most eloquent: a deathbed of powdery snow crystals, strewn with half a handful of downy feathers, three or four drops of blood, a yellowish spot . . . Chinese ideogram of a small catastrophe) . . .

  It lives on unchallenged, my park. Everything in it is precisely as it always was, even twice seven years ago—except that I am no longer here.

  Or rather: I am here in a dual, abstract way that can be mirrored back and forth at will: I as a child, and my own legend of myself as a child, and I now, likewise detached from myself. I gaze at both of them, first through one at the other, then through the other at the one. I gaze through my present self at the child who in his curly-haired, cherry-eyed charm, his well-bred, adorable moodiness and precociousness, was already, all too consciously, his own legend and probably deserved to be slapped. And I gaze through the child’s eyes at the lightly built young man, scrawny, pale, shot up too fast, but visibly tough as a whip, wearing his uniform like borrowed clothing, with a strange watchfulness and, if you look him square in the face, something of Aunt Selma’s enchantment in his eyes (and another, more modest garden in his mind).

  I put my two selves side by side, testing them for this or that aspect, this or that value. I find that the twice seven years of exile, the hateful formative Viennese years with Uncle Helmuth, Aunt Hertha, Aunt Selma, and all their bloody fucking middle-class thinking and feeling and reasoning and arguing and praising and condemning and accusing, as well as the diabolically tempting Cain-like brotherhood with Cousin Wolfgang, were in many, many respects a wholesome testing, a hardening. And the no longer so finely groomed attitude, the no longer so sheltered and protected nature, the slight air of neglect—all these things they have so clearly left with me are balanced by a keener sight and a certain nobility in being able to hate.

  But not even this has anything to do with me, really. This too is already a legend, which someday I may have to cultivate—like the other legend of myself in my childhood, the other myth with which I deliver myself into timelessness; I could not have existed otherwise . . .

  Now, here, returning home to the land of my damnation to form myths of myself, I am once again new, different, something I have never been before:

  A man who is everywhere a stranger, but most of all in his own home.

  18

  My book (which, as you know, was unfortunately never completed) was also supposed to describe a different cold world: the Ice Age five, six, seven (there we are again!) years later in Hamburg-on-the-Elbe, Germany: WWII’s aftermath, known as the Age of Rubble, or the Age of Reichsmarks.

  This period is experienced by the same person, an alien everywhere, soon at home everywhere, and most alien to himself in his own home—

  experienced by a person who has virtually come out of himself and is beside himself, for whom, to be sure, this schizoid split became so much a part of his nature even then (1947) that it produced a peculiar, gleeful well-being,

  a feeling of immunity, of invulnerability—not a resistance to surprises, which our cherished life always has in store for us, but an ultimate inviolability in regard to surprises (the result, of course, being a totally abstract relationship to existence, to the world, and, last but not least, to morality).

  In my manuscripts, I have gone to great pains to explain and clarify how this trance-like state was induced by the experience of March 12, 1938—the day Adolf Hitler came home to his homeland, Austria, which German troops occupied amid the jubilant delirium of the people. But even the most conscientious analysis boils down to inexplicables. It was the day when one era ended and another began. A day of solstice, when the sun stood still in the heavens. It is easy to write this down, of course, but proving it will be far more difficult. However, that will be done elsewhere.

  What I wish to say here can probably be best expressed in a description of the climatic conditions.

  March 12, 1938, was, as we all know, an unusually cold day. Arctic iciness plunged like a guillotine blade into the loveliest and most promising spring. Yet the sky remained blank and blue, not a breeze was stirring. The sun’s smile was caught, like that of a beheaded man. And because the saps of spring had begun to rise, buds and shoots and perhaps also hopeful hearts froze to ice so suddenly that they shone, the world looked as if it had been placed under a glass bell: extraordinarily smart and delicately pretty and well-nigh varnished all over. The springtime seething was cut off, naturally. And with it the mood of the first half of my life.

  On that March 12, 1938, I was in Vienna with Stella. She had long since taken my destiny in hand and was already preparing my return to Romania, my call-up for military service there, and my visit to Uncle Ferdinand in order to enter the sphere of influence of reliable friends; thus, she had already launched the entire intrigue that made me unreachable, lifted me over the coming events, kept me hovering, as it were, between heaven and earth throughout the war, but ultimately cost her her life.

  We spent a summer of near-exemplary beauty in the Salzkammergut and managed to enjoy many more hectic days of sunshine in the following year, 1939, before the first shot was fired in September and Europe committed suicide for good. But, retrospectively, the iciness of March 1938 passed directly into that of February 1940 in Bessarabia, and then, fairly uninterrupted, into the diluvial period of Hamburg until 1947. And it goes on, visibly losing light, turning grayer and drearier, more and more wintry. I cannot recall a single bright day during the so-called Age of Rubble or of Reichsmarks from 1945 to 1948 in Hamburg-on-the-Elbe, Germany. Never did the sun shine but through aseptic gauze, even during the brief Arctic summers when trees and shrubs were greening amid the yellow tundra grass in Pöseldorf or Övelgönne.

  At any rate, by February 1940, which I am now telling about, it has been going on for almost two years—this Ice Age that keeps
getting grayer and grayer, perhaps because it keeps filling up with gray iron men and smoking, fire-spewing iron weapons, and more and more gray men keep dropping and turning into phantoms under the smoke-and-fire spewing of these weapons, many many hundreds of thousands of gray phantoms, flowing together in a denser and denser wintry fog that shrouds the world and veils the sun so thickly that it hangs as a small, pallid, powerless disk in the grayness, even after the thundering of the fires has been snuffed out.

  I too, in my nettle-cloth uniform, yellow-green like dried peas, am now (in February 1940) one of the iron men. I too occasionally wear an iron helmet with a chin strap, and I handle iron weapons that are ready to spew fire. My regiment is ready for action. Each one of its four thousand young men secretly prays to God that, if it comes down to it, he will be among the few hundred survivors. We have sworn to serve our Fatherland unto death with our weapons in our fists, and the makers of this cant and these weapons are trying to harden our mood, our combative will, our readiness to die—harden them like iron. But nonetheless we are a rather sorry lot, shaking with fear whenever things look serious for us too, fatalistic whenever the immediate danger is merely put off until tomorrow. And terribly hopeful, by the way: that the Germans’ll get it done.

  The Germans. They’ve got a kind of warfare, called Blitz, that rips enemy armies open like a zipper. They spliced and crushed the Poles, they’ll do the same to the French. And when the time comes—that is, when they can free their dreadful hands for the job—they’ll work the Russians over in the same way. All we’ll have to do is storm after them, spurt a little fire here and there, stick a couple of bayonets into anything that resists. Perhaps we, the cavalrymen, can even mount again and chase our fleeing foes, slicing and smashing them with lances and sabers, so that war will regain something of its old, colorful fun . . . But the war hasn’t reached us as yet. The war too is temporarily frozen; the adversaries are lying opposite each other like dragons, showing their fangs before charging and entangling themselves and tearing one another to shreds. Even the Russians are paralyzed in this hostile lockjaw, prevented from invading Romania by the Nonaggression Pact with Germany. Accordingly, the weather here is still bright and beautiful, almost festive. “Hitler weather,” it has been called since March 1938: days pearling along crisp and cold under an azure sky, yet the woods and fields and meadows, the trees and bushes and groves are covered with a fur of frost, which shouldn’t be mistaken for warmth . . .

  I, at any rate, can still play the peacetime soldier, the toy soldier. Uncle Ferdinand has gotten me an apparently unlimited furlough. Naturally, he knows the brigadier general. My regimental commander clicks his heels at the sound of his name. For his sake, I was simply shoved up the ladder from a one-year volunteer recruit to master-at-arms and finally second lieutenant. In his honor, instead of the dried-pea yellow-green uniform at dinner (we are a party of two, served by four footmen) I can wear the plum-blue, gold-frogged, red-braided officer’s uniform, in which I feel like the lothario in a student performance of a classic Viennese operetta.

  Uncle Ferdinand goes to bed very late. He finally has somebody to talk to about his Middle Kingdom, tell stories to, show letters, photo albums, and news clippings to. In short, he can now discuss the most urgent matters of the inner circle, the nucleus of this distant reality within reality. The discussion usually goes on until the gray hours of dawn. Finally, liberated at long last from my high boots and the throat-tightening collar of the hussar tunic, drugged with fatigue, numb with much-too-heavy food, far too much wine, coffee, kirsch, whiskey, my head spinning nonstop like a mill wheel, I tumble into the pillows of an English brass bed, which, I would swear, my mother ordered from London during my childhood. And now, the memories slosh over me, inundate me . . .

  but the images, the scenes, the moods, colors, sounds, smells that I have carried about, as precise as if engraved in steel, that I have so poignantly preserved, like flowers pressed between book pages, like ribbons, locks of hair, and billets-doux stored through decades in splint boxes—now, all these things turn out to be inaccurate and deceptive; they tumble chaotically, dissolve, flow together and away. . .

  I lie in the bed in which my mother (if memory serves me and this really is the extra-wide bed that she ordered from London before 1926) presumably received Uncle Ferdinand, the rooster . . . I am no longer a child and I can imagine what happened then. Nor do I have any illusions about my beautiful mother’s professionalism in this respect: I can exchange Uncle Ferdinand at will with any of my numerous godfathers and nominal uncles and leave the scene unaltered. (Mama, after all, had ordered not just one of these brass beds but several, dispatching one to our house on the Côte d’Azur, one to Uncle Bully’s house in Biarritz, one to Uncle Agop’s house in Ireland, and God knows where else.)

  Here, as everywhere, it was the same. A high-class courtesan (poule de luxe, as the term was in those days) always serves her present backer. My mother the trollop. I, the son of a whore. A suicide’s bastard. Stella the Jewess’s gigolo, kept by her husband, the spy. . .

  I say this out loud to myself to test the effect that the echo of such disgraceful epithets might provoke in me. But there is no effect. Quite the contrary: It amuses me to imagine the irony with which my beautiful mother might have plied her loose trade and been ready to grant her sundry lovers’ every desire. Thanks to her (and John and Stella and all my nominal uncles and godfathers) I am totally lacking in the sense of shame that my Viennese relatives tried to instill in me: Aunt Hertha occasionally at length and with insinuations about the past and my mother’s end that were scarcely to be mistaken, Aunt Selma in spellbound silence, Uncle Helmuth with biting discretion, and Cousin Wolfgang generously not saying a word: the poor blind fools! The pitiful misled saps! The victims, constantly deceiving themselves, of the criminal narrowness of their reality within a reality! Martyrs of the falsity of their shittily vertical Middle Kingdom, who have no past and no trace of a future, but only a gray, cheerless present for all time: always reflected in themselves; seeing nothing before them but themselves, their eyes incapable of seeing anything else! . . . But what really torments me is the discovery that I know as good as nothing about my mother, don’t at all know her as she really was; that I’m but a hypothesis of myself based on a hypothesis of her. The image of her that I have been carrying around might, on the whole, correspond only hazily and casually to her actual reality, despite the sharpness of countless details—like the images I preserved within myself of this house, the village, and even the park (images that here and now I find myself forced incessantly to correct). I have found photographs of her: they do not fit the legend of my sweet mother in any way, and yet they complement and complete it, as though I were now discovering an unknown dimension of her, of myself, that might conceal yet other dimensions . . .

  I know and have always known that the radiant maternal goodness that I think I recall, the smiling-Madonna quality (without the crushed suffering of Our Lady of Sorrow), the lightness, the serenity that made me think I was a favorite of fortune—I know that all these were figments of my imagination, daydreams, retrospective projections of eternally unfulfilled wishes onto a concocted phantom. But that is not what unsettles me now.

  Gazing at the extremely elegant, extremely fashionably stylized young woman on the (incidentally, masterful) photo portraits I have found here (they are signed: Bill Brandt), I cannot learn anything about myself. But I can learn a great deal about an era that haunts me like a ghost stalking a house.

  To my small surprise (and secret satisfaction), it is not an era of mothers. The young woman embodying it is not a mother. With her steep, narrow shoulders from which the fur has slid, with her stem-like throat displaying the severe emerald necklace, with her shingled black hair like a patent-leather cap, her oval face with its small corrupt mouth, and her radiantly innocent eyes under her thin, high brows—this is the most feminine form conceivable of an ephebe. If someone like this bears a child, it must be either a de
migod or a homunculus . . .

  At first, however, this strange, beautiful creature in which I only very remotely discover familiar features similar to my own, as if in ironical reflection, is as desirable as a sister brought up somewhere else and entering my life as an adult: I know both everything and nothing about her, but I can vividly picture her as an excellent lover, with expert hands, like a Japanese flower arranger. What I see is the Eros of an era, and I—or perhaps that stratum of my existence that felt itself to be my self (and that I now feel was me at that time, as remote, to be sure, as abstract as Nagel’s shot-off arm, my venerated Djakopp Djee)—this self is a child of that era and belongs to it more than my self of today does . . . and is no more and is merely an echo of something that has long since waned, just as tomorrow my self of today will belong to the echo of 1940 and will have waned and faded with it . . . if it does not emerge from me as an image and myth and live on as such.

  And just as I am about to doze off with these thoughts, there is a banging in the big tiled stove, which is heated from the corridor. An old, familiar, deliciously cozy noise, announcing that Miss Fern is about to come in with a fresh, warmed-up bath towel in order to—but no. It means that fourteen years have passed; that my mother and ideal beloved is dead, drowned in the pond; and that I will now have to pull on my boots again, because Uncle Ferdinand, the spider, is waiting for me downstairs at the breakfast table (he hardly sleeps anymore) in order to weave me into his Middle Kingdom, so that it might live on as image and myth.

  19

  He waits for me with the cruelly loving patience of the spider waiting for the fly that strays into its web. He has long since had his tea, and his long, yellow teeth under the straw whisk of his mustache and the parrot beak of his nose are gnawing on a fragment of zwieback. Now he watches as I, with the ravenous hunger of an exhausted young man, wolf down bowls of oatmeal and milk (Miss Fern’s long-missed porridge) and bacon and eggs and black bread and piles of toast with butter and honey and currant jam and orange marmalade. My exceedingly healthy appetite in my drowsiness, my visible freshening with the gradually rising day, the animal physicality of youth in me must repulse him, the rapidly aging man with the delicate stomach and weakened liver. But he doesn’t show his disgust. His round eyes, still gazing sharply with piercing pupils from under their wrinkled, eggshell-thin lids, follow my every movement while his voice speaks to me: gently, in an elegant, tenderly ironic, lightly entertaining, conversational tone, changing language at whim or to fit the topic. Normally, he speaks a much-too-literary Balkan French, and pronounced with affected purity. But occasionally he uses the English of his generation, who, innocently believing that one must speak the King’s English, mimicked Edward VII’s German accent. At times, he lapses into his startlingly natural (albeit borderland-hard) Austrian aristocrat’s German, or even Romanian, whereby an earthy, peasant-like vitality colors his diction.