Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  When I returned to my relatives, who excitedly recounted a hike through the woodlands of the Rax, I had my first fistfight with Cousin Wolfgang, which made Aunt Hertha say I had the makings of a criminal: all that had preceded it was a remark that Wolfgang had arrogantly tossed at me when I finished the blazing description of my day: “From a castle park to a garden plot—should this step be viewed as descent or progress?”

  Cousin Wolfgang now lies in Vienna’s Central Graveyard. I think of him often and with sincere affection. In those last few years, when it tortured him to see me reading Nietzsche as a matter of course while he wrestled with the same text like Jacob with the angel (“For you, it’s a cowboys-and-Indians story!” he said angrily. “And for you?” I asked. “But this shakes your whole being! This bowls you over! It forces your inmost nature to make an ultimate decision . . .” And then his voice trailed off before my ironic look. Oh Schwab!)

  in the last few years, I say, when he was standing up more and more resolutely for the worldview of the National Socialist German Workers Party, which was outlawed in Austria but was celebrating triumphs in the “Old Reich,” he would speak starry-eyed about the Volk. We used to talk a lot in those days, just before and just after John and Stella entered my life (until his way of seeing the world no longer permitted him to watch unprotesting while I lived as the kept lover of a Jewess). This was the era when we had drawn so close through our fistfights as to recognize our brotherhood despite our incompatibility—good Lord in heaven! Fourteen years together in one room, at one table, in front of the same emaciated faces, in the same dripping, steaming bathroom . . . Too bad he departed from us so prematurely, my dear cousin Wolfgang! He has been lying in the ground for six months now (it’s 1940)—a martyr to his “reality within reality,” which he regarded as the only reality: as if its standards, its weights and laws, were valid for everyone . . . I should have done more to convince him of God’s approval of better bathrooms . . .

  21

  Anyhow, there in Bessarabia I pleasurably prolong my bath. I feel it’s important to mull these things over while I cover my chest and arms with the sumptuous, spicy foam. Despite the four-course lunch and the opulent afternoon tea, I feel hungry, which adds a degree of poignant warmth to my affection for Uncle Ferdinand, for I know how carefully he will have arranged the dinner and the accompanying wines. I am tense and overtired, but quite thoroughly happy. I feel as if once more I have escaped into another, new, unexpected state, a new, abstract reality. My frame of mind must be similar to that of the souls who, at the Last Judgment, have managed just barely to slip under the angel’s dividing hand to the right side of God—only to realize that they are floating in space because they have lost the ground under their feet.

  I would have liked to chat with Cousin Wolfgang now. I enjoy picturing him seated here on the edge of the bathtub as he so often did on Sundays in the bathroom of the apartment in the Twelfth District, when Uncle Helmuth and Aunt Hertha and Aunt Selma had gone off to the woodlands of the Rax, and he and I, claiming we had to study, enjoyed a quiet day of ample loafing and undisturbed bathing joys. Our brotherhood was unclouded at such times.

  Now, here, I could talk to him “fairly”—as we said—about John and Stella: with more thorough knowledge and greater insight into the ways and dynamics of their world. I could explain to him why it made no difference at all whether they were the exploiters and oppressors that Uncle Helmuth made them out to be (and that he, Wolfgang, agreeing with his father for once, saw them as): John, the second son of the second son of some high-ranking peer, who went through the typical education process at Eton and Cambridge, who, casually and peripherally, as it were, became a linguist, highly esteemed in that field for his knowledge of Sanskrit and ancient Persian and for his translations and editions of rare manuscripts from the early Sufi period, but who one day chucked his bookworm life and entered the British diplomatic service, where his duties were of a very special sort; and Stella, the daughter of a Bucharest department-store millionaire, a woman for whom squandering money was an inner compulsion, a redemption of her socialist conscience from the guilt of being a capitalist’s child. Stella, who, in Berlin—the legendary Berlin of the late twenties!—had been friends with Paul Flechtheim, Gottfried Benn, Max Reinhardt, George Grosz; who had studied sociology in Heidelberg, psychology at the Sorbonne, art history in Florence and Freiburg, and was as well known in Prague as in Madrid. Stella, who had her winter chalet at Saint Moritz, her summer villas in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat and Biarritz, and regularly won the prize for being the most elegant “Lady in Her Car” at the autumn races in Baden-Baden as well as first prize in the golf tournament. Stella, the indefatigable nightclub denizen, the chain-smoker whose collection of lovers was as significant as her collection of Futurist art. Stella, who had read her Marx as passionately as The Divine Comedy, who knew her Einstein as thoroughly as the writings of Lilly Braun . . . Whether it was correct to call these two people plutocrats, cynically knowing participants in and promoters of an inhumane system, even its parasites—this made no difference whatsoever;

  it wasn’t the issue, any more than to what extent and in what manner they would have been able to open new horizons for Cousin Wolfgang too, to have done for him what they did for me: expand the world by adding a different world, freer, roomier, airier than the petit bourgeois confinement in which we spitefully crammed our Plutarch and Hölderlin in order to be something better than the uneducated in the back courtyards. They could have opened up to him a world that was cheerier, brighter, more humane than our sweaty, anxiety-damp probity made insipid by hopes that were never fulfilled, the philistine probity about which we boasted because it cost so many sacrifices, though it brought us nothing that did not feed our arrogance; in any case, a world in which the bathroom pipes weren’t rusty from the wet laundry always hanging from them.

  He hated all these things as much as I did, my brother Cousin Wolfgang. He suffered as much as I did from the stench of cabbage and watery soup in the stairwell of No. 14 in a long line of tenements built in the same ugly way, dilapidated in the same grease-smeared, gray, filthy decay. He felt as much as I did how our vitality was suffocated under all sorts of lamentable restrictions and shameful renunciations. He felt as much as I did—like a lead band around the mind—the eternal anxiety about that cherished bit of breathing space beyond sheer existence, threatened daily by higher rents, potato prices, job dismissals, forced evictions . . .

  he was as ashamed as I was of the rigid demand for recognition, the jealously alert, distrustful class arrogance and cultural hauteur with which we looked down on the “trash,” the “little people,” the proletarians and semi-proletarians from the back courtyard and basement holes. We, the educated ones, strictly brought up with so-called good manners (“Would you please stand up, you ass, when a lady enters the room!”), as poor as church mice but clean (“Did you wash your neck? Show me your fingernails!”), bypassed by Fortune, step-children of life, scared of a hundred taboos but proud. Uncle Helmuth, a native of Thuringia, the son of a pastor with innumerable children, respectably starving as he worked his way through college, getting his degree in electrical engineering and occupying a low industrial position only because research was paid even more poorly. And Aunt Hertha and Aunt Selma, the stiff-necked soldier’s children, born somewhere between Przemyśl and Udine, the daughters of a Lieutenant Colonel Subicz, who (successfully emulated by Cousin Wolfgang a quarter century later) promptly died in action in Galicia in November 1914 and strangely enough also turned into a myth. A myth, to be sure, that no one beyond our four walls cared a fig about and of which no other token was left but a yellow photograph showing a waxed mustache over a uniform collar, a saber with a thickly knitted gold-thread sword knot, and a medal earned by a legendary saber scar across the forehead. That was all that remained, or could be learned, of Lieutenant Colonel Subicz. But his spouse, who likewise had died prematurely, was a von Jaentsch, and that sufficed to give Cousin Wolfgang his rigid
spine and his scorn for trolley conductors, and Aunt Hertha her occasionally breezy but normally wry and caustic complacence, and Aunt Selma the bewitchment in her old-maid boniness; and it never let any of them forget what a disgrace it was that the third daughter, born in Dornbirn of Lieutenant Colonel Subicz and his spouse née von Jaentsch, beautiful Ilse (who characteristically called herself Maud!), went astray and perished by her own hand, leaving behind a bastard as a stain on their clan: humble me.

  My brother Cousin Wolfgang had all these things in his blood just as I did—like a disease, a wasting toxin (which, however, if you overcame it, made you especially robust and immune to susceptibilities). For him too, it would have meant salvation to leave all these things behind and manage to forget them. For him too, then, the temptation to switch his world out for another must have been irresistible. But no: Cousin Wolfgang was one of those people who prefer to change the world—lock, stock, and barrel. He did not live in life, he lived in ideas and convictions. And suffered because a sharp-toothed doubt gnawed on the most sublime ideas, the firmest of his convictions—

  and it would be idle, invalid, to perceive in this doubt some possibility of hauling him into my camp: for the camps are long since indeterminable, the fronts vague, shifting; everyone is entangled in everyone else, no matter what ideas or convictions a person was once moved by—

  and thus it is also idle to brood about the philosophy underlying the subtle distinctions in John and Stella’s social likes and dislikes. The resulting valuation seems strange. For instance, they take a lively interest in the fates and concerns of the working classes, and not just theoretically, they naturally adore their chef, spoil their caretaker’s wife, treat their chauffeur, John’s butler, and Stella’s chambermaids with patriarchal care and kindness, heartily shake hands with their dentist when encountering him in the lobby of the opera, greet his wife with explosive recognition whether meeting her for the first or the tenth time; however, they display ethereally remote politesse toward the wife of a bank director, because the borders are so fine here as to be all too easily crossed; and with vigorous cordiality they are icily neutral toward the wives of those of John’s diplomatic colleagues who cannot deny a background that is, no doubt, highly respectable but simply not quite to be counted as part of Society.

  a year and a half ago, I recall, all this was terribly interesting to me. I felt the bliss of a butterfly hunter who has caught an especially rare and beautiful specimen when, for instance, I discovered that it is always the wives who determine the final place in the social hierarchy; for the time being, bachelors are uncategorized, with every opportunity open . . .

  but it is winter 1940, the first Ice Age commenced two years ago and is about to climax, the butterflies are dead on their pins in the glass cases, my passion for lepidoptera has deepened into a passion for deeper biological dynamics: now, for instance, I would like to open Cousin Wolfgang’s eyes to what the stylistic difference between John and Stella’s informational conversations and Uncle Ferdinand’s overflowing chitchat signifies for their joint world. When John and Stella exchange information about the beau monde they belong to, they do so in a businesslike way, which is cool, terse, and precise. Their membership is presumed by their social prestige and their financial standing, matters that must be administered both cautiously and soberly if they are to be well administered. John and Stella, in the web of the higher and highest circles, hang on the threads of innumerable commercial, social, familial, and, last but not least, simply human interests. Unavoidably, they talk about their world. But only privately. They leave no doubt that it is a closed world. They even lower their voices as though fearing that outsiders might be eavesdropping. Even when they are alone—or privately with me—they speak quickly, in shorthand and ciphers: they refer to people either by nicknames and pet names (Maxi, Bully, Manetti, Coco, Toto, Cloclo) or by titles that reveal nothing to the uninitiated about family connections and that conceal degrees of kinship like that between the Baron Charlus and the Duke of Guermantes. Or else they speak about their friends by using—even more mysteriously—the names of their estates, which are not always identical to their family names. John and Stella practice the utmost discretion. Even when directly asked, they avoid exposing all too intimate facts. And they handle anything beyond the sparest information with a certain blurry sketchiness, which one can follow only with precise and comprehensive knowledge and which is therefore accessible only to true initiates (even though the subject matter is usually something that anyone might just as well know). Even I, who live with them in a way that one could—God knows!—call intimate, am sometimes afflicted by a vexed impatience at this hush-hush business over banalities. And though Coco’s wheelings and Cloclo’s dealings are largely matters of indifference to me, I do find that when John and Stella exchange their quick and quiet seals and ciphers, I am as spellbound as someone trying to divine the hushed cooperation of face and gesture between two deaf-mutes.

  Still, this never happens without John and Stella’s instantly apologizing and hinting that these are matters that could not possibly be of general interest but that must, alas, be briefly discussed (by them). They leave no doubt that only one part of their existence belongs to this world within the world—the worldly part—and that neither their egos nor their true interests have settled there. John and Stella wish very much to be treated as individuals and persons, quite independent of membership in the grand world of society (which is actually a very small world)—even if they can’t deny that, within this particular world within the world and its reality, they live in an ever more abstract and unreal reality. Still and all, they live in it; they speak of something that is alive.

  Uncle Ferdinand is altogether different. He identifies fully with his Middle Kingdom. Never for a moment does Uncle Ferdinand think of himself as outside it, for he is intergrown with it in every fiber of his being. And yet he speaks of it with utmost indiscretion. He exposes the most humiliating facts, reveals the most compromising circumstances, does not spare the most personal and intimate details; but he does all this with a reporter’s sobriety, which is disarming. He narrates even the worst scandals in a matter-of-fact way that allows any judgment, makes no moral or aesthetic evaluation, but simply testifies to something that exists, like life itself.

  Above all, Uncle Ferdinand speaks with this relentless scientific detachment to me—an outsider. True, he pretends to take me for granted as one of his own kind, to whom he may assume that his world is not alien and whom his tales would not strike dumb, like the fables of Sinbad the Sailor of the copper city to which the roc carried him. But the thoroughness with which Uncle Ferdinand exposes each bit of trash (Toto’s wheelings and Cloclo’s dealings) in every kind of connection with other bits of information both trivial and significant—demonstrating, explicating, dissecting—merely betrays how well aware he is of dealing with a nonmember who must be taught the rudiments.

  Uncle Ferdinand is deliberately telling tales out of school because he wants to transmit what went on in school. He wants to instruct me about his Middle Kingdom as minutely and precisely as possible. Whether he seeks to understand his aims and motives is debatable. He probably never asks himself. Something urges him to it. It might be his loneliness and nearly monkish isolation from the world here in threatened, wintry Bessarabia, his yearning for his friends, the other paladins of the Middle Kingdom, his homesickness for them. But his exile here is voluntary. And so it is to be assumed then that something urges him to it as well: perhaps the clear insight into the nature of the time, perhaps an instinctive sense for it. When Uncle Ferdinand feels the urge to talk about the Middle Kingdom, then it is not really he who is speaking—something speaks out of him. The Middle Kingdom wants to speak through him. Uncle Ferdinand must speak his world, for otherwise it no longer is and will never have been.

  True, the kingdom of the rich and richly influential has not gone under. WWII, expanding more and more icily, more and more lethally, in this heart of winter 19
40, may have disrupted the overlappings of the circles of friends. But Maxi, Bully, Mutzi, Putzi, Manetti, Coco, Toto, Cloclo, or whatever their names are, they’re all still getting by. Restricted perhaps, cut off from their own kind, without galas, dinner parties, cocktail parties, treasure hunts, but certainly not in dire straits. Some of them may even die, but they have heirs to their wealth and spirit. The carnivore’s teeth have not been blunted. Once the deluge is past, they will weave themselves together again, probably tighter, tauter, finer-meshed, and richer in booty than before, with threads of interests more mercantile, more mondaine, more tightly connected and in the end more quintessentially human. Nevertheless—or rather, for that very reason—their world will never again be what it was in Uncle Ferdinand’s time. For it is already a world of shadows and will remain a world of shadows, albeit occasionally moved to become lifelike by a shadow player and evoked for the glory of the shadows’ magic.

  22

  That is what I would like to explain to my dead cousin Wolfgang: Uncle Ferdinand’s innocence. His eminently creative inability to act otherwise. The way he is woven into his time, his unity with the spirit of his time—an involvement so intimate that he will pass away with it, but singing of it, telling of it, like a dying swan.

  My cousin Wolfgang, who as a boy once sang so charmingly in the church choir, so angel-precious, that in listening Aunt Hertha’s eyes brimmed with tears, wouldn’t be able to close his ears when he heard Uncle Ferdinand say: “When I think back over my life, naturally my youth at the imperial courts in St. Petersburg and Vienna and London was incomparably more brilliant than the period after the first great war. However, life was almost more entertaining after the war. It was like going to bed with a duchess: God knows what discretion it required, what complicated preparations you had to go through, and then all kinds of obstacles and dangers, with her having pangs of conscience that in the end she’d have to confess it all, and then when it happened it wasn’t much different than normal. That was the old world. The new world was like hopping on the Orient Express in Paris and looking around to see who else is on board and spotting a fiery female and not knowing whether she’s a cocotte or your cousin, but either way you make up your mind to spend the night in her sleeping compartment: it’s a lot more fun, a lot more adventurous, don’t you think, even if she turns out to be married to your dentist, even if you’ve once again hung around with people with whom you really shouldn’t have any personal relations; it’s irksome enough to endure her husband’s fingers in your mouth. However, this became unavoidable after the war; I mean, associating with such people. They were suddenly there like flies in summer—the snobs, you understand—and I must say, a new tone came into the world with them, of course, and thereby a new taste into life. I don’t even mean a bad taste, although this goes without saying. Yet it was somehow more enticing, more piquant . . . Now, there are two kinds of snobs, after all: one kind is sometimes even simpatico, and quite useful too—like courtiers. In our day, these are courtiers sans courts, alas, but with the same qualities: pushy and bootlicking, ambitious and groveling with their superiors and snappish with their inferiors, but always so poignantly helpful, so pleasantly assiduous . . . These are simply people who always want to be included but don’t quite have the grit for it, nor can they be alone. They’re dependent on you; you have the impression that they look up to you, like children to grownups; it breaks your heart when you have to send them off to bed . . . However, there are also very unappealing people among them; that’s the second category. You have the impression that they clamber up to you like mountain climbers, sweating terribly all the while, and so you are cold to them and treat them badly, thus taking on snobbish manners yourself without meaning to do so. Or else you feel involuntarily tickled by the thought of being something like the north face of the Eiger, you feel flattered that they would risk their necks to climb up to you, you recognize the athletic ambition. So you tolerate them. A kind of mutual complaisance develops: while they ecstatically inhale the ambrosia of their gods, one of whom is you, your nostrils suck in the sweat of their brows like a sacrificial smoke. And in this way, too, all sorts of bad manners evolve, don’t you agree? When one is with one’s own kind, one would never dream of thinking oneself better than anyone else. But if you’re incessantly surrounded by people who suck up to one person and snub another and make someone else realize that he is more than someone else or less than someone else or is doing something or other that is better or worse than what someone else is doing, or that he has more than other people or less than other people—yes indeed, then you too involuntarily start thinking about what you really are and do and have. And then it occurs to you that someone or other may be more or have more or do better things than you. He can be anyone and anything, a scientist or a nouveau riche or a film star . . . And then, of course, the whole thing blows up; you no longer have a society in which rank and fortune and kindred opinions and manners go hand in hand, you’ve got a motley crew consisting purely of people with nothing in common except that one talks about them, no matter why or in what terms, whether it’s because a man may be a prince or a jockey or an adventurer who hopes to break the bank at Monte Carlo—so long as people notice him. For, after all, that’s what snobs are all about: they want to be seen moving about quite casually among the noblest, the richest and the brightest and the best. And for this reason, of course, everyone has to know who they are. The snobs then make sure that the group keeps getting smaller and smaller and more and more exclusive. And anyone who doesn’t get fed up with taking part in this everlasting exhibition, or who doesn’t suddenly feel ashamed of having so much more than the others, and doesn’t withdraw, will, of course, do his best to belong to the select few and will show the others that he is and knows and has more than they—and thus the world will ultimately consist of nothing but snobs. But you know, when they first started hanging around us, the snobs, it was often very entertaining . . .”