Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  Thus, the fronts seem clear. Clearer, at any rate, than in WWI. But not completely clear. For instance, Uncle Helmuth’s comments since March 1938 revealed that not all of them emigrated when the brown brothers of the Reich marched into Vienna, not all of them fled like bats from a cave when a light is carried in. He had always called them “shady elements,” alluding to their “obscure machinations.” Now, evidently, a certain portion of them who were not so allergic to light had remained, and they occupied his imagination more keenly and more intensely than ever. They were now personally closer to him, so to speak, were more of his ilk, and in donning brown uniforms had changed their identities but not their power and arbitrariness, not the infinitely freer existential form that towered over his own and made it appear subordinate. But because they were of his stamp, for the moment he looked up at them kindly, yes reverently. He knew them individually, knew their names (Reich Field Marshal Hermann Göring, Reich Propaganda Minister Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Reich Labor Leader Ley). But in general they were still (albeit now in a positive sense) they. At first he spoke their names in a different tone, of course (as Cousin Wolfgang did about the “New Human Being,” the “People”). With stars in his eyes and the booming of unconditional trust in his breast, he would say, “You don’t have to worry about a thing; they’ll take care of it properly!” But this gradually changed again. The intonation became flatter, more sober. Soon the individuals melted back into the old collective term; the names gave way to the anonymous expression his powerlessness used for those in possession of power: they.

  The more the days plunged, light and blue, into the great icy vacuum from which an ever-greater past promised to emerge from an abstract present—very much the right basis, then, for a great future—the more taciturn Uncle Helmuth became. I saw very little of him then; I had already moved out of the apartment and was chicly installed in a garçonnière (paid for by Stella) in the center, so I saw Uncle Helmuth only when I visited Aunt Selma or Cousin Wolfgang, who refused to meet me anywhere but in the “joint parental home” (“If you want to see me, then the place that was your home for twelve years ought to be good enough, right?”). But by early 1939, one could catch the irked overtones whenever Uncle Helmuth mentioned them. (“They seem to be forgetting that we people of the Ostmark are Germans too, after all.”) And then the hour of vast collective bloodshed began palpably to advance on him too. It must have been around this time that I last saw him, but I can imagine that by September 1939 everything was back to normal: “They’ve put us in a fine mess!”

  25

  For Uncle Helmuth and his iron men, I am now in the enemy camp, even though I too am standing as an iron man to fight side by side with millions like me against some kind of “them.” This is paradoxical, but I enjoy every moment of it.

  Having bathed nicely and rubbed Geo. F. Trumper’s West Indian Extract of Lime into my skin, having slipped into my exquisite, freshly ironed linen after sprinkling it with a few drops of Knize Polo, and having donned my plum-blue gold-frogged-and-braided operetta-hero uniform, I will go downstairs. Uncle Ferdinand will be waiting for me in the drawing room. He will be wearing pumps and black trousers, a starched shirt with a tuxedo tie, and a velvet jacket, in prince-of-the-Church violet, that is no less imaginatively frogged than my uniform. His Russian greyhounds will be lying next to him on the sofa, and when I enter, they will raise their bored lady-in-waiting heads and graciously bang their tails twice. On the low Chinese enamel table in front of him, there will be a large silver tray with a battery of bottles and carafes and all sorts of high and low, smooth and bellied, stemmed and flat-bottomed glasses. And he will brusquely tell me to have a drink, for he will be impatient to talk about his Middle Kingdom, against which the iron men have taken up arms.

  Outside, the world is at war. Two hours ago, we were having tea in the library (Indian tea, not Chinese, like Mama), and for a few minutes it looked as if a huge, soundless battle were being fought in the west. The acanthus jungle of frost flowers on the windowpanes was blossoming as if on fire. The ribs of the leaf plumage were going up in yellow flames. But it was only the sun in a flawless heaven, at sixteen degrees below zero Celsius, gliding into its molten-iron bed.

  Now, it has long been dark behind the frosted windows. A cold, heavy, ruthless darkness, such as one learned to fear in childhood when hearing about death and graves and tombs in horror stories. (Miss Fern didn’t want these servants’ stories told to me, and it was all the more sinister when the servants whispered them into my ear when she wasn’t around; I was scared numb, and yet happy to belong with them by sharing their terrors.)

  The cold, heavy darkness must be in people’s hearts, for the night is pure. Surely the sky is filled with high stars. The knotty acacias by the courtyard gates are throwing their naked branches up to them. The village lies hunched in the blue snow. The yellow squares of windows are carved out of a few of the houses’ black walls under their snowy bonnets, pricked by icicles hanging from the edges of roofs. It is so cold that all the dogs have crept away, silent. And perhaps, from the dark thicket of sloe bushes along the cemetery wall, where the three birches loom, a slim figure swathed from head to toe in a black cape will now emerge and come up the village road without visibly moving its feet and float to the pond in the park, where it will vanish. . .

  I have to think about Aunt Selma, my dead mother’s sister. There is little likelihood that she ever told me horror stories, but she has their romantic poetry within herself. In all her being is the tomb-like darkness of a well shaft. Deep down lies a pure surface, dark and round, a hare’s eye staring at the heavens. Of course, you have to catch her off guard. This is not easy, considering her harshness. The image of her afternoon nap blots out any other image that I have of Aunt Selma. There was no way of talking her into lying down. As if to demonstrate that it was her accursed destiny to slave away for us and allow herself scant relaxation and no full rest, she took her nap sitting on a kitchen chair. Seldom did she really sleep. She dozed like a horse in its harness. Her head jerked forward, eventually swaying back and forth as though to a mute internal singsong. Earlier, we were told, her hair had been extraordinarily rich and lovely. She had cut it off because “it got in the way during housework.” The part in it, dividing the ashen strands down the middle, expressed a harsh humility. If you touched her shoulder to suggest that she lie down on the living-room sofa or the bed in her own room, the weary draft-horse head yanked up and murmured with closed eyes, “Just wait—I’m coming. I’m just going to rest for a minute.”

  If she intended to arouse our sympathy, then it was only to reject it gruffly. Fate had decreed that she be our servant. She used up her life for us in a feeling, rooted deep in peasant blood, of responsibility for her clan: for her sister Hertha, whom she really didn’t care for that much and toward whom she acted as a quarrelsome older sister; for her brother-in-law, whom she despised; for Cousin Wolfgang, whom she felt indifferent towards even though she thought he had all the qualities of a “dear, well-behaved, hardworking boy”; for me, whom she regarded as her booty, something of her own, the sole property ever granted her. She worked her fingers to the bone for us in stolidly monotonous housework, performed with an anger that was more or less part of the routine and that she put on with her kitchen apron, laboring with tooth-gnashing gee-up, with the cumbersome creaking and obstinate squeaking of wheels on the cart she dragged over her life’s stony paths.

  It was, as she revealingly put it, a “cherished ordeal.” She rose “with the chickens” at dawn, got us all up, prepared our breakfasts, made sure we left the house on time. And then, all alone and probably with odd bits of incoherent monologue, she “slaved” the morning away, airing the beds hanging out the rugs washing the breakfast dishes sweeping the floors straightening up making the beds re-placing the rugs peeling potatoes scrubbing vegetables slicing onions and wiping the tears from her eyes with her apron putting water on handling pots pans plates left and right up and down like a percussio
nist dropping the gas ring swearing at the gas cursing the gas company accusing life wiping the hair out of her face tearing the lid from the pot that had boiled over sucking her scorched finger—that was how she spent the morning until lunchtime, when Cousin Wolfgang and I came back from school, I from the realschule, he from his stuck-up humanistic gymnasium, Uncle Helmuth from the plant, and Aunt Hertha from the office (she was bookkeeper in an ancient, oddball, lopsided little music-publishing firm). Aunt Selma set the table and served the loveless food, cooked from thrifty recipes. She hardly allowed herself time for even a bite: every day for twelve years I heard the sentence “Selma, would you please finally sit down!” alternately from Uncle Helmuth’s and Aunt Hertha’s lips. No sooner were we fed and the table cleared than she began to do the dishes, and at times it almost came to fisticuffs when Aunt Hertha tried to help her. “No, I simply won’t hear of it—please! You’re tired and overworked yourself; you’re in the office all day long; please let me do it!”

  Uncle Helmuth and Aunt Hertha caught the trolley back to the plant and the office, and Cousin Wolfgang and I started our homework (but only during my boyhood and early adolescence; later, I broke out, ignoring threats and rebukes, playing hooky and strolling through the adventure of Vienna). Meanwhile, Aunt Selma spent the afternoon waxing the floors watering the flowers polishing the silver doing the major laundry the minor laundry patching linen sewing ironing darning, until Uncle Helmuth and Aunt Hertha came home for supper (always cold: usually sliced cold cuts with mustard pickles, a hard-boiled egg, kippers, vegetables left over from lunch). Her years thus passed, like the potatoes with which she prepared Bohemian dumplings (Cousin Wolfgang’s favorite dish), vanishing between her fingers on the grater. And it was “just for fifteen minutes now” after lunch, when she had cleared and washed and put everything in order, that she permitted herself some rest in the harness. Seldom did she let herself go so far as to put her folded arms on the table and drop her head on them like a sobbing woman. I was the only one who knew that she was different than this: that she was really indolent, work-shy, and moony. I was her property, the fatherless orphan-boy of her dead sister, placed under her guardianship by the court, her booty; but that was not the only reason she favored me wherever and however she could, sacrificing herself for me even more thoroughly than for the others. Whenever she winked, luring me into the kitchen to slip a penny into my pocket or spirit a piece of cake topped with whipped cream into my outstretched hand, I would sense that this was also a bribe. She knew that I saw through her. We were the same sort.

  More than once, I managed to catch her unawares, but each time, it was as if she were catching me. I recall the first time precisely. We were alone in the apartment, a delicious silence. I lay in bed with one of those marvelous childhood diseases that are painless but that keep you out of school and free from responsibility. The adults are full of loving care; they don’t criticize, threaten, or demand. Moreover, the fever gives your thoughts a gliding lightness, as if in slow motion, and the least exertion changes them, like images in a kaleidoscope, into something totally different. Words are transformed into numbers, just as they are in the minutes before you drop off to sleep, or into images, entire sentences standing there abruptly, like totem poles looming out of slow waters, while at the back of your neck, at the base of your skull, a small, sticky knob like a medlar fills your mouth with a lukewarm taste of brass. I was thirsty and I wanted to pee too. So instead of calling Aunt Selma, I got up and went to the bathroom. And that was when I saw her through the open kitchen door. She was standing at the window, gazing out into the courtyard; or rather, she had been gazing at the courtyard (or the sky above it), but, upon hearing me, she shifted her eyes to me. And even though there was absolutely nothing to see outside but the ugly wall of the left wing of the apartment building and a patch of indifferent sky overhead, her gaze was full of something very definite, something she had seen with great clarity, with a hungry, wolf-like sharpness, even. And she was smiling. Of course, it was just the vague start of a smile, its tenderness contrasting poetically with the danger in her gaze. Since then, I have often thought that La Gioconda’s smile, which people make such a fuss over, can be understood only if one imagines that she was peering into the distance a millisecond earlier and the smile remains as she looks over toward us.

  Later, I often lurked about to see this distant gaze of Aunt Selma’s. It was never in her eyes when she slaved away. Her entire nature was confused at such times, bewildered and jittery, quarrelsome and vehement. She had a way of wiping her forehead with the back of her hand as if she had run into a cobweb and was whisking it out of her face. But no sooner did she drop her arms than that gaze came into her eyes. Her truer being now seemed to be flooding over and into her, and it was silent and listening. Neither Aunt Hertha nor Uncle Helmuth nor even Cousin Wolfgang noticed this strange presence of Aunt Selma when her mind was absent. (Even though, for Uncle Helmuth, this must have been one of the most ordinary circumstances of his weekly spiritist séances. But, of course, when Aunt Selma’s spirit was absent, no spirit of a departed man or woman entered the momentarily vacant shell of her body; it was she herself who entered it—and that should have provided the mathematician in Uncle Helmuth with food for thought.)

  Aunt Selma darns stockings, bowed over a darning egg. (It was incredible to see her achievements: there were holes that had ripped into the darned areas and been redarned again and again, so that archaeological strata of darning work covered our toes and heels.) She sits and holds her head at a slight angle, and I know: she is now listening to herself. She hears herself like a faraway melody. I think, Now that strange, almost Gioconda smile is budding in her. But she senses that I have caught her unawares, and she turns her head to me. And no matter how quickly I look away, she catches me lurking. (I once heard her saying to Aunt Hertha in the kitchen, “The boy has something shifty about him; he’s not open and straightforward, like yours. Sometimes I find him downright sinister.”) The others live in the empty rooms of their terribly lonesome indifference. Even Cousin Wolfgang. My brother Wolfgang. The open, honest, dear boy, already reading his classics at twelve and thirteen (while I was struggling to understand what logarithms were, and, because I didn’t believe I would ever succeed, perusing penny dreadfuls under my school desk, fleeing into a world of wholesome archetypes, instead of consulting Mocznik-Zahradniczek’s Mathematical Textbook for Realschule); Cousin Wolfgang, who at sixteen began his enterprise of absorbing all the great thoughts recorded during six thousand years of history (which barely allowed him to have a single thought of his own but which did not prevent him from exhausting the prime of his mental energy in the dissolute fantasies of masturbation); my brother Wolfgang, with whom I had grown up in the hellish intimacy of a room shared day and night for twelve years, in the brotherliness of mutually smelled farts and mutually knocked-out teeth, in the shared torment inflicted by adults and parents and guardians, in the agony of our impotent and useless hatred of them . . . even he never lost his gaze into nothingness.

  Sure, he daydreamed sometimes too, he said when I asked him. About what? Oh, you know. You imagine you’re going to do something important (a gymnast’s dreams, so to speak): contribute to the welfare of mankind (the gigantic swing on the horizontal bar), become famous, respected, loved . . . Rich, too? Sure, if possible, rich too. But that’s not the most important thing (leaping from the horizontal bar, elegant knee bend with arms stretched level, straightening up elastically; the palms slap against the thighs; body frozen at rigid attention: Bravo! Mens sana in corpore sano!). What do I dream about? he returns the question. What do I mean—nothing? You can’t dream about nothing. A mood—eh? Okay, then, not a mood, but what? A sensation with no object, a listening out into the stillness, a peering into nothingness, that’s not a dream . . . Fine, I’ll spare you the quotations, but even the contemplation of the mystics . . .

  It was after this conversation that he began to treat me a bit condescendingly, my bro
ther Cousin Wolfgang. Every so often, I saw that his high forehead under the blond German adolescent’s shock of hair (the steeple head that he had inherited from Uncle Helmuth along with his slightly short legs) had become more arrogant by a few dozen important books, his eyes more and more bewildered, more and more tormented. At such times, I felt sorry for him in his emptiness, in his terrible indifference, which was filled only with himself and the great thoughts from six thousand years of history. My pity was so deep that I yelled at him, shouted some obscenity at him, which provoked him into pouncing on me. He was a lot stronger than I, with his gymnast’s muscles, but I always managed to get the better of him with cunning tricks and dodges. And I was anything but a generous victor, thrashing him without mercy and then being treated accordingly by the rest of the family (“He shows an outright sadistic vengefulness against anything better than him; it would be no surprise if this soon turned into genuine criminality!”). But why didn’t he too occasionally stare into space, my brother Cousin Wolfgang? Why did he always have the rim of a helmet shadowing his helpless gaze? . . .

  Whenever he realized that along with all the great thoughts of six millennia he had also absorbed all the great doubts, he would get nervous (“jumpy,” Miss Fern would have said). Something of the bewildered fidgitiness of Aunt Selma the cart horse came over him. He made faces as if cobwebs were sticking to his nose . . . granted, that too reveals a kind of inner life: the inner life of people with shining, watchful eyes that never deviate from the object and the purpose and the meaning. A truly lovable, fabulously decent, warmhearted, magnanimous, even intelligent fellow, my cousin Wolfgang, God rest his soul! He lies in the Central Graveyard in Vienna. Not exactly a soldier’s grave, but the stone says that he died a “Hero for the Führer and the Fatherland.” (Aunt Hertha, who “isn’t as quick to switch sides” as Uncle Helmuth—he inadvertently sobbed, “They’ve got my boy on their conscience”—was supposedly the one who insisted on this inscription. But then he did himself believe so strongly in what was written.)