Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  26

  So that was what we had been living toward, as things turned out historically. The five of us penned up in a four-room apartment on the fourth floor of a tenement in the Twelfth District (Schönbrunn in its abstract glory before our noses). Each of us in his enormously empty space, casting a long shadow, a monument to his own lonesomeness and indifference. Around us roared the city of Vienna—it too an empty space, its roaring similar to the kind one hears in an empty seashell. To be sure, each of us filled his space with some kind of activity, fiction, illusion, even with ghosts. Not just Cousin Wolfgang, who sought out the plaster busts in the corridor of his humanistic gymnasium for this purpose: . . . Uncle Helmuth, for instance, had real phantoms. Every Saturday evening, he would frequent them in his spiritist circle, the way other people went bowling or to a tarot game. When the medium went into a trance, her eyes rolled back and the whites peered out like the ones the good soldier faces when his bayonet plunges into the body of his enemy. From her lips (she normally stammered, heavy-tongued, and in shredded sentences), Uncle Helmuth had relayed many an interesting tiding from the beyond, which he repeated to us. As early as 1937, when nothing as yet hinted that he would one day tend in this direction (although he often remarked upon the miraculous doings in the Reich, as opposed to the slovenliness here in Austria), he announced something to us in conspiratorial secrecy. He had received a revelation from over there (the beyond, I mean, not the Reich). He had learned that there, in the immaterial and actual Reality and Truth beyond ours, Adolf Hitler occupied a much higher rank than here on earth, higher even than Buddha’s and Helena Blavatsky’s and his, Uncle Helmuth’s, as well. And he, the Führer, had taken the ordeal and degradation of an earthly, material existence upon himself willingly, like Jesus Christ, in order to bring mankind one level closer to God.

  (Of course, Uncle Helmuth asked us to keep this to ourselves for the time being. The spirits, he said, pursued their goals in a very complex manner, which we earthlings could scarcely comprehend. Their intentions could be discerned by us only after they were carried out and on the basis of the results. We therefore had to be careful not to interfere rashly in this delicate spinning and weaving . . . Incidentally, Uncle Helmuth was extremely annoyed upon learning that Wolfgang had joined the illegal Nazi movement, and he declared Wolfgang’s membership null and void since he was still underage.)

  I say: That was how we lived back then (three years before this winter of 1940, but far away, before the start of the Ice Age). Each of us lived his dreary days in his own emptiness and either stared into nothingness or filled the terrible hollow of our existence with frail actions, fictions, fancies, yes, even with ghosts. Aunt Hertha (to remember her too with piety) filled her emptiness (and, one hopes, other of her hollow spaces) entirely with Uncle Helmuth. She worshiped him, but not for himself. She worshiped him as her counterpart.

  For, you see, Aunt Hertha too had relations with superreality. She had heard from over there, an indisputable source, that every self materializing here on earth is merely one half of a spiritual unity whose other half is embodied in a different self, usually of the opposite sex. Every self seeks this other half, and when it has found it, then there is no end to bliss. Such was the case with her. She had found her counterpart in Uncle Helmuth and henceforth lived only for him.

  It didn’t bother her that Aunt Selma despised her for it (“Why, you’re in bondage to the man!”) or that Cousin Wolfgang visibly suffered from it. Her mind was fixed on the sublime. A person who has found his counterpart has not automatically arrived in the Nirvana of bliss. On the contrary, he (or she) is chosen for special tasks. For when such a unity is completed, then in its fully restored spiritual capacity it naturally understands the mission it must carry out through its materialization. By means of brotherly love and the proclamation of the True Doctrine, it must build the ever more spiritual, dematerialized City of God on Earth. Superfluous to mention that she, Aunt Hertha, as the female (i.e., more tested, more earthbound, hence doomed to greater suffering in material existence, and thus, of course, more sublime) half of the Helmuth/Hertha duo, believed in Adolf Hitler’s mission of salvation long before Uncle Helmuth did.

  Now, Cousin Wolfgang believed the same thing more and more resolutely and was more and more ready for action. In the evening he would disappear without saying where he was going. I alone saw him in our room girding himself up and pulling on shoulder straps. I also found brass knuckles and rubber clubs and once even a pistol on our bookshelf—behind the Spinoza, comically enough, which he must have felt was secure from me. But even though my brother Cousin Wolfgang now daily armed himself to flee the emptiness of the house and submerge himself in the bliss of Nazi comradeship, he could only shrug at his mother’s ravings. He believed that if she had read her Plato, she would know that with her—or rather, Uncle Helmuth’s—silly notion of a counterpart, she was making a gospel out of the joke of a drunken comedy writer—the dumb cow!

  Still, Cousin Wolfgang was fair enough (“intellectually honest,” he called it) to admit that the reason his parents’ no doubt basically harmless spiritualism enraged him so much was that he was jealous of his father to the point of occasionally murderous hatred. This realization (especially the insight that his own spiritual ambitions sprang from the desire to expose the knuckleheadedness of this “cross between a mechanic and an Anabaptist” whom to his great disgust he had to acknowledge as his procreator) annoyed him doubly because it required him to recognize a so-called Oedipus complex, thereby corroborating the obscene theories of the Jew Freud. Although, to be sure, Germanic mythology also had . . .

  Thus we lived, with our spooks in our heads and our webs across our eyes. Or with eyes that saw through them, and thus stared into space, into sheer nothingness.

  Twice a day, the dining table united us in a group of five, and not even quarreling could lure us out of the terrible indifference and solitude within which each of us kept his league-long shadow. When we had been fed lunch, the table cleared and the dishes washed, and the Helmuth/Hertha duality was happily gone, then Aunt Selma would grant herself her cart-horse snooze in harness (hardly ever more than twenty minutes). Next, while Cousin Wolfgang and I got down to our homework, she would go back to her drudging. Usually, but not always. And I caught her unawares one last time.

  It was one of those wasting, silent afternoons that only a large, teeming city can produce (according to the stereotype, I should have someone practicing the piano on another floor of the building). Once again, I had failed to understand something (let’s say it was differential and integral calculus this time), and I wanted to pee, or drink a glass of milk in the kitchen. Cousin Wolfgang, in order to be completely undisturbed, was probably cramming in the shitter. I did not hear Aunt Selma drudging anywhere, but the door to her room was ajar, and I peered inside. She was sitting on her bed, looking through a couple of magazines. This time, she did not sense my eavesdropping, so I found her fully emerged from her well, so to speak. She was slowly turning a page. I could see by the covers of the other magazines strewn across her bed that these were fashion and society magazines (“smart-set gazettes,” Uncle Helmuth would have said indignantly; she had probably pinched and scraped to save up the pennies to buy them). As she sat there on the edge of the bed, very straight, her legs in front of her and her knees scarcely bent, her posture very noble, I saw for the first time that she was tall and slender and had full, firm, high breasts. Her throat, her neck, which I had always seen in the draft-horse collar, was now free and lithe, and her slightly bowed head perched on it gracefully. I saw that she must have been very attractive as a young girl, equal in beauty to her frivolous sister. But I saw this well nigh at the edge of my gaze. What my eyes grasped fully was that she was dematerialized and thereby entirely her true self.

  Again she had the vague Gioconda smile hovering around her lips, but now it showed no cruelty, it was gentle, shadowy, charmingly dreamy. She turned a page and, before looking down, lifted her he
ad and stared out the window with her distant gaze, as if her eyes were holding their breath. She seemed to be listening for something, something that was not sound and certainly not speech, notion, or thought. The smile stirred her lips to the bare extent that the surface of the well water is ruffled when, from above, from the small blue disk of sky at the end of the shaft, a voice calls.

  I thought to myself, She’s a nixie. Some terrible curse forces her to dream that she is a household cart horse, and only when she’s completely oblivious of herself, and is no longer trapped in the nightmare of herself as a draft horse, only then can she emerge from her well shaft, can her nixie eyes look upon the alien world of human beings, can she see the faces and visions of her dream and brood about what they might signify. I said this to myself thus, poetically, because I saw how profoundly her Dalmatian-hill-girl head, in this moment of objectless dreaming over some banal object, had been transformed into something that struck me as the epitome of the German. And already in winter 1940, in the tub of my bathroom in faraway Bessarabia, I knew that a further precious element from the lost half of my life was thereby irretrievably lost in an icy, sinking Europe.

  27

  I hope it does not irritate you too much, esteemed Mr. Jay Gee Brodny, if I do not unravel the thread of my narrative chronologically but instead, in order to proffer you an insight into the various paleonto-logical layers of my existence, draw it back and forth, pulling out a piece now here, now there, in order to revive some significant moment or other, some informative situation or episode, and thus perhaps to display something that strikes me as worth narrating for a very specific reason. What I envisage is a self that keeps emerging out of itself in constant regeneration, like horse willow, yet becomes more and more self-alien, more and more self-inscrutable in this phased growth, so that ultimately the time experienced and the world experienced seem to it like a theatrical stage during the continual set changes and scene changes in a play whose author has in no way adhered to the classical rules of unity of time and place—whereby, of course, the protagonist of this tragicomedy is always a different person, although spectrally the same, as it were. This can hardly be depicted except as a literary equivalent of looking at raw footage for a film, but I admit that this unsteadiness in storytelling is, no doubt, due to many years of watching movie editors at work and witnessing their laudable persistence, the way they scour through the provisionally stitched together takes, the way they comb through the wealth of filmed events, forming a new series that is often the opposite of the original outline, until the intended meaning of the whole becomes acutely evident. For, as Nagel has his leading character, the narrator, say in his latest (rather plainly autobiographical) best seller, “What we imagine we are expressing is not always what we are actually urged to express. That is why the writer’s labor commences beyond language, where one confronts oneself eye to eye . . .”

  And here lies the reason I am telling you so much, so meticulously, about myself, sir. In fact, it’s the reason that I, unfortunately, cannot tell you my story in three sentences. After all, that was what you asked me to do, wasn’t it?

  Needless to say, you did not expect to hear my life story. You had learned that I was writing a novel. A book for which Big-Time Publisher Scherping (heeding the literarily expert but commercially catastrophic advice of his editor Schwab) had paid considerable advances over the course of fourteen years (until he fired S.). That much money invested in one author brings commitment. The man becomes more and more valuable, more and more desirable. If the chance arises to foist him off on some other sucker, then he advances to the status of genius and potential Nobel laureate. I assume that Scherping deployed all his eloquence when he told you about me. But you, Mr. Brodny, are too much of an old fox in this business not to smell the rot in the overly fat bait. When you invited me to tell you my “story” in three sentences, you weren’t only asking about the commercial value of what I wanted to tell, nor yet whether I had it in me to write a good book, you were plainly asking whether this book can ever even be completed.

  One could not ask in a more intelligent way. Chapeau, monsieur: if I were wearing a hat, I would doff it to you. For you, Great Brodny, are not just a pike, a shark, but an Orcinus orca, a killer whale, in the carp pond of international publishing; you know all too well the kind of writer you have before you. You recognized at first glance the fateful personality split that took place within me—back then, during a different paleontological era. It actually took place in 1949, at the end of the second Ice Age in Hamburg-on-the-Elbe, Joimanny, when I felt as if I had been cast away among the lotus-eaters, and Big-Time Publisher Scherping, in the bosom of maternally strict whores, chanced upon a movie treatment left in the brothel and sent his blessed editor Johannes S. to seek out the author and talk him into writing a novel—the novel of the era, of course, the masterpiece of the century. Since that time—a period now of nineteen years of my life—the screenwriter who works his fingers to the bone for the piglets of the postwar German movie industry (as Aunt Selma, RIP, used to slave in the household during my formative years in Vienna) has existed alongside the dreamer in me with lurking eyes lost in the distance, and he, the dreamer, has been working on a book. On his book: the novel of the era, the masterpiece of the century. And while the screenwriter, the assiduous servant of the lively producer-piglets, keeps pouring more and more stories into the feeding trough (stories that can indeed be told in three sentences, goddammit, and occasionally even made into cinematic works of art, which may even win a gilded palm frond at the next festival on some sunny coast, but will, alas, in spite of everything, never become a box-office smash)—while the screenwriter humbly works in the sweat of his brow, the other one, the brilliant novelist and potential Nobel laureate, is chasing after his fata morgana and dreaming of writing the masterpiece of the century, and writing his fingers to the bone and going blind and turning his mind into sauerkraut, in vain, in vain, because his work begins beyond language, as Nagel says: “There, where one confronts oneself eye to eye.” . . . And over there, friend Brodny, no story can be told in three sentences. There you merely unearth black bugs, fruitful as termite queens; they give birth incessantly to many, many other stories, which give birth to new stories, which, in turn, give birth to new stories, so that they teem and swarm. Their narrator drowns, suffocates in stories, and every single story wants to be told, has to be told, if (as Cousin Wolfgang demanded in his gymnasium ethos and Schwab, moved, repeated twelve years later) he wishes to speak fairly and honestly about an era and its people . . . and if the writer wishes to write all his stories down and put them into a form, it will lead to the madness of the chef-d’oeuvre inconnu, to total chaos, to a progressive division of cells proliferating in more and more metastases.

  Tell me a secret, dear Yankel Brodny. How does Nagel do it? Confront himself eye to eye while writing and tell a story whose essence can be summed up in three sentences? I don’t doubt his fairness and honesty for even an instant. I know the man; he was my friend. But he’s fooling someone: either himself or us, his readers. There is something shady somewhere in the way he lays the eggs of his stories and hatches every one of them into a novel. To his credit, I have to say that he is less infected than anyone else by the narcissism of the time, less spellbound by the utterly amazing mystery of existence, even when confronting himself eye to eye. Thus, he appears to succeed in peering through and beyond himself and perceiving his fellow men and neighbors Tom, Dick, and Harry. Okay. No one is saying that novels have to be ineluctably autobiographical. On the contrary: there is a widespread opinion that there is no such thing as a true autobiography. Even more unavoidable in literature than in everyday life is the con of the as-if. Fiction, Mr. Brodny. Nagel iz a firstrayt fikshinriter. I am an even better fikshin-riter. But Nagel has the colder heart. He does not sufficiently love his fellow men and neighbors Tom, Dick, and Harry. Otherwise, he would commit to them more fully and turn them into human beings, not marionettes. As he presents them they f
unction purely to present the events of which “reality”—according to his steadfast troglodyte opinion—is woven. Sure, this method produces stories that can be told in three sentences, but one wonders why he bothered to use more than three.

  And that is Nagel’s con, Mr. Brodny. For reality does not consist of events. It consists of existences. Believe Uncle Ferdinand. In his Middle Kingdom, only the same things keep happening: champagne breakfasts lunches polo games golf tournaments hunting parties Mediterranean cruises cocktail parties intimate dinners galas poker chemin-de-fer roulette movie stars duchesses and other whores. These things keep repeating themselves from here to eternity—and thus, nothing happens. However, Bully Olivera and Agop Garabetian—what full existences they have! Tom, Dick, and Harry, if one takes them lovingly and thoroughly in hand—what miracles of creation! If Nagel succeeds in letting Tom stroll through a novel without supplying the total content of his skull, the myrmidon teeming of Dick’s thoughts ideas impressions experiences reflections, the entire meteorology of Harry’s spiritual life, then I can only repeat: Chapeau, monsieur! This strikes me as neither fair nor honest. I for my part love people; I encounter them wherever I go. All I have to do is stick my nose out the door and I run with the pack. There are crowds of people around. They populate the towns, the highways . . .

  But I see I am boring you. You’ve scarcely got a shrug for my problems. As far as my novel and I are concerned, you knew at first glance: this guy is cradling a dead child. You don’t want to squander your time on my adolescent writing problems. Please, however, permit me to take the matter seriously. These were the problems that caused the death of my friend S., my brother Schwab.