Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  And there you see the reason why

  it’s only through the asshole by

  which narrow passage for the fart

  he finds the entrance to her heart.

  Although Uncle Ferdinand is so prudish that he freezes at the slightest obscenity, he now has a good laugh. If an off-color joke is heartily ribald, he appreciates it as he would a hearty peasant dish that occasionally interrupts the monotony of his daily haute cuisine. He has me repeat it twice: “How did that go again? ‘And there you see the way—’ Oh yes, of course, ‘the reason why’—otherwise it won’t rhyme. It’s only through the asshole by—well, well, very funny indeed—she lets him find his way to her heart. Very funny, really very funny!”)

  but this is only a short digression, after which we return all the more assiduously to the business at hand. He rapidly becomes impatient whenever I show lacunae in my education. He is slowed down by having to localize every last detail and connect it to the others: “Well, naturally, they got to know each other better at Titi’s wedding, because he’s a cousin of Mutzi’s—in Rome, of course, where else!” An intake of breath, with which he controls unruly stirrings. Then relief, because he thinks of something that excuses me: “But I keep forgetting how young you are. J’ai une mémoire admirable, tu sais: j’oublie tout . . .”

  Which, needless to say, is pure coquetterie. In fact, his memory is fabulous, worthy of a cabaret act. It enables him to focus on the titanic chore of keeping the inventory of the Middle Kingdom. The material is gigantic: “une mer à boire,” as he himself admits. Scientific meticulousness requires that every detail be recorded of the happy inhabitants of that reality vanishing into legend: the tonnage of their yachts and the horsepower of their sports cars; the names of their horses and dogs, their pedigrees; the jewelry, hair color, and liver spots of the women; the cock sizes of the men; the quality of the silver used at this or that gala dinner; the names and vintages of the wines that were drunk; the bizarre wanderings of the jewels important enough to have destinies of their own (“Well, first Toto inherited it from his mother, an Aldobrandoni, and he gave it to his wife, Nini, and then she gave it to Lazzi when she had an affair with him, because he had gambling debts, and that was why Lazzi sold it to Joshi for a song, and then Joshi gave it to a Parisian dancer at the Lido; he was madly in love with her, a girl named Yvonne; and then she . . .”).

  The catalogue of the Middle Kingdom is like the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, and, like this key opus of modern literature, it is bound to end in sheer mathematics. Uncle Ferdinand’s reports grow more and more abstract. The Middle Kingdom is dematerializing. It makes no difference that its de facto survival is endangered. Uncle Ferdinand appears less disturbed by the realization that Poland is lost once again (“despite the stubborn assurance to the contrary in her national anthem”) and that he will probably have to write off Stash and Wanda, Kotja and Olga, once and for all, and with them the fantastic wild boar hunts in Volhynia. He is much more worried about whether roulette and other games of chance are really still elegant. Who is still playing them? Of the friends in the innermost circles, only the Greeks and a couple of Sicilians and Spaniards (he lists them by name).

  The tide of gray iron men, rising all around Europe, is of no concern to Uncle Ferdinand. He knows that they have massed just a few miles across the Dniester and are menacing him directly and personally, but he doesn’t care. Nor does it matter to him whether others are about to blow up the Maginot Line before pitching into one another. Nothing, incidentally, says that they won’t make a detour and invade France via Belgium (as a former member of the general staff, Uncle Ferdinand thinks of General Schlieffen with great respect). In other words: Jacqueline and Guy and Alain and Marie-Jeanne and with them the stag hunts in the Île-de-France and the pheasant shoots in the Ardennes and in Sologne are as much at the mercy of providence as, perhaps, Ian and Daisy, Hugh and Elizabeth-Anne, in their splendid country houses and play parks full of first-class horses, dogs, sailboats, on the other side of the Channel. But more than anything, Uncle Ferdinand is haunted by the observation that for some time now—that is to say, increasingly since the last decade, from the end of the delightful twenties till today—more and more friends of the innermost circles have been complaining of boredom or (usually this goes hand in hand) have become boring themselves. (“If you can still remember good old Nicki—he was absolutely mad about your mother, and she liked him because he was so entertaining—I’ll never forget what he said at Stefanie’s funeral: ‘C’est commode, un enterrement, tu sais: on peut avoir l’air moussade avec les gens, ils prennent cela pour de la tristesse. . .’ ”—Stella calls this kind of esprit provincial.—“And then he married that person, that former actress. There was nothing to say about it. After all, in our day, the king of England stepped down from the throne because of a love affair, but he didn’t become more boring because of it, on the contrary. But poor Nicki, he was a completely different man. And when that person died in the bargain, he never stopped talking about her. He was unbearable. No matter where you ran into him, he talked about her. Eventually, nobody wanted to have anything to do with him. Who wants to hear about such matters all the time? People have enough problems of their own. If everybody carried on like that, that would be the end of it. And so ultimately we quite abandoned poor Nicki. Sandro as much as said so in his eulogy when Nicki died. And he talked about what a valuable person Nicki had been. Oh, well? Éloge funèbre. La moitié de tout ça lui aurait suffi de son vivant. But poor Nicki had really become unendurably boring . . .” This reminiscence has unforeseeably arisen during the recitation of a long list of cocaine sniffers among his friends, and he terminates it with a necrologue: “I can understand old Silvio Francalanza. When he turned ninety-five, he simply shot himself. Things had gotten too boring for him. Basta, fini, goodnight, everybody. I can understand him perfectly.”)

  33

  It is midnight. The witching hour, Mr. Brodny. Back in Vienna, at twelve midnight, Uncle Helmuth and Aunt Hertha would exchange intimate glances at every creaking of an ancient and decrepit piece of furniture (almost pure Biedermeier, a von Jaentsch heirloom). They knew what was happening: visitors from the beyond. The departed were going about. Uncle Helmuth even knew them by name. During the séances of his spiritist circle, they would materialize in the temporarily emptied physical shells of the mediums, identifying themselves and revealing from which sofa nook or dresser corner they were creaking. You should not be surprised, sir, that I, familiar at an early age with such occult phenomena, have gotten into the habit of summoning ghosts. We live in the era of historicism, obsessed with the notion of rationally comprehensible causal connections; they alone guarantee our reality. I, for my part, am haunted by the loss of a full half of my life. I would like to conjure up the vanished reality of that half. I have to do so. I ask for your sympathy: it’s not pleasant living amid the realities in the no-man’s-land of time. To feel comfortable here, one must be dead, like Uncle Ferdinand, like Cousin Wolfgang, like Schwab and all my other loves. They still exist marvelously as heroes of their myths. Which, of course, also means that they have to put up with being summoned forth by shamans like me. People like us have the power to call them from their shadowy existence into time’s no-man’s-land and to materialize them in the magical element of writing. Just look: all I have to do is use my quill, my ballpoint pen, the keys of my typewriter, to place a few hundred letters on this sheet of paper, and Uncle Ferdinand—the Uncle Ferdinand of winter 1940—will live before our eyes. His yellowish-white spider-head is wedged deep between his high-thrust shoulders. The straw whisk of his mustache bristles out horizontally on either side under the parrot’s beak of his nose. The skin on his forehead is so smooth that it rosily mirrors the glow from the fireplace. I sit opposite him, listening attentively. The reflection of the fire’s glow is fitful in my boot shafts; the boot tips are in a pool of red light. Uncle Ferdinand is also staring at this. Though physically still very much alive in tha
t winter of 1940, he is no longer of this world. He already belongs to another dimension. He now belongs to the marvelous no-man’s-land of space and time in which history and stories exist.

  He is already with his ancestors, whose pictures gaze down at him from the high walls of the dining room. His faith in immortality has placed him among them. Perhaps Uncle Ferdinand does not really believe in the immortality of the soul in God, even though he has been brought up in this faith and would regard it as poor taste to doubt it. But he does believe in the immortality of fame. His ancestors did not die because they entered history. He too will not die, for he will become history. Stella says that he is one of the modern princes who do not determine the fate of the nations with an open vizor but manipulate it surreptitiously, rather in the way a man rummages under a girl’s skirt. Hence, says Stella, his proper place is not in the history of the world but in the history of manners. Nevertheless, when you consider the people in the highway rest stop, this is still the history of the manners of gods: mythology. Meanwhile, he thus placed himself in my shaman power. I need only a few dozen letters again, and he scurries over the glossy curvature of the samovar, withdraws into the constriction under his belly, telescopes into his spindly legs, is caught by the ring over the samovar foot and is dreadfully flattened out; then, extended into a serpent, he slithers around the base of the cone over the heater flame and, as though liquefied, pours into it—

  and he steps back from the tea table. He has gotten hold of his watercress sandwich mushroom patty currant tart or cucumber sandwich, and struts once again as a giant rooster through my childhood day—

  and in the silver on the tea table, as his shadow moves away, the springtime rises again, a hundred times in a hundred radiant stars. Spring, outside the window, wafts through the air, blue and full of distressing promise. It is the springtime light, the sweet core, of the lost half of my life. It has not even been snuffed out by the years of my Viennese upbringing with Uncle Helmuth Aunt Hertha Aunt Selma plus Cousin Wolfgang as a dowry of the spiritualized philistine world. The dismal gray of those fourteen years was still lined with that light—as was yesterday’s fog (the day before yesterday’s fog? or that of how many nights and days ago?), through which I walked from the place des Ternes to Calvet’s on the boulevard Saint-Germain in order to meet you, Mr. Brodny. Don’t think me certifiably mad if I repeat that this was the light of the old Europe—behind the fog even here, in Pearris, Freanss, in the year 1968. It froze on a solstice day thirty years ago, in March 1938, in Vienna, Austria. The first phase of the Ice Age then commenced. Now, the second age is already long since past. But the ice doesn’t seem to have thawed completely. The gray mist is still hiding that golden light. How long will it take the mists to dispel altogether? And will the light that finally breaks through be the old light again? What do you think?

  34

  How regrettable, dear Mr. Brodny, that our meeting yesterday (the day before yesterday? the day before that? I can’t remember which day it was; since then, I’ve been living behind closed shutters and without a timepiece; I write; now and again I sleep for a few hours and then continue writing, and I shall not stop until I have explained to you why what I have to say cannot be said in three sentences)—how frightful, I repeat, that our meeting was so inauspicious! I would very much have liked to talk with you. As a compatriot, so to speak—former compatriot, for now of course you’re an American through and through, while I, hopelessly behind the times, have remained a European. You see, I insist on imagining that you too originally came from Bessarabia. I insist that I saw you when I was a child there. You were one of the men who purchased Uncle Ferdinand’s harvest. We had gone on a carriage ride. It was still very warm; my mother held a white parasol over us. Uncle Ferdinand told the coachman to turn into a field. There you were, standing by a fiery-red thresher that puffed small white clouds of steam into the spotless sky. You were wearing a linen jacket and leather gaiters, and you greeted us—my beautiful mother, Uncle Ferdinand, Miss Fern, and me—with such forceful verve that Uncle Ferdinand automatically and irritatedly waved you off, telling the driver to keep going. Thus, our first meeting was unconsummated, Mr. Jacob G. Brodny. And, at the second meeting, it should not have surprised me to discover features in you that I had not reckoned with—for instance, the dismayingly clear singsong of your angelic voice. I was quite taken off guard by this cantorial tenor.

  But all this is nonsense, of course. Sheer fantasy. A fancy of my overstimulated imagination. If it were true, then you would have to be over ninety years old today, in 1968. And besides—why? There is no reason to assume it. Not the slightest thing to go by. At best, some sort of manipulation by my subconscious. The foggy day outside, from which I came, was edged with a light that reminded me of autumn days in Romania. Autumn and also spring days. (I myself begin to fear for my mind. Abbia pazienza!)

  And you greeted me so dashingly, with such forcefulness. Without having ever seen me before. As if you had known me for years. I found this heartwarmingly pleasant. It led me to joke on the spot. I could not guess that you expected more ceremony from me. After all, you are a mighty man on the literary scene and I am nothing but a writer.

  But no matter. Right after our first exchange went awry, everything else went awry. But you should not therefore believe, Jaykob Gee, that I didn’t like you. On the contrary. I liked you very much: the way you sat there, enjoying a thrush pâté on small pieces of white bread. From the mashing masticatory movements of no doubt perfectly filled molars, your cherubic voice asked what I was writing. Could I tell you the plot in three sentences?

  Try putting yourself in my place. I had come from the fog outside, as I have said. From a white-surging ocean. A bright, splendid blue-gold autumn day could be divined at the bottom. The fog was lined with gold. The dove-blue and lemon-yellow city of Paris was completely dissolved. It had turned into gray-whitish steam suffused with gold.

  I had walked all the way from my hotel near the place des Ternes to the boulevard Saint-Germain. Or rather: I had swum. Along streets that had turned into white-surging riverbeds. Across squares like vast bays. Through the great flood areas of the Tuileries, where tree stumps, planted in the steam, loomed into the air. Across the Pont Neuf, which had turned into a cloud bridge over a steam-filled chasm. As I walked, I was overcome, of course, by all sorts of memories. Thanks to my drifting through the fog, they too were detached from any context. As if moving through fitful half sleep, full of exchangeable and exchanged meanings. They came floating from every place that hovered between Bessarabia and Paris in the torrent of time. They were not in me—I was in them. Dissolved and disoriented. The thing bearing my name was not a person. I was a surging flood of memories.

  I should have explained this to you, Mr. Brodny. I should have told you that the contrast was too abrupt, too enormous, when I entered Calvet’s. There you sat, so unbelievably concrete, so utterly self-assured and American, so—how shall I put it?—so formed, so solidly immured . . . Yes indeed, in my disheveled mental state, I involuntarily thought of Schiller. I said with boyish zeal:

  Solidly immur’d in earth

  Stands the mold of hard-bak’d clay. . .

  Yes indeed. There you sat, Jacob G. Brodny, the world’s most efficient, the globe’s most important literary agent, square-shouldered, square-faced, with iron-gray woolly hair in an angular crew cut and heavy dark eyes under heavy thick lids in your striking Jewish head. You sat there like a solidly cast iron cube between the wall and the table. And before you there was something that seemed to come from a German fairy tale, all those things straight out of Red Riding Hood’s little basket, spread out before you on the neatly folded red-and-white-checkered tablecloth: little plates and little forks and little knives and little spoons and sparkling little glasses. And in a pleasingly shaped little pot of fired clay, half-covered by a layer of white fat half-scratched away by your knife, the thrush pâté gave off a spicy aroma. And in a little basket next to it lay the wine, half-swa
thed in a snowy napkin, like a dusty, ruby-red-capped and white-bibbed child-mummy: a bottle of blood-red Château Margaux. You, Mr. Brodny, were sitting there, breaking pieces off a stick of fine white bread, smearing them with clay-colored pâté, and inserting them between your greasy satrap lips. You were chew ing very pleasurably, earnestly, eagerly, washing down the food mush every so often with a sip of the dark wine. And where your form-fitting, albumen-bluish nylon shirt was wrinkled by your chest hair, a black bug ate at your heart.

  I should have taken that into consideration. Likewise, the clear bell tone of your voice. But I was so thrown off by your request to tell you my story in three sentences that I forgot the black bug in your heart and did not even perceive your voice. This may be pardonable. Going by the purely optical effect of your utterly American appearance, Jay Gee, one expects the usual mixture of senatorial potato-mouthing and lay-preacher sanctimony, squooshed out in chewing-gum cow pats. But not that heavenly milk of a voice. That voice does not fit under a Stetson hat. It doesn’t even go with the Cosa Nostra boss’s cigar jutting up toward the brim of his fedora. I should have noticed that voice. But I was bowled over, bouleversé. Once again: Abbia pazienza! Forgive me!