Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  I said, “Please keep trying. Someone has to answer. It’s a hotel.”

  The last sentence stood like a mountain: planted there by faith.

  I listened to my own voice passing through the cosmos. (My breath had thrust its way between me and the echoing expanses. It perched on my chest like a beloved cat: a purring of the secret of myself.)

  •

  I was no longer a magician. I no longer conjured up lower, subservient spirits in order to awaken a slumbering corpse and have her follow me, sleepwalking from the underworld into life. Something more powerful had emerged from me, walking through the night with my voice, like the word of an archangel:

  It announced to the anguished waker the tiding of patience.

  Beneath it, the earth had gone wintry and rigid: a poor people’s land in the broken poetry of a collage: snowy expanses of paper, forests scattered like shreds of felt; the rusty wire ribbing of the plowland in the stringwork of roads, glass shards, glittering like ponds—and settlements like Bethlehem: humble earth-stars, sheltered from burning out by God’s hollow hand.

  My voice passed over them, across a thousand leagues, to arouse again the sparse rippling of the strand of pearls, the monosyllabic flute tones:

  Tracer trajectory fading in its goal—

  the tiding of PATIENCE cleaved to the telephone switchboard in the Hôtel Épicure.

  Here, it was transformed into a desperately malicious buzzing, and it feebly sawed away at the trunk of the stillness

  —which had grown into the stairway chasms with crooked roots and sprouted its branches into the corridors and rustled its dark foliage in the rooms over the gaping mouths of the sleepers—

  sawed away and dulled its teeth with each of its powerless strokes.

  •

  This went on night after night from twelve to four. If I then fell asleep, I dreamed and committed my murder.

  •

  The jittery disquiet of love. That beatific state of being beside oneself. High frequency of existence in full, immediate presentness. A sporadic condition, announced by a preliminary stage of amorous inclination; until chance selects a specific woman, every female is a potential love object—which may explain some of my relapses with Nadine.

  Meanwhile, the pure gifts of God: effortless, cheerful, uncomplicated, noncommittal bedroom affairs (similar to periods of effortless success when writing: gambler’s luck: being in harmony with the cosmos: FOR UNTO EVERY ONE THAT HATH SHALL BE GIVEN . . .)

  what is spared in such encounters? What remains untouched, unstirred? Does so-called love dig deeper into the mire at the bottom of our souls? Does it unearth things more deeply hidden there—more essential, more fundamental things? And what is it that makes one encounter cheerful, well tempered, pleasant, enriching, carefree, while another, equally random, initially perhaps even more trivial, crashes into our lives with the full force of destiny?

  Christa’s devouring mouth in the canteen of the Nuremberg law court . . . and years of our tortured efforts to reach each other, of my tormented attempts to reach her, like a deaf-mute trying to recite a poem taking shape within him . . .

  and in contrast: Gisela, whom I first see as she crosses the bombed-out railroad terminal in Hamburg, her head high, her figure tall, slender, unapproachable—a queen. She strides through the mouse-gray teeming of refugees and belated homecomers, the war-damaged and the war-dazed, looking neither to the right nor to the left. More vision than tangible reality, she passes through the medieval misery of this crowded humanity of mislived lives, through the mob of rags and worm-eaten flesh, like a beautiful ship through brackish water, le beau navire of eternal boyhood dreams, a ship’s figurehead of possibilities of experience, scarcely believed anymore but now, with her, surging up again, new and powerful—

  and I dare not follow her; I want to keep her as a vision, reserved for all possibilities of experience. Nor would it make sense to follow her, accost her: as wild, as adventurous as the time may be, this woman is beyond the vulgarity of such adventure.

  It is futile to hope that I will ever see her again: the age is medieval, whole peoples are on the move, the wind of our time is driving them along like chaff, God alone may know where they come from, where they are going . . . only her majestic stride, long, swift, and light, is purposeful; even though her purpose and her destination may be unnameable and far away from here, she bears the certainty of reaching her goal—

  and then, several weeks later (it is the year of OUR LORD 1947, the Ice Age is approaching its bitter end; before passing into the new phase of the world, it sinks its teeth one last time into the survivors’ rubble cities, coating their makeshift lodgings and their woeful rags and trash with ice, their hunger swellings and reconstruction dreams, the final hopes of the timid, the finest intentions of the valiant . . .

  but the tougher souls will survive this too, will live to see the approaching year of OUR LORD 1948 and thereby the impure miracle of the new epoch:

  the pitiless, the greedier and greedier souls, survive ever and always; and with them, those who are eternally outside reality, the eternal dreamers;

  the former and the latter are destined to become the founding fathers of the mankind of tomorrow; fools and somnambulists, criminals and monks:

  this is the stuff with which—on which—they will create the tremendous conjuring trick of the currency cut, the sinister prestidigitation of the onsetting economic efflorescence and thus the new reality:

  the abstract world of the prosperity-termites in the baleful profiteering, proliferating administration of deranged production and demented consumption: the horrible, abortive total of identical life-drained days in the nightmare geometry of cities of utilitarian buildings, shooting up like crystals in some nasty mother liquid:

  Already built into the trashy boxiness are the ruins of tomorrow, the tin-and-concrete wasteland of secondhand Americana, with mangebelts of rust and mortar, seething and teeming with ever-swelling, ever-swarming masses of more and more colorless more and more dissatisfied more and more demanding more and more hopeless more and more evil supermarket consumers in ever swifter, tinnier, more hastily glued-together, more and more perilous automobiles: highway rest stop eaters with empty gazes over munching chewing kneading swallowing mouths . . .

  Christa’s empty, inward gaze into the emptiness beyond the wall of the Fürth law court, while the kneading, munching, chewing swallowing of her thrifty lips betrayed the secret—guarded by good breeding—of wanton voraciousness: a vision of the future, a blueprint of the world our son was to be born into:

  the emptiness in the gaze of the innocent culprits, having lost the wonderful possibilities that were soon to be forfeited forever, with that final start of the new era in 1948.)

  the time I’m telling you about is still 1947; the Ice Age, which has lasted ten years, is clamping down one last time: one evening, a day drawing to a close as the future dawns (the food rations are approaching those of Buchenwald, but the film industry is already back in bloom), during one of my aimless strolls through the world of the lotus-eaters (the first star is already sharply needled into the turnip-water-stained sky over a starving Hamburg), I wandered into the red-light district of the Gänsemarkt

  (long since vanished, this ultimate remnant of the old walkway district, now replaced by the Axel Springer building with its utilitarian geometry towering into emptiness—

  but at that time, it was a place of profound Christmastide expectations, a stronghold of seething, sap-driving, vital warmth and the seashell-carbolic-acid smell of whore cunts, an El Dorado of sexual plight and the torment of erotic fantasies,

  in the honey light of dim bulbs in windows at the base of the swiftly darkening shafts between half-timber gables on bowing gingerbread houses, the sparkle of promises shimmers like a treasure half buried in a dark riverbed: the Rhine gold of rubble-dwellers, the abstract fabled wealth of association

  nixie-bright female flesh bursting through the fish baskets of bodice
s, caught smooth as eels in the black nets of cancan stockings; lascivious gaping coral lips millipedes of false eyelashes peacock-blue-green mother-o’-pearl of mascaraed eyelids; blond hair like beer foam, black hair grease-enameled in piglet-tail whorls, painted on floury-powdered skin; cartwheel hats the plunder of ostrich plumes the impudent fire of crab-red wigs over violet feather boas the pale medusas of tremendous breasts fat arms like dragon bodies guarding the grottos of acrid-smelling shaven armpits the lacing of hams of tremendous matron-thighs high-heeled champagne-bottle-shaped boots tightly buttoned up to the jellied-meat of old knees emaciation-larvae of weak sweaty cellar-child-skinniness back-courtyard-vileness of eyes and words knife-sharp voices and the clatter of keys on the salon windowpanes)

  and there—I cannot believe my eyes, but there she is: the same woman; the woman I saw just a few short weeks ago, striding as proud as a queen through the tattered railroad terminal.

  She sits with her back beautifully straight, gazing imperturbably out into the street. Her full, rusty-brown hair is swept up; she wears nothing but a lightweight sleeveless sweater with a narrow turtleneck and very short velvet pants (years later, they would be all the rage as so-called hot pants); her wonderful long legs are bare; her feet are in flat suede pumps.

  I purchase a quick trick; she handles it with sovereign and businesslike dispatch, merely stripping off her hotpants; only after I put a bonus on the table is she willing to pull the sweater over her head. She is not wearing a bra, her breasts are magnificent. She knows how beautiful she is, and she is intelligent enough to know that such beauty counts for little here; the important things here are stylization, alienation from reality, denial of reality, which the imagination puts, unrestrictedly, into the splendors of its creations. This doesn’t bother her; nothing fazes her: she is sovereign, utterly sure of herself.

  Our coupling takes place on a narrow, greasy sofa; the room is tiny and messy, repugnantly appointed with teasing effects in the worst petit bourgeois taste; one can smell the bedbugs in every nook and cranny. The thin door cannot be locked, it opens onto a stairway that creaks continually under footsteps, voices speak, as loud and as close as if they were with us in the room. The whole place smells of chamber pots and disinfectants.

  I have to overcome an instant of panic, which ambushes me with a memory

  a similarly horrible room in an ill-famed hotel in Vienna: Cousin Wolfgang and I have saved up enough from our laughably meager allowance to pay for a cheap streetwalker. The instant we approach her, our nerves flutter: we are still in school and are tormented with the fear of being caught, of not having enough money, of getting into an ugly scene with her pimp, of getting the clap. When we are asked which of us is to go first, Wolfgang takes off: he can’t bring himself to find the lamentable creature desirable: everything disgusts him: the place, the circumstances, the thought of himself in these lower depths. I am no less repulsed, but more resolute. He remains outside the door, waiting for me. But I too fail. I too am incapable of letting natural drives prevail over upbringing: the girl’s Zille face, her limp little breasts and pointed shoulders both move and repel me, the bushy triangle of her colorless pubic hair fills me with horror. I stick out my hand, think I’m touching something like a big boil, and pull back. Since I offer no sign of being ready, she becomes impatient, milking and tugging me, and finally she lets out a string of curses, but I am stubborn, I have to show Wolfgang I am man enough to overcome the sentimental philistine in me. What I now undertake is a symbolic act of protest: my defiant renunciation of the spirit of my formative years in Vienna and their bogus aesthetics as I undergo this test to show I am capable of striding unfazed through such filth, freeing myself of Uncle Helmuth Aunt Hertha Aunt Selma and everything they are and feel, think and represent. I would like to penetrate the girl as if I were boring a knife into Cousin Wolfgang’s heart . . .

  Here it’s different: I am free to the point of weightlessness, as if I were on a different star with a weaker force of gravity. The failure of my efforts to get close to Christa has released me from my last tie. Now there is nothing left for me to rebel against. My soul is calm. I can have pure enjoyment; the shining slice of little windows under the Biedermeier gable on the house opposite is beautiful in the reflected golden light from below in the street. The young woman is beautiful. Her soul too is calm. Neither of us feels much pleasure, it is a business transaction. In order to reach orgasm, I have to shut my eyes and imagine following her after seeing her stride through the tattered train station, approaching her and properly seducing her, contrary to her actual intentions, she being overpowered by the eroticism of adventure, swept away, giving in . . . I am grateful to her for this dream.

  We talk afterward for the length of a cigarette. Her German has an eastern tinge: she is from Upper Silesia, probably the daughter of Germanized Poles: Gisela—she does not tell me her last name. I ask her whether she would care to have a cognac with me; her answer is clear, resolute, and scrupulous: her percentage of the overcharge on a mere two glasses of cognac will not make up for the loss of possible business during the time we would spend drinking them, but if I ordered a whole bottle, she would be willing to chat with me for an hour.

  She smiles. Her whore’s profession, she says, consists mainly of such chiseling. Contrary to the popular conception, there is a great deal more talking and boozing in a whorehouse than there is sex. As for the latter, her life here is presumably calmer than that of many a decent Hamburg housewife.

  The cognac is wretched and many times more expensive than a select one would be today at Maxim’s in Paris, but that doesn’t bother me; my pockets are stuffed with money: movie money—an inflationary currency, especially when handed out in one as worthless as the Reichsmark. My delight with the girl increases. She merely sips, but tells me with her open, comradely smile that I can imagine she knows all sorts of tricks to make believe she is drinking like a lord while actually pouring the cognac away; so, for my own sake, I shouldn’t insist that she keep up with me. Nor can she drink, she adds: alcohol is one of the narcotics that wreck the lives of most of the girls in the whorehouses along this street.

  I ask her if she has been plying her trade for a long time. No, she says, only a few months. But you can work your way in very quickly, if you’re not stupid. Unfortunately, most of the girls are. Practically any girl who winds up on the street owes it to stupidity or laziness.

  And what about her? How did she wind up here? I ask, ready for some tale of high drama.

  She came to Hamburg as a refugee, she says obligingly and without pathos, and then she found herself on the street. Her parents had insisted that she get out of Upper Silesia when the Russians came, with the first wave. They themselves were supposed to come later, but they didn’t make it; they are still there or else they’ve vanished; she hasn’t heard from them. “But they wanted to get me out,” she says, and laughs, “so that the Russians wouldn’t rape me.” The Russians caught up with her and rolled over her before she was even halfway to Berlin. The combat troops barely had time for raping; that came only with the stragglers, in Berlin.

  The early days were bitter in every way: hunger, cold, and pretty much constant menace. Still, people were as helpful as they could be. There was something like an “emergency humanity.” (I ask her where she got that phrase; she says she made it up, just now.) She took off for western Germany in fairly hazardous circumstances, but she doesn’t go into detail (she doesn’t give me the particulars until a later time). At first, she moved in temporarily with distant relatives in Schleswig-Holstein (in a one-horse town near Preetz: later on we went there to delight in the good people’s astonishment at her elegance). But the narrow-minded, intimidated philistines, in a fever of concern about their meager property (they ran a grocery; at night, behind tightly closed shutters, they devoured the sausages they kept hidden during the day), had been so reluctant to take her in that she left after a short time—all the more hastily since the father had, of course, made a pas
s at her. She went to Hamburg.

  “Within a week, I realized I’d have to wind up in some bed or die in the street,” she tells me calmly. “I’ve never done so much walking in my life—and never in such thin clothes and on such an empty stomach. One day, I ended up on this street. At first, I didn’t know what it was, but the penny dropped soon enough. It was morning, scarcely any clientele. I got to talking to the girls, and they were friendly and nice and understanding. After my country relatives and the railroad policemen who kicked me out of the waiting room when, like hundreds of other people, I tried to warm up there, except that I came several days in a row—after all that, I felt at home here. I asked the girls what things were like for them here, and what you had to do to get into one of the houses, and they all told me to do it; they said I should go to the police and register.”

  She explains that the whorehouses are city-owned. They are run like rooming houses, leased as concessions to veterans of the trade who have saved enough money and have impeccable police records. The girls pay rent and get a percentage of the receipts, plus any personal bonuses from the johns. “But most of the girls fritter away their money and start boozing, or else they play cards or snort cocaine or do lesbian stuff and ruin themselves that way—they’re always very over-excited, and they can’t come with the johns . . . The worst thing here is the boredom.”

  What does she do about it? I ask.

  “I observe,” she says. “I never get bored. Although I used to.”

  When was that?

  At school, and then later, when she worked for a photographer.

  “If you ever want to get out of this someday,” I say, “maybe I can help you find a job. I’ve got movie connections. For a girl with experience in photography, there must be work in the movies: maybe editing; that’s not so boring.”

  She muses for a while, her elbow propped up, her hand, holding a cigarette, on her temple. “I want to stay here until I’ve saved up a nice tidy sum. I’m in no danger of going to ruin here. I’m not interested in alcohol or drugs or other girls. I want to be a first-class whore—one who gets top money. To do that, I have to specialize in something. S and M is a pretty sure gimmick. You wouldn’t believe it, but most of these guys come here for some crazy thing like that. They can fuck all they like anywhere else without paying. We make our money off guys with fantasies in their heads and their crotches. And homeless guys like you.”