Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  She was silent, and I knew she had only a fragmentary and incoherent grasp of a sentence or two of all I had said to her, but she did listen to the singsong of my voice and heard from my finely ground shriek of distress that which was hers, and presumably that which was actual (that was what later made me so impatient with Schwab: that he always took me at my word) . . . and perhaps she caught the madness woven into the monomania of my endlessly reiterated melody, the gentle eeriness in the obsessive idées fixes, all of which was not without its peculiar enchantment and could be, in the compulsive recurrence of motifs amid the overall confusion, as insistently fascinating as drawings done by madmen.

  But perhaps she felt and thought something entirely different or was even about to fall asleep in my arms; it didn’t matter, I was talking to myself and, over myself, into the world, the world in which our son when he grew up would experience the same distress and, presumably, be thwarted by the same eternally anxious questions. I said, “The awful thing is that we men cannot escape despair, even if we recognize the dreadful illusion and fiction of our men’s work or perform that labor unswervingly under the constraint of somnambulism. Because we have to reinvent the world in order to experience it in our reality, we also have to reinvent and reenact the destruction in it: ourselves in the destruction . . . We have to become murderers in order to experience ourselves as real . . . isn’t that horrible? This comes out in even the most beautiful of our myths. Do you remember the story of Daedalus? Hertzog called him the ‘compulsive inventor.’ Daedalus built the labyrinth, a symbol of the world: the artistic copy of confusion, in which, as the epitome of the dark and dreadful forces of Nature, the minotaur dwells, half animal, half human, full of demonic might, devouring human beings . . . Daedalus banished it into his image of the world, and now he, the compulsive inventor, must also invent an image of his own spirit, the spirit of human beings, of men, which aims beyond itself, eternally insatiable, into infinity, heedless of the sacrifices . . . so he makes wings for his son Icarus to fly to the sun, and when Icarus comes close to the sun, it melts his wings, and the boy plunges to his death. Daedalus sacrificed his beloved son because of the compulsion to reenact, as an image, the manliest of male deeds: the action of getting beyond oneself to the point of atrocity.”

  I cradled her gently in my arms, for now she really was about to fall asleep, and that made me feel tender in a suffering kind of way, like that day in the canteen of the Nuremberg court, when I saw the embodiment, the incarnation, of creaturely indigence and human neediness in her chewing, chomping, kneading little mouth, in its bitter heartiness when she swallowed one of the chewed-up, chompedup bites, in her utter forlornness, her removal from the world, her absorption in her bodily self, her physis, the sheer biological functioning of her anatomy. I realized that she had to pay her dues for the intrinsically female ownership of reality, and that the price was no smaller than what we men paid in our longing for it.

  I said, “I know, my poor darling, that all my blathering is no excuse for my inability to get you the herring paste that would make the frozen potatoes fit for us to eat.” (There you are: I said “us”: I was identifying with her; I was generously hiding the fact that I didn’t care about herring paste in the least, and if I did have to eat frozen potatoes, I would prefer eating them without herring paste: out of love of the unadulterated, or rather out of a delight in alchemistic transubstantiations of things, in order to turn lead into gold and derive enjoyment even from the unenjoyable.)

  I said, “I know: other men bring their wives butter and nylon stockings, even egg-yolk liqueur, like your cousin Hatzdorff. That doesn’t make him any less manly, of course; no, no, that’s not what I was saying; on the contrary, he is the truly strong, courageous, reliable one; and your cousin Jutta must appreciate these qualities in him, despite her teenage swooning over Nagel, who, aside from the liqueur of the eggs that one doth not eat, has little to offer her . . . yes, indeed, I know I’m tasteless, but you could overlook a bit of silliness on my part now and then; Nagel would have laughed heartily for at least thirty minutes over my pun . . . Seriously, though, darling,” I said, kissing her hair and caressing her thick stomach, and thought myself repeated inside there as my son, “if there is one thing I know for certain, it is that several decisions are being reached here and now in our misery, and that it is important to know where one belongs. I admit it is more difficult and more courageous to get hold of butter than dreamily to give in to the chimerical idea that now, here, in this ice-wind-whistling rubble wasteland of a shattered world, it must at least be possible to lay the cornerstone for the future kingdom of God on earth, but I think one might nevertheless find some sense in the butchery we have miraculously survived (albeit more vegetating than alive); we might at least assume that it has purged the world and that the enemies, who bled each other white, have now realized how insane they were and will join together as brethren so that, united, they can transform the remnants of a devastated civilization into fair conditions for a humane existence on earth . . . and not recommence at a point from which the new bad end can be instantly foreseen: a world of profiteers and racketeers, of the horribly shortsighted and blindered, of the fanatics of abstract ideologies and the fanatics of materialism . . . What I fear, my darling, are the dangers that come with people who are all too efficient in getting hold of butter. They are the human type to whom we owe the most exquisite terrors brought to the utmost perfection of destructiveness: the engineers and electricians of my uncle Helmuth’s ilk, the professional termites with slide rules, who, in carrying out their male mission of reinventing and reworking the world, are all too crazy about reality. More than anything else, I fear what stands behind them, driving them to self-oblivious work: money, which Nagel so poetically calls the ‘idol and Moloch of this godless time.’. . . Today, we must decide where we belong if Gottfried Benn’s prophecy comes true and, one hundred years from now, the world consists exclusively of monks and criminals.”

  And Christa spoke, in words that were, to my utter amazement, intellectually not at all simple, albeit grammatically correct, fluent, and elegant: “If I had a pound of butter now, I wouldn’t doubt for even an instant that a hundred years from now I would want to belong among the monks.”

  She was brilliant. She would always speak illuminating truth whenever—seldom enough!—she was willing to open her disdainful little mouth and say anything at all. Once again, she was speaking nothing but the terrifyingly pure truth—the very thing that everyone was thinking and feeling. For we dreamers and blatherers, we illusionists, we utopians, we intellectuals (already we were being derided as such), were by no means the only ones to perceive the dangers inherent in the way people were preparing for reconstruction. Soon it was possible to turn the act of prophesying a new and final cataclysm into a profession, as a newspaper editor, or as an educational-network director, or even as a novelist; and this was possible because one had only to say what everyone knew anyway; one had only to say it so that it did not stand out as too importunate a sound amid the usual background noise. After all, everyone had made up his mind to do good, and he would have been even more mindful of doing so if the circumstances of life had not forced him to take into account things that were less than good. The reconstruction, especially after the memorable act of the currency reform, had its pleasant sides—this was undeniable—and for the time being, people, as consumers, avoided the alternative of “monks or criminals.”

  No, no: we were not the only seers who could read the future and foretell to what extent they would have to cut their ideals to the cloth with which time had graciously covered the past. Even they, the people of the other race, the stone-hearted bourgeoises whipped by anxiety about life and therefore occasionally irritated, and concerned only with their narrowest interests—even they realized that something was sprouting in our Ice Age winters, something beyond their immediate present. Today’s time was pregnant with tomorrow’s time, and our universal mission was to make sure that this
tomorrow would not be a changeling, as yesterday had been. They nodded when they read such things in the new newspapers, whose pulpy paper lent a touching purity to their contents, as if the words, arriving in hair shirts, could do nothing but tell the truth . . . and the monstrous birth of the future took place beyond or below the threshold of the collective consciousness, virtually on its own, with no visible help from individuals and yet with the admirable assistance of everyone and completely unmolested by the admonishing and warning and morally armoring claptrap of the pseudo-intellectual philistines, who were soon well paid again for making the tiny celluloid balls of their intellectual elitism dance on the pitter-pattering fountain of their eloquent pessimism.

  It was given to Christa to sum up this complicated and dismal state of affairs in a single sentence, and I loved her for it, even when this sentence passed an annihilating judgment on us and our impulses for a happy humanity. It was a rather sordid attempt at justification when I told her, “I admit that even we, who do nothing but speak of the devil, know only what must not happen so that the devil won’t get us, but do not know how to stave this off—much less what should be done instead. We talk about the new spirit that should inspire us, yet even if we spoke about it with nightingale tongues, we would be incapable of inspiring anyone with it. It is as if no one would have it, unless everyone did. Either the new spirit is part of the time and is pouring into everyone or it is not part of the time, and then it is idle to preach the new spirit: the seed of the word will not sprout . . .”

  I could have added, “It is like our situation, yours and mine: I can speak to you with the tongue of an angel, and because you are not imbued with the same spirit, my words will be empty sounds for you”—but I did not have to say it; she knew that everything I said referred profoundly to us. It was from the noise of my words, not from the words themselves, that she knew what I meant when I spoke of the plight of those who felt called to speak: “Those people who are trapped ecstatically in their dreams, the people you call intellectuals, it’s true they do nothing but talk; and if it becomes practicable, they will have to clear out and give way to the professional termites with slide rules and, behind them, the profiteers and shamans of money idolatry. . . and yet the idle talk of the visionaries is the salt of reality—how can I make it clear to you?—it is the herring paste without which you people could not eat your frozen potatoes because they would stick in your craw. . . Please try to understand what I mean: The movers and shakers depend on the visions of the dreamers: those for whom the world is real are nothing without the others for whom the world is an idea; the two have to work together to reshape the chaos into a world we can live in: it is an act of procreation, in which both participate, just like you as a woman and me as a man, the sons of the mothers and the daughters of the fathers . . .”

  It was truly heart-wrenching! I might have added that it was for the sake of this cooperation that people spoke to each other, but then I would also have had to say that this very thing was the most deceptive of our illusions, we dreamers and visionaries, for not only was it a dreadful proof of the fallacy of this statement that I had to repeat it to her here, even though it had been iterated and reiterated for thousands of years and already wore a yard-long beard, like all my other philosophemes, but, above all, we could immediately experience how unreal, how purely theoretical, such basic philanthropic statements were. Did not Christa and I bear the most eloquent witness to the human distress of being unable to speak to each other, the horrible plight of always speaking past one another, of using words that signified something quite different from what was meant, words filled to bursting with affects, emotions, resentments, hence achieving something quite different from what they aimed at—semantic explosives, so to speak . . .

  but nevertheless, I persisted in my monkey chatter, held firm to the proposition concerning the necessity of speech and the delusion that speech was a means of fostering understanding. I believed in the curative power of the word and in the high priesthood of those who force it to produce the clearest expression of its most profound content; and I bombarded Christa in a way that not only made it impossible for her to understand me but was also bound to incense her, turn her against what was said and against me for saying it. I said, “You know, darling, every sentence we speak reveals something, and the revealed can signify the most sublime thing—salvation in the crucial sense, as Kierkegaard says—or the most insignificant thing—the articulation of something random. ‘We should not allow it to confuse us; the category is the same; phenomena have this in common: they are demonic, even if the differences are otherwise dizzying. The act of being revealed is the good thing here; for revelation is the first expression of liberation. That is why we have that old saying: If one dares to speak the word, the mirage of enchantment will vanish, and that is why the sleepwalker wakens when his name is spoken.’ ”

  I kept my voice low, as a precaution, for by now she had already fallen asleep in my arms, and I was afraid of waking her by talking loudly—even more however by ceasing to talk: a sudden stop to my stream of words might unbalance the gentle transformation of her dozing off into deep sleep. So I kept talking, and I secretly kept hoping that she was still listening, or, even better (like the hope that sustains lazy schoolchildren when they take a book whose lesson they have not learned and put it under their pillow for the night), that her subconscious, by a sort of intellectual osmosis, would absorb the substance of my monologues; and even though her all too human sleepiness made me feel tender, I nevertheless began to feel bitter that she so mercilessly left me writhing in the plight of my compulsion to express myself, she, cruel in the superiority of silence, making the speaker appear an idiot, so that ultimately there was only one way to interpret her hard-heartedness: she simply didn’t love me, had probably never loved me, or at best only in her meager way, which I did not regard as “true” love, even though, for all its meagerness, it struck me as far more reliable and far more pregnant with reality than my importunate and possessive “true” love. In any case, I suffered, because I could not avert my eyes from the fact that my loving had turned into a steady and annoying pursuit of a word of love, of a revelatory gesture from her; had turned into an incessant jolting and jouncing in order to get something out of her, something that (as she put it) was “not in the cards anymore”; and thus, I was eventually seized with a hate-filled self-scorn, which I—a true intellectual!—projected onto the state of the world and a vision of its imminent destruction. Naturally, I also knew how ridiculous this was; I knew that I would someday take bitter revenge for it. “Don’t forget,” I told Nagel, “the reason why Robespierre became a mass murderer!”

  But Nagel, who had only a rather nebulous idea of Robespierre and the circumstances that had made him a mass murderer, assumed I meant the class struggle, whereas I had meant “excessive virtue and an excessive sense of order.”

  And yet Nagel was right in a way, with his class struggle—although then again he wasn’t—because Christa was so extremely highborn, virtually from a gold vein in the bedrock of East Prussian aristocracy, while I was a bastard from a remote Balkan land. I could not have more successfully invented a hero’s wife in a novel, the servile relationship that exists between a husband and a wife (especially a wife who is loved hopelessly). It was not only the humility of the hopelessly loving husband but above all the dog-like devotion and uxorious worship, the impotently indignant dependence with which the husband looks up to the totem pole of the “wife” and “mother of his children” while he may hate and despise her with all his heart, the wife whom he has raised to that level—these things often made me gnash my teeth like a serf in bondage. I said to Nagel, “Don’t believe for a second that the institution of marriage, which has been raised to a sacrament, has its origin in a biologically reliable guarantee of the legitimacy of the offspring. The roots lie much deeper. They go back to prehistoric times, when hunters and gatherers started to farm and store grain. The underlying goal is to cope with ti
mes of dearth, to get through the winter, so to speak. If a man doesn’t hunt and gather sex from dawn to dusk, then one day he will come back empty-handed; the fat times are followed by lean times. Might not then one of our early forebears, upon contemplating the imperishability of a bear haunch smoked by chance and recognizing the advantages of preservation, hit upon the idea of dealing with sex in the same way: I mean, legally preserving the steady playmate; the wife as a preserved cunt, to be consumed at any time of the day, the night, the year, even though nowadays, thanks to the increased use of deep freezing, it might lose a bit of its flavor . . .