Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  Colonel, turning to the puffy medical corps captain, who, it is painfully obvious, has been dispatched here from the reserve post in Berlin-Wedding: “. . . Except for a couple of fillings in the teeth, he’s perfectly intact . . . Something you don’t find anymore nowadays . . .” To me: “A born infantryman, my lad! . . .”

  I, blushing: “If you will permit me, Herr Colonel . . .”

  Colonel, unpleasantly impressed; White Horse pricks up his ears: “Yes?”

  I, modest, but firm: “In Romania, I was trained as a cavalryman.”

  Colonel, paternally clearing his throat à la Papa Wrangel, his ears now alertly playing forward: “Oh, yes . . . I understand . . . But then the cavalry dismounted, unfortunately—”

  I, trumpeting a confession: “I would like to request permission to join the paratroopers!”

  Colonel White Horse, raising his head, his eyes shining, his mane waving in the wind: “Good lad; yes . . . officer’s child, eh?”

  I, simply, but loud and proud: “Yes sir, Herr Oberst. My grandfather.”

  Colonel, spotting a mental obstacle: “Hmmm—yes. Training takes a long time.” Accepting the obstacle, increasing his tempo, intensifying his volume: “We don’t want to wait that long till the Final Victory, do we?” Emphatically digging in his spurs: “And you want to be there when it comes, don’t you?!”

  I, wildly enthusiastic, helping with a crack of the whip: “Before then, Herr Oberst!”

  Colonel (yohoho!): “Well, then, how about the tank gunners—bravest lads on God’s earth!”

  A splendid leap: the horse and the rider snort blithely.

  I, radiant: “Thank you very much, Herr Oberst, sir!” My naked arm jerks out, exposing my underarm hair, its manliness so poignant on my adolescent body: “Heil Hitler, Herr Oberst!”

  My about-face is so snappy that a thick splinter from the cauterized floor shoots into the ball of my foot. Ignoring it, I stomp smartly, back stiff and tin-soldier chest rounded and vaulting, into the next room, where, after receiving my papers, I pull the splinter out and my clothes on. I am blissfully certain that it will now take at least seven weeks for the certificate of qualification to produce its results and for the official order to be issued, and for me to submit it to the Reich Ministry of the Interior together with the other documents required for attaining citizenship in the Third Reich. My papers will then be handed to me by the postman against a receipt at my apartment (subleased) at 14 Wielandstrasse, Berlin. Whence, unfortunately, I will have moved in due order to Klein-Klützow on Lake Papenzien, in the district of Deutsch-Krone, Pomerania. Whence, after a sojourn of thirteen weeks, I will move once again, this time to Stedlinger in the Franconian Jura. Now the precarious document might have to take a further detour by way of Kienberg on the Erlaf, in the region of Scheibbs in former Lower Austria (now the Danube Gau in the Ostmark) and Illerstein near Crossen, in Neumark, Prussian Silesia. And if it then circuitously catches up with me back on Wielandstrasse before the Final Victory is won (without me), a further delay will be open to me (and this was what Stella farsightedly foresaw): in order to enter the German Wehrmacht honorably, I had to be a full-fledged citizen of Greater Germany, and in order to become one, I had to prove my pure Aryan extraction—certainly an extremely time-consuming enterprise considering that I, regrettably, cannot state for certain who my father was. Meanwhile, however, my already invalid Romanian service pass (which Stella also procured for me) certifies my voluntary registration with the German tank gunners: proof of a commitment to the German Victory, which will make everyone who checks my papers click his heels automatically and send his hand racing up to his cap visor. . .

  “You’re smiling? What’s so funny?”

  The wide sleeves of the dress have glided away and now she places her folded arm on the back of the sofa, propping her temple on three fingers of her hand. Her hair splendidly ruffled: light, soft, fiery (her stylist spends two hours a day on it). Her dark eyes with their blackish blue circles rest moistly on me.

  “Nothing, darling—something silly. It has nothing to do with us.” (This “us” is a hand reaching out to her, a deathbed for the small, cold bird of her own hand, mercifully arching towards her. Soon the bird will lie in it with tiny, rigid, fragile claws.) “Well, no. It does have something to do with us, insofar as we’re brother and sister . . .” Only we can’t stay that chaste, goddammit! (“Whatever you do, don’t forget that if Madame Carrier doesn’t bite then we’re screwed—okay?”)

  Okay. That was the difficult part of the matter. For what Nadine esteemed more than anything else was sibling love. (“Why do you want to destroy that? The bond between us is so much more than sexual, isn’t it?”)

  Exactly. If only she knew how passionately I’d love to keep things between siblings! But, alas, as a little sister, she had a penchant for precocious sophistication. The effect was humanly delightful but scarcely conducive to the smooth development of movie projects (many a poor fellow screenwriter could tell you a thing or two about that). However, if the relationship was not purely one of brother and sister, then, as they say in the business, you could get down to the nitty-gritty with Nadine Carrier. If she waxed poetic, then you had to hop into the sack without further ado. If she wanted to hop into the sack, then you could beg off, pleading work on the script. But it was I, alas, who had to make the first move.

  The first move was to convince her about the material for the screenplay. It’s easiest to talk about it in bed. You had no choice: the orphic melos of artistic inspiration (which would soon permeate her entire being, swell up in her into a dithyramb and become a hymn) was commenced in her uterus. And this uterus was temporarily blocked by elements alien to art. (“I have to tell you that there is someone in my life who means almost as much to me as you once did.”)

  This didn’t necessarily mean very much; I had been permitted to learn it, and I would soon have it reconfirmed. Still, one had to be considerate of her notions of order in these matters. (Please don’t push! Everyone’ll get his chance! Everyone in his time! An orderly line makes it easier to take care of everyone, so if you’ve had your turn, then please go to the end of the line!)

  The trouble was that I quite sincerely liked her. I suffered with my little sister when I raped her. The very thought of it tormented me. Her face torn back into the crackling, spraying fox hair, the face staring with large, childlike eyes into the dreadful resolution of my face, trying to understand what brought this wild, sudden change over me (“Is that really you? Tell me it isn’t you!”)—

  the thin eyebrows rise into a gable of terror as though under a threatened whiplash, and amid unuttered words (“You can’t really want that?!”) the mouth tries to bring out a “No!” from the fear-choked throat, a “No!” that finally, since it is not granted verbal expression, forces a prematurely aged shaking of her head. The face—still anxiously investigating, the circumflex of the eyebrows awaiting a blow—begins to turn back and forth in front of me, gently and swiftly at first, like the mechanism of a fine clock, then swings out farther and farther, more and more unsteadily, teetering more and more, thereby coming closer and closer to me (hobbling on its knees, so to speak) until, rolling under a wild and desperate kiss, it suddenly buries what the lips do not wish to say (“Why do you torture me?! You know I can’t refuse you!”)—

  a kiss with which negation virtually tries to burrow into me, whereby our lips curl over our teeth in all kinds of overlapping folds, like blotting paper loosely drawn over a roller, a kiss with which negation is minced as fine as chives under a chef’s knife . . .

  but then her head just as suddenly tilts back again, as though a karate chop had cracked it at the cervical vertebra. Her splendidly trained hair now flies out from the lunar arch of her forehead. Her mouth stays open. From her eyes, an Edvard Munch gaze breaks like a final shriek. Then the eggshell-thin, bluish-brown lids drop, form two moist, narrow slits that shimmer lasciviously from the thicket of lashes, while an unusually skillful shift of t
he pelvis receives the inevitable, point-blank, and her legs fold in surrender over my back . . .

  This I had to contend with, it was part of the emotional ceremony. You don’t just throw an international star over your shoulder like a shopgirl. But I couldn’t suppress a certain annoyance. I was born under the sign of the Ram, my impatience is cosmically determined, given the slightest resistance I immediately turn stubborn, I have to put my skull through the wall.

  (Besides, in the end it’s almost ridiculous: here you are, you’re staying in the same hotel—am I supposed to sit at the bar and smile at the slut who works evenings? The last time it was a girl from Würzburg who made a go of it at the Crazy Horse with a Hitler parody: pubic hair shaved to a toothbrush shape, a steel helmet perched on her bottom and finally used as a chamber pot—or something like that, anyway: she couldn’t be prevailed upon to say exactly how she’d imagined it. Whatever the case, the act wasn’t a success, so she went looking for her daily bread here and in the course of this search ended up in my room at three a.m. drinking whiskey, speaking to me extensively of her fatherless child, who lived with distant relatives in Rothenburg ob der Tauber, I’ve kept the address somewhere . . .)

  Maybe, I tell myself finally, Nadine is right. We struggle for equilibrium between fiction and reality. It’s well known that there are situations that prove from the first glance to be inevitable. Nadine knows me well enough. She isn’t so dumb that she doesn’t know what is blossoming between us from the moment I called to tell her I was coming (“Oui, c’est moi! . . . bonjour, mon ange . . . écoute: Serras-tu à Paris le douze?—oui, c’est un mardi—bon, j’arrive de Munich—oui, en voiture. . .will you be home that evening? Shall we say around seven o’clock? . . .) If she were for any reason indisposed or if there were actually someone in her life who meant almost as much to her as I once did and wasn’t yet on the verge of disappearing, then all she had to do was say so. But a “yes” to the question “Will you be home that evening?” meant “yes!”, that much was indisputable.

  But unfortunately with her too (even she is still very much a woman!) I had to account for the usual womanly margins. They’re cut down with chitchat: “All right then—granted: I hurt you—no, of course not an abandoned lover and all that—that much is clear—All I mean is: objectively, on a personal level, I might have . . . but you see, that’s precisely where the misunderstanding is—I know: a year might be extreme, but I just needed to get some distance, try to understand: twelve months for a new run at things—after all, we had hit a dead end (cul de sac), so to speak—or rather I had, I mean: emotionally—I’m sure this is all inordinately complicated, you know me, probably a lot better than I do myself, I don’t need to explain anything to you, doll . . . I mean I’ve got Sagittarius in the ascendant, this figure aiming off into the distance, right? A lot of times you miss the tree for the forest . . . plus the centaur aspect, the wanderer—no, no: it’s not that you willfully wanted to bind me to you, definitely not, what frightened me far more was just this underlying—yes, sure, I’ll have another if you’re having one: with a touch more lime juice, please—you see, that’s just it: this incredible wealth of empathy you have—it’s like a creeping poison, and plus I have, if you will, trouble surrendering myself—completely, I mean . . .”

  But no. One shouldn’t start out envisioning the worst. I wouldn’t have to go so far, I hope. Everything would play out a lot more casually—maybe actually coming right out with the transparently emotionally packed cinematic offer (“It was clear you wouldn’t let go of me: and so I spent twelve months with you on my mind. Here: the result is a screenplay. . .”)

  But that again meant putting the cart before the horse—with the most undesirable result. The bluestocking wouldn’t have drowned in the churn of emotions, and I wouldn’t be spared the rest (“I can’t at all imagine how artistic collaboration is meant to be achieved without Eros.”) Anyway, whatever the case: there would end up being a few hours of sweaty acrobatics before (as Wohlfart said) “the thing was in the bag”. . .

  Hours for which I (knowing myself) would one day have to take bitter revenge . . .

  and in spite of all that, I really did like her! I could have beaten her up. Why all this fuss?! Her performance needed no fancy dramaturgical contrivances. It played out quite like an epiphany. The effect was already in her physicality alone: her child’s body, at thirty-three, not much more lacking in vigor than it might have been at thirteen. She could grow as old as a tortoise with it; she had been born as old as a stone—two or three hundred years would scarcely make any difference. With her infantile leptosomia she was just made to lie there like a drowned woman cast up on the beach, with waves smashing over her, man for man . . .

  No, no—this was no violation. It was the ocean of eroticism in which she drowned, and which bore her light burden ashore, in order to go beyond her—

  She could not sink into it, of course. Orgasms were denied her. But she could not help being moved, carried, will-lessly washed back and forth. She was meant to embody the female destiny, and this gave her a tragic sublimity pleasantly reduced for clever domestic use—and I could look and look until my eyes ached and see what I had done again:

  The gigantic eyes in the small, wan face, blurring black on the edges, like coals in the head of a melting snowman, eyes that were so eloquent in expressing the variations on the basic anxious question (“Is that you?” “Is that really you?” “Who are you?”); the aureola of her hair, ruffling lightly yet flowing, peacefully sunset-like yet blazing (“Don’t forget, I’m a witch!”) . . .

  her thin, fragile neck; the even flute melody of her clavicles; her disarmingly adolescent arms, hanging childlike from her thin shoulders (one was involuntarily tempted to see whether a pair of dragonfly wings had not grown from the shoulder blades) . . .

  the movingly yielding melancholy of her tiny breasts like bloodhound whelps—and with them the quite powerfully forested triangle above her crotch . . .

  then again, the parenthesis of her thighs now so poignantly clasping nothing (often, when lying on her bath towel in the swarthy sand of the Dalmatian coast while she came striding toward me after a shoot, I had seen the prettiest landscapes in the bronze-sword-shaped air space between her thighs: a clump of black cypresses over a fragment of fieldstone wall; an upside-down blue triangle of Adriatic Sea with the right-side-up white triangle of a sail; the smoke-colored silhouette of the isle of Rab) . . .

  her dance-of-death knees; the calfless shinbones, then the surprisingly large, broad feet—bone cartilage and strings of sinews red and prominent through the white skin, so very much a déjà vu of some other pair humbly folded together under a nail—just where was that? . . . when was it? . . . That’s it! An alabaster insect with yawning wing covers, skewered in an insect cabinet, lifeless in its terrible liveliness. One would have to consult Uncle Vladimir to pinpoint it zoologically. . .

  Truly! My Supreme Piglet Wohlfahrt hit the nail on the head when he said of her: “What does she have to act for? The woman’s a natural.”

  She was a natural at making me suffer, even her evocation of the early part of the lost half of my life (which made her a sort of mother for me), even its tasteless facsimile, produced according to the banal law of stylistic repetition. It was certainly no accident that this daughter of Pre-Raphaelites, who had ascended from a manger in Belgian coal country, rose as a star of the cinema at the very apex of the new era, when the sensitive vanguard of art consumers began to sniff out the triumphal rebirth of art nouveau. (This certainly had not been the crowning of a thespian career but an epiphanal consummation. With gentle abruptness, like the evening star, she was there, in the firmament of the screen, surrounded by the dancing and flickering of sparks. But alas, she also shared the uneasy destiny of the evening star, which soon gets lost in the magnificence of astral space . . .

  Logically then she was also true to form from a career standpoint: always striding, ever more ethereally, over fields of asphodel towards
the river Lethe . . . which, again, particularly suited the taste of cinema zealots whose aesthetic sense had been fashioned from the filigreed lilies and water lilies of stained glass windows in Berlin’s back courtyard tenements) . . .

  •

  But there was no helping it. This all had to be overcome. It was part of my arrangement with the producer piglets “to be carried out at the place of destination.” The Prodigal Daughter, a Wohlfahrt Production of Intercosmic Art Films, was at stake.

  (“Well, you can take my word for it, maestro, the material as such isn’t at all bad—right? Of course. We still have to talk about the ending, it’s not convincing, we’ve gotta come up with something, but I will, I will, you can count on it. Anyway, where would you be if it weren’t for your pal Wohlfahrt, who had the brilliant idea of getting Nadine Carrier (though it didn’t hurt that the treatment was tailored to her to the point of tactlessness), where would you artists be, I ask you, without the lightning-fast mind and vigor of the entrepreneur, the manager, the producer—if you want to be ruthless enough to use those words, I don’t have anything against being called that, at any rate being called a businessman, I admit I’m one, whom you so greatly despise, not you personally, I know, you’re an old hand in the business, you know the responsibility weighing on our shoulders. I’m talking about intellectuals in general. Why, they wouldn’t even know where to steal their pens from if it weren’t for us, with our all-inclusive production organization. And yet they imagine that we, the people who make their brainstorms come true and also let them get a nice fat share of the money—why, they imagine that we brazenly exploit them! Let them think what they like for all I care—forget it, I don’t want to discuss it anymore. But there’s one thing you can’t say. You can’t say Wohlfahrt does not respect the mind. Please, be my witness. When the mind creates something that can be realized as something beautiful, making not only an economically important industry like the cinema blossom—have you ever looked at the statistics?—yes?—you haven’t? then I advise you to do so, it will open your eyes to the situation. And with all this we independent producers give the masses the possibility to escape their dreary existence by enjoying first-class quality entertainment. That is our cultural mission, which people always use to put a noose around our necks. And yet all you have to do is mention the present case: here is a subject that’s fairly alien to the general public, but it’s got possibilities for artistic development. For this kind of thing, we’re always here, we hold our own, which you can see once again with this project of ours, The Profitable Daughter. Here we have a treatment that, among so many hollow nuts, makes me, Wohlfahrt, realize right away, damn it, Wohlfahrt, you can make something out of this! Put it together with some concrete possibilities, and I’m already surveying the field: who’re the good distributors? which performers are great box office draws? which popularity poll do theater owners send me? Market research is the name of the game—who reacts to it like a seismograph at the slightest tremor? Wohlfahrt! Let’s get cracking! Here’s my offer, I say to the money guys: a subject—right?—not ideal as yet, but it’s sort of got the makings of an interesting screenplay. So that’s why we two are sitting here together, to develop it. Movies are teamwork. In you, we’ve got a writer who knows the business, your name is not unknown to the public, no one remembers the old flops, and if the distributors start bitching, I’ll tell them, Let the dead bury the dead. I, Wohlfahrt, will vouch for the man and for his total cooperation with the production. In life, you’ve got to be able to make decisions. I’m known as a man who’s willing to gamble—always on a solid artistic foundation, needless to say, that’s the opening move, now we’re gonna play our trump card: a lead actress who’s all the rage, a European star. If you read ‘Nadine Carrier’ in the movie ads, then you know nothing can go wrong here. The screenplay may be pure shit, like so many of her movies, but the audiences will flock to the theater anyway. The next step is to hire the up-and-coming young director. Who’s got him if not Wohlfahrt? Dennis Kopenko created a sensation in the industry with his first opus. This isn’t your Grandpa’s cinema. This is avant-garde. And it’s not kid stuff either, with bedwetting leftist ideals. This is solid work, I can market it as a commodity. Two or three big names in the featured roles—and you’ve got a first-class package. Now that’s a reality, not a pipe dream. The moviegoers will bite, and coproduction with a foreign country—France at the top, as usual—makes the enterprise foolproof. And if we can talk the Americans into it, then the project will gain a global dimension. The ruble has to roll, my friend, what else can it do! We all wanna live, and so do you, after all. Don’t act as if the financial part of the affair doesn’t concern you. I’ve seen your new car—damn it, you won’t get that with pure intellect. I for example only spring for something like that to make the right impression. Nowadays, people like us have to know how to present ourselves—if for no other reason than to avoid intimidating those little bureaucratic shits in the government-subsidy office. Those guys wanna see prosperity, the economy’s gotta advance, especially when our industry goes through hard times. The thing that convinces them is the courage of the entrepreneur. Don’t give in. Attack the enemy resolutely. That’s my motto. People today don’t want a depression. People today want the welfare state. Make a note of it: Wohlfahrt knows his onions. The main thing is for you to know your onions too. We’re fast workers. That’s why I’m assigning you the job of going to Paris and convincing Madame Carrier that you’ve written the role of a lifetime for her. The end, as I’ve said, will be taken care of as soon as possible. It’s got the right makings, as I’ve said. The woman’ll see it at first sight. She wasn’t born yesterday. But it’s your job to make sure she doesn’t turn everything upside down. The methods you use are your business. I’m just telling you not to waste even half a day. You’ve got to have a treatment in four weeks, ready for a screenplay, something I can hand in for a government prize. Without the 200,000 subsidy, we’re screwed. I’ve already got Kopenko and the other artists under contract. Wohlfahrt works fast and resolute, before anyone else can grab anything. I’m no dream dancer, and I don’t expect my team members to be dream dancers. The responsibility is yours. The Paris co-producers have been notified, they’re not forking over one red cent without Carrier. So everything depends on your script. I’ve told them: What’s today? Today’s October 11, I said. My author’s got exactly four weeks to put a first-class treatment on its feet and four more weeks for a first-class screenplay—something with which Madame Carrier can expect the hit she hasn’t had for a long time and urgently needs. I’ll be working here parallel with you. On November 11, my writer will deliver. It’ll take the prize commission another six weeks to decide. Meanwhile, I’ve set up the shooting staff, the assistant director and the cameraman are already out scouting locations. I’ll take care of the sets and so on right here. The studios are ready for February. The trailers’ll hit smack dab into the Christmas market, and by January 1, at the latest, the first shutter on the outside shots will come down in Cannes. So get to work, comrade. I’m counting on you. Our project will rise and fall with you. You know what it’ll mean—especially for you in your financial state. I don’t have to point that out. I’m just reminding you that according to the contract you’ve just signed, your expense account is also limited to four weeks. . .”)