Abel and Cain
Page 45
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There was nothing I could do, alas. I had to take up the burden: along with the slow awakening of the woman drowned in the sea of senses—even though she had remained wide awake between the crescent line of her torrential hair and her eyebrows painfully drawn into a pointed bracket . . . I, my SELF, who was actually the shattered castaway on the beach—I, my SELF, the somersaulting breaker, hurled into shallow water, feebly running off her childlike body, the reflecting trail drying in the sand . . . I had to overcome it along with the gaze coming sore and dark from the wet thicket of her lashes: the gaze first seeking a hold on the ceiling and then, as though involuntarily following a transparent fiber on the retina, sliding down to me in a slanting arc and clinging to me with the anxious question “Who are you? Is that you?”—
together with the awful silence with which we would both reply to that question . . .
and finally with her kiss of reconciliation, chastely offered with corrupted lips.
I would respond to the kiss warmly and gently, humbly knowing that this moment, bursting with betrayal, would later be recognized in connection with the past and the future and might thereby become one of those rare moments of reality possessed, the memory of which inveigles us into continuing to endure life.
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Still and all, this would enable me to withdraw from an ever more painful affair. I would not need to occupy myself with my book—which means, with myself or, worse, with Schwab. I wouldn’t have to hide here in the Épicure any longer, could step out into the day, into the open air with an open expression, wouldn’t have to wonder whether my nightmares were true or not, but rather would know that I’m not capable of murder.
But, on the other hand, if that weren’t the case (and I wished with all the ardor of despair that it were not)—if it were true, and the recognition on the first day here when I saw the name Johannes Schwab in my papers delivered on what it had promised me (not just like a conjurer, who draws gold pieces from one’s nose and triumphantly displays them only to make them vanish again)—if my old nightmare, last dreamed in Reims, was indeed the horrifyingly and essentially truthful reflection of a murder that I, my SELF, had undertaken and committed to the very last gasping and twitching of my victim, then I could still hope. For then I had something to tell, after all, something concerning not only me and my psychotherapist. I would have something to write about that wasn’t of interest only to literati and consumers of literature deeply schooled in psychology, but absolutely everyone.
A murder, no matter how vile its motive, no matter how despicably committed, no matter with how much literary hedonism it may be grasped, goes beyond, must go beyond the private and the literary sphere. A murder (and presumably only a murder), despite all modern-day problems of interpersonal communication, establishes a relationship with the other—and indeed one that instantly becomes transcendental:
—for everyone carries the murderer inside himself and is simultaneously a murderer’s victim. And thus the terror aroused by a murder is a primal terror, the immediate realization of the Evil that dwells in us—more fundamental, more essential, more arbitrary than all drives (and, incidentally, contained in all drives). And such a confrontation with this terrible thing in us, bloodily witnessed by a martyred victim, who I, my SELF, am, and a murderer, who I, my SELF, am, instantly raises the question of the why and the wherefore and thus of the how of creation. Why is man born with this terrible thing in him? Who created him in this way and for what purpose?
For this reason, every street ballad about murder is actually primal history, and even the most inane crime novel (beyond the silly hunt for the murderer, who could be anyone, and not just for the sake of suspense) is a circuitous search for God, a search left to the acumen of the reader (who can draw his ultimate conclusion from the struggle between good and evil in the intellectual dual between the detective and the criminal)—
I had dreamed my dream in Reims, on my way from Munich to Paris. For a couple of days, I tried to tell myself that I had interrupted my trip in Reims because of exhaustion. That’s not true. It lured me there.
I like driving long stretches at night. The roads are emptier, and I’m more lonesome, more intimate with myself. I love being encapsulated in the spaceship of the car, which hums and zooms like a hornet into the glare the headlights cast ahead. This has something of the boyhood delight in concealment, in caves and grottoes—I love my cozy isolation in the big womb of night. Nowhere else—not even here, in the glow of the lamp over my papers, while Paris snores all around me—am I so autocratically isolated. In my car, I am a sovereign who detaches himself from the profane bustle of the surrounding world with a few moves of the gearshift. A bold isolationist who holds his fate in his hand and races toward it, tracking down the etiological secret of the aleatory. Anything chance may hurl at me has the character of necessity.
And I don’t have to be alone if I don’t want to. Sometimes, with the press of a few buttons, I invite abstract guests in: voices that speak to me in many languages, music whose sounds I pull along with me over windswept hilltops, through the ravines of black forests, past dead villages with their rows of houses that fall back as though mown down. I press another button, which cuts off my visitors, denying them entry into my spaceship. While the world around me is as silent as in the Carboniferous, I fly, I dash through its blackness: hovering in the shimmer of the dashboard lights as though I were lying in the sickle moon that cuts through the rushing clouds of an autumn night.
No, no, it certainly wasn’t exhaustion that made me strike the sails of my flagship (the Dutch Schout bij Nacht) in Reims. Quite the contrary. The truth is so trivial that Kapudan Paschà is ashamed to write it down here: I was lusting after a woman.
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I had already been in Munich. During my Hamburg days, at the start of my ignominious career as a screenwriter, after the endless, confused, sometimes dreamily bizarre, always traumatically reverberating script discussions with Stoffel & Associates, I would flee to Gisela in Whores’ Alley. And now, during the last eight days of daily hot air talked away amidst cognac and cigarettes in the leather armchairs of the Intercosmic Art Films office (the piglets called such meetings “conferences”), between a thinker’s brow, a smoker’s cough, heartburn, and my trouser fly, I had only one wish: to lie with a woman, not to think, to feel only female skin, to smell a female, to knead female flesh; briefly and brutally to unleash latent atavisms (murder instinct, anthropophagia) and then to sink into beneficent stupor (the postcoital numbness of certain species of mice). The Chinese definition of happiness: warm, sated, dark, and sweetly drained.
Naturally, I had tried to satisfy this need. I got plastered in Schwabing’s abstract cellar gloom, in vain. I’m too alientated from the local customs; I used the wrong semaphore: my British necktie and the wretched shoulders of my jacket look antiquated, miserly, devoid of department-store reality; they serve to repel rather than attract, elicit distrust and mutual clumsiness. Language too no longer obeys me. Not even liquor can reduce it to simple communication, much less to conveying my physiological desires. Either it falls short of the target (“All I want to do is screw you, kid”) or overshoots it (“You probably aren’t even capable of loving”).
Only once did I get my hands on something. After the bar closed and I paid a tourist-trap bill, after shouting in the street and an unpleasant scene with a policeman (“I insist on having your badge number! I’m a foreigner and I will not be spoken to in this way!”), after a bone-quaking cab ride and then a wild Weisswurst gorging in the din of Donisl and another taxi trip, she turned out to be a kind of biting albino rat. We wound up in a room in Harlaching that looked as if a tornado had whirled through it. She was equipped with the clitoris of a hyena, which, however, hysterically yelling, she wouldn’t let anyone approach—and certainly not me. Despite a numbing quantity of whiskey from a bottle acquired at a brothel price, and despite a tumultuous rolling around in bed—which woke up the next-door neighbo
rs and made them bang their protests against the door and the walls—any peace-bringing discharge of my neuromuscular tensions was out of the question, not to mention any appeasement of that erotic urge that wants to absorb the feminine and make it an integral component of one’s own being, like the wonderful Schistosoma haematobium, which, a velvet-lined casket, carries its beloved all its life within itself and releases it only temporarily, to lay eggs.
The matter ended badly, of course, with a couple of resounding slaps, which did not produce any meliorating effect. On the contrary: now the neighbors were properly mobilized, and they did not take my side at all . . . It took me several days to repress the incident.
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On the evening of the tormentingly long day that the piglets required for what they term “executing the contract”—drawing up and finally signing a document that reduces by half the agreed-upon honorarium and stipulates all kinds of loophole contingencies for further reductions—I left Munich. My car had been waiting since noon with freshly changed oil, a grease job, a full tank of gas, and the tire pressure carefully checked. Packed with my suitcases, briefcases, portfolios, and the cartons of papers for my book (I dragged them everywhere, as Nadine did her deluxe tray), the car stood ready in front of the hotel. It was a flat, low monster, like a predatory bug, and a small pack of more or less expert observers was always gathered around it. In the grouplet of scraggly-dressed young Germans (even in Gypsy garb, they manage to have something stiffly awkward about them), I was struck by the gaze of a girl: dark, beautiful, relaxed, open wide in the eternal, primal question: “Is that you?”
I took this gaze with me into the smoky turquoise into which the blue of the Bavarian sky had faded on this October day, gilded with autumn foliage. And now the turquoise also filled the roads with magic spaciousness. It hinted at a night frost; pale, wan, and hazy, it shimmered around the dividing and hardening contours of the neo-Gothic gables and neoclassical moldings and the baroque-capped twin church towers. My curved windshield sucked in pallid strings of light and scattered them. To the left, the massif of the railroad station, star-studded red and green, accompanied me for a while. White-waving columns of steam with capitals edged in a dawn-red blaze tumbled up into the blue, rolling with a fiery glow—technology’s romantic early period, when it still had a volcanic character. On the right, tooth gaps in the line of buildings recalled the bad wartime and worse postwar time; architectural horrors of the Wilhelmine and Reconstruction eras glided past, then, while the rail strings frazzled out under black Egyptian tau symbols with emerald and ruby eyes, flattened out into suburban beer halls. A square, with a trolley shelter painted Josephine-yellow and decorated with peeling geraniums, evoked a children’s-book illustration of garrison bandstand concerts. One breath farther and the Spiegelfuge of a church façade, carved of plaster, sprang back into the lilac-blue of shadows. On the left again, a landscape-shaping dimension of depth yawned open for an instant: a perspective bordered in black-silver-black by two canals between tree-lined avenues, shooting out straight as an arrow toward the façade of Nymphenburg Castle at its focal point, as if carried off at the wrong end of a telescope. Next, housing-development row houses and crumbling suburban villas hid behind front-yard thickets—a couple of big Technicolor gas stations . . . I turned onto the Auto-bahn—and the gaze of the girl whom I would never again meet hung over me like the Star of Bethlehem. But I hurried away from it.
I did it without melancholy. I was even exhilarated: faithless by blood. I love to leave cities in gathering twilight. Then I don’t have to say farewell to them. I just wait for the moment when the broken light disintegrates their density, pulling them apart as though with a magical molecular expansion and thus canceling their gravity. I drive for a while into the darkening countryside. The evening is a sigh of relief. The earth is liberated of the bad dream of another wildly marauding human day. The city falls back. Gradually, the mange that it spreads along its outskirts is healed. Once I’m beyond it, the city’s magnetism lets go of me; I too can breathe more freely again. Behind me, the descending night swallows up the city. It no longer exists; it was never real, only a dream: the echo of an existence I attempt to escape.