Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  Out here, incidentally, it is becoming bitter cold, the flinty polish of the sky is growing dull, the nine lead-gray monoliths, counter to the laws of atomic disintegration, are transmuting into an even heavier metal, moving one step closer together. In the grid pattern of their 2,336 windowpanes, the first lights are beginning to glow in crossword-puzzle fragments, abstract life signs of the horlàs; I flee toward them, for whatever posterity may think of me, I now have need of their feigned life. Nourishing kitchen smells already promise it, real, actual—good solid food will be served for supper, juicy roasts and steaks and pork loins, lavish gravies poured over mealy potatoes, sauerkraut and red cabbage, cauliflower and brussels sprouts and turnip greens, slippery puddings in vanilla sauce, strawberry sauce, raspberry sauce, soon it’ll come rolling up. (“It’s ready, dear! Bring along the Bommerlunder if you want to have another quick drink!”) We’ll wash it down with venomous Riesling, Krötenbrunn, and Liebfraumilch, perhaps beer, which will keep me burping for hours. Our Lucullanism has a Lutheran breadth, I would never have believed that I could eat so much. Through the chewing noise in my ears, I can barely make out her noncommittal admonishments: “Nice, huh? Bon appetit!” and “Tastes good, doesn’t it?” I nod, grunting (one doesn’t speak with one’s mouth full!); nor, after I swallow, do I object to or contradict her chatter (“Well, at the new self-service store—oh, it’s fabulous, dear—they have a contract with a fruit-and-vegetable importer who brings the produce direct so there’s no middleman or anything”). What could I say, anyway? When I read an analysis of the Common Market in Der Spiegel or an exposé of tax breaks for building contractors in Stern, I react at best with a snort. If I put up with the one, then why not the other? Besides, I’m tracking down the poetry of emptiness, I listen for it when the broad talks about her streamlined, well-engineered household appliances (“You’ve just gotta see it working, dear. A whole new kind of hot-water heater”—the word causes her difficulties, like syncopated gutturals in Arabic: hahht-wawdehheeedeh—“it’s also a coffee roaster, steam iron, dish dryer, fruit pitter, bottle rinser, garbage disposal, it’s brand new, from AEG”). Her knowledge of merchandise, shopping expertise, and awareness of prices are stupendous, I see no difference between them and the specialized learning of a bacteriologist or a Sanskrit scholar. The interpersonal aspect is also included (“Well, you can get the same tie at Münnemann & Möller for only half the price”). She goes no further into personal matters, except in more or less concealed erotic offers (“That blond on the third floor, dear—you’ve never seen her, she’s very chic—well, she’s asked me about you twice already, where you come from and so on, I think she likes you, she’s got a boyfriend who’s with the river police, he’s got a small house on the Elbe, which he inherited, they have group sex there on weekends”).

  Still and all, this is a curtain raiser before getting down to the real point of the visit: the Murphy bed in the bedroom has already been swung down out of the wall (“A real bed takes up more than half the space, to fold it into the wall is a lot more economical”). But it’s not so simple, the structuring of sex uses Bele Bachem’s corseted debauchee as a model, her claws dig into my hand as it tries to sneak under the sweater (“You little thief, you!”). After some rather intricate fiddling, the brassiere finally snaps open, her eyes deepen, she painfully bites my earlobe, then I’m promptly sucked into the maelstrom of a four-minute French kiss, no sooner can I draw my breath than the struggle with the girdle begins, but no (“I can’t just undress like at the swimming pool and spread my legs, dear, there’s no excitement in that”), first stocking after stocking must be detached from the complicated garter-belt mechanism, rolled down individually from each thigh, a kiss in the hollow of the knee (which she has artfully slung around my neck: “Trying to drive me crazy again, are you!”), and in order to get to the girdle again, I require some unwinding (Laocoön), pulling it down is then relatively easy (at least no harder than a rabbit skin), it comes rustling off the already damp buttocks, their notch feels marshy, a peat bog burial ground, one heartens oneself with amorous truisms (une femme qui ne mouille pas—c’est comme un homme qui ne bande pas). Ramming my right middle finger in all the way up to the proximal knuckle (my hand trapped between iron thighs: “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Want to make me nuts!”), I can finally think about unbuttoning myself (while sucking on one of her nipples: “Oh yes, that feels good, dear!”). For the actual act of love, I then have to carry her like a kill into the Murphy bed (“Just feel those springs under the mattress, dear—chrome steel, it doesn’t rust so easily”), a frivolously added-on cliché (“If you don’t rest, you don’t rust”) entangles me once again in the breathtaking thoroughness of one of her kisses: what follows is of the highest technical perfection, with something of the glistening enamel industrial-product luxury of the magazine ads, it aims at one’s happiness, which is suspended from a safe interest rate and full-coverage insurance (“Make sure that the excitement curves meet harmoniously in the culmination points!”); all the positions shown in sex manuals are tried out, the accompanying moans have an ad-copy character (“Just see if you can find anyone who’s better than me!”), any original features that break through aim to stimulate (“Trying to fuck me to death, are you?”), and the aimed-for fulfillment has psychologically remote-controlled dimensions (“Yeah—now—yeah—baby—give Mama everything!”).

  But that’s it for now. She jumps up, marches into the bathroom, there are alternating gurgles of pipes and faucets while I smoke a cigarette, take a little (cleverly set up) baking soda with a sip of water, slowly begin to dress. She comes back from the bathroom—“Do you have to go so soon?”—the question is asked quite impersonally, a manner of speaking, so to speak, even the finest ear could not detect any implicit protest. While I then lay claim to the bathroom, she telephones for a taxi (“A gentleman would like to be driven downtown”). The leave-taking is (although jestingly intimate) casual (“Well, dear, be good now, but not too good!”). She holds the apartment door open, waiting to say good-bye, and as I pass her going into the hallway, she raises her arm to buzz open the building door, her dressing gown falls open, there is a split second of breast splendor—but before I can even think of returning, she has pulled it out of sight with a quick motion of her left hand. The building door springs open with a hissing squashed humming of wasps, I don’t have to turn my head, I know she’s still standing there, intersected by the door and door frame in a narrow rectangle of light that is denser and yellower than the neon lymph in the hallway. When I get to the front door, she sends a last “So long!” after me (it topples from a headvoice C down to the A: “So lo-ong!”), and I slam the stubborn reluctant door behind me: an air cushion in the cylinder catches the swing, and the door settles with slow dignity and a pejorative hiss into the lock. The final snap is salvation, I hear it as I flee, hunched into the artificial-leather upholstery of the taxi, I give my address to the cloddish male rump in front of me, and a hand (lit by the blue dashboard light) turns a key, the engine, rattling, kicks on, a pull on the gearshift sets the car in motion, in the rearview mirror the outlines of the first, the second, the third high-rise block (covered with radiant square mildew spots) dance darkly in the cobalt blue, and then the entire development is visible: Stonehenge, starting to fluoresce in its decay. . . It swings to the left and out of the mirror’s range while we dip rightward into the bright flurry of an arc lamp.

  Thereafter, at home, in the blissful solitude of my rented room, my dream. . .

  •

  There is no basis whatsoever for assuming that S. could actually be connected to my dream. It was probably pure coincidence that at the very moment the slip of paper with Schwab’s name came into my hand, the fear hit me like a punch in the solar plexus—the fear that my murder was real, was not the projection of some triviality that had slid into my subconscious and been dramatically enlarged there by the residues of old established guilt complexes, was truly what my dream showed me: the gruesom
e killing of an old crone for no other reason than to prevent some even more shameful ignominy from coming to light. The momentary recognition is almost pleasurable: it is a holy terror that strikes me . . . but there’s no way this sort of thing could be triggered by the thought of S., much less by my projecting him into a fictional character: a ridiculous notion, inspired by an overwrought brain. A hint of burnout, presumably. Nevertheless . . .

  I have an astonishing number of notes about S., an almost alarming number. Almost every one refers to him in some way or has a later note connecting to him. But the explanation is simple: I must have reworked most of the other notes during countless revisions of countless versions of my book, with various kinds of structures. Except, of course, for the notes that were done peripherally, so to speak, and not in terms of a specific plan. Granted, this did not come without some specific idea: I cannot deny that I was tempted to depict the character of a certain Johannes Schwab: a generously constructed figure, an editor in a publishing house, intellectual guru, well read to the point of blindness, well informed about anything worth knowing to the point of despair, hence disoriented, painfully aged by abandoning his once passionately nurtured ambition to write a book himself (one of the masterpieces of the century, the classic of the era, needless to say, an opus that would inscribe his name deathlessly in the pantheon of literary titans), a great-minded, great-hearted man, inspired by lovely envy to admire lovingly all those he regards capable of accomplishing such a masterly feat in his stead (Nagel, me), hence (I would almost have said) an alcoholic, based faithfully on my friend S. in all other features and characteristics . . . I won’t deny that I was tempted to capture such a blockbuster of a featured player on the page. Thus the many slips of paper with his name (or the initials J. S.). In the end, the explanation is simple. It can all be like this, or else entirely different.

  Still, I likewise cannot deny that I am more and more obsessed with the belief that S. is standing before me, as vivid and physical as in the moment of my recognition of my murder. I mean to say, in the same stunning presentness, with the same almost blissful terror that hits me like a punch in the solar plexus—no, deeper, below the belt. A holy terror, I called it, and I commit myself to this expression, ludicrous as I find it, however much it may evoke the abstruse formulations of my years in Vienna—

  Uncle Helmuth’s and Aunt Hertha’s transfigured secrecy whenever they came home from one of the séances of their spiritist community: initiates who had penetrated beyond the primitive practices of moving tables and conjuring up spirits, penetrated into the occult and thereby into the transcendent; who now virtually had a direct connection to Creation’s switchboard, a through line to the Good Lord, who, as chief mechanic, kept a universe of his own invention and personal patent operating eternally by utilizing, as the motor power, energies released by the tension in the polarities of good and evil, light and dark, up and down, positive and negative, and similar pairs of opposites . . .

  no perpetuum mobile, alas, if you don’t want to place the promised final victory of good at infinity and bury the hope that the light of the Last Judgment and everlasting transfiguration is nigh; still, an illuminating metaphor for electricians and grease monkeys, in which they could read their ranks in the universe on all sorts of do-it-yourself power meters . . .

  a troglodyte theodicy, which I supplemented in those days with my own mental flights into metaphysics—for example, when gazing from the window of our apartment in Vienna’s Twelfth District up into the rectangular chunk of starry sky revealed by the air shaft between the front and back wings:

  primal situation of man: overwhelming juxtaposition of his nothingness with infinity:

  there I sat in the window niche, gazing up into the immense silver-dusted firmament beyond the fire walls, staring bewitched, like a nixie who knows of a different world in the celestial circle above the well shaft, a world about whose alien life she has an inkling as it fills her with strange yearning: exiled, trapped in the narrowness of my self and tempted out of it and beyond it by an enigmatic something—

  and as far and high as my imagination could carry me out of myself, it never brought me to where something beckoned.

  For beyond myself, I was stretched over and above myself. My SELF dissolved, was absorbed in cosmic vastnesses. I flew over the city of Vienna and beyond, over all the beautiful cities that mankind has built and destroyed in the eternal conflict between good and evil, up and down, positive and negative, while incessantly dying within itself and rising again from within itself. I flew over continents and over the planet and into the universe, into the icy spaces of Creation, veiled and dimmed by astral whey, where light had not yet been separated from darkness.

  And soon the earth was a mere speck of dust scattering with myriads of its kind in a tremendous explosion into infinity. I, my SELF, shrank accordingly, of course: so utterly into the microcosmic that ultimately I was hurled out again into the macrocosmic, as it were: I WAS THE UNIVERSE.

  When I, my SELF, burst through my human dimensions, the whole world burst with me in the clattering shattering of categories—and the thing that rose again from it, like the phoenix, was I, my SELF. Though poorer by one universe than before . . .

  My dead friend S. didn’t need to feel such anxieties anymore. Now, he knew. Now, he was freed from the monkey cage of his self, dissolved in the universe: with the possibility of peering into the plan of the Creator and Head Mechanic of the Universal Mechanism and understanding its wondrous ultimate meaning (or else the even more wondrous lack thereof) . . . It was regrettable, however, that this knowledge was no longer his: he had paid for it with the loss of his self (in accordance with Miss Fern, dispenser of wisdom in my childhood: “You can’t eat your cake and have it”), and it was confusing to reflect that a total consciousness is one that is totally released; that is: totally dissolved in everything, hence extinguished. Still and all, such a consciousness promises us a certain state of contentment, and I simply cannot understand why S. is bothering me so much. (So much that, for instance, I am now frightened because I have perceived S. as “something.”) Schwab’s presentness is a challenge, a demand I cannot evade. The holy terror that overcame me when I identified my sense of guilt about a murder with S. is a demand. It comes from where he is now.

  Among the notes that his secretary (Fräulein Schmidschelm, called Schelmie) sent me after his death, there is one in which he says that once (during a lunch at Laget: he had seen me home; that is, here, to the Épicure), I inferred that he was planning to write “a book of a religious nature”; i.e., his theodicy. I had to check this: no doubt I made a note of it; after all, our Russian duel as each other’s potential biographer was in full swing. Still, I must congratulate myself upon my clairvoyance back then: this intention is now obvious. I feel the need to importune my dead friend with another of the monologues I’ve made for him. After all, what I have to tell him is in his interest—which he violates whenever he pushes me off into the transcendental. The point, I would like to tell him, is to draw borders: I seek my outline in order to find the outline of my book. Or, if you will, vice versa: I seek the outline of my book in order to outline myself. It comes to the same thing. Micro and macro are interchangeable here too; they are merely symbols of a multidimensional relationship. If, for example, my story is that of a man who carries within himself the picture of a man who carries within himself the picture of an adolescent who carries within himself the picture of a child, and the man and the adolescent and the child are one and the same SELF, then, quite logically, the child carries within himself a child who carries within himself an adolescent who carries within himself a man who is carried within himself by a man who carries within himself a man who carries within himself an adolescent who carries within himself a child and ad infinitum to and fro and on and on . . . and yet it always remains one and the same SELF. . .

  And now inscribe a book in this SELF (or around this SELF), then you can form a simpler and even more bewitched series
: a man who wants to write a book about a man who wants to write a book about a man who wants to write a book . . . and this diabolical circle is our case, dear friend: we dash around in it in a ring like rats in a trap, without ever reaching each other; and when we ask about the meaning and purpose of the whole business and what impels us to ask about a meaning and purpose, then we really get into a maelstrom. But, whatever, I, my SELF, am nothing but my story. And this story is my book. So I can say: I am my book. Regretfully a statement that obviously can’t hold a candle to the Sun King’s proud words “L’état c’est moi!” I haven’t even established my kingdom. I have been trying to do so, but in vain, for nineteen years now, two more years than Joyce spent completing Finnegans Wake. You may at best expect something equally obscure, albeit far less brilliant. I have been a king without a country ever since you installed me as pretender to the literary throne—with, presumably, the respectful trust that I would find my kingdom and define its borders myself. My deepest, deepest thanks, retrospectively! For even while you were alive, you kept an eye on me, you noted snidely any territory I might have overlooked, you noted my annexations with such flattering envy that I kept going out in quest of virgin territory . . . It’s all too understandable: you didn’t want me to disgrace you. You had told everyone so much about my brilliance that any disappointment would have embarrassed you. People were eagerly waiting for my book; it had to be worthy of its initiator . . . Today, at best only Scherping is waiting for it, because money is more important to him than the pleasant spiritual agony of thinking that he’ll never earn back the advances he’s been giving me all these years. Nevertheless, your demise obliges me to show the world that you were not mistaken and that I am not a loser. I would have to be made of stone not to have sensed the meaning of the gazes focusing on me at your funeral. The book that people are expecting of me demonstrates not only who I am, but also who you were.