Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  Hertzog, challenged by failure, now puts his shoulder to the wheel. The notion of health has been clarified, so let’s go back to disease, to document what I have said let me give you a few examples—a merry Mardi Gras procession of all kinds of neurosis is drawn up; now it’s really hard not to laugh, hilarious, all these kinds of lunacy, things get quite wild, and Hertzog realizes it: he soon calls the neuropathic clowns back and leads us into the real horror chambers of psychiatry, here even the attentive smile is no longer appropriate, so stiffen the corners of your mouth, look at the floor, earnestly but attentively (the ludicrous footwear of the discussion-group members offers diversion), pull yourself together, damn it! Let us concentrate with ethical frowns on the graphically described cases, tut-tut-tut, the things that exist in the world, it’s like Hieronymus Bosch, a finger up the ass (Hertzog says “anus,” of course) seems like sheer grace in contrast, Botticelli, so to speak—but Hertzog does not wish to be cruel: I feel like Raphael, who, as we know, refused to paint a martyr (even the experts will have a hard time finding the Nietzsche quotation in so much subtlety), so I’ll spare you far more dreadful cases (which is too bad: when you read the church fathers of depth psychology, those cases are the most interesting), which cannot be helped by any focus on the experience of faith, alas! Now you will probably say: How can there be such terrible deformations of the human mind? Yes indeed, how? Some most likely have organic roots; schizophrenia, for example, may have something to do with the chemistry of the brain cells, and manic-depressive psychosis may be connected to the glands, this is unfortunately a rather unresearched area, offering science many fascinating problems, psychosurgery, as I have said, is making terrific progress, let me just mention in passing the slicing of certain nerve fibers in the brain, which procedure often turns out to be highly beneficial for some patients who have suffered from incurable states of agitation and depression, for the first time in years they now can leave the hospital and lead a more or less normal life, at times, to be sure, they are a bit irresponsible and carefree and must therefore remain under close surveillance to avoid their doing anything disastrous to themselves or others, in some cases the cure seems worse than the illness to their near and dear, but you don’t have to worry about that for the moment, thank you ever so much, that’s our problem, I mean for us medicine men—the point here and now, today, in our first discussion evening, which I so heartily welcome, is to establish that neuroses and psychoses are increasing at a terrifying speed; the further our civilization moves away from nature and its compelling givens, the more acute the danger grows for everyone—yes indeed, for practically everyone!—just think of America, where the percentage of mentally disturbed people in official statistics is frightening, just think of the high suicide rate in Scandinavia, the higher the level of civilization, the more dubious the whole business becomes, the question naturally arises whether the unspirituality of this civilization, its absolute rationalism, its narrower and narrower restriction of any possibility of providing a valve for our natural drives—whether, as I have said, this mind-and-soul-strangulating world, in which mankind believes it can erect an earthly paradise in materialism, may not be one of the causes for the obvious loss of vital harmony. He, the philosopher Hertzog, believes that he can decisively affirm this and he would take the liberty of maintaining (and demonstrating!) that faith—yes?—the attachment of human existence to a transcendental object, is an inexplicable factor in this vital harmony, which must constantly be striven for—ladies and gentlemen, just listen to language, that treasure trove of human wisdom: “Savior”—this word comes from “save,” Latin salus, health, as in “salvation” (a new humoristic swerve, surprising here): As a psychiatrist, I construed “Heil Hitler” as a challenge to heal rather than to hail him, unfortunately I was not offered a chance to put this into practice, hahahahaha! This jest finally catches on, and how! After a tour through the hell of psychiatry and the apocalyptic visions of a world tenanted more and more densely by psychopaths, the joke has a wonderfully liberating impact, and Nagel’s arm stump evinces a reflexive attempt to bang his missing hand on the missing knee of the man next to him). Joking aside: if we wish to get to the bottom of the causes (and we must), we won’t get any further, as I said initially, with psychoanalysis and so forth, Freud is simply too nineteenth century, this has got around even in professional circles, he is stained with the individualism of the era, but even those colleagues who are now finally starting to deal with the relationship of the individual to society, to the collective, and, beyond that, to collective life itself, shrink back from the final simple step: admitting that the soul of humanity cannot be separated from the connection with the notion of the Godly—

  an instant of effective silence, voice lowered as we reach the conclusion: “Western Civilization, my friends, is experiencing itself as a moribund culture. Observers can actually pinpoint symptoms of a serious ailment. The question arises whether a transformed, renewed religious experience might lead to a cure even in such a vast general framework—”

  (lively once again): “But then that brings us to the actual topic of the evening! . . .”

  But woe to them that are with child, and to them that give suck in those days! And pray ye that your flight be not in the winter.

  —Mark 13:17–18

  Christa meanwhile lay in bed in the villa and pouted. I must unfortunately say: with good reason.

  I did creep regularly to her bed to give her the most precise reports on all our adventures (including the intellectual ones) and to seek solace with her when Nagel surrendered all too ardently to Hertzog’s ideology and now generally betrayed the tender poetry of buddyship in many ways. Nor did I hold back with all kinds of tenderness, affectionate teasing, and so forth: after all, I loved her very much, if I remember correctly, very physically; it may be that I am now confusing that with the memory of other and similarly ephemeral happiness brought by erotic possession, but in any case it is one of the good deeds of life that have settled as soothing matter in my consciousness, however dearly they may have cost me—

  back then, at any rate, her girlish fragrance, her soft, round flesh, and the warmth of her blond skin made up the capital in my emotional household, and I used the interest to make up for my disappointment with Nagel.

  Perhaps I should have told her this at some point; she probably didn’t know, though she could, of course, have noticed it. Especially when she was expecting a child, I was simply entranced with her, placed my head on her belly, which had already taken on the milky bloated quality of motherhood, asked her to hold her breath, and I listened to see if I couldn’t hear my son’s heartbeat—the little boy who would trustingly grow up holding my hand and then stride, laughing, towards life, to which I would release him—a sunny life that we upright survivors of the wintertide would have set up for him, perhaps in the city of mankind, ANTHROPOLIS . . .

  Naturally, there was nothing to hear but the growling of her empty stomach, but I loved her all the same, and even though all she had to say to my early paternal ardor was that I had unpleasantly cold ears (she had received the news of her pregnancy not, like me, in a worshipful crèche mood but rather with an annoyed, despairing “That’s all I needed!”)—she’s simply a rather dry person, that Christa, and her poetry too lies ultimately only in her sensitivity.

  Incidentally, she didn’t spend the entire period in bed, of course, merely the bulk of it, including daytime. The time, namely, that I spent with Nagel & Associates. And just what else could she have done in those days, when even the angels were frozen to the earth and the nearest basement movie theatre was a twenty-minute hike away? . . . There wasn’t much housekeeping to do. I cooked when there was something to cook, cleaned up the two rooms we lived in, pretty much the only livable ones in the villa on the Elbchaussee. It was bitterly cold, after all, and wood and coal were scarce; Christa saved them for the visits by her countless friends and relatives, the scattered blossoms of East Elbe Junker flora that the polar wind b
lew our way.

  During such visits, Christa had every opportunity to demonstrate how proficient she was in bearing her sorrow in a simple, ladylike fashion. If I was introduced to the droppers-in, they communicated with her by means of a glance. Stateless, eh? What was the father? Unknown. I see . . . They forwent the shrug taking me as a phenomenon of the times. The conversation then continued in a brittle, piss-elegantly booted and spurred class jargon, as though it had not been interrupted; my offer of a sip of our turnip schnapps was declined with thanks. I took the hint and soon left the like-minded alone. For Christa, however, these were pretty much the only events in her sad life. She had probably had different expectations in her heart when marrying me. She had viewed me as John’s protégé, the foreigner and almost ally, the PX rations–recipient and travel-order passenger—

  no wonder she retreated and preferred seeing the winter through in her bed.

  But when I crept to her, there was closeness again, other skin, flesh warmth, intimacy. We still had things to tell about ourselves; we exchanged the tinsel-wrapped life treasures of childhood memories. Christa sometimes chatted very sweetly about her childhood in East Prussia: very clear weather again, a very blue sky, a very anacreontic nature, a huge estate household, golden fields of grain and darkly wooded lakes, at night the mighty copper beeches soughing over the gentle fireworks of the glowworms in the park. A rather eccentric mother, who had broken her neck in 1939 while jumping over a ditch (on horseback, of course); an elegant patriarchal portrait of a father, who had been strung up in 1944 as a hero of the resistance; both parents very much alive in her memory. A flock of brothers and sisters with quaint character traits; neighbors and relatives had saved them from being arrested for guilt by kinship and thrown in a concentration camp: nocturnal cross-country escape on horseback (the roads were watched), two months hidden in the hay of a barn (not without its humorous episodes), soon the all-out chaos began anyway, the refugee trek to Mecklenburg, finally an underground existence in Hamburg, waiting for the end.

  A children’s book. I soon knew it by heart. Nagel’s stories were a lot meatier, more anecdotal, blossomed in tropical brilliance from the à propos of conversation. They didn’t tiptoe forward step by step on girlish feet; these stories leaped about daringly and surprisingly, sovereignly disconnected, held together purely by a keen eye, toppling over into more and more configurations, like the prismatically reflected picture elements in a kaleidoscope.

  What Christa told me was the beginning of a novel, with the glassy brittleness of Fontane’s idylls, over which a tempest of Tolstoyan drama suddenly breaks. Very attractive, no doubt, very gripping, but fragmentary, the opus got bogged down in the far too broad beginning, the main character never got beyond the initial stage of development, events rumbled behind the scenes like stage thunder, many things went up in flames, and stormy sheet lightning flashed over graves and execution sites, but the heroine lay in bed and pouted because there were no more county horse shows and no more aristocratic society balls.

  Nagel on the other hand—yes! Nagel picked up the splinters and assembled for me a colorful mosaic of a reality whose farthest reaches were charged with the mood of a thunderstorm. No thread was needed to string together the tangle of characters, settings, themes; the drama behind them set forth the situations, put them in order, arranged them. Any humor only made it more sinister. Any sublimity quickly revealed the dreadful bathos of banality—

  but from the barbarism, poetry proliferated like bindweed. It’s not a civilized plant (whatever one may say); it blooms and thrives best in rubble fields and steppes . . .

  •

  For Nagel was writing now. He had always planned to write and was bursting with accumulated material: the things he had seen, gone through, made up. He was working on several projects at once: various short stories, a play, and even the draft of a novel. There wasn’t any further cooling of our friendship, which had suffered because of Hertzog and the exuberant growth of the manger-shepherd circle into a discussion group, but we saw less and less of each other. He worked fiercely day and night, wrote tirelessly, using his left hand with childlike awkwardness. We weren’t allowed a glimpse at his literary output. During the discussion evenings with Hertzog he was struck by an aspect of me that seemed to him more suspect than it had before. “You’re too Austrian for me, man.” I was orphaned.

  During this period, the thrifty bitterness began to appear in Christa’s mouth, ultimately transforming the artless cupid’s bow of her lips into the clasp of a mostly closed purse. I then might have guessed what she was thinking. (“Nagel is at least doing something sensible with your endless talk.”) Even Hertzog, whom she had regarded as a slick crook (“He’s only using all of you as guinea pigs; he’s just observing you and then doing something completely different with it”), she began to see in a new light (“There has to be something to it if it gets Nagel to do some proper work”).

  Naturally, she didn’t put these feelings into words, either. (In general, she was visibly less communicative; even the memories of childhood and adolescence, memories of large cakes on the coffee table under the copper beeches, and buggy rides to neighboring estates, faltered and oozed out into chilly, ladylike silence. Only later, when our little boy could listen, did those memories surge up again, and, much to my sorrow, he absorbed them more ardently than the myths I had to hand down to him.)

  But I could tell by other signs that Christa did not view the evening get-togethers in Nagel’s garden house merely as an intellectually camouflaged collective waste of time by a handful of bums, alkies, and moochers. She now barely protested when the remnants of the pool table from the half-buried den, then the cue rack and the window frames vanished into Nagel’s stove, followed by all the stationery with the engraved patrician address from the table where he wrote (with his left hand). Furthermore, her transient relatives and acquaintances now evinced a certain interest in my doings. (“I understand you’ve founded a cenacle with friends, for discussion evenings and so on. One of them even writes, I hear? I’d love to meet the man. Who publishes this kind of stuff? I mean: if ever I were to think of writing about my experiences during the escape . . .”)

  In short, we were becoming respectable.

  This was then gloriously confirmed one evening by the appearance of a gentleman whom I stubbornly called Major General Baron von Neunteuffel, which was not his real name—I forget what it was—but in any case, he had been a lieutenant general or something like that, and the victorious powers had soon set him free because of his various brilliant qualities. Neunteuffel happened not to be one of Christa’s relatives, or one of the many acquaintances who had been closely allied with the family for generations. But before entering the garden house, he naturally did not fail to pay his respects to her, as a man who had almost joined the resistance movement and was an admirer of her unfortunate father—“he’s laying a wreath,” I said, reaping Hertzog’s explanation that according to Freudian teaching my cynical proclivities were a symptom of a prematurely repressed infantile sexuality with subsequent masochistic tendencies.

  It was Hertzog who had invited Neunteuffel. But the major general did not come alone. He brought along (presumably as a political alibi) a distinguished-looking character, whom he introduced as a “victim of Fascism.” This man was a Baltic German, his name was von Rönnekamp, and as an incorrigible homosexual he had spent the length of the war in a concentration camp. Incidentally, he was later to surprise me and everyone else present by saying he had discerned in me a “truly religious man in the Dostoevskian sense.” Major General Baron von Neunteuffel proved to be a versatile, proficient, and—as it turned out—clear-sighted man. With his dependable, alert, and sociable character, he succeeded in loosening the awkward restraint shown toward him by several participants in the group.

  Understandably enough, even though we were supposed to be establishing a truly Christian classless society, the (sometimes missing) heels under the dyed coats and battle-dress tunics of
most of the men there involuntarily clicked together when confronted by the spruce civilian appearance of the major general, who had by no means lost his military air. But the women, of course, were instantly on his side. In the shattered Wehrmacht, he had been one of the youngest officers of his rank, he had garnered the Iron Cross with Oak Leaf, plus swords, diamonds, WACs, and crab lice, and his blue eyes radiated a zest to share in the reconstruction of Germany with the same spunk and dash that had brought him high military distinction.

  So overcoming our resistance, ponderously loaded down with resentment, was only a matter of minutes. “A good troop leader,” as Nagel said appreciatively; he did not dislike the major general but actually found him quite agreeable. Even though Nagel had gotten no further than sergeant with the Close Combat Clasp and the German Cross in Gold, he was treated by Baron von Neunteuffel with a certain officers’-club camaraderie; from now on, it was really a dialogue between initiates, which Hertzog as the consulting egghead could gently steer.

  So, anyway, Hertzog delivered his paper: a summary of the jointly worked-out ideological principles (“I would especially like to thank—next to our friend Nagel, of course—Fräulein Ute Seelsorge for her tireless . . .”). The possibilities of practical realization under the given circumstances. Serious doubts, objections, corrections (“I do not wish to fail to express my thanks to a certain friend for his caustically humorous but often for that very reason animating insertions; in our new society, we must also make a place for an Eulenspiegel”). And many thanks for everyone’s sincere comradely cooperation, especially the ever-improving distillers of the helpful turnip schnapps (hahahahaha!). Also many thanks to the detergent industrialist Witte, the true host and owner of the rubble property, who has so far been absent from our circle of friends because the all too slow denazification commission has unfortunately not yet enabled him to add the no doubt valuable intellectual contributions of an experienced industrial leader. And in general, many thanks to a kindly providence, which has preserved us from annihilation and allowed us to find one another here in these makeshift quarters, as the primal cell of a new society that far from neglecting tried-and-true human wisdom actually wishes to continue it. Per aspera ad astra! Let that be our motto evermore!