Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  Bravo! Be seated! The women have already begun, at their own initiative, to embroider a club banner (unfortunately, silver yarn is still scarce, but sperm threads will do nicely for the moment). We thank Herr Speaker for his warm, lucid words. The newcomer, Herr von Rönnekamp, in particular, can probably not help being moved at the mention of so many warm, gay feelings. With special joy and expectation, we now greet our guest. Major General Baron Waldemar von Neunteuffel (stop scratching your flea bites, Fritz!)—

  Major General Baron Waldemar von Neunteuffel took the floor (took it swiftly, virtually vaulting onto it: Münchhausen on the cannonball could not have been a defter equestrian). He said it was hard for him to say how happy he was to be here and see one of his oldest dreams come true: namely, to see the spirit of the future born from the rank and file (that is to say, from the community of all, with no distinction of merit or rank). Especially you, my dear Nagel, must understand how deeply moved I am. Congratulations with all my heart and soul for the excellent work you have done! What particularly impresses me is the unadulterated Hegelian spirit of this enterprise; after all, without this great Prussian philosopher, any future political formation will be built on sand.

  So, many thanks to Professor Hertzog (and of course to you, my dear Nagel) for so to speak replanting the cross of the knightly order in the scorched earth and for gathering the liegemen around you in a truly chivalresque democratic way, inspiring them to lay the cornerstone of the new polis. Equality, fraternity, and liberty (in obeisance!) are, after all, ideals that have both led to the triumphs of the spirit of Western Civilization and endangered them when distorted; the most daring things are tied to the greatest perils; anyone who truly wishes to dance must dance on volcanoes; we are all forced to do so in the atomic age; anyone who is not a utopian today is not a realist but a defeatist. However, being a utopian does not mean seizing impracticable things from the clouds and designing them into a world of dreams; it means creating the ideal model for shaping and fashioning reality. This reality is at the door; needless to say, it is related to all tried-and-true ideals of Western Civilization. Christianity goes without saying, socialization too, in the widest sense, of course; the new political formation will presumably crystallize on a federal basis; the most important thing now is the economic reconstruction; I can tell you from a reliable source that the Allies have very specific ideas in this respect; in the long run, no one can afford a slum in the heart of Europe; there is still some resistance, but people will soon have to accept that we live in the era of large-scale organisms. Germany cannot be excluded from the European orchestra; we can thus on this point look forward to the future with hope and confidence; it would, to be sure, be dreadfully optimistic to assume that this means the launching of a long era of peace; we must realize, ladies and gentlemen, that the real conflict has not yet been fought to the end; Churchill’s far-reaching world-political view was not to allow the Russians to seize half of Europe, but his view was, alas, not shared by all powers; the American now confronts a fait accompli; the ultimate struggle will not keep us waiting for long; we Germans find ourselves in the both embarrassing and yet—for negotiations—advantageous position of being a buffer state with, one may say, the power to tip the scales; it is highly desirable that German politicians of the future remember this; I am, of course, not advocating a new German power politics; that would be lunacy, suicide; Europe must henceforth march together and strike together when it is time to strike again, God damn it. But let us very clearly visualize how this will take place: the first phase, of course, will be an atomic attack on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Here in Germany, it will presumably strike at our newly and better-built-up industrial center, the Rheinland, the Ruhr, and so on. You know, of course, that within twenty-four hours of the eruption of hostilities, by the latest, that area will be a radioactive wasteland. Now add a few more unimportant zones, for instance our beautiful Hamburg here with its hinterland, Hanover, et cetera: within the shortest possible time, the result will be total chaos and of course starvation; a situation that cannot possibly be dealt with by mere organization—different from the famine now, where the supply authorities do guarantee a certain survival minimum by means of food rationing. Well, plundering gangs and hordes will throng into the still-untouched areas, and naturally the local population will defend itself; refugees and survivors from nuclear-struck areas will be clubbed to death like stray dogs because of the feared danger of contagion and contamination: in short, a situation worse than the Thirty Years’ War. To prevent this from coming about, dear friends, we desperately require the establishment of an effectively powerful German force for maintaining order. It will naturally require utmost tact to wait for the psychologically proper moment when one can make such an institution palatable to the Germans, who have been disillusioned by any sort of military structure. But bear in mind, ladies and gentlemen, that this step will be necessary and unavoidable—

  And here, the unexpected occurred; here came Nagel’s crowning glory. Twitching his arm stump in the empty sleeve as though trying to pound on the table with his missing fist, he suddenly blustered and shouted that he had had enough of this shit; if things developed as Herr Neunteuffel prophesied, then he hoped that he, Karl Nagel, would have found a way of emigrating to a place where it wasn’t worth the trouble to use nuclear weapons, Korea or Siam or God knows where, and if he hadn’t succeeded, then he would prefer plundering hordes of radium-contaminated Rheinlanders or Lower Bavarians defending their forest homeland with clubs to any powerful German force for maintaining order. He was fed up to here with all the stupid talk; he had more important things to do than waste his time with this chitchat, goddammit; after all, this garden house was not the bookstore at the Cologne railroad station, it was a private home, damn makeshift to be sure, but all the same—So get out, all of you! The whole goddamn bunch of you, get out!

  It was fabulous. Hertzog was the only one who made an attempt, at the threshold, to remain. All he got for his trouble was the knob of the slammed door in his back. Hurrying to catch up with Major General Baron von Neunteuffel, who was hurrying toward his car, which had just been approved for him by the occupation authorities, he tried to explain that poor Nagel was in the throes of a subliminal religious crisis that made him extremely irritable and also, because of an unresolved father-son attachment, tended towards an unequilibriated functioning of the gall bladder.

  The rest of us stood in the starry, frost-smoky night. Herr von Rönnekamp, who seemed uncommonly worked up by the incident, ecstatically shook hands with every last one of us, holding our hands awhile in order properly to relish each friendly gaze. Despite everything, he said, he hoped to see us again soon, talk to us, get to know us better (the hope was to come true in my case). Then, with a bulbously Baltic “One second! I’m coming!” (which spouted from his mouth as a small gray cloudlet in the frosty night), he likewise went to the car. Fräulein Ute Seelsorge quickly joined him to see whether there wasn’t room for her too. Some of us laughed. Some felt that Nagel had been quite right. One man said, “Okay, but that won’t do all the same!” One girl was weeping silently to herself, and all of us agreed that it was freezing cold. The little group dissolved and trickled apart.

  And I was proud! My shirt buttons almost popped off, I was so proud. Nagel, my friend Karl Nagel, had shown what a grand fellow he was. He had driven the money changers out of the temple. He had spurned the tempter. In the teeth of temptation, he had remained steadfast. He had finally, with his own hands (or rather one hand), set sail to steer his life’s dream through the winter night.

  Yes indeed. That’s what he was like. My friend Nagel. A gruff old bastard, but he had balls. I still remember his white-toothed smile in his sooty face (darkened with smoke from the stove) when he told me how he had lost his arm. Somewhere in Russia, he and a group of similar daredevils—wild fellows from a penal column who knew they were done for anyway—were meant to blast through an encircled area. In the middle of the night, t
hey had put on snow coats and crawled all the way to a particularly vicious nest of heavy machine guns and anti-tank guns. Nagel led the way as platoon leader. Now, the morning was coming up (he described its rosebuds on the ice with an ardor that did credit to his later full-bosomed spiritual kinship with the painter Philipp Otto Runge). The moment for attack had come. Nagel raised his arm to signal to his buddies: “Storm the nest! Get going!” But nothing happened. No one got up to storm. Only the Russians began shooting wildly, lashing the terrain with sheaves of machine-gun fire. Nagel looked around furiously for the assholes, who were lying with their mugs in the snow. Why the hell hadn’t they started running at his signal? After all, he had raised his arm—

  at this point, he glanced at his arm and didn’t see it. The arm was gone. There was no arm to give a visible signal. It had been shot clean off when he had raised it.

  And so all his buddies were likewise cleanly picked off where they lay, one after another, their faces in the snow. They hadn’t seen the arm that was supposed to signal the attack.

  At the time, Nagel, grimly laughing, called it “a really stupid story.” But I’m not sure. Today, when it comes to mind, it strikes me as dismally symbolic.

  •

  How far back, how remote this lay in time, and how present it was in my memory! . . . I could reel it off like Nagel himself:

  All I have to do is apply the pen and it races across the paper. Sheer delight. I write even more fluently than when I concoct delicacies for my piglets. Wohlfahrt & Associates, their snouts zealously snuffling, badger me for something they can smack their lips over: some gaudy, juicily snot-oozing subject to lure yet again some distributor threatened with bankruptcy.

  (“. . . Well, just listen—listening?—this idea is worth its weight in gold: after all, GLORIA made Till the Last Man, didn’t they?—Did you see it? No? Well, this is the theme: a political demagogue convinces the masses of his ideas, which are actually criminal; he starts a war, and the very people who were his most enthusiastic followers, who believed that the man only wanted the best, now have to hold out until the bitter end—Till the Last Man . . . It’s sure to be the box-office sensation of the season. And now VICTORIA’s keen on a topic like that, but with a more optimistic ending. The distributors say that the audiences are excited when they arrive but they’re down when they leave. Victoria can’t afford that—look what happened with Till the Last Child—you know: last phase of the war, a crazy old sergeant wants to defend a village even though it’s totally useless; since all the men are away at the front, he arms the kids with bazookas, and all of them are wiped out, of course—right? Well, it turned out that audiences were expecting a silver lining of hope on the horizon. So after a good start in the big cities, the flick’s been collapsing in the provinces after just a week. Why don’t you mull it over a bit? Find the right solution for Till the Last Woman—okay? The title itself is sexy; that’ll get them to the box office. Besides, with luck even the biggest dummies will notice that it’s not meant seriously—but it’s supposed to be, you understand, a hard war theme, but not so hopeless; if a couple of broads get bumped off, it doesn’t matter, most moviegoers are women anyway; they like it when something happens to another woman. So think it over; maybe you’ll hit on something bubbly. That’s up your alley, isn’t it: harsh reality behind the humor—right?—I’ve already registered the title, you can’t expect any payment for the material itself, but you’ll get a nice tidy sum for the treatment, money up front is more important for you than a lot of money later on, I’m counting on a script contract for you, but let me just say this much: it’s a unique opportunity, you’ ll be doing business with VICTORIA, so show us that I didn’t pick the wrong man when I chose you as the writer . . .”)

  Then I’m in my element. Then I do without the handwritten stuff (what symbolism in Nagel’s scribbling left hand!)—

  —then I fantasize “the thing” right into the typewriter: attack the keys with nimble, forceful fingers, as if I were sitting at a Bechstein in a concert hall—and what should inhibit me here, anyway? The question of quality?

  (“. . . Our industry can afford an artistic cinema only if it stands on a sound financial foundation—which comes from the box-office receipts of entertainment movies. I, as the producer, am obliged to make sure of this . . .”)—

  I don’t even have to ask what sense the whole thing makes. The answer is obvious: my piglets want to tap money, and some of it will be siphoned off to me—

  what, then, should hold me back? my self-respect? the lamentable shred of dignity that we of the sad countenances reserve for ourselves in our work?

  (to Schwab: “You needn’t look up at me all conflicted and embarrassed—I know perfectly well what you’re thinking: that it’s despicable of me to do this sort of thing—yet you can’t ignore the fact that I can do it, can bring myself to do it and not give a damn. Isn’t that what you’re thinking? . . . Irrefutable proof of the cynic’s energy: I can get away with it . . .”)

  what in the name of all that’s holy would get in my way? my intellectual honesty? the certainty that I am deceiving?

  whom?—and about what? . . .

  Just reach into the throes of human life! The teeming of maggots all around. Into Hertzog’s Divine World and Neunteuffel’s New Reality, into the roaring torrent of commuters and highway rest stop people—what does reality look like in their brains?

  A vortex of images, no doubt. A boiling noise-gruel. A flickering chaos of momentary impressions, eardrum sensations:

  incident-fragments happening-tatters event-slivers occurrence-splinters—bubbling up and away in the effervescence of ceaseless and ubiquitous occurrence, the total superreality of illustrated magazines—involuntarily captured dissipated perceived interrupted chopped-up ripped-up spliced-up throttled arbitrarily jumbled-up incoherently superimposed like the trailer to a film that is never screened in its correct and meaningful sequence.

  A day of the white maggot—how does it pass by? what is it like?—every morning a torturous everyday spawn:

  Alarm clock-buzzing-instant-of-terror, everlasting and as explosive as an atomic bomb:

  Dream-world demolition, dream-reality annihilation. Collapse of the logic of the multidimensional. Solutionless abruption of all events, identity loss, feelings of guilt for things not taken care of, frustration of non-coping—

  Existential panic: tightening dimension-narrowing, powerlessness, primal sense of forlornness, fear, anguish, menace

  Irruption of the outer world into the shredded inner world irruption of time into the timelessness of physicality into the world of gravity-defying nonphysicality space-confinement irruption of what is rigidly established into what is arbitrarily alterable exchangeable penetrable irruption of banal design of multiple experience into sovereignly unprecedented unique unheard-of

  Reluctant renunciation of the freedom of unreality the uncommittedness of the ungrammatical helpless striving against being moved by the merciless causality of the factual fragile clutching at melting dream-formations a sense of being swindled humiliation of vulnerability degradation through coarsening

  Fettering to the physical: mass load inertia bulk: hard things sharp-edged things hostile things—

  Resistance to pain as a mediator of reality, defense, arousal of aggressiveness

  Rediscovery of the physical sense of self: self-member-stiffness self-urinary-urgency self-hybrid-morning-erection self-bad-taste-in-mouth self-breath self-warmth self-smell

  Gathering, finding one’s bearings, getting it all together: mosaic-like reconstruction of the human being who dissolves in sleep every night, mosaic-like reconstruction of the world of facts which is demolished nightly, blurry and bleary, partially snuffed—

  Arduous pulling-oneself-together to cope with existence

  Everyday treadmill of propitiating the trivial physicality pissing, shitting, hawking, coughing, throat-clearing—spitting, swallowing—

  Reluctant civilization-ceremony: tee
th-brushing, gargling, washing, shaving, combing—

  Meanwhile: recapitulation of existential provisos, necessities, duties

  Recourse to history: the hardships successes triumphs defeats humiliations satisfactions of yesterday the day before yesterday and the day before that; transmission of expectations hopes disappointments prospects anxieties coercions into today—

  And thus: ordering of reality into the effable, the articulable, the verbally expressible, the grammatical, the chronological. Anything that cannot be said can no longer be part of reality, is pushed under the threshold of consciousness, pads existence with congestions of malaise, defense, anxiety, pleasure, pleasure-quests, pleasure-defense-impulses

  From now on this reality seems to take place linearly, in the movement of time, steered by more or less conditioned reflexes and in tension and tension-release, kept vibrating by more or less unchecked affects: as a glimmering, glittering chaos crisscrossed by the meteorites of chance, a uniform three-hundred-sixty-five-day reiteration, in constantly changing guise

  Irruption of everyday life with the urgency of necessity, of duty, of time: racing with the clock, with the quota, with the demands of the drives, of forced goals. Cowering under the volley of requests, requirements, requisitions from the other—wife child parent sibling friend neighbor colleague superior subaltern contemporary compatriot coreligionist party-comrade fellow-man hated loved feared honored despised—flight into the chaos of teeming masses, anonymity as the ultimate refuge of self-awareness, isolation in protective shells—the suit the car the office the company the union the after-work pub the club the party the creed the nation. Personality shells. Cell existence. Monad in the aggregate of monads. Maggot in the maggot-teeming of a continuous disintegration process—then suddenly unexpectedly: the randomness of event