Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  But I was only telling myself those things. The wall of fire was impenetrable and was reflected in me just as impenetrably. No shriek pierced it on either side. Then, the young man came toward me.

  The young man was gazing straight ahead, imperturbable, striding through the heaps of broken glass, the smoldering ruins of furniture, and the tattered snarls of fire hose. He was walking along the more or less intact right side of Kurfürstendamm (for this took place in the Berlin of 1944, on the morning after a turbulent night: one of the solid bombing nights in which the Wilhelmine splendor of Berlin’s Old West Side lost its plaster of paris amid all sorts of illumination effects that flouted the blackout regulations: the loss being so complete that only the sooty walls remained, and even they were mostly joined and entangled like the fingers of a praying pastor—very few of them were still left upright, as a warning) . . .

  He was obviously a young man of good breeding, and he wore civilian clothes. This too was not something one saw every day. For it was precisely the young men of the best families who deemed it an honor to do their accursed duty and carry out their obligation to Führer, Volk, und Vaterland, on land, in the air, and at sea, in Minsk and Omsk and Andalsnes and high over the wind-rowed dunes of drifting sand in the Libyan desert and deep down with the fish by Ullapool. His raincoat with a sloppily dangling belt was unbuttoned, and his hands were in his pockets. He was heedless of his good shoes, which trod over upholstery springs and into the twisted spokes of baby-carriage wheels. And when he had to cross one of the side streets, he stepped rather inattentively down from the sidewalk to the road and tripped . . . However, he caught himself with the inexplicable, clownish skill of a drunk or other deviant and, after briefly reeling, as if drawn on an invisible string, he strode on: without removing his hands from his pockets or his gaze from the nothingness he was staring straight into. What was happening around him wasn’t his concern. Nor was it really his concern anymore what had happened to him.

  And I realized, something extraordinary had happened to the young man! And only then did it dawn on me:

  Something extraordinary had happened.

  •

  I almost always append this episode to the tale of the flower woman: as a paraphrase to clarify the theme for the slow-witted and, for the quick-witted who grasp it immediately, as a gratis addendum to be gratefully received. And I quite regularly reap, with a sigh of metaphysical anxiety, the exclamation “Man! You ought to write about that!”

  Yes indeed, I know I ought to write about it (and a lot of other things too). I ought to write about it for the sole reason that it has something to do with writing itself: it contains a formula that is as simple as it is foolproof. But it’s not so urgent as other things I ought to write down. It may be an extremely effective bit of narrative art (at least it’s seldom disappointed my listeners). But it concerns me only peripherally (although the end of an era back then—in March 1938—put an end to my era: so completely that my previous life seemed to have been lived by a different person than he of the later life: kind of like how my childhood before my mother’s death was lived by a different child than the one who then grew up in Vienna, ultimately experiencing that March in the year 1938). But the extraordinary thing that had happened in Berlin in 1944—and which the young man in his absent mental state had caused me to grasp as being extraordinary—this wasn’t my concern even then—no more than it was his.

  I would venture to maintain that the issue is purely an external one. It was (by way of having happened) to have extremely far-reaching consequences—certainly not just for myself but, strangely, even enigmatically, for me in particular (although, for the time being, it altered nothing in the externals of my existence).

  In any case, it sliced my existence in two again, pushing the earlier portion behind a glass pane, as it were. What now lay behind it was, no doubt, something I had gone through, lived through, at times even suffered through—yet it really had nothing to do with me now. I continued living with it as if I were keeping one portion of me like a tench in an aquarium: more as a hobby than as a necessity.

  One portion of myself was entirely abstracted from me, existing in a different element. In a reality that had become unreal. I could observe it with scientific detachment. It no longer aroused my passion, only my occasional interest.

  Like Nagel’s amputated arm, which lay buried somewhere in Russia while its owner industriously wrote with his left arm in Fuhlsbüttelon-the-Elbe, that era of my life was separated from me. And even though it sometimes seemed that I could identify with it in some way or other, this was not actually the case. I was prey to the same illusion as Nagel when some sort of nervous reflex in his arm stump led him to believe that he could move the fingers of his right hand.

  In a word: I still experienced myself in that portion—but simply as history.

  Even later (years and decades after March 1938), I was forced to carry out such amputations of previous sections of my life; for instance, after my divorce from Christa, in a certain way after Schwab’s funeral, and certainly after Gaia’s death. So that ultimately my story became that of a man who experiences himself in the story of an adolescent who experiences himself in the story of a boy who experiences himself in the story of a child. Or if you prefer a visual metaphor: the surrealistic portrait of a man who carries within himself an aquarium in which he swims like a tench (a tench, it goes without saying, that carries within itself an aquarium, in which it swims like a tench) . . . And even though he keeps getting progressively smaller and younger and changing his suit so that ultimately, as a dear little golden-curled sailor, he carries nothing more within himself than the nostalgia for the amniotic fluid from which the stork unexpectedly brought him and placed him in a nursery somewhere full of toys and the first terrors of life, he was nevertheless—albeit hazily and mysteriously and tench-like—the very same man! All those cuts separated me from myself like a tapeworm head, from which the same tapeworm keeps growing back (because, in accordance with a biological command, it contains an established design of itself and hence its style, as it were). But none of those cuts supported its effectiveness by using the spectacular circumstances of a historic event. Only the cut in March 1938.

  From which one may conclude that my personal history is connected only rather loosely and randomly with World History. It really does not concern me.

  •

  Hence, now, here in Paris, in 1968, it was not memory that stunned me but simply my small interest in it. My gaze up into the peepshow box of the air shaft, through which nothing was to be seen but a rectangular section of the ice-blue sky, sucked me out of time into a sort of removal from time—into a no-man’s-land between the here and now and today and the there and then and yesterday long since and frequently separated from me.

  I belonged to neither one now. I saw both as equally remote and abstracted from me: each a wholly different story. I could tell either—but neither expressed me.

  I peered simultaneously into my two aquariums, each of which contained the other and me in the amniotic fluid of a tale to be told—as a literary fetus, so to speak. One was a Paris hotel room reeking of bedbug killer and couscous spices; the other, the Vienna of the annexation by the Third and Greater German Reich.

  In both, something swam in slow-motion weightlessness: I, my SELF—or at least a human being with an unbearable resemblance to me. In one, standing at the window and gazing up the narrow airshaft to the sky, a man of forty-nine, modeled trait for trait on my wanted poster, and with the same personal data, the same name, the same place and date of birth (and its disreputable circumstances), the same color of hair and eyes, the same nose shape, ear shape, fingerprints, and distribution of liver spots—hence, in terms of all criminological leads, quite unmistakably me. In the other, the same man, thirty years younger—a callow nineteen-year-old, in whom all these traits were just budding, so to speak, not yet settled in creases, leathern and weather-beaten and masculinely marked—yet nevertheless me. Indeed,
beyond the shadow of a doubt, ME, my SELF—

  and neither concerned me directly. Each was I, my SELF—but simply as history: as my abstraction.

  Still, a secret rapport existed between the two of them (the realization they were ME), in which I was not included. They existed through me and beyond me, in a higher form of existence that I had not yet attained. They looked as if they were winking and waving—indeed, even calling to one another, shouting something I could not (or was not supposed to) make out. It sounded like something I knew, indeed knew very well. It sounded like my own echo, but I had forgotten the words of the original call, and the echo had died away no sooner than I thought I had caught it.

  They knew the words and had decided to keep them from me. And thus, they (these stories of mine, twice times two times two times two times two stories) aroused my curiosity, forcing me to deal with them and cope with them incessantly, to tell them to myself over and over again, unceasingly—yet without ever managing to become fully a part of their equation, all their numerators and common denominators, their common multiples as well as, ultimately, the solution to their algebra.

  My gaze through the tetragonal funnel of the light shaft yanked me up and out into the cold void, in which I floated away from myself like a balloon cut loose. And, like the hazy strips of soft, perforated cloud covers, the rags of other memories, other histories of my many detached and abstracted SELVES, soared past me:

  a pond in a now entirely mythical land (known as Bessarabia, a name that is speckled like a guinea hen): a small pond in a park, where a delicately old-fashioned boat was decaying

  a bridge arching over the Danube Canal in Vienna, under whose slanting shadow, cast transparently into the mealy lit fog, I, my SELF, a boy of eleven, was placing a toy boat in the black water: in it a candle that was to drift to my dead mother

  a classroom at the realschule in Vienna’s Thirteenth District, in whose mountain sorrel a wheat field of youth was rotting on the stalk, year by year

  the nixie eyes of my foster mother, bewitched and strangely hungry for salvation, her gaze with drawn-in flanks, as it were, arousing the same hunger in me

  Stella or liberation, sinful lovemaking in the veil the frogs wove with their croaking one moonlit night over Baneasa, furious mating behind a boundary ridge on the highway where the car stands with its motor running, predatory pouncing on each other in hotel rooms rented for hours at a time

  and John, whom we—still glowing and breathless and with hands trembling—sit facing, with his perfectly immobile face.

  The war:

  Cousin Wolfgang, appearing before me in military gray; Berlin in flames, and the gray human faces which the soot of conflagrations has seared so deeply that they shine; the canteen with German attorneys and witnesses at the Fürth law court and the purely physiological gratitude in the otherwise perfectly expressionless face of a young girl who is eating, taking in food with all the senses, all the organs, all the cells of her body

  the Yuletide Ice Age in Hamburg: Christa and I holding hands and gazing down at our newborn son

  Dawn, undressing an Indian doll here in this hotel room while Schwab and I watch in delight—and her stunned look, her sudden blush, when a giant vermilion penis appears on the undressed doll

  Gaia dying and Professor Leblanc chatting away at her bedside

  And none of these things really concerns me anymore. They could just as easily be made up and have never actually happened. They have passed away and could, told as several individual stories, become history. Without someone to tell it, it has no reality: as if it had never happened.

  •

  The ice-blue bit of sky over the air shaft was, in any case, wholly un-dimmed by any of this. It had swallowed it all up into its cold blueness: all of Nuremberg with all its spiritual dousing and crawling grave worms as well as the entire month of March 1938 in Vienna and everything I had been through, gone through, lived through, in between or before or after. True, I could wrest some of these things from that bit of sky, I could resurrect them and bring them back to life—with interest, raised to the level of narrative, an object of reflective contemplation, provoking our thoughts. The sky challenged me with a smile to do so, but this was sheer derision . . . It had swallowed up so many other things that I had not taken part in: the atomic mushroom of Hiroshima, for instance, and the smoke of the crematory ovens of Treblinka; the kiln glow of the bombing nights of Berlin and Dresden, of Hamburg, Würzburg, Rotterdam, and Coventry and Warsaw, plus the sweetly burgeoning stench of decay from the fields of corpses in the Ardennes and in the Donets Basin, at Monte Cassino and El Alamein and Singapore and Waikiki and goodness knows where else; the defoliated jungles of Vietnam, the Algerians blown up by a hose in their anus—this blue sky has sucked up all of it. Certainly, others were, fortunately, present in those places: they saw, witnessed, experienced, and are capable of wresting these things away from it, resurrecting them as narrative: on the level of an object of reflective contemplation. But this did not concern IT up above, it did not concern IT at all.

  The bit of ice-blue sky over the air shaft (sixteen feet square): it had swallowed up all Babylon and was completely undimmed by this, without the slightest frizzle of a bellyache, silky smooth, crystal clear, and as deep as a well. And what if mankind were now preparing to hurl the entire planet after it, including itself? What concern is this of IT, what concern of mine? I have nothing to oppose it with but words.

  •

  Up there, in the blue, the man who experienced himself as the story of a man who experiences himself as the story of an adolescent who experiences himself as the story of a boy who experiences himself as the story of a child—I, my SELF, up there in the Arctic blue (still unborn as a story, still not wrested from the blue maws of oblivion, but about to be: always, destined to be so from early on, misborn to mislive my life as a story), with my image I also carried about a piece of human history—

  March 1938, for example:

  The Arctic-blue emptiness of those days—and Vienna, washed up on their shore like a lovely dead seashell . . .

  Certainly: as a story, it was smashing. Blissfully, I stuffed it into the light blue of Schwab’s eyes, how many times—and these eyes were never fed up, they kept gaping, round as tennis balls, gawking through the thick glasses. And thus I never got fed up with telling stories—that is, wreaking vengeance. For that’s what it really was, an act of revenge each time. Revenge for the betrayal of our life’s dream, for our wasted youth, our now empty and abstract life, revenge for the loss of reality, for our lost innocence, for the demiurge’s shameful game, imposing upon us an existence under scornful conditions: giving us life in order to steal our lives from us . . . Blissful revenge, turning into gall, until even its bitterness was no longer palatable—until I was only chewing ashes: “Yakkety-yak—why am I blabbering to you about the magic and the death of cities—you who saw, who breathed Berlin: a son, a legitimate offspring of the splendid, legendary Berlin of the 1920s, of the first decade after WWI—until 1933, until the oriflamme of the Reichstag fire. That was another radiant star, a sister star of the city of Paris in the diadem of Europe. I mean, before the hopelessly aged, bull-borne girl donned cowboy pants and New Mexico boots, became the hit of the county fair, despite her crone face and multiple unsuccessful face-lifts, the bronco-busting rodeo star Miss Yurop with neon tubes around her Texas hat . . . Back in that faraway morning hour of the world, when we were all boys, you, friend Schwab, and Nagel and Cousin Wolfgang and I—you, as the firstborn, could spend a few blissful holiday weeks there, in that legendary Berlin, presumably in furuncular late adolescence, but blind from too much reading, and mature enough to note the quickening of your pulse when reading Gottfried Benn and ascribing it to increased distrust, and yet happily enjoying the well-crafted wordsmithery of Else Lasker-Schüler, and associating jazz with Otto Dix’s paintings of the world war or the brown shirts and red-white-and-black armbands of the SA with the songs of Brecht & Weill, Inc.�
�devouring all this like a whale gulping down plankton: to drink the world, to be drunk on the zeitgeist—you lucky man! Born to such riches! . . . And where is it now, your precious Berlin? Does it exist in reality and not just on political maps and in Bild magazine as the scene of the German Wailing Wall? . . . Cross your heart and own up to it: that city never really existed, it was a legend, wasn’t it? A dream that a city dreamed about itself? . . . How can I believe anything else? I was shown a settled spot in Brandenburg and told it was Berlin, and I wandered through it, up and down, in every nook and cranny, before it was destroyed by fire. And I can assure you: nothing there, absolutely nothing evoked even the slightest echo of that legend, of that dream of a city. . . I am ready to believe in Atlantis and, if you like, in Vineta and, of course, the Baghdad of Haroun ar’ Rashid. But the model arch for tinker-toy tinkering (the big Wilhelmine Memorial Church edition in the Kaiser’s birthday package for higher social classes, free delivery), this giant bourgeois toy left to the little people in the brown shirts from the back courtyard, this couldn’t possibly have been the Berlin that an entire generation dreamed about, even I in the brooding dullness of my formative years in Vienna dreamed about, like a modern Babylon . . . I had pictured it altogether differently—not architecturally, of course, but in its atmosphere, as they say: in its mood substance. The legendary Berlin of the so-called cursed Systemzeit must have been magical, like a jungle painting by the Douanier Rousseau: an adventure dappled in flickering light like the face of a predatory feline suddenly emerging out of the sickle-moon-sliced blue of the tropical night . . . At least, that was how I had pictured it when I yearningly dreamed about it in the stale air of a puberty-fermenting classroom in Vienna’s Thirteenth District. A tropical voluptuousness, especially at night, when the entangled lianas of light were reflected in the black asphalt currents and vice waxed in the moor ponds of darkness, making the overexcited mind fluoresce. So that, from the miasmas of lust-for-life and misery, luxury and crime, the orchids of the intellectual events of art, of strange, bizarre, baroque existences, of anecdotes, blossomed forth . . . You used to say you envied me for my formative years in Vienna: Klimt and Schiele, Wittgenstein and Berg, Schönberg, and so on . . . But permit me: In my time, all that was in a different paleontological stratum. It was past and past perfect, not present. It was history, myth, legend: literature, not life. Your Berlin, on the other hand, was, for at least a decade (until 1933), the most vivid present in our existence—granted, not one hundred percent the ANTHROPOLIS of the utopians, not exactly the New Jerusalem of the pilgrim fathers, but a Babylon: cesspool, chaos, yet all the more beautiful for that, all the more seductive . . .