Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  “Uncle Helmuth had good reason to listen to the voices from the beyond that announced a potentializing of our planet by Adolf Hitler. Austria’s greatest son, the former suburban asphalt-walker, whom we had seen as a savior and redeemer, grouchily snuffling into his butcher’s mustache under his oversize doorman’s cap as he entered Vienna through the divided sea of the people—he truly seemed to be chosen for that mission. Nature had been alienated from mankind, violated by technology and art, and he was restoring her to her full rights—and this took place in the spring wind of the zeitgeist; even someone like Stella, who was born alienated, could not resist.

  “No arguments could refute this. Reason—if it was worth its salt—had to admit this was beyond its jurisdiction. The force that pulled and steered was the collective feeling. Everything that occurred in the thin air of an incomprehensible but undeniable, irrefutably powerful enthusiasm came out of the collective feeling. It was so primeval, so earthy, so full of life, and yet so pure! It came virtually from the Alpine glaciers and tasted as clean as mountain air and as fresh as a mountain spring, even over slit bellies. It foamed with the trout streams through the valleys into the lowlands, sweeping souls along with it. Anyone who was not destined by nature to be a victim or was totally dull and without functioning sensoria was swept along. His tie was torn from his throat and his shirt collar was torn off and he was offered up—to the GREAT MOTHER. What is man, Czerwenka? Chaff in the wind of time, Herr Professor. And the wind was blowing out again into the open countryside. The Garden of Eden had recently become a nature preserve. Human beings were ensuring its care and protection with rifles. Shielding the Alpine flora and gassing vermin and Jews. The fictions were pine-needle green and rich in vitamins. And the GREAT MOTHER laughed so hard that her sides ached—looking forward to the next big feeding . . .”

  •

  It was like a vicious revenge-taking when I spoke to my dead friend thus: revenge for the sold-out dreams of our youth, for the gone spring wind of the lost halves of our lives, revenge for the guilty part we had played, revenge on myself for his death.

  Revenge too on the insatiably alert, bright eyes, clear as water, gaping from his thick glasses—behind them someone busily copying everything down, recording every word in the intellectual’s fine-limbed script, inscribing everything with a sharp quill in the greasy gray matter of his brain “as if someone had sewn it into his eyelids.”. . . What’s he hanging on to it for? What does he plan to do with it? How is he going to render it? . . .

  “All these things that I’m so recklessly going on about seem to fascinate you no end—or am I mistaken?”

  His face is nicely reddened: a blond’s thin skin, boy-scout lock combed back over his high, narrow forehead (start of a steeple head: underneath, it’s more massive, more Lutheran). A few beads of sweat on it. Restrained excitement. He’s controlling himself nicely, but his face is not dominated by his eyes, which, grotesquely magnified, gape out of the round steel frames of his glasses; no, his face is dominated by his mouth: mollusk flesh, quivering with sensitivity.

  He nods: “You are not mistaken. I am fascinated!”

  •

  Revenge, then, for every sentence extracted from me. For the sanctimonious simplicity in his sharp alertness. For his quick weighing, his swift connection of anything he hears. For the spinning of threads, the lying in wait, the shooting at the prey, for the paralyzing sting, the meticulous wrapping and preserving . . . Revenge for the smile flying up involuntarily amid light breaths—the cruel smile on his nervous lips. For the occasional light sniff from his nostrils . . .

  “I seem to be giving you a great deal of pleasure with my stories? . . .” “Indeed you are. Extraordinary pleasure . . .” The irony he manipulates so much more skillfully than I. His superiority. The gently interspersed questions. The razor-sharp precise comments: the greater suffering, the more cutting experience, the more tested, more knowing patience. And he keeps measuring himself against me. Forces me to measure myself against him. “If you only knew how much you resemble my cousin Wolfgang. . .”

  •

  Rasping fraternal hatred in my voice, the voice of Cain: “Too bad you died, Schwab: you could have seen a new, more thorough era. The last time you were in Paris, I gave you a hint about this. Let’s not fool ourselves, dear boy! You’ve got ants in your pants here, you can’t even keep your ass in your chair for three minutes. And the cause? Sheer panic. You’re scared of discovering that this lovely Paris, which is nevertheless still beautiful, nevertheless still poignantly Parisian, is no longer itself; you’re scared that it died long ago. Just a blank shell: the paling home of a dead creature, still inhabited, but not by those who built it up around themselves out of the compulsion to express their nature. Why, if so many cities have died, if THE CITY, the myth of ANTHROPOLIS, has died—why should Paris still be alive? True, it’s teeming before our eyes—or rather hustling and bustling—like I’ve said: the maggots teeming in a corpse are biologically potentialized life . . . I mean to say: Without our noticing it, perhaps during one of our absences, a quiet, bright dying may have taken place—like one of those instantaneous life-changes that amputate our past, cut it away from us, so that we undeniably go on living and remain the same persons, and yet no longer live the same lives, even if they are the same on the outside . . . After all, we know that, normally, a real event occurs discreetly. Dramaturgically, it is not proportionate to what it marks. It may be a stroll during which it occurs to you that you no longer love Miss McDonahue, whom so far you have regarded as the nuclear core of your existence. Or a ride on a bus during which it dawns on you that Karl Marx is not the be-all and end-all of the world. Such things happen entirely without our interference. A relatively nugatory cause for a sudden, thorough revision of previous thoughts and feelings brings about a sudden, thorough alteration of our entire existence. A private turn of the century, so to speak, which transforms the previous future into something outmoded and the past into a conjecture about any number of possibilities. But you believe that this is your personal, private turn of the century. In reality, the change lies in the times, and everyone is affected by it one way or another. For you, however, it was an existential change. And naturally, you go on living, and so does the world, to be sure. The world, as we know, is divided into facts. One thing may be true or not true, and everything else will stay the same. What is truth, what is fact, is the persistence of circumstances. The latter, however, changes all at once, so substantially that we no longer know for sure what was true and what wasn’t—and nevertheless, all factuality remains as it was. But no longer—how shall I put it?—no longer in the same innocence . . . I am expressing myself quite clumsily again. What I want to say is simple, you know. For people like us, the experience of time is a gradual increase of guilt. Perhaps not even personal guilt so much as collective guilt. Original sin. The guilt of belonging to the human race. Especially to a dying civilization. Why else would you have the jitters? Why can’t you stay seated? Why do you roam the streets of Paris like a hungry wolf? Like a murderer drawn to the scene of his crime?

  “Admit it: You feel that you share the guilt for the death of the city. You too have betrayed ANTHROPOLIS. So you skulk around here to find its corpse—and yet you’re too scared to look at it and see your own cadaver. Let me make a suggestion: Let us regard our existential changes as something positive. Simply as new steps. Metamorphosis existence. Butterfly existence. You’ve got to pass through the maggot stage. Who knows what’s coming afterward? Uncle Helmuth spoke of dematerialization. Let’s take the chance! It’s totally painless. Without the shock of physical death. First, it happens to our environment. A city dies away under our very noses, as it were. You wake up one fine day, stick your head out the window, peer into the air, sniff at the patch of heaven that you can see over the air shaft, and you ascertain that out there the weather is extraordinarily fine, golden-blue—the fine weather that on a foggy day can lie in wait with a sedate and superior smile—time
has time, of course. The air is a bit crisp perhaps, but that’s good for your smoker’s bronchia. So you brush your teeth, shave, put on a particularly attractive necktie, and stroll out into the street—and all at once you notice that the city has died, and you with it, of course. True, everything looks exactly as it did the day before. The houses are standing in their places, the streets are teeming, the cars are rolling shinily along the boulevards, the street of man-in-the-street faces under hats, caps, all varieties of hair, unkempt or combed, meticulously curled or wind-tousled, flows, dances, whirls, halts, dams up, breaks out, ebbs, swells again—and they are all deceased in the LORD, and you are too . . . Fine and dandy! How interesting! How very literary! You have just sloughed off a form of being that was previously your SELF, and from now on you are a new SELF, forging ahead with new possibilities of experience. The old self sinks back like the dry husk of a larva from which a butterfly has hatched. The burned-out capsule of a rocket. You yourself plunge onto a new path with new bright eruptions of fire out of your behind . . . Are you disturbed by the abstractness of the new form of existence? It is consistent with our loss of gravity. Do we mourn it? Is it really true that we lost paradise yesterday? Is it true that we were more innocent yesterday? Just what is that anyway—YESTERDAY? A myth. A legend. A fairy tale about ourselves. Dreamed by those who cannot dream a tomorrow for themselves. Is that not the reason for our feeling of guilt? We know that we are a breed without a future. Yesterday, we could still dream ourselves into the future. Today, we dream ourselves back into our dream of yesterday. But keep your spirits up! How does Novalis put it? We are about to wake up when we dream that we’re dreaming. Why not as maggots? Without a past, if you please. Without a history. Likewise without a future. Creatures of the present. Highway rest stop people. Limited to a pure here and now. If that doesn’t appeal to you—then, dear friend, all you can do is escape by forging ahead: into perfect abstraction. The pure butterfly. Dissolve in absolute abstractness—like you up there in the icy sky-blue. Or like me in my literary existence: as a literary object. Whether my own or yours . . .”

  •

  I stood naked at the window and peered up through the air shaft to the sky. Cold bit into my skin and shriveled my scrotum. I thought of the day when I had looked out of the same window at an angle, down to the opposite window (whose shutters were now closed), and Schwab and I had surprised Madame in her nakedness. I thought of her big, maternal breasts, whose fullness had charged into my gonads. In those days, I was not exactly overfed by the tender virginality of Dawn’s breasts (which, moreover, I had not yet relished). At Dawn’s age, Madame’s tremendous appendages must have been magnificently bursting, with pale, bud-like nipples.

  Rarely does one set eyes on such perfection (much less set hands or kisses or bites). I did once, however, when I was frozen stiff in the collapsed air shaft of a bombed-out house in Hamburg, shortly after my arrival from Nuremberg. She was a victim of the widely feared “rubble killer,” a deliciously beautiful woman: stark naked and silkily glittering in her frozen matte nymph skin gently strewn with feathery snow crystals; only her face was bluish violet, like an eggplant. You see, the rubble killer strangled his victims with a wire noose on a wooden throttle valve. All he had to do was twist it behind the victim’s neck to tighten the wire with a horrible lever effect. The eyes of the corpse very sharply revealed the power of this tightening twist: one eye had rolled up at a leftward slant under the caved-in lid, the other gaped dully at a rightward slant toward the stiff nipple. And her tongue had burst out of the cracked lips as though she wanted to lick it (they say of hanged men that their last moment passes with an ejaculation—what is it like with women?)—

  Anyway, it was when I was engaged to Christa that they discovered that woman, yet another victim of the rubble killer, and I believe Christa had a good night after that. I was at my peak, as now.

  I stood at the open window and wished to be seen in my morning glory. By Madame, preferably, or even one of the fat-assed Algerian women. Or, for all I cared, by one of the traveling salesmen, or the chambermaid who was probably cleaning a room across the way. Or the handsome Pole, who must have been sleeping with Madame one floor below, after finishing his night shift . . . I wished for a scandal. A voice furiously shouting “Tu te fous du monde, salaud?” A window being slammed shut. The telephone: “Vous n’avez pas honte, monsieur?” Someone banging at my door: “Dites donc: ça vous amuse?”

  I wished for MYSELF AS AN EVENT.

  It occurred to me that this too was connected with my constant thoughts about Schwab, with what had appeared to me in our precarious friendship as the quest for defeat: Eros, which had let me pleasurably feel the first conscious humiliation of my life, when I had been cruelly laughed at by classmates for an artfully recited English poem. But this was lay psychology. I was hunting for a different prey. For example: the connection between all this and the something that drove me to write. Or: what was at play behind the chance occurrence when it produces such a grotesque that it opens up a perspective into the paradoxical—that is, into the negative of logic. Seen thus, wasn’t it funny to think that it was really by way of my friend Nagel that I got to meet the piglets and thus came to write at all (not Wohlfahrt & Associates, of course—that rosy little race didn’t exist back then—just their biological ancestors, the primeval pigs of the postwar German movie industry, I would almost be tempted to say—but I would then have to beg forgiveness for this locution from Stoffel & Associates, may they rest in peace; it would by no means be meant pejoratively; its function would be purely evolutionary—those species of Sus scrofa already domesticated in the Stone Age, in the order of mammals of the setiferous artiodactyla, who are at the origin of the noble families of the European domestic swine).

  Decent Nagel, in his aboveboard literary (and human) uprightness, has nothing to do with the nimble little race, of course, although every one of his best-selling novels could have been made into a box-office smash for housewives. But the rise of his star along its celestial course took place in the constellation of Stoffel & Associates, the ubiquitously long-forgotten heroes and forebears of the postwar German cinema.

  They too, you see, are part of this legendary wintertide of the years 1945–48, which I (perhaps with a few rare members of my age group) must recall with persistent nostalgia, though they have otherwise slipped away from the memory of the German collective as thoroughly as the glacial periods of the Tertiary.

  In those days, in the bronze heavens over Hamburg (rusting soon after midday, toward the evening), near the Bronze Age community around Professor Hertzog in Nagel’s (or rather Witte’s) garden house on the Elbchaussee, another star arose, a star that would soon outshine Nagel’s meteorites until its extinction:

  the Astra Film Company—boldly wrested from the hesitant occupation authorities, mainly thanks to the vital energy of a man named Horst-Jürgen Stoffel.

  Stoffel had succeeded in saving a wood-processing plant (which had quite profitably supplied carbine shafts to the Wehrmacht) and had seen to it that it survived the war’s end with rather large stocks of timber. Seamlessly adjusting to the new historical conditions, he took the enterprise (which had been evacuated to Winsen-on-the-Luhe) in hand and converted it to the production of Christmas toys—

  a highly popular item, for instance, was the so-called Eckermann doll: a droll little troll made of branch knots and sporting a flattened back that could be used as a bookend. Scherping was so delighted with it that he planned to throw it in free of charge with his edition of Goethe’s Faust (copyright 1947, all rights reserved), which had been licensed by the military government.

  Because I ought not forget to mention that the publishing industry was already beginning to stir. Just as all manner of life was still teeming in the ruins. The red-light alleys at Gänsemarkt and on the Reeperbahn had also remained intact (like the Davidswache and the City Hall).

  •

  Horst-Jürgen Stoffel was not a man whose enterprising
spirit could be restricted to the manufacture of cultural goods. After the Eckermann doll, he started producing wooden soles for ersatz shoes (which soles, to be sure, could be purchased only with rationing stamps). However, his lumber supplies were now categorized as “controlled goods” and subject to a quota.