Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  Lovely Heli, bravely defying her timidity toward appearing among respectable people, had emerged from the whorehouse to accompany to the grave the man she had loved and would love to the end of her days. Her standing behind Uschi was a subtle irony of chance. For she, Heli, had given herself to any man who wanted her, from the milkman to the professor, because she was trying to make up for the ignominy of normally being paid as a professional joy girl (“A person shouldn’t have to pay for joy,” she had said to Schwab with professional naiveté; and if it hadn’t been for Gisela, who brought her to her senses, Heli would have ruined herself).

  She was very beautiful in her powerful, common way, with her fresh complexion and auburn Hamburg hair, which was now demurely upswept rather than loosely tied into a working girl’s ponytail. And I envied Schwab for her love, which was pristine, like in a folk song, and which he had squandered with the recklessness of the untrue beloved in a folksong. All sorts of memories whirred through my head—for instance, Schwab and I sitting in Heli’s room at Gisela’s whorehouse, delighted by our view of the narrow whores’ alley, whose serried gabled houses preserved a final bit of pre-Wilhelmine Hamburg; our enjoying the soft, yellow light in the small windows and mellow shadows down in the street and talking about women as being the natural proprietors of reality, each of them able to give birth to a human being, no matter whether a man or another woman; we said that they carried humanity inside themselves and were capable of renewing it out of themselves—while we men bore the curse of unreality because our contribution to this renewal was so abstract and implausible, an ejaculation and nothing more, so that we could not justly believe that we really existed and, in order to have reality, had to realize ourselves in some sort of activity, in a work aimed at re-creating the world, at creating a new reality—in short: some kind of fiction; and therefore, we kept looking for ourselves, always and everywhere, and could not really love anything but what keeps reflecting only us: always only us . . .

  It was probably Lovely Heli’s loveliest hour, a professionally intimate experience. She could sit at Schwab’s feet, her head in his lap, his hand in her hair, and she could listen to him talking to me—

  and he had spoken about the nixie, whom he knew from my tales about Aunt Selma, and he had said that the bewitched creature that gazed with listening eyes into an alien world (although something there is calling to it that this was once its world too)—the nixie was to float ahead of the story I wanted to tell in my book, precede it like the figurehead of a ship, her hair flowing in the great headwind and her countenance stretching forward, blindly clairvoyant with listening eyes. . .

  and I had to think of how enthusiastically I had gone home, straight from the brothel to Christa and our little boy in Witte’s halved villa on the Elbchaussee, in order to renounce all the deceptive promise of the movie piglets Stoffel, Spouse & Associates and to become Nagel’s good buddy again, and start on the story right away (for all this had taken place in the mythical past, in the very last days of the Ice Age: Lovely Heli was still practically a child). And Christa and our little boy had been so dreadfully poor that I had gone back to Stoffel, Spouse & Associates after all. And later, I never mustered the ethical strength to emulate our good Nagel and devote myself to pure, literary writing—a part-time artist indeed, in Witte’s categorization. And as for the story that Schwab had liked so much, I could never really launch it, I kept bringing it back to the dock and rigging it up again, until it had become its own wild and gigantic construction site and never sailed out on its blue adventure . . .

  The nixie, at any rate, was still waiting to be nailed to her bowsprit. I kept encountering her blindly clairvoyant gaze, now wept empty in Lovely Heli’s eyes. At last I knew why she had been a symbol for me through the many years, a symbol of the never-fulfillable, of the aiming-beyond-all-reality, everlastingly listening ahead into the nothingness of male love. I realize this shamefacedly. For here, in Lovely Heli’s eyes, the female force that maternally says yes to anything, the love that holds reality in its hands—here, it wept itself out.

  •

  All this, as I’ve said, began to wear gently on my nerves. It bewildered me to perceive that the whispering stopped when I slipped into an angle of the visual field of mourners who had not reckoned with my approach from behind:

  “. . . fall coming so early again—why, I could lie in the sun three hours a day—day in day out . . .”

  “. . . it used to be the club in Hamburg, and we’re hoping that it’ll be the club again . . .”

  “. . . well, I’m Protestant, but I’ve got a certain weak spot for the Virgin Mary. . .”

  “. . . what does it have to offer? It’s got a delightful atmosphere, there are chic people, there’s a fabulous band—the great advantage is that when you feel like a bit of chic dancing in the evening, then you can . . .”

  I had thought I knew what it was that made them go quiet upon seeing me. And evidently, nothing had changed in this respect. I was still fundamentally alien to them, hence suspect, even sinister: a member of an altogether different species, whom you couldn’t trust any farther than you could throw him. Thus, I was all the more bewildered by the shameless goodwill that now appeared in their gazes. It could not be due to their having grown accustomed to foreign workers in Germany or vacations on the Costa Brava. The more probable cause was that they knew I wasn’t going to contest their claim to anything. Not even to a share of his grave.

  •

  Truly, I have never been concerned with such possessions, nor do I care about them today. I don’t even know the location of my mother’s grave. (Presumably, she was fished out of the pond in Bessarabia and then buried somewhere; Uncle Ferdinand had been too tactful to touch on it, and I too cowardly to ask). Nor would I lift a finger to find out whether any sort of paternal legacy has devolved upon me, which apparently is meant to be the origin of humanity (assuming I could determine which of my mother’s countless lovers can claim the questionable honor of having sired me). My cousin Wolfgang, as I have said, lies in Vienna’s Central Graveyard, to which nothing draws me; and I was not informed whether the corpses were salvaged from the basement air-raid shelter of the building in Vienna’s Twelfth District where, in the summer of 1944, a bomb forever ripped my rather worn tie to my foster parents. And so it has remained.

  Thus, facing the hill of flowers into which my brother Schwab had been transformed, I could not understand why his further transformation into the contents of an urn, and eventually into humus under a grave slab, should bind me to the Hamburg soil, which had not succeeded in binding me to itself, even though I had spent years wearing out my shoes upon it—usually during long walks when I brooded about the enigmatic fate that had cast me ashore here in the first place.

  True, my dead friend, while alive, had tried everything in his efforts to convince me it had happened so that I could tell stories, to narrate—but what? A glance at the faces of the philistines here informed me that it was bound to lead to a misunderstanding—whatever it was.

  For they would again be the victors and somehow turn it into grist for their mills, whether I told them edifying tales as Nagel did or tried to play the little insect nagging at their consciences, even though they kept swarms of them for their own titillation:

  —the a capella choir of Jeremiahs, to whom everyday German life assigns the cultural business as a sort of natural preserve so that German Cassandra cries will not be missing from the swan song of the West: in the tenor of the eternal (and, alas, ubiquitously betrayed) values of beauty, goodness, and truth; in the baritone of old, traditional humanitarian principles (that not even a dog observes); in the bass of generally (albeit rhetorically) accepted categorical imperatives—

  and yet so very dramatic in the gesture of the decent man who has taken the globe upon his shoulders and now summons the whole world to help bear responsibility when it rolls off; so intimately moved by himself in the role of powerless knight whom no one heeds, so that no eye in the publi
c refrains from widening in fear and pity, and no lips refrain from agreeing: “How true! What a daring and global vision! How terribly ineluctable!”—

  while, in the meantime, everyone is making a leisurely effort to get his share of the pie baking in the fire of the Apocalypse, and all people have tranquilly resigned themselves to the fact that everyone’s actions are different from what he says and certainly different from what he thinks—

  and thus the call of the angel to the Last Judgment is merely one more noise in the tremendous din of universal chatter, a tiny fiber in the overwhelming thread of sound that is caught by a few powerful, opinion-shaping institutions and twisted into the dog leash of the zeitgeist, which irresistibly draws us toward our collective fate—

  These people could do just fine without me. They had more than enough cleaning woman fairy tale tellers and culture-pessimistic intellectuals. Their verbal gruel burst through the windows of bookstores and came to them every evening on the more uplifting radio and television programs; it fed the cultural sections in the weekend editions of their family papers (illustrated and unillustrated); it occupied the minds at congresses of their leading scientists and philosophers; it was the major discussion topic in their adult-education courses; it echoed through the utterances of their statesmen and began to break through even in movies (after America had courageously taken the lead, here, too)—

  and went as smoothly in one ear as it did out the other. It was part of the sound track of their reality, an “integrating component” of the background noise that the present era used in its drive for self-perfection. And had I joined the concert, then upon my demise they might have treated even me to a hill of flowers, like that man up front there, and during my lifetime they might have paid me all sorts of gratis tributes, but never this eerie goodwill, which seemed to have a smarmy familiarity at its heart. What the hell did they want from me?

  •

  In bidding solemn farewell to a man who had nagged at their consciences not in the cultural division but in self-destructive reality, the congregation of mourners had, of course, hired a shepherd of the soul, a pastor (presumably a Protestant of the Augsburg Confession).

  In order to greet the grief-stricken and take them into his care, the pastor stood facing his flock, with his back to the hill of flowers (where the deceased, always quite shy and unsociable, had finally found a refuge where no one could get to him); and the pastor, with an ardent assurance, emanated waves of solace as if to say, Do not despair, your beloved relative is really lying here. By way of demonstrating that he truly believed in the faith with which he wanted to fortify the faith of all the others, he had disguised himself as a mountebank at a medieval fair. His robe (raven-black and creased: the domino of a macabre heavenly carnival) flowed all the way down to his fashionable department-store shoes and was tied over the shoulders like a sack; over it, the buzz saw of a gigantic, chalk-white furbelow ruff decapitated him, so that he presented his head as though on a plate—virtually his own executioner. The head was anointed with the grease of the edifying word and was slightly tilted in a posture of humility. The skeleton of a Gioconda smile hovered around his mouth.

  He stood there, looking toward me—and I understood: he waited in loving Christian patience for me, the belated straggler. The assurances of solace, which his thriftily smiling mouth had excreted in small, murmuring rations of verbal gruel, had vanished without a trace into the furbelow rills of his ruff. He was now gathering a new little portion for me. His hands were concealed on his stomach, inside the folds of his sleeves, as though doing something indecent (the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing). Now, they hastily slipped out to seize my hand—

  first, slightly arched in the prayer position of Dürer’s mother’s hands, lurking as a trap to snatch the timidly offered hand like a broken-winged bird: with two simultaneous lunges, one reaching under the prey, the other quickly covering it. At the same time, he closed his eyes—presumably to roll them Jesus-wards behind his lids. And, with his fingers contracting into a meaningful suction grip over mine, his listing shepherd’s head tilted back, while his eyes reopened, offering their watery void—sea-blue—to the wafting sighs.

  It was as if he had spiritually grabbed me by the balls. I wanted to pull back my hand, but he held tight. And while his mouth over the ruff drawled at me, “You were his best friend—I know!” (how did he know? The church and the funeral parlor were obviously in cahoots, like Interpol), he pulled, or rather pushed, me to a chair standing somewhat away from the first row and directly in front of the heraldic foam of lilac. I compliantly seated myself, thankful that his Lutheranly licensed freebooter grab at my emotional world had not incorporated me, but instead had separated me from his flock—depositing me on the edge of the plate, like a fly that has dropped into the soup.

  But I was to be mistaken. While sneaking along the wall, I had pulled the gazes of the congregation along with me like rubber bands; but since little more than my shoulders and the back of my head was offered to their delectation, those gazes had gradually turned from me and were worshipfully fixed straight ahead, until the downtrodden cousin twice removed had surmounted his Pachelbel on the organ. The galvanized pipe clusters, quivering in their steep flanks, were exuding their final, rigorously structured shrieks into the paraboloid vault of the cremation temple. Then, devotional silence, astir with stifled coughs and noses blown into handkerchiefs, fanned out through the space.

  As usual, I vividly pictured what had to happen:

  To my right, there would be a whispering, like reeds swishing the secret that King Midas had donkey’s ears . . . and Witte’s giant figure would rise up out of the whispers, hand his black burgher’s hat to the aunt, and ponderously stride toward the hill of flowers in order to turn on his heels at the head of the coffin and show us the club cocarde of his countenance: the sea-blue eyes shining in the apoplectic red and surrounded by the flickering white blaze of his silvery lion’s mane. He would roll his padded shoulders as though priming himself to lift the flowery slope at his feet—but no: he merely raised his fist to his mouth and cleared his throat resoundingly into his hand, cleared the mucus-lined spaciousness of his cigar-smoker’s bronchia into the echoing vault of the cremation temple. Then he dropped his head. Remained in mute concentration. Jerked his white-blazing skull up again in order to hurl out a gaze and enclose us, all of us, and with us Hamburg—and Germany—and the vast ocean—the globe—the starry cosmos—and in it, GOD—enclose us all with a single gaze hurled out into eternity.

  Then Witte would speak. Would inform us that we were standing here at the bier of a friend. And, in accordance with his principle in all situations of life, he would be the exemplary, living proof of this fact: he would stand there, dynamic, at the flowery bier of the vanished friend as though on a conquered peak on which he had just planted the flag.

  His word was bronze. It gave eternal value to the personality of the deceased. But it also raised an admonishing finger at the human foibles that the dear departed had sloughed off with his corporeal envelope (and as whose dismal witness I sat here, to the side, on the poor sinner’s bench). In this sense, you see, this man (wide sweep of the hand across the flower hill) died vicariously for all of us: filled with the most splendid promise and endowed with all the gifts to make all the expectations about him come true, but foundering on the all-too-human: this gave his premature decease the character of a sacrificial death. Here he lay as a symbol of the fine possibilities inherent in every human being and, alas, not always reaching development because of the all-too-human, a martyr to earthly imperfection (three powerful coughs into the fist, thorax pumped up for the grand finale): here he lies, cleansed of all the slag that marred his earthly travels (involuntary glance at me) and obfuscated his rich talents, so that his road of life was not, alas, a trajectory that hit the bull’s-eye of self-realization. But this very failure lends redemptive value to his demise: he died for the average man. His fate is that of most people: much
promise and even more expectation sinfully lost to time—Ecce homo! (involuntary scraping of Herr von Rönnekamp’s feet).

  Witte lapses into silence. His head sinks upon his chest. The club cocarde fades. Now he is no longer the victor on the conquered peak. He stands by the bier of the departed like an elephant hunter, with the sportsmanly hunter’s humility before his vanquished noble prey. Then his giant figure detaches itself from the flower hill and, with a sunken head, strides past the pastoral nightshade plant (two nuns humbly bowing to one another as they pass in the cloister), returns to his seat, devoutly lifts the black hat (which the aunt, after holding it in her lap for a while, eventually placed on his chair), and once again covers the now unoccupied surface with the seat of his pants.

  And again, a whispering moves through the rows of leave-takers, like evening wind soughing in the foliage of a weeping willow. And (spurred by a poke in his ribs from Carlotta) Scherping rises most ceremoniously and turns and coils in front of his chair like a puppy getting ready to lie down and sleep; and, with a slight bow that tenses the seat of his trousers, he places his black Sunday hat on the chair as gingerly as if he were inserting a brick into a basket of eggs; and he turns toward the flower hill and stares at it with such a painfully pleasurable look, as if extracting a dagger from deep within his heart and feeling as he does so a cunning delight. And then he resolutely heads for the place where Witte was standing; and, while walking, he sends a quick, ironic snort through his nostrils, pulls his head in between his shoulders, like Rumpelstiltskin, and begins to speak. And he says: If it must be so, then he too does not wish to refrain from casting a few words into the grave of the deceased, his dear editor and difficult friend. And now he stands in front of the flower hill like a Baltic beachgoer before his prizewinning sand castle: smirking awkwardly in joyful anticipation of the free beer that the resort provides for the prizewinners.