Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  •

  I’ve gotten used to it by now, but back then, script conferences with Stoffel, Spouse & Associates weighed on my soul like millstones. They took place in a Hanseatic villa on Harvestehuderweg, which had been saved by Providence from major bombing damage in order to provide Stoffel’s reconstructive will with the appropriate setting. The furniture was old German. The filmmakers, who had been shit out into their Aesir sofas in front of the Valhalla fireplace, turd columns of thick cigars rising from their pursed bud-like mouths, seemed to have been created to fit in with the style. Such scenes aroused the most dreadful notions in my head. This potpourri of a living room—an omnium gatherum of clinker bricks, cast iron, and stained glass—came off as a cabaret parody of a Wagnerian opera, and the gray manager-mugs on the conference-exhausted giants, the fresh-faced heads and uniforms of the rosily well-fed culture-creator occupation officers mixed in among them, fit in nicely in a Götterdämmerung kind of way; and Astrid von Bürger was beautifully typecast in the domestic garment of an Ufa star, a sort of Nibelung dressing gown in royal blue with scarlet lining, which she forgot to button from the mons veneris down, so that each of her calculatedly negligent movements revealed kilograms of German female ham hock. The memory is lodged traumatically in my soul: her arms are flung far apart on the ox-leather bulges of the sofa upholstery; her torso is bent back, her twin howitzer-shell breasts practically bursting through the (here decently buttoned) silk; and over them hovers her—alas—really beautiful Brunhilde head (the head that seduced Nagel at the front, his dream of the “best friend’s sister”). A powerful flood of short dark hair, virtually a banner of Berlin freshness, dangles over her eyebrows, and her big-cat eyes are observing the effect of her erotic presence: a drumbeat into the diaphragm of every man in the room. At the center of the room, her husband, Stoffel, is roaring, with a snifter (black-market cognac) in his left hand and a (black-market) Havana in his right. Primordial Piglet Stoffel, his own totem pole, as it were: six feet six inches of bombastic tremendous stupidity whetted by a certain shrewdness; a double hundredweight of crooked cunning combined with the upright joviality of a suburban bon vivant; a gigantic man-child, still emanating the sweet-and-sour odor of mother’s milk; blond, fat, rosy, moody, ridiculous, and dangerous: the horrifying epitome of German entrepreneurial vitality bulldozing everything in its path . . .

  There he stands, on solid seafarer legs, inspired by the model of the Hanseatic cog on the windowsill, bucking the weather, towering in the pea soup of cigar smoke and Hennessy vapors, swaying in the waves of emotional logorrhea that have been pouring out of him for hours; with arm stumps and flapping elbows, snifter and cigar in his sausage fingers, he beats time to his rhetoric, and, with hypnotic gazes from his small, light-colored pig eyes and a spooky play of his features, he tries to make his spouse, Astrid (who pretends not to notice), aware that the skirt of her slit Blessed Virgin frock has slipped off her lap so that over the silver-slimy snail paths of her nylon stockings (from the American PX) two succulent, quartz-lamp-browned thighs are visible all the way up to the groin . . .

  It is heartrending to see how greatly this irritates him, even though he wouldn’t dare say a word about it or walk over and shift a corner of the old-fashioned dressing gown to cover the splendidly conjugal boundaries that his spouse so hospitably presents. His face twitches like the face of a sleeping man when the legs of a fly stroll across it, his eyes blink, his breathing is audibly heavy, his intonation more and more menacing: “. . . and so, gentlemen, and dear Astrid, once again, I can sum up the results of this conference as quite positive in the following terms: for me personally, the project seems to have made great strides thanks to the night’s discussion and especially thanks to the objections—approved by all of us—the objections raised by our friend from the bank, Herr Jansen. Certain details in the treatment aroused in each of us—and I am expressing myself with some amount of restraint—an impression of superfluous, highfalutin intellectuality. But now, thank goodness, all those aspects have been omitted, and the author will be so kind as to replace them with new and—hopefully!—better things. However, beyond that, we are all—and I believe I am speaking on behalf of everyone here—we are all as convinced as ever about the project—one hundred percent. And if this isn’t a film that can bring us back to the peak of the good, old—I mean: the pre-Nazi Ufa—yes indeed, dear Astrid, we all know and appreciate your contributions, but you can’t possibly claim that the German cinema during your Doktor Goebbels’s days could be compared to what it used to be—huh? Well, then! If we can work our way back up to the top with this project—incidentally, I think you’ve lost a few buttons, darling—What? No, it doesn’t bother me, I’m only pointing it out for the sake of order—anyway, as I was saying: if postwar German cinema doesn’t show a desire to regain its supreme position, then my name’s not Stoffel, and to you, my friend”—meaning me—“I will never speak another word!”

  •

  When my experiences ran along those lines, when they made me realize the net I was caught in and that I was getting ever more irredeemably tangled in it because I was chasing the chimera of money, which in the movie business is tossed out left and right—inveigling the needy into leaping at it the way fools leap at confetti during the Mardi Gras in Nice—

  when I found myself before the mountain of shit that I had to chomp through in order to be allowed brief sojourns in never-neverland, where I was quickly permitted to play the rich daddy for my little boy and bring Christa some pathetic bit of black-market luxury, which she didn’t even want; when I perhaps achieved, temporarily, an even more pathetic bit of respectability, which Christa truly and very sorely missed in her marriage to me: a threshold swept clean of embarrassing creditors and scandalous rumors, a threshold her Junker relatives could cross, willingly and honorably—

  when I was walking home from Pöseldorf, the site of the clinker-brick Valhalla that the occupation authorities had requisitioned for Stoffel, Spouse & Associates, and when I headed toward the Elbchaussee, where my darling little boy was waiting for me, as was Christa with her elbow over her mean little mouth in Witte’s halved Swiss villa, and when I had brooded enough about what it was that always kept bringing me to strange worlds and alien people and dream-like and traumatic experiences, I would then turn off on the Reeperbahn, right behind Davidswache, make a left on Herbertstrasse, and seek refuge with Gisela in the whorehouse, which had migrated from Gänsemarkt to the more lucrative zone.

  •

  The day was usually dawning, even though most of the lights were still burning on the empty Reeperbahn: the stars of the streetlamps piercing the stone sky like needles; and the bulbs in the grottoes of pinball arcades giving off a gaudy, theatrical glimmer; and the garlands of lamps hanging over the war-damaged façades of the dance halls; and, across the street, a wretched kerosene lamp smoldering sootily on the counter of a sausage stand, where a couple of bleary-eyed loafers and gadabouts were hanging around. In the empty vastness beyond this cheaply scrubbed-up poverty, there was something of the forlornness of Bessarabian cities, left all to themselves in the tension between a yearning for the twilight west and the agonizing promise from the east. And I entered the red-light alley as if I were coming home.

  I don’t know for sure now whether this took place in the midst of the Ice Age or after the grand, world-changing fraud of the currency cut—the criminal conjuring trick in which Stoffel, Spouse & Associates took part as fascinating shamans. It probably occurred on the threshold between the two; the crèche period, at any rate, was past, and one of the few clean places in the world was the brothel.

  At some point, I left a few pages there, the draft to a screenplay presumably, it couldn’t have been anything else back then. Scherping, who was a regular customer of Gisela’s, found these pages, read them, and took them along—ever the publisher. He showed them to Carlotta, who had meanwhile left Witte and had become Scherping’s secretary and dame de compagnie. And Carlotta showed them to Sch
wab, with whom she was still living in conjugal union then, and said she thought she knew who the author was—we were seeing each other from time to time.

  Thus it was that Schwab, an editor at Scherping Publishers, set out to find me and talk me into writing books. After all, it was reconstruction time, and literature too had to be created ex nihilo.

  •

  I also don’t know whether to interpret it as symbolic that my road to writing began in the whorehouse. But I can see Schwab when we met for the first time. He was taut and lanky, like all of us at that time; the scant wartime and postwar diet suited us. His hair was cropped short, and his thick glasses made him seem as if he were sorry he hadn’t died at Langemarck. He did actually appear to interpret the origin of our acquaintanceship as symbolic. He handed me the pages Scherping had found in the whorehouse and said that he, Schwab, had read them with the greatest pleasure. He then made it clear to me with some embarrassment that he knew where Scherping had gotten hold of them, and added with a heart-winning smile, “I envy you your right of domicile there.” My brother Schwab.

  I knew why the burghers had piled up such a lovely flower hill for him here. They were tied to him in the same way they were tied to me. Their act of taking possession of him as one of their own and the dreadful benevolence that crept into their eyes whenever they looked at me were one and the same. They saw us as failures—and that was why they identified with us. We were all failures from the start.

  •

  I could now look up and peer into their eyes and see myself in their eyes as a lotus-eater among lotus-eaters. We had all forgotten where we came from and where we were going. We were all whirling in the whirlwind of our delusion, our epoch’s delusion, floating, sailing, reeling, plunging, and soaring up again on the pinions of our fictions and illusions, whirling chaotically in an unreal carnival of realities, while around us the squadrons of horlà fortresses grew into the sky and the all-covering cement would soon wipe out our very last traces. And with us, our finest dream visions would come to an end: the gardens and the cities, the Eden of regulated nature and Babylon within it, and the New Jerusalem to be built, the city of mankind, ANTHROPOLIS.

  “Peace be with us, Brother Schwab,” I said to the flower hill at my feet, “once again you’ve imparted a valuable lesson to me with your generous reconciliatory gesture under your white flowery splendor: we’ve got thousands of reasons, but no right and no occasion anymore to despise the burghers here, because all of us have died—you may be a little more dead than we are, here in your blossoming grove; but these are differences of degree; in essence, it’s the same: we are all of us dead. We—you and I and our true blood relatives, our contemporaries in the highway rest stops—we can now make peace with one another. Granted, they muddled up our lives with their shaman guiles, these burghers, these bastards of the bloody fucking middle classes, they screwed up our crèche period in Nagel’s garden house with their currency cuts, and in the insanity of their fictions they destroyed beautiful Babylon and all the even more beautiful plans for the New Jerusalem. But in all fairness, we have to admit that we, and those like us, eagerly beat our drums in accompaniment. The drumbeat was mostly confusing, and that only helped them. Yet it was never clear whether we weren’t just beating their rhythm, and indeed beating it most effectively whenever we thought we were drumming our sheer hatred of them out of ourselves.

  “We can hedge all we like, but we are their brethren in this perishing world, and the more violently we rebel against them, the more firmly we follow the logic of our being and our decline. We follow this logic in any case, whether as revolutionaries or as conformists. For just as there is no escape from the cage of our SELF, so too there is no escape from the pens and prisons of our diverse Middle Kingdoms. No matter how isolated we may feel inside them, whether in the defiant pride of the individualist or in the misery of the lonesome man among too many, as a stigmatized reformer or as a cynical exploiter of the system—we merely express the prevailing trends and moods, we are merely witnesses to the state of affairs, symptoms, scale points on the fever curve, points on the life stages of our world within the world. As redeemers or wanton strivers, as geniuses or run-of-the-mill morons, we are tiny particles of some collective whole whose will we carry out—thereby fulfilling its destiny. None of our gestures can be dissociated from these states and currents, which furrow us like a wheat field in the wind—in the wind of the zeitgeist, which, in any Middle Kingdom, sets its own time.

  “We should never have forgotten these things—we who sought our salvation in writing. We would have become more tolerant, at least more reticent. We would even have found it, our salvation, if we had realized that this very search for salvation in the art of writing (or any other art) is a symptom of the times of our world within the world and not an individual destiny. It would have opened our eyes to the act of dragging the past into presence that we were committing by deluding ourselves into thinking we were something special—or even: especially alive: Artists, creative people—according to Dr. Sigmund Freud nothing more than neurotics, who are capable of healing their own neuroses—magari! Nagel for the Nobel Peace Prize! . . . We are quite simply the children of an artistic zeitgeist and not even its firstborn. We are chaff in the wind of time like everyone else in the world around us.

  “We are about to wake up when we dream that we’re dreaming—isn’t that so? That was the utterance that made us brothers—do you remember? But did we actually awaken? Instead of resorting to anything (even the destruction of our artistic devices) to prolong our ever-frailer, ever-more-transparent trance, to keep dancing the shaman’s dance of artists, we late-born senile Young Writers, we sorcerer’s apprentices of the anthracite-gray magic of the Word should have realized what we were and what we were doing.

  “The way we feel the wind of the zeitgeist when it barely comes up as a breeze, and the arms of our mills move with it instantly, rather than waiting till the storm shakes the trees and makes the fields bow down to the earth—how proud we were of this ability of ours! How we fancied knowing, before others knew, that the time was past when one could speak about the individual and his plights in the collective of others; or that one feels as stir-crazy in the solitary confinement of any Middle Kingdom as in the terrifying capsule of the SELF; and that the knock signals sent from one to the other merely knock them apart all the more thoroughly, these individual worlds within the world; that here too the cells begin to divide and to proliferate, and the entangled circles of the individual worlds, Middle Kingdoms, and Fatherlands fall apart into monads—so that one could no longer speak about man in general, but only of the collective and the completely isolated, unconnected SELF . . . What bitter dignity haven’t we derived for ourselves from this knowledge—but have we grasped the consequences? No! The intellectual in society—or even: The artist and his subject—aren’t these ridiculously antiquated topics? . . . The sorrows of young Werther when he reached for a quill instead of a pistol—for instance, his despair about the things that tried to express themselves out of him and the things that he succeeded in expressing

  as if the gods wanted to make us realize that it is not up to us to say what ought to be said, but rather that it was up to their arbitrary will to determine the time for such utterance, as if the gods wanted to force us to realize that this arbitrary will is divine in its enormous wastefulness—

  for even the stupidest man, saying something that no one heeds, will sooner or later utter a basic truth, for which a Thales would envy him; something occurs at some point to even the dullest head (and then drops out again), something capable of expanding the spiritual and intellectual horizon of mankind by a good big step; in beer garden conversations, one may hear an insight that, if uttered before attentive listeners, might stamp its utterer as a genius; and in his dreams, every child surpasses Homer and Dante—

  while the poor fools who feel destined to speak must earn every word in harrowings of hell until they finally reach the humble awareness that
it is a matter of luck whether a crumb falls to them too from the steadily wasted and squandered opulence—

  •

  “Sure, we knew all of this. But we kept on living as if we didn’t know it. After all, we had a promise to fulfill. HE WHO HATH, TO HIM SHALL BE GIVEN . . . A gift means having substance, so they say morality gives expression to this substance; talent means finding this expression in an interesting way, with the insight that the word spoken for communication separates more than it connects, that little else is possible but the flight into absurdity, into humor, satire, parody. Didn’t we act as if we didn’t know this, even though we gave ourselves to know with meaningful augur’s gazes that we knew all too well? . . . above all: that we aren’t ironicists and parodists by nature but rather stolid souls—but called by the zeitgeist to transform our sadness into mockery—of that which we secretly held to be our true calling: to become great writers: to speak beautifully of the world in which we live. Let’s leave that up to Nagel. He does it with so much devotion that he’s forgotten to say how this world truly is. Let’s be of good cheer, brother! The truth of this world in which we live now emerges only in caricature. We can hold our heads high. We are the Eulenspiegels of our time. We finally admit to being what we had always been before, unconsciously and with the ludicrous arrogance of various kinds of grandeur: the clowns and court jesters of the middle classes. Albeit with the fool’s privilege to say what’s on our minds. Now, we believe we’re finally doing for fun the things we had once done in holy beery earnestness: celebrating funerals. We anti-burghers thus carry ourselves to the grave in the universal carnival of ‘realities.’ As the clowns of the burghers, we are burghers in the final phase of a logical development. Just as parody is the final phase of an art, so too the burgher has to become his own parody as an artist and bohemian. Indeed, if possible, as a celebrated artist and bohemian. To recognize the burgher in his apotheosis, one must see the procession of the BIG ELEPHANT BALLYHOO as pompes funèbres. Only then do the values reveal themselves. This is the only way to show how awfully futile it was, the only thing we really wanted to do: take revenge.