Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  They didn’t talk much on the way. It really was quite oppressive and totally dark in some stretches. Here and there, a lonely stoplight glowed. Any houses still standing had boarded-up doors and windows and looked quite forlorn. Instinctively they pressed against each other and at some point in the gloom between two pale islands of light the good Samaritan gave in to his desire for more intimate human contact and tried to kiss the girl. As I’ve said, he was a sympathetic man in his mid-thirties, as well dressed as it was possible to be in those days, and he’d shown himself to be friendly and helpful. Under other circumstances the girl would have been quite willing to let it happen. But for some unfathomable reason, she instantly panicked, the suppressed tension of the preceding hours broke through and tore a scream from her throat, a scream so wild and terrible that her escort took fright himself and ran head over heels in one direction while the girl fled in the other, screaming all the while. She ran and screamed to the point of utter exhaustion when she spied the lighted sign of a police station in the distance. The officers on duty were already pouring out in response to her screaming. One took her firmly by the arm. “Where is he? Which way did he run?” She struggled for breath. “It was nothing—I’m so frightened—He just wanted to—” “Which way did he go?” the policeman yelled at her. “Somewhere in the other direction.”—She heard the sudden roar of the motorcycles, a swarm of police raced off in the direction she was pointing. “But he just wanted to . . .” “Come with me!” said the officer still holding her by the arm. He led her into the station and in front of a mirror. Around her neck was a wire loop with a toggle . . .

  He told it with great dramatic effect and the reaction was usually what he’d hoped. But he had to be reminded that the story had been making the rounds for a decade or more. “That’s exactly why I keep telling it,” he said. “At least people from those days will recall it. Everything else has been erased, suppressed, never happened. And there’s hardly a more vivid way to bring that time back to life, the Ice Age that sucked the marrow from your bones: a mixture of anxiety, fear, and lust . . .” “Lust?” his listeners would ask. “Yes, lust. Freedom that might even become blood lust. There was nothing left to keep people in check. No commandments, no restraints, nothing. Sheer, naked survival was the only thing that mattered. People could do whatever they wanted. Everything was permitted. No wonder they never caught the rubble murderer. Even if all his victims were killed in the same way, it doesn’t necessarily follow that there had been only one. What if the girl’s escort had just decided to try out the role? Put a wire loop in his pocket to see what would happen IF. . . Can’t you imagine the delicious curiosity to see just once what would happen if you cast off all inhibitions . . .”

  • • •

  THE BACKGROUND (BESSARABIA, 1940)

  Uncle Ferdinand chats about the phenomenon of time:

  “. . . people these days are all excited about relativity, especially the relativity of time discovered by that Jew, that Einstein fellow—well, it’s something all of us have experienced—for example, you’re at some event and bored to tears, so you disappear with the wife of another guest and spend a little while with her in an adjoining room—well, for you it was a nice quarter of an hour—right?—but for her husband—right?—who can feel his horns growing the whole time, it was an eternity. . .”

  But that’s a piece of shop-boy wisdom. I’m sure it’s not what what’shis-name—Einstein—had in mind. If that was his discovery, he wouldn’t be so famous. He must have been interested in something else, something to do with mathematics, which I know nothing about. But someone just as smart could have come along sometime and realized something else, namely, the way time suddenly shifts. What I mean is the way the quality of time, an era’s sense of life shifts. All of a sudden everybody experiences time differently than they did yesterday or the day before. You can’t tell exactly why it is: historical events, like maybe wars, revolutions? They didn’t touch it off, didn’t cause it. Not at all: they’re just the products of the shift. They never could have happened without that abrupt, mysterious change. Today’s experts are utterly nonplussed by it. Even the theologians can’t think of anything to say about it, for instance, that God must be in a bad mood or that He just inhaled and then exhaled. It’s something worth studying: what makes two eras different from each other? Do they return in some guise or other? Are their fundamental principles transformed into their opposites? At any rate, you can’t ignore it. Everyone’s felt how the world can change from one day to the next. The difficulty is that you don’t notice it right away. It takes a while to realize that since such-and-such a day, everything is different . . .”

  • • •

  I was born in the forest. My mother washed me in a spring, laid me in the moss, and covered me with her hair. Her face hung over mine as I blindly slept through the night. In the morning she took her hair from my face. The sun warmed my little body. The fragrance of strawberries penetrated my skin. I was a child. I played with the doves that came to drink from the spring. When I was a boy, the kingfisher was my playmate. My limbs grew like willow boughs. Sometimes when I was tired, my mother took my head in her lap and let her hair fall over me. Then I dreamed I found my father who was missing in action. “Hey,” he would say, “who’s this then?” And he would grab my locks with his hard hand and lift me up like a puppy to take a good look at me. But I would scratch and bite until he let me go. “So that’s the kind you are,” he would laugh and try to catch me again. I would run away. I was quick and knew the forest. I would lure him away from the spring where my mother lived in a hut of ferns. Then I would go to her and say, “I found my father and now I’m going off to war with him. Let your hair hang down over me once more and let your tears fall on me.”

  I left my mother and the forest with its shy animals to follow my father to war. Soon the war laid waste the land. People told me my father was a bad man and they had hanged him. So I became a bad man like him. I burned down many houses. I watched many roofs collapse into the honeyed light of the flames that fell from the rafters like a woman’s loosened hair. Once I came to a house where there was a beautiful daughter. I took her with me and loved her. She bore me a son, I don’t know where. There is no more forest. They felled it in the war. I want my son to seek me. I want to find him and grab his dark locks to lift him up for a better look at him.

  • • •

  Preface (Draft)

  The best part of this book are the drafts I told to someone or other and immediately forgot; they are the chapters of happy invention I neglected to write, the important themes I pursued for a while and then lost the sense of, ideas and accidents I was too lazy and neglectful to note down—in short, everything not to be found in these pages.

  The man who left us these notes (without a doubt, they are for the most part autobiographical) was born in Bessarabia, which had just become part of Romania, in 1919, shortly after the First World War. Although it would perhaps be wise to take this symbolically, he spent a princely childhood in extremely feudal environments on country estates there and in the villas of his various “uncles”—a.k.a. the lovers of his happy-go-lucky mother—on the Côte d’Azur. After the untimely death of that beautiful woman, orphaned and forgotten by his mother’s benefactors (his father can only be conjectured as one of their number), he ended up with relatives in Vienna and “wilted,” as he put it with bitter sarcasm, through a dozen nightmarish years, studying in the sweltering stupor of various third-rate schools in the outlying suburbs and living in the narrow (in every sense of the word) confines of a “starched-collar bourgeoisie” degraded by war, inflation, and what might be called a smoldering Socialism, until in 1937, only a few months before the Anschluss, the Jewish wife (the “Stella” of his manuscripts) of one of the legendary patrons of his childhood, the shadowy British diplomat John, discovered him and, by taking a more than maternal interest in him brought his “existence back into bloom,” a good deed for which she would later pay with her lif
e.

  What he calls the “blossoming of his existence” will suggest to anyone more or less familiar with the psyche of writers what his destiny would be. The passages of his manuscript that refer to it sound like a catalogue of the wishful thinking of those who, according to Flaubert, “sont faits pour le dire, et non pour l’avoir.”

  The times did not favor the fulfillment of those wishes. When German troops invade on March 12, 1938, and Adolf Hitler makes an appearance in Austria, it “mows down the naive conscience of those happy beings who were able to take part in the beauty of the world.” Although the author of the story spends that summer on a lake in the Salzkammergut with his beloved, “confidently wrapped in a cocoon of togetherness that recognizes nothing but itself,” the winter of 1938–39 separates the pair. Stella manages to arrange her protégé’s return to Romania and his reunion with another patron of his childhood, “Uncle” Ferdinand. By the winter of 1940, he is a Romanian soldier stationed in Bessarabia. The “world of iron men” has begun and with it the “Ice Age” that will last until 1948.

  How he passed the war years is still an open question. He hints that he was in wartime Germany with dodgy papers that kept him out of the conflict. Stella makes an insane attempt to see him in Berlin and gets caught in the bone-crushing machinery of the Nazis. He is unable to save her and will feel guilty forever after. In the war’s final days, he witnesses the destruction of German cities and the “death of Europe.” The war ends in 1945 and in the world of rubble and the “unfortunate reconstruction” that follows, he is in Hamburg, where his story really begins.

  He never tires of telling it from all possible angles. Stella’s husband John, who always played a not completely transparent role in the thicket of British foreign policy, has the grotesque idea of calling on him to testify about Stella’s death at the Nuremburg Trials. While there, Aristides meets his future wife Christa in the cafeteria of the courthouse in Fürth. His son is born and Aristides, who is not trained in any profession and is in many respects as unworldly “as Kaspar Hauser,” “sleepwalks” into a chance to earn his living: thanks to a concatenation of circumstances, he finds work as a screenwriter for the reviving postwar German film industry. Just as in his marriage and most other personal relationships, however, the passionate need to write his book gets in the way.

  That book can contain nothing but his personal story. What that means to him is not just a record of ongoing events and experiences, but also “the exasperating telescoping of present and past, the enduring presence of all one’s experience,” in a word, “the torment of not being able to exist without history.” The result is his compulsion to recount his entire life with each new experience—and thus the obsessive idea that his life is designed to be narrated, could have no other purpose than “to be a book.” “From the days of my childhood,” he writes, “with awakening consciousness and then forever after through all the years of my life, I was engaged in producing this book by living its story.”

  Note:

  Got into an endless debate over that sentence with Scherping yesterday. He thinks it’s so obviously true for an autobiography that saying it sounds like a “gimmicky commonplace.” Since I didn’t want to get into another argument, I just laid a typescript on his desk (following Schelmie’s good advice). Scherping can pass it on to his gofers.

  In the first place, it’s not the author’s autobiography, it’s the biography of his book. Of course it’s Aristides’s story, but “story” and “history” are terms that recur in many guises and in the fullness of their semantic possibilities in A’s writing. He understands history as both a cultural fact and a chronicle, a written record or oral tradition of events that concern human beings, whether those events be collective or individual—thus as both res gestae and simple stories or anecdotes, but in addition—and this definition underlies (so to speak) all the others—truly transcendentally as “actual existence” (“I have no other reality than my history”). Not by way of deduction from ontological contemplation, but through examination of the essence of his work—writing and especially the writing of novels—he reaches the same conclusion as for example (to choose a contemporary meta-physician) Ortega y Gasset: “Man is the novelist of himself, whether it’s original or plagiarized.” And according to the rule that “for the writer, any basic insight into human existence immediately becomes part of his literary program,” he draws a practical literary conclusion.

  (It’s a waste of time trying to explain this to Scherping. What he wants is a juicy narrative that includes the liveliest possible scenes from a picaresque career. And make it as sexy as possible, please.)

  Apropos “gimmicky commonplace”: as he says that, Scherping leans his head to the side as if it was a nervous tick. He narrows his eyes behind his glasses. The plosives burst from his lips. “He’s foaming at the mouth again,” as Christa Reiterlich says. What’s his problem? Is it the publisher’s mistrust (remorsefully foaming at the mouth as though in self-incrimination, he refers to himself as a “bookseller”)? Is it the unease of a middleman toward the authors who earn him a living? The hatred of the half-educated for “intellectuals” (especially me!)? Or simply his helpless wrath that Aristides is costing him money? Whichever it is, it gives him pleasure. After our irritating argument, I unfortunately found myself adrift and stumbling into a low dive, return home veiled by benevolent amnesia.

  Postscript: a preface is probably not necessary.

  Postscript to Uncle Ferdinand’s chat about time. The way time “slips from your grasp”: experience accumulates and always remains present while “pure” time flows away unnoticed. “We pour our lifetime through a sieve. It catches not just the facts but also what moved us inwardly; and the finer the mesh of our sieve or net, the more intensely we experience ‘time.’ But we don’t feel time itself; it flows away while everything else stands still and is always there . . .” (include in the preface?)

  • • •

  HAMBURG, 1949 (?)

  “As if he had been cast away among the lotus-eaters, he seemed to have forgotten his fatherland. He knew he was a stranger. The tired ocean-wind told him so, tossed it into his face—the wind that blew, day in, day out, sweeping across bleak marshland and weed-choked rubble fields and straying into the gaps and ruins of meandering streets.”

  That’s how he had wanted it to begin.

  How long have I lived here? he asked himself. He couldn’t remember. The bloom of reconstruction after the Ice Age had erased his memory. As it thawed, fog drifted in. He saw the world through a veil. The constant trickle of tinny vehicles through streets that shortly before had still afforded distant panoramas of the rubble fields flickered before the image of the resurrected city and distracted him. Sinister things were in progress here, high-rises sprouting from the bomb craters like mushrooms. Over the fire-blackened ground, a herd of construction cranes stretched out skinny necks like skeletal dinosaurs, nest-building monsters designed by Paul Klee. Cement covered yesterday’s rubble. Mortar dust obscured the daylight and made him thirsty.

  The room he entered, down a few steps from street level, was dark and narrow, a tunnel dug into the subsiding walls of an old half-timbered building that encased the bleak new space: the rudiments of superannuated good old days, folkloristically preserved and dedicated to the dullest of all vices: sitting on a barstool to soothe the soul. Like the careworn face of a war widow, the light of an autumn day pressed against two narrow windows at sidewalk level fashioned from bottle bottoms cased in lead. Twilight reigned in the depths. Dark paneled walls and carved wooden dividers between the booths: thick clusters of grapes and putti wearing grape-leaf wreaths—bacchanalian German baroque. Pools of shadow swallowed the light his eyes had carried in from the street. He couldn’t see a thing and only sensed the presence of people in the booths, caught the scent of their rain-wet clothes below the sour smell of beer. Above the bar at the far end of the tunnel, neon tubes flickered. Red and violet stars were reflected in the zinc sink where the
glasses were washed. Like an aurora borealis cased in metal, a resplendent jukebox pushed back the darkness, shimmering in all the colors of the spectrum. Its lantern-jawed visage bared the teeth of selection buttons and farther back, the baleen-like rows of 45s.

  He pushed his way through the silence that had instantly descended at his entrance. The back of his neck prickled from imagined stares that were probably not following him at all but made him feel like an outsider, importing foreign weirdness: a samurai perhaps, in a dragon helmet and lizard armor and studded with swords; or a camel with a cage on its hump, a Turkish crescent jingling exotically; or Caesar and Cleopatra driving a yoke of leopards. He felt their glances, believed the sea-blue, blinking eyes of the coastal populace directed toward him, as if sizing up his value as driftwood. He saw it at work behind their high foreheads, beneath their unruly corn-yellow thatches, saw how the worldly wisdom of these port-city inhabitants was piecing together what to make of his strange appearance, saw himself dissected into various exotic elements and then slapped back together at clumsy angles, saw how their sensory equipment palpated those angles, seeing if they hadn’t injured or rubbed themselves raw on something like this before, if open hostility was called for, or at the very least caution, suspicion, basic disapproval . . . He saw reddish-blond wives embarrassed by their gender becoming restless, shifting in their seats, putting themselves on display. . . but no, it was just his imagination, he knew they were paying hardly any attention to him, not even as an interruption of their dribble of conversation. Their silence didn’t mean anything, it was an involuntary reflex of seaport inhabitants who were used to foreigners but had never entirely accepted them. Everyone who came in snapped their brittle sentences in two, and they only grew back together once he had passed. They didn’t need to look up to have him sense that he wasn’t one of them. They weren’t hostile, he felt, or even curious, only forewarned against foreignness. Nevertheless, the few steps to the bar were as far as in a dream, when gravity seems both suspended and multiplied a hundred times, so that lead weights on our feet hurry us toward a goal we will never reach.