Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  Don’t look back, he told himself. It’s like a fairy tale: whoever looks back turns into a stone beside the path. A group of teenage boys blocked his way to the bar, would-be hipsters in what passed for fashion in Germany: blue jeans and cowboy boots, their greasy blond hair combed into Elvis ducktails. One broad back in a leather vest blocked his way. To avoid bumping into it, he loudly cleared his throat. No luck. With more irritation in his voice than intended, he said, “Pardon me!”

  That was a mistake. He realized it from the faces that turned toward him, suddenly alert as hunters. “Pardon me” was a foreign affectation no true foreigner would ever use. It placed him pretentiously outside their communality, was intended to create class distance. It wasn’t a foreigner who said something like that, it was a prodigal brother and therefore an enemy. He stood there, waiting, his heart beating. The back in the leather vest turned so minimally to let him pass that he brushed against it. He suppressed the impulse to shove it brutally out of the way. Such temptations befell him all too often. The anger that surged up and then sank back helplessly was his soul’s daily fare. It nourished his hatred.

  He stepped up to the bar. “A Coke,” he said to the bartender. He felt the need for a schnapps but it would have sounded like he was trying to be chummy. Drinking as a male bonding ritual.

  The teenagers were also waiting expectantly. They had grouped together right behind him, including the back in the leather vest, now returned to its original position. He was trapped.

  A man dressed in suspiciously elegant clothes who says “Pardon me” and sips Coca-Cola—they’ll think I’m a fag for sure.

  (Of course, they themselves are potential prey for fags. I ought to tell Rönnekamp about this place. They’re all set up for it with their Elvis coifs and tight jeans. Their being, their Dasein and Sosein, as their philosophers call it, is bursting out of their tight jeans. My Sosein hangs on the clothesline—a counting-out rhyme for adolescents.)

  “Eighty,” said the bartender, took a bottle of Coca-Cola from the refrigerator, pried off the cap, stuck a straw in the bottle, and pushed it toward him.

  —The world-famous trademark, top-of-the line product of the synthetic beverage industry, spouting hundreds of geysers from Karachi to Caracas, conjured up from the crust of our spinning planet by a wave of the hand of powerful business interests, from Dallas, Texas, to Paris, France; from Heidelberg, Iowa, to Heidelberg, Germany: Take a Break! Shove your hard hat, bus driver’s hat, or filling station cap off your forehead, lift the bottle in a toast to the milk-and-roses face of the blossoming girl at your side (warmhearted foreman’s smile exuding solidity), her spring-fresh, Pond’s-Almond-Cream face—lift the plump bottle—conveniently ridged like a hand grenade—and its starry tingles in salute to the glistening Colgate teeth of that fragrantly clean daydream of a creature in her summer blouse, straining two full, bulging handfuls of proffered pleasure toward you: eros of consumer excess—holding up for your inspection the giant economy-size, small-change, fractional economy, it’s the turnover that counts, billions from Greenland to Palm Beach, from Sauerland to Tierra del Fuego, from Flanders fields where poppies grow to Maya-Land, Watusi-Land, Singhalese-Land, and old Atlantis, webbed and crisscrossed by superhighways and airline routes, bald eagles and ibises, land of tourist brochures, a Hindu lad waves to the stewardess from his zebu’s hump, igloos, silent ivy-covered castles reflected in water-lily ponds, Rob Roy, hero of the whiskey tartans, Cesare Borgia of the Dukes of Supercortemaggiore, oil rigs boring through the megalithic tombs of the Lüneburg Heath, stockyards in the Zane Grey prairie, like swarms of ants the buffalo herds trickle away over the distant horizon into a gigantic jar of Bovril meat extract, Quaker-Oats-Land, Singer-Sewing-Machine-Land from the calving polar ice caps to the coral coasts, from the foam-flecked strands of the Spice Islands to the rocky islands where seagulls flutter and the atolls are alive with crimson fish—

  the cherry-slim, invigorating beauty arches toward you, soap-fragrant, firm to the touch, the coolly fogged consumer grenade, the geyser of synthetic sensual satisfaction, extracted from the wilderness and sterilized on a distant star, the juice of meteors . . .

  He placed a coin on the zinc bar, heard the cash register whirr, and waved away the change.

  The bartender took hold of his hand. “You gave me two marks.”

  “Did I?” he said distractedly. Now he was probably just making a ridiculous impression: the absentminded bourgeois, the mama’s boy. “I thought it was just one.” He tried to extricate his hand.

  The bartender still held it fast. “You got one twenty coming.”

  “Yes,” he said, “I made a mistake. I intended to give you a twenty-pfennig tip.”

  “But you gave me a two-mark piece. I can show it to you.”

  “No need to. I believe you. If you’d just let go of my hand, I’ll take a mark back.”

  The bartender let go of his hand. “A mark twenty. Gotta keep things straight,” he said.

  “I’m not trying to cheat you.” He was indignant about his captured hand.

  “Not the point,” said the bartender. “Gotta keep things straight.”

  He could feel the young men breathing down his neck. “Well now they’re straight again, your things,” he said, irritated against his will. “Now can I drink this stuff in peace?”

  “Yes you may,” said the bartender. “You’re allowed to drink as much as you like here. Not just this stuff, as you call it. Here you’re allowed to drink till you fall down. As long as you pay, that is.”

  “I did pay,” uncontrollable anger sharpened his voice, “didn’t I?”

  “Yes, with a two-mark piece. Didn’t I give you correct change?”

  “You did indeed. Now I’d like to be left in peace.”

  “And you will be, mister,” said the bartender. “But that doesn’t mean that anybody can tell me to keep quiet. Not in my own bar. When I say you were mistaken, it’s to your advantage.”

  “To my advantage?” This was starting to be amusing.

  “Yes, of course to your advantage!” said the bartender. “You’d’ve been throwing a mark twenty away. And when I point out your mistake, you should be grateful, mister, and not tell me to shut up in my own bar. And if you don’t like it, mister, then you know where the door is.”

  “Now kindly allow me to drink the cola I paid for in peace.”

  “I’ll allow you,” said the bartender. “But nobody’s ever told me to shush up in my own bar before, not in thirty-five years in the business.” He raised his voice to a threatening lament. “There’s been a bar right here on this spot for more than a hundred years, mister. These young folks can tell you if you don’t believe me. They’re Hamburgers born and bred, mister. This bar survived the terror and it’ll survive whatever else comes along. It was here when seafaring was still a Christian occupation.”

  He thought he detected in the bartender’s voice the compulsion to spin a yarn. In a chatty tone, he said, “Must have been nice back then. Too bad the old interior didn’t survive. Mermaids and ships in a bottle, right? Were they destroyed in the air raids?”

  “Plenty more than that was destroyed,” said the bartender. He was washing glasses. “You can still see the mermaids—right around that corner. But my wife and four little children died in your air raids.”

  “I wasn’t in any bombers,” he said, tormented by guilt.

  The bartender started drying the glasses. He did it in a peculiarly clumsy way, more like an inexperienced servant girl than an old barkeep. He screwed a corner of the dishtowel into the glass till it reached the bottom, stuffed the entire glass with the balled-up towel, held the protruding end with one hand and turned the glass with the other, and then pulled out the towel and held the glass up to the light to see if it was clean, closing one eye as though taking aim.

  “I wasn’t in any bombers. I did play at soldiering once, but thank God not in the war.”

  “Well weren’t you lucky,” said the bartender. “
People like us didn’t have it so good.”

  Now the silence of all those around him was thick enough to cut with a knife. He thought he could sense their contempt. “You didn’t have to start in about it,” he heard himself say, “about the war, I mean.” He listened intently for the silence to become malevolent. Ready to fight. It would have been a relief to throw a few punches. But that was just what they were waiting for.

  Should I go over and put a few coins in the jukebox? he thought. Play just any old record—probably nothing but wild rock ’n’ roll in there. Set off a racket to accompany this unreal reality; unleash the hullabaloo they use nowadays to smother thoughts of the past; transport the senses into blazing intoxication to match the psychedelic, spectral light of this new world . . .

  Strike up the jukebox and the magic begins! Shove a coin in the stamped-tin slot, give it a push with the ball of your thumb, rough and brutal, and the spirit of the times begins to twang: droning, clanking, blaring, eardrum-bursting, the hand of the times unleashes the din, the hand of a young wildcatter, gas station attendant, or trucker, a boy’s hand but already a workman’s paw, a few grips learned by repetition is all it knows: the grab, the yank, the shove, the twist, the push, ignorant of relaxed, idle fingers, eloquent gestures that remodel a word, make a thought spatial, suggest a caress. The hand of the times, no longer an instrument to initiate sublime events, no longer a hand that paints like Piero della Francesca, not a hand that sets tones singing like the hands of the boy Mozart, not a hand that writes like the poet Eichendorff. A mercenary’s hand, the thumb horny from counting its wages, sliding the bills again and again across an index finger bent from pulling a trigger, smooth from familiarity with the utensils of murder: money-grubbing hand—let the coins begin to jingle, shove them into the stamped-tin slot; no swindle possible: the machine is finely adjusted to the size and weight of each coin, it registers the slightest deviation, the smallest irregularity, the most trivial-seeming difference and immediately jams, your hand has to push it in with horny fingers, roughly, so the whole cabinet shakes, the heavy, bulky cabinet of iron, tin, and plastic, all sorts of serrated, fluted, stamped, shopworn, dented tin, all sorts of plastic bulges and groins, plastic with tin inlays, tin with plastic inlays, a mongrel of cowboy saddle and squeezebox, oil sheik’s Rolls and vaquero’s guitar, soda fountain and Mexican revolver, the tropical night lurking within, full of jungle screams, gives it a good whack, it’s a bit sleepy, the old gorilla, doesn’t react in a split second like it used to, Tarzan has it easy, his thumb gives a shove, the coin clatters into the metallic entrails, a soft, elastic click indicates it has come to rest in a kind of trigger guard, the final instructions have yet to be given before the spinning soup pot rises into the ionosphere, the triple rows of plastic-button teeth in its shark’s mouth transmit them telegraphically, the selection-button molars pass them on to the sharp incisors of tin-rimmed cards in the title catalogue, which convey them to the vertical stacks of baleen discs—the three stages of ignition—then the horny thumb gives another push, pushes from the shoulder with a brief twist of the upper body taken up by the hips, a dry shove of the bent arm, a thrust into King Kong’s heart, the bulletproof armor plates of the prehistoric monster clank in alarm, the iron entrails of the enemy-occupied space station are jostled together until at last the release is accomplished amid flickering electric discharges: apotheoses of flaming light, blazing spectra coil in slowly rising and falling spirals, aureoles fan out and disperse, geysers of synthetic visual stimuli join the billowing wreathes of light which curl up like incense smoke and undulate down like a desert god’s pillars of fire into arcaded arches, erecting cupolas, oil-sheik Alhambras melted down into Sabena-borealis, grand vomitatio of ice-cream colors, tapping a super-rolling mill of sound: like a burst of fire the aural fare shoots out of the triple-toothed baleen whale’s gorge, Jonah the American, pours out in the primitive form of a musical motif, gets caught under the pile-driving beat and is squashed, hacked, steamrolled flatter and flatter into cheaper and cheaper clattering tin, grooved, serrated, stamped, processed to be consumed by trash dumps from which the lime slurry of neon tubes flows into the starry sky on high, the lymph of suburban mange: the mournful wailing of suburbia that has devoured the city and all cities.

  He turned to face the teens standing silently with beer glasses in their hands. They didn’t seem to be waiting for anything, were without thought or action, completely given over to the trickle of time, and he wondered in what sense they belonged to reality, the reality of reconstruction, of the unleashed restoration of misunderstood facts, the abstract reality of resurrected cities and the ruthless rhythm with which they sprouted from the mounds of rubble.

  Nothing is resurrected. Nothing but the chinking of the cash registers, the banging on the bars of the cage you inhabit, the prisoner of money. You can’t take a single step without money running through your hand, every move you make is immediately confirmed by the clatter of the register that lends it a definitive air, checks it off, establishes the causal short circuit that every action must be immediately followed by a payment: you pay and get paid—even for murder—that’s how every act is transacted, even the most inhuman acts, with every activity thus completed, the compelling certainty grows and finally incorporates even the initial impulse to act, the motivating need or desire, into the causal circle of being paid and having to pay—the desire inspired by the cherry-cheeked daydream of a creature with the twin faucets and their sterile promise of pleasure: that great household teat is only there to fool you, lure you into the fallacy that the more you consume, the cheaper it is—the certainty that you must pay is not thereby cancelled: on the contrary, its rhythm is accelerated, more and more harrying and harried. Your scream into the starry sky merges with organs, bells, vaquero-guitars, revolver shots, factory whistles, lonely locomotive shrieks, packs of moonstruck saxophones, kettledrums and trumpets, Jericho trumpets that bring the walls of cities tumbling down, you gasp and sob, your voice quavers and shakes, gurgles and cracks, buffeted back and forth in ecstatic convulsions, you’re a world-war trembler swatting at invisible flies, foaming at the mouth, sweat dripping from your Mexican tresses in the merciless beat, your mangy homesickness for some unseen land of suckle and reassurance, for cities as many-towered as Monsalvat, for all the cities you’ve known and lost, all you’ve not known and lost, the blues of my life, my lost, squandered, misplaced fatherlands on the mangy crust of this planet hurtling through space: no confluence or interweaving of events is permitted unless it’s been chopped up and riveted back together by the bang of a rubber stamp—payment received!—no longer do actions blossom from mysterious sources and sow their seeds in the wind that carries them where it will, no longer can an idle whim connect events in a round dance, the staccato of the rattling cash registers grinds them into chaff, a sum of separate processes, each of which demands to be dealt with at once, and woe betide you should you evade paying immediate attention, woe betide you should you break free, delay or even prevent the short circuit of performance and payment, woe betide you should you withdraw your deeds and wishes from this universal law, do something without money, wish for something without money: you’ll be as culpable as if you’d interfered in the harmony of Creation: they’ll pursue you like a blasphemer against almighty God, someone whose example—God forbid—could be imitated by others, by several others, possibly by many, even by all, could lead to the planet being thrown off course, the planet that’s harried, clanking and rattling, through space by the pulse of thudding cash registers, in cosmic rock ’n’ roll, while on its crust the rabble of humanity slaughters and strangles one another, one tribe wipes out the other, one people lets another bleed to death ad maiorem dei gloriam: slaves to the great mammon—thou shalt not sin against it! Otherwise, continents would escape from the nets spun by airlines, the coral coasts would drift away from the iceberg-calving polar glaciers, Karachi and Caracas would separate from their embrace of fervent agreement that consumption must rise
whatever the cost, because cheaper consumption means increased consumption, Dallas (Texas) and Paris (France) would fly apart with explosive speed . . .

  In my far-off fatherland they came once a year, on New Year’s Day, in the entourage of the children dressed as the Wise Men who came singing door-to-door, collecting charitable donations. First came the tenants in new white stockings; they left their shoes on the doorstep. They brought venison and poultry and lovely fish, jugs of wine and honey and stacks of golden winnowing baskets. Then they went to the overseer’s to pay their rent. In the afternoon the vendors came crunching down the frosty road from town in jingling horse-drawn sleighs. They presented the overseer with bills, which he went over carefully, and it lasted into the evening. Uncle Ferdinand stood by the window and watched in frowning contempt as they departed one by one or in groups after repeatedly bowing in thanks to the overseer. When the last one had left the yard, Uncle Ferdinand washed his hands—

  I was never allowed outside with bare hands. They always made me put on chamois gloves. I was never allowed to touch money. I knew the old pennies with snipes on them in Uncle Ferdinand’s numismatic cabinet long before I could make change with the coins of the currency then in circulation—

  and all that was less than a quarter century ago and maybe it’s not even real, maybe it never happened in flesh-and-blood reality. Maybe it was only invented by some dreamer who told it to me or about me, or maybe I invented it myself. Who’d be able to confirm it, or even want to? I lost my fatherland. It’s extremely odd and quite extraordinary. And I don’t even know who my father is. I carry my mother’s name (assuming it was her real name)—