Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  “I’m not going to drink this stuff,” he said, pushing the Coke bottle away. “Take it back and bring me a schnapps.”

  The bartender widened his pale blue eyes. “You want to exchange your drink?”

  “No. How much is a double kümmel?”

  “Two forty,” said the bartender, giving him a very suspicious look. “Here’s three marks. Keep the change, give me a double kümmel, and keep your mouth shut till I finish it and leave.”

  From the handful of change in his pocket he sorted out three one-mark coins, shoved them one by one with his thumb over his crooked index finger, and with three sharp snaps placed them in a row on the zinc bar. The gesture gave him spiteful pleasure. The horse trader’s ostentatious display was surely a provocation for the bartender and the teenagers and also a sneer at the miracle of reconstruction, a miracle produced entirely by money, worthless paper become hard currency overnight, hastily hardening hearts and heads—

  it was exactly how Mommy snapped down her solitaire cards on the green baize of the little card table—the contempt of the rich for small change . . .

  He sees himself sitting with John and Uncle Ferdinand, watching his mother play solitaire: three lovers, and him at seven years old by far the most ardent. It must have been at Uncle Ferdinand’s estate in Bessarabia; the lighting is as it was in those days. Nowhere did I ever see such light again. In it, the world was infinitely wide. When the sun shone, it lit the wetlands along the Pruth River with all the bright distance from the Don to the Côte d’Azur: our hunting grounds: Balkan castles and casino palaces. Courtesan country. Mommy the high-class courtesan, the marionette of a paying gentleman on each of her slender fingers . . .

  The cards bloom in neat beds on the dark green baize. Mommy took them out of a little tortoiseshell case, tiny cards with pink and powder-blue backs on which a pair of doves bill and coo in a black frame of filigree rose tendrils. On the case is an enamel showing the aces fanned out: the ace of hearts, spades, diamonds, and clubs, held in place with a brilliant. Everything Mommy owns is tasteful and luxurious, earned on her back with nonchalant grace. And I, her darling, was also earned on her back: Uncle Ferdinand could just as well be my father as John or one of our other benefactors from the Côte d’Azur, Bully Olivera or Sir Agop Garabetian. They will all repudiate me when Mommy dies—

  Unwillingly, he sees himself in Vienna, an orphan, living with relatives made shabby by inflation. Not now, not here, where hatred of these philistines is already choking him. What he needs now is propping up: he’s on the verge of losing himself here in Hamburg, in this patched-up world of rubble, busy rebuilding everything that only yesterday led to its utter ruin—

  I don’t want to think about the way I was when I wasn’t allowed to be myself. I’m not allowed to here and I wasn’t allowed to back in Vienna. I need my myth: the pipe dream of my true self: me, not the stranger, the odd one, the cause of offense, but as I was back then: snugly nestled in everyone’s goodwill, the Little Prince, luxurious little son of a whore. I worship Mommy but I don’t like the way she snaps down the cards. It doesn’t go with her elegance. It’s vulgar. It’s nothing but . . .

  she cheats: instead of drawing three cards from the pack each time, she draws them one by one. The rings on her fingers glitter, her polished nails are hard and pointy. When she casts a strategic eye over the colorful field to see where she can play a card, or if it will be discarded, she purses her red lips as if to whistle a silent song. Kissy-mouth. I read rapture in Uncle Ferdinand’s eyes. John’s face is cool. Both know Mommy’s passion for cards. She has cost them both a fortune . . .

  now Mommy has spotted a place where she can play her card. Her lips part in an incipient smile that would be cruelly triumphant if she allowed it to ripen. Her eyes flash. She presses the card onto the green baize with such enthusiasm that it bends double. Then with her thumb she snaps the lower edge over the last joint of her index finger. I can’t help thinking it’s like when someone squashes a flea with their thumbnail, a nasty sound. Where did I learn to think so? Was it when one of Uncle Ferdinand’s foresters was de-fleaing his dog? A mundane idea. Better: in his dressing room Uncle Ferdinand has a Sèvres porcelain, “Le puce.” A shepherd kneels behind a lady who looks invitingly at him over her shoulder. She’s pulled up half her crinolines to expose her naked bum, plump and rosy, on which sits a flea. A pastoral: just a game, like Mommy’s solitaire, a game that can turn dangerous at the chemin-de-fer tables in the casino, where fortunes are lost. A man can be squashed under her thumbnail. (Pulp fiction!) MONEY IS HARD. Gisela told me that, and Christa says the same thing every day—

  He snapped the third coin onto the bar and looked up. The bartender just stood there. His lips pursed as if to whistle a silent song, he added a fourth mark and said, “Eighty cents for the Coke and two marks forty for the schnapps, comes to three twenty.”

  “Exactly!” snorted the bartender. “I thought you were trying to get away with three marks.”

  “Nothing’s too much to get out of here, not even if you made me pay twice for the Coke.”

  Bewildered, the bartender started to object. “Forget it,” he said. “We can’t all do sums in our head. Keep eighty cents of this filthy money for yourself and throw out the Coke, or . . .” with the beginnings of a malicious smile he turned to the boys behind him, “. . . give it to these gentlemen here. A refreshing soft drink for youngsters.”

  None of the boys moved. He waited three breaths, then turned back to the bartender. “I’ll have a kümmel or a vodka. Or a Steinhäger, please. Or whatever you have on hand.”

  Without a word, the bartender took the brown stoneware bottle from the cabinet and poured a glass. He picked it up and tossed it back with studied nonchalance. The schnapps burned his throat.

  “Keep the eighty cents yourself,” said the bartender belligerently. “I’m not taking no tip from you.”

  But he’d already turned on his heel and waved off the threat, twiddling his fingers at his temple like he’d seen Gary Cooper do in Morocco. Where had that been? In Vienna, a fallen world ago. As an orphan, a boy not yet fully grown: a dreamy experience in the world of the philistines. Long before he’d met Stella. Long before the advent of the Ice Age in which the world of the philistines would disappear along with the world of the fortunate—only to rise again with doubly hardened hard currency.

  The unresisting hipsters manqué opened a path for him. Halfway down the tunnel he heard a voice calling a bitingly sarcastic “Byebye”. . .

  • • •

  . . . was already writing back then, laboriously, with his left hand, the damned right hand together with forearm and a good half of the upper arm having been left behind in Russia—he wrote in simmering fury at how clumsy the pen was and at the scrawly letters it scratched onto paper, the stack of writing paper I discovered in the villa under the ruins of a desk and brought out to him in his garden house. The letterhead bore the august address Hamburg, Elbchaussee in elegant cursive. It looked very cultured, genteel as a frock coat, and Nagel’s scribblings on the page below were quite touching. At first glance you would think they were the clumsy attempts of a well-brought-up grandchild to write a birthday letter to Grandpa, a prince of international finance. He wrote on that paper with grim and stubborn determination.

  Nevertheless, he still never missed one of our gatherings. Poured turnip schnapps with a generous hand and shared our homegrown tobacco. When Hertzog and the others left, we’d have a little hour of quality time, just the two of us. The joys of friendship—and only yesterday, but it wasn’t just our friendship that had vanished. In the meantime the whole world had changed.

  Of course he wouldn’t show me what he was writing, not after the offensive remarks I was guilty of, evidence of my cynical, godless attitude (“which I really wouldn’t have expected of you, dear friend!”). He kept it from me like a secret lover (I was able to buy it in a bookstore a year later). But once he had gotten his fury off his chest by talking, he fo
und his way back to our old intimate tone, his teeth shining white in a face smeared with soot from the stove. He worked with his brain instead of his hands now, and in place of his miner’s lamp, his forehead glowed with the sublimity of the successful creative process. We talked to each other again, had conversations instead of discussions, exchanges of ideas instead of debates. We forgot our utopias and turned to daily life, the adventure-filled daily life of those Ice Age years. In brotherly cooperation we pursued the day’s business (usually black-market business). Sometimes Nagel even made a little joke at Hertzog’s expense, but then he had a relapse, became deadly earnest about the nights of discussion—or rather, about their noble goal: “thinking through” a new society—

  or did I deny that this was a matter pregnant with significance and consequence?

  No, no, not at all. I only admitted that in this regard, I was totally without ideas. I was abashed in the presence of such passionately engaged people as our one-legged friend Wilhelm; I wasn’t suffering under the current conditions, after all. Given the current state of affairs, I was remarkably contented—

  and Nagel got excited again: Do you realize what you’re saying, man? The country’s bombed to smithereens, a horde of starving people are controlled by a foreign military power and barely able to keep from giving up the ghost—and you’re content? . . .

  I had to declare myself shamefully devoid of any sense of national pride. I wasn’t a German, after all, hadn’t anything invested in the lost cause, hadn’t risked my neck—an arm off here, a leg off there—no, no, the times owed me nothing . . . but that’s not what I’m talking about; it’s the future of Europe as a whole I’m worried about . . . exactly, and that’s why I was so contented: that future could only come from the total destruction of the existing order, right? In that regard, Germany was an exemplary country. . . But that’s pure nihilism! . . . Could be, I said, sure. I’m quite aware of that, but I’m simply a very radical thinker who happens to have no allegiances whatsoever, always an outsider, alas, I’ve always been a lone wolf—in short, the hunter-gatherer existence in this arctic, archetypical landscape suited me. It corresponded completely to the world of inner experience (as Hertzog would call it) that was formed by my experience of the war, and from that, from the acceptance of that, something new might emerge . . .

  (Honestly, back then I seriously thought it could be possible. I was dazzled by freedom, didn’t see what was coming. That is, I saw it but refused to see it. But even then, Nagel didn’t buy it.)

  He was pissed off: So why the hell are you even here!?

  In fact, that’s a very touchy subject, I said. I couldn’t really tell you without hurting your feelings . . . Come on, don’t beat around the bush and play Mr. Sensitive, just spit it out if you can . . . all right then: I’m looking for a spiritual experience de profundis as well—in fact, I feel like a pig in shit at our evening discussions—but I don’t find it in what Hertzog has to offer (I have no intention of becoming a cabaret comedian). But I think it’s enormously worthwhile to observe the impression he makes on our friends and where it presumably will lead—that was a significant spiritual experience, wasn’t it? . . .

  Nagel pricked up his ears: What do you mean, exactly?

  Well, what it takes to make a new society. . . For instance, the development of a catacomb congregation into a church—

  Come again?

  The metamorphosis of spiritually impoverished people, touched by God’s finger, into staunch spiritual bookkeepers—

  Nagel made a superhuman effort to control himself, but below the surface he seethed and rumbled alarmingly. The stump of his arm thrashed about involuntarily, making the empty sleeve of his dyed field shirt flutter, but he was listening—

  And that was wonderful and amazing: persuading Nagel to listen seemed like a gift, a gift from the god of friendship. It made me serious; I dispensed with the cheap thrill of teasing him and taking it out on him instead of Hertzog. I even made an honest attempt to suppress my bile against Hertzog, my bitter rejection of him for intellectual—no, for physical, for physiochemical reasons with an admixture of straightforward schoolboy envy. I loved my friend Nagel but there was something about the man who called himself so pretentiously Hertzog with tee-zee that concentrated all my hatred, my hatred of the curse inflicted on this country, this people, and of what would soon return—relentlessly step by step—and one day change the world instantly and forever.

  Sometimes I was so overcome by despair that everything within me was destroyed—literally: my will to live, my ravenous, wolf-like will to survive, the hungry, emaciated beast from the steppes that had kept me safe through the infernal madness of the Third Reich and its destruction and was determined to hang on by the skin of its teeth through the Ice Age that followed. Resigned to its fate, it sank impotently to the bottom of my being and lay there in feigned peace—

  it was a remarkably happy feeling of dissolution, of being adrift in the current of time . . .

  Why the hell was I here? No reason. I was washed up here. Uncle Helmuth would call it my karma—and he, Nagel, angrily returned to his garden house and wrote—wrote page after page of his first book with his left hand—how envious I was behind all my irony! How impatient I was to be seized too, seized somehow or other by such devotion to something, to be redeemed by a passion . . .

  (In memory, it’s all connected to the sight of the bleak, icy landscape across the frozen Elbe: a streak of crepuscular red haze in the glacial blue limns a desolate horizon. In the foreground, the dense filigree of bare lilac branches on the slope facing Övelgönne cuts a black border between the ruinous premises and a world gripped by frost. Above them the villa’s silhouette rises into a sky of iron—a neoclassical structure, half Schinkel and half Palladio—in massive Wilhelmine pretension, but the mangled left wing lends it the romantic enchantment of a ruin—a foreign world: wildly foreign and bedecked with icicles like wintry Bessarabia long ago—and in it, me, the foreigner, turned into a foreigner . . . Isn’t it weird that I should yearn to go back, that I feel homesickness when I think about it? . . .)

  • • •

  Teutonically gigantic in a dyed soldier’s greatcoat that reaches down to his feet; his hands buried in its pockets and a head like Luther’s, topped by a grizzled shock of blond hair and thrown back haughtily in the turned-up coat collar; his sensitive mouth clamped bitterly shut, he gazes dully forward at nothing through thick glasses, striding through the seagull ruckus of the girls’ jeering welcome. He carries a whiff of contempt, the good citizen with his ambiguous morality, cast iron, corrupt and rotten: the right hand should not know what the left hand is doing. Has he come to snatch the prey from one of them again? Last time, he led away a patron who’d been under treatment by Gisela for three days and nights, led him like a prisoner. In this same gnomish rigidity, hounded by curses and threats, he’d walked along beside the john who was still racked by sobs of happiness. And everybody had known their cries of protest were hypocritical. Nobody wanted anything more to do with that fuckedup guy he was leading away. He’d been fleeced to the last penny; his watch and even his gold eyeglass frames were gone; shreds of shirt hung out of his jacket sleeves because someone—probably the supposed pimp who had been hired to beat him up—had ripped out his cuff links. But who asked him to come get the guy out of here as if he needed to be rescued from something? He had come and stayed of his own free will to the end of the treatment. Gisela wouldn’t have released him any sooner even if she’d been threatened with violence; she’s a reliable girl who takes customer service seriously.

  It’s especially not the job of this former POW in professorial spectacles to meddle in this business. What’s he really want? Gisela has no customer at the moment. It’s high noon and business is slow. Out of rank boredom, the girls make catcalls as he passes. Some tap their keys angrily against the glass of the windows behind which they loll on display—not to lure him but to draw his attention: look here, we’re whores and we despise
you! Why aren’t you at the office or home eating Mommy’s hash? Or are you up for a quickie? . . .

  Maybe he came for a session of his own with Gisela? He looks like he needs it. His miserable existence is written all over his face. You can tell he drinks so he must have a reason to. This is where the girls can give you solace, a shelter for the lost. But you have to be profoundly desperate to come here in the middle of the day, driven beyond the limits of the bleak, blessedly dull escape from yourself to be found in the bottom of a bottle.

  It’s different when the lights go on in the evening all around the little gingerbread houses spared by the bombs hailing down in the fire-breathing nights of the Ice Age, as if a magic spell had protected Whores’ Alley from the fate of the respectable town that was collapsing in a fiery mass into its burst-open cellars; when those squat houses with their old-fashioned gables—still intact among the ruins that are sprouting more and more concrete cubes—stand jagged against the smoke-blue sky that soon turns inky and would swallow them up if not for the windows of the girls’ rooms, shining yellow as buttercups; when the glass boxes light up to display the half-naked girls sitting on plush sofas in tiny carpeted parlors, teasingly tricked out in black silk bodices and fire-red feather boas, thighs showing white through their net stockings; when their harem pants and plump tits in open-necked sailors’ blouses and Spanish boleros advertise the motley, wonderful, erotic as-if in the golden light that fills the narrow alley, then the hour has arrived for those who hope to press a few moments of oblivion from the last dregs of illusion, the wine of self-deception. Anyone who comes in the middle of the day has realized what constitutes redemption; he’s heading straight toward his own destruction.