Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  All that, however, stands in the spotlight of what is happening in the Russian Zone. There, politics is not a morally fraught concept whose retroactively disastrous effects get registered in questionnaires. On the contrary, it’s the central word of a new ethos. While on our side, the God who (based loosely on Nietzsche) no longer exists still casts a terrible shadow from his cave, in the Eastern Zone he’s dressed in new clothes and shines in his old glory. His radiance does not admit of any guilt feelings. His yoke rests lightly on shoulders used to carrying it under his old name.

  Exhilarated, we bid each other farewell. Rönne’s handshake is like a suction cup, as is his parting glance. It seems to be saying, “Haven’t you recognized who you are yet?” Like all queers, he surmises one of the brotherhood in every man, just like a masochist suspects everyone else of masochism (while hoping for a sadist). His long front teeth flash in his good-bye smile as though firmly rooted.

  • • •

  On Christa and Aristides:

  In order to remind him that as his wife, she has a claim to part of the money he supposedly rakes in bushels of working for Stoffel & Co. (in reality, he works without pay as an idea man and besides, he has pulled back almost completely to leave the field free for Nagel, its lawful occupant), she decides to buy some new clothes. She’s surprised to discover how familiar he is with questions of feminine couture, but of course has no idea that his knowledge comes from the shopping sprees on which he accompanies Gisela as an advisor. With his bad conscience, A. can only half appreciate the humor of the situation.

  Even his bad conscience is ambivalent. On the one hand, he welcomes his relationship with Gisela as a liberation from the erotic obligation that binds him to the standoffish Christa, leaving him unhappy; on the other hand, he is sorry to see what he’s destroying. He’s also stung by the fact that he has to pay Gisela for every copulation. He tells himself he’s encroaching on Christa, taking it from her already meager housekeeping account, so to speak. But then again, the idea of taking some sort of revenge is a satisfying feeling. His relationship with Gisela punishes Christa for the coldness with which she responded to his passionate courtship. With pure schadenfreude, he now sees that Christa has gotten wind of his infidelity; the fact that it’s with a girl from Whores’ Alley on the Reeperbahn is beyond anything she could imagine, not to mention that his relationship to that kind of rival could have become so intimate that he goes clothes shopping with her. All that flatters his sense of irony, but smacks unpleasantly of bourgeois complications: he cannot help calling it—with Stella and John—“the fucking problems of the bloody middle class.” In his heart of hearts he tells himself that the Hamburg milieu is beginning to rub off on him. From a nonbourgeois perspective, his marriage to Christa is a banal misunderstanding on which any emotion is wasted, while his deep-frozen but intellectually fiery relationship with Gisela is a pleasurable adventure. (Two different aesthetics. Muddied when morality puts in a word).

  Perhaps superfluous. Hard to connect it with more important questions. Interesting, of course, from a psychological point of view. Gives A’s figure more profile. But—you need to know things like that, but you don’t need to say them.

  • • •

  “The activities of the mind arise solely from adequate ideas; the passive states of the mind depend solely on inadequate ideas.”

  —SPINOZA

  NOVEMBER 1949

  Cultural event: Debut of the film star Astrid von Bürger (gloriously denazified but still deeply controversial) in A Woman Plays Foul, her first postwar role (screenplay by Nagel). Producer: Horst-Jürgen Stoffel, her spouse (production company: STELLA FILMS). Location: the Anglo-German Club on the Alster (following the screening in the Holsten Theater).

  Went there to forestall arguments about it with Scherping. Accuses me of intellectual arrogance when I stay away from such things. Nothing much different in the club since the forlorn gatherings of creative artists in pre-currency-reform days. Nevertheless, more relaxed interaction with the British occupiers. (Recent exchange between two club friends: “Hello, Heinz-Günther!”—“Hallo, Percy!” pronounced “Pörsü.” Percy was clearly a frequent name in Hamburg as well, testimony to Hanseatic relations with the Anglo-Saxons: my cousin Percy Fettkötter.) Duly noted, the rearmament of fashion: the triumphal procession of German textiles begins. Silvery bowties everywhere (symbols of “nothing to hide”). Axel Springer’s natty pseudo-English downtown Hamburg elegance in contrast to Witte’s almost Russian boorishness (his apoplectically red, Falstaffian face with the sea-blue gaze of a “gatekeeper to the world,” haloed by a lion’s mane of white hair—a bourgeois cockade). Equally eager to make visible his reclaimed urbanity (with a tinge of Winsen-on-the-Luhe, however): producer Stoffel, stuffed into a double-breasted pinstriped suit like a gangster in a hit from the Roaring Twenties. Scherping too, Hamburgishly Anglo-Saxonized (somebody’s persuaded him that you don’t have to wear gray flannel pants with a checked jacket; it’s more fashionable to wear pants of the same pattern). Once again, it’s painfully funny to see how hard he tries to downplay his status as the representative of high culture, joking about the book trade, playing the clown—you expect he’ll begin turning somersaults any minute—kidding me, “Well, what should I call you, editor-in-chief? Or maybe just chief? Chief sounds like a dog’s name: Heel, Chief! . . . That is, if you’re not already planning to become my boss! Go ahead! You think I’m illiterate anyway!” He’s looking for his daily dose of abuse and humiliation. I have to control myself to keep from throwing up.

  Surveying the physiognomies present I can’t get out of my head the image of the hostages being shot in Crete: Father and son standing together in front of the firing squad. Two gaunt, noble peasant faces, the son with eyes closed, the father looking almost peevishly straight ahead, a second before the crackle of the salvo: the complete, inward collectedness of their composure, nothing demonstrative, no heroics; just a proud coming to terms with an absurd fate—including a cosmically boundless contempt for fate’s violent henchmen . . .

  these bloated pusses by comparison: Herr Senator Meier-Müller or whatever his name is: I can’t stand his face, prefer his ass. I can recall it packed in field-gray trousers, general-staff tucks along the side seams. He staggers around, drunk. The staff is quartered in the remains of a villa. On a tattered sofa lies a little dog the grunts have picked up as a mascot, still a pup, wagging its tail in excitement and greeting everyone who comes near—and the ass approaches and plops down on top of it. The major is too drunk to notice what’s there under his bottom, whimpering, its chest crushed and legs broken . . .

  With every glass of the generously available (gastritis-inducing) expense-account champagne, increasingly severe palpitations. Professor Hertzog’s pills obviously have conflicting effects. Keeps me on a short leash in any case; if I ask for more, he blabbers about Thanatos. (As if the wish to be no longer a part of this world belonged merely to the subconscious ur-elements of the psyche and were not urged upon us by every step we take through our environment.) Didn’t even confess to him that I now and then swallow whatever I can get hold of even without his prescriptions. But perhaps not so harmless after all, in combination with his pharmaceuticals.

  By the way, on the subject of new German fashions: my kind, artists and intellectuals, still cling loyally to our old duds: baggy corduroys, anoraks, and berets. (In the days of Rinaldo Rinaldini, highwaymen too wore distinctive and easily recognized clothing.) But even the lads from the radio already betray a tendency to rebourgeoisify into manager types. Gone is their buccaneering candor. The currency miracle’s caused shockwaves. The stroke that separated today from a swashbuckling yesterday in the bombed-out landscape cuts through one’s character. The innocuousness of those who had nothing left to lose in the poorhouse generosity of the hunger years spent in cellar holes and Quonset huts belongs to another race of men. I wonder if the trip through purgatory was a process of purification? It’s a long road to travel from former
Party member to nihilistic existentialist to arch-democrat and citizen. Can’t get rid of the impression that it happened almost without any—or at least with mostly unconscious—involvement on our part, over our heads, so to speak. Collective fate. The times are pregnant with it. (I’m afraid to encounter myself in the mirror: yesterday, gaunt as a Belgrade hackney nag, but with bright eyes [bright with horror!]; today, drunkard’s eyes like old oysters behind thick lenses, pillowed in the fat of the all too abrupt dietary shift of the miraculous reconstruction. Specifically German in bearing and gesture: a routinized display of droning uprightness: “True blue and always honest!” as a program for worldwide profit. By the way: the post-currency-reform spirit is dropsical: the edema of yesterday’s famine shines through; the pressure mark of a finger takes several minutes to fade.)

  In response to all that, the occupying Brits in their dysentery-yellow field blouses maintain a stiff upper lip. No longer the masters in their former officers’ club, they mingle in uneasy nonchalance with the horde of German cultural managers busy devouring rolls while balancing champagne glasses as if they had no memory of the raggedy cigarette-butt collectors of yesterday (“Exskyooze me Zurr, I vant to ax you for a purrmeet to go to Buxtehude to fetch my zister. She iss a ferry pritti gorl”). Done and gone their colonial grandeur, when the Ice Age Germans were the coolies of the British Labor-Sahibs. A people’s prestige is measured by the hardness of their currency.

  For a while I stand by a group talking about the recent past and what a disgrace it was that many of our countrymen acted after the defeat and under the Allied occupation: denunciations, self-abasement before the victors, begging for cigarettes and chocolate, turning tricks for nylons, and so on. An occupying officer turned cultural advisor stands there listening. He is young and the very model of an Englishman: clay-colored field blouse; tangerine-colored hair; banana-colored mustache; innocent, steel-blue eyes framed by egg-yolk-yellow lashes; rabbit teeth; and a long, pointed chin like King Thrushbeard. Someone turns to him.

  “Tell me, John, don’t you think it was a disgrace? If we’d invaded England, for example—you’ve got to admit, we almost did, with that mess in Dunkirk—so, if we’d occupied your island, could you imagine anything like what happened with us here in Germany?”

  King Thrushbeard blushes and bats his yolk-yellow lashes. His chin gets even longer and sharper. After overcoming his obviously genetic Anglo-Saxon bashfulness, he comes out with, “I can imagine that in that case, just about everything you’ve mentioned could happen to us just as it did to you—except for one thing: this conversation.”

  No one seems visibly affected by the screening of the embarrassingly bad cinematic work of art. Except for Nagel, of course, who’s seething about how the brain trust of director, star, and her producer husband as well as the distributor and the investment bank’s film consultant made a hash of his original screenplay. He claims he can’t even recognize his own work. But even Nagel has no ear for the disgrace of this concoction’s warped attempt to overcome the past, especially since the only thing it’s meant to overcome is the exceedingly banal past career of the former Nazi film star and present leading lady, Astrid von Bürger. Good old Nagel is too much in love to see how her biography is glossed over in the cinematic legend he’s been force-fed: her rise—amid the death throes of Universum Film Inc.—from an athletic starlet to the popular image of young German womanhood, thanks to the patronage of the Reich Propaganda Minister Dr. Josef Goebbels, while shielded from that mighty man’s more intimate attentions by a feigned friendship—at first only a hypocritical simulation but soon becoming a real bond—with his wife, Frau Goebbels, whom she, Astrid (in the film she’s called Helge), does not betray even in the critical hours before the suicide of the entire family, and for that is retrospectively accused of collaboration in the crimes of the Third Reich.

  (If only it had been like that! But what irony in the double entendre of the title “A Woman Plays Foul”! Irony masking as profundity. Nagel is genuinely proud of it. I’m having trouble persuading him not to make a novel out of the story. Moreover, some very unpleasant arguments about it with Scherping, who’s all fired up about the project and willing to underwrite it if only to contradict me.)

  Insufferable remarks by Stoffel, producer and husband of the leading lady (“. . . I’m especially proud of you, my dear Astrid, making such an important contribution to correcting the image of collective guilt . . .”). Abashed faces on all sides.

  By the way, Nagel brought a friend along who supposedly lives with him in Witte’s bomb-damaged villa on the Elbchaussee. An exotic apparition (here?). Pleasant, but with something faintly disreputable about him. Elegant clothes that don’t seem to belong to him. Fashionably well worn and out of date. Out of the ordinary, at any rate. He’s one of those people whose features you forget sooner than how they affected you. In retrospect, he escapes precise description although leaving a strong impression. Only a sketchy physical description is possible: strongly built, pleasant outward appearance without distinguishing features—perhaps except for very bright, intense eyes; melodious voice; cultivated manner of speaking with unmistakable Austrian overtones, but speaks a vaguely alien German, as if it’s a perfectly learned language but not his mother tongue. Said to be from Romania. I noticed him as I was standing at the window gazing out at the foggy Outer Alster. The clubhouse, originally requisitioned for the exclusive use of officers of the British occupation and now serving the cause of German-English rapprochement, stands almost exactly opposite Witte’s house on the opposite shore. (Witte’s residence in town; his bomb-damaged villa on the Elbchaussee was left standing for the time being as the half-ruined and barely habitable domicile for Nagel and his friend.) Interpolated correction: Nagel lives in the garden house. Only the friend and his wife are in the villa.

  At any rate, you couldn’t see the far shore of the Alster at all. It had been swallowed by a thick, yellow fog. The world lay under that misty blanket and even the surface of the water could only be guessed at. Soundless and weightless, two ducks glided by through the gray pea soup: a Zen image. Abruptly walking over to me without having exchanged a word or even being introduced, the stranger said, “Beautiful, isn’t it? A Japanese screen, the gold a bit impasto. German roux. What might lie behind it? In the war they’re said to have built dummy buildings out into the water as camouflage to fool the approaching bombers. I always imagined they could have been pagodas or Attic temples. Or maybe Indian teepees or Eskimo igloos. Why not? If you’re going to do it, do it right. Nothing gets in the way of art, after all. Don’t you agree?” For a moment I was captivated by the vision: an artificial city installed in the real one, starkly picked out of the darkness by the light of slowly falling rocket flares. As if he sees the same thing, he continues. “Hamburg is still back there, isn’t it? The Gateway to the World?” A surprise question I prove not equal to answering, and remain silent. Must have seemed fairly dull (and drunk). While he continues to look out into the fog, I awkwardly declare myself allergic to anything that reminds me of the war. I can’t escape the awareness that there was no point to that global conflagration. The constant thought that we were standing on fields of corpses and reconstructing exactly what led to them in the first place . . .

  He gives me an ironic look out of the corner of his eye, nods briefly and, it seems to me, with astonishing cordiality, turns away, and leaves.

  Almost at once, Scherping accosts me. “Did you talk to him?” Excitedly: “I think he’s the author of the script I found at our friend Gisela’s place” (convulsive bleat of laughter) “and left there by accident. He seems to be for Nagel what Merck was for Goethe.” (Interrupts himself and gazes up at me like a jackal)—“Okay okay, I know what you’re going to say. I shouldn’t go around parading my solid partial education, but if you would please drink a little less and look out a little more for the interests of the publisher, you’d go after that man. An interesting apparition. How else would his manuscript have ended up wit
h Gisela? Fellow brothel patron.” Another bleat of laughter.

  I turn around and walk out into the fog.

  Sentimental idea: Le grand Meaulnes. Powerful urge to throw up.

  • • •

  For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned.

  Since S. has been coming to the house, a certain interest in me seems to have reawakened in Christa. “As if you had discovered,” I say to her, “that an old hand-painted chamber pot can also serve as a vase for flowers.” She doesn’t answer. Her haughty little mouth remains disdainfully shut. She finds my comment tasteless. Correctly, I have to admit. A vulgarity from my school years in Vienna that I haven’t been able to shake off. A cynicism born of opposition to the milieu of Uncle Helmuth, Aunt Hertha, Cousin Wolfgang, and Aunt Selma. An occasional fart to clear the air.

  I’ll leave aside the question of whether such means are effective in a marital situation. In any event, they’re part of the chemical composition of the prevailing miasmic moods. You grasp at anything that could enrich the air you breathe, even the pinch of resentment that prevents a tepid resignation from precipitating out of sheer habit. Give us this day our daily drop of gall! It gives us a taste of how deeply the slightest error in the choice of spouse cuts into one’s life. Especially ours!