Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  “Yes,” I said. “I feel as though I could move them if they were still attached.”

  “And when you think about the Virgin, can’t you also feel something of what you felt for her as a child?”

  “I’m a protestant, Ljubenka. A Lutheran. Or at least, I was. Today I’m not that either anymore.”

  A shadow passed over her face. Quietly she asked, “What about God? You did believe in God before He—as you put it—got shot down, didn’t you?”

  “Unfortunately, He was shot down. In bursts of fire that took off my arm and a couple hundred of HIS chosen people too.”

  “And Jesus Christ? Do you believe in his gospel of love?” Her hair was touchingly blond.

  “I believe in Jesus Christ as a revolutionary. The leader of a revolt of the poor. Like Gandhi.”

  “And his suffering for us all? His death on the cross?”

  “Gandhi was murdered too.”

  “You don’t believe the Savior freed us from guilt through His death?”

  “Did He? Is that what your monsignors tell you? Why don’t they teach you to see in his crucifixion the incurable bestiality inherent in all humanity—”

  “Unless you believe in God’s mercy,” she gently interjected.

  “God’s mercy? Where’ve you been living, girl? Did you forget the mass grave your parents and siblings are lying in? The backhoe they used to fill it in when you weren’t sure they were really dead?”

  I was pitiless. I wanted to hurt her because it was tearing me up. I didn’t care about the tears streaming down her cheeks. The paler her lips got, the more painfully I wanted to wound her. “God’s mercy that allows a madman to drive millions into unimaginable misery and a wretched death. Just look around you! It’s already been two years since the war ended and God stands by and watches the bellies of newborns swelling with edema. Was that the point of the sacrificial death of his only son? The crucifix as a symbol for the cynicism of the Allfather Creator . . .”

  She put her finger on my lips so slowly and gently I couldn’t push it away.

  “Don’t talk anymore. Come with me!”

  She led me to her bed. On a stool she used as a nightstand were some books; a half-burned candle was stuck into a drinking glass.

  My senseless anger melted away in the sweetness of her embrace . . . at some point it seemed like she whispered into my ear, “Believe me, God is merciful!”

  • • •

  Trivia:

  His eyebrows knitted in extreme concentration, holding his breath, and delicately probing his incisors with his tongue—he files his toenails.

  Sketch:

  An official banquet at Witte’s—not in the family circle, no nieces and grandnieces, but only his sister as ersatz lady of the house; instead, a senator for culture with his wife and a university professor (also wifed up), whom Rönnekamp—acting even more queeny than usual (one has the impression he would sizzle if you touched him)—identifies as an important art historian. A. has the audacity to remark that unless you’re a Worringer, art history as a field combines exceptional learning with the convenience of never needing to have an idea of your own. He hasn’t reckoned with the man in question being able to hear him—which he does—and A. gets a correspondingly poisonous look. For the rest of the evening he remains monosyllabic as usual—and here, it’s obviously advisable—until Christa, who always gets unexpectedly lively when she’s had some wine (Witte, encouragingly: “Drink up, my child, it’s an extraordinarily good vintage”), during a conversation about the problem of form which almost everyone is taking part in, prompts him—A.—to describe an idea he’d monologued into her patient ear at home. A., whose thoughts have in the meantime strayed far afield, at first has a hard time getting oriented. At once, the art historian stridently challenges him to come out with whatever it is he has to say on the topic of “form.” A. protests that Christa seems to be referring to something else. He’s never talked about the problem of form in art, which he knows nothing about (interjection of the professor: “Oh really? But I thought . . .”), Christa was probably thinking of what he once said in reference to the condition of German society after 1945. “And that would be?” That would be a few things about the astonishing persistence of traditional social forms, levels, and groupings even after their supposedly complete destruction.

  He’s asked to elaborate. Wasn’t it remarkable, he said, that in the Germany of today, 1950, despite all the social leveling already brought about by the First World War—to say nothing of the Second and the lean years until 1948—one finds the same stratification of classes and social prestige as around 1914, namely, an upper nobility still deeply revered despite its stratospheric distance from everyday life, an also admired but less lofty aristocracy, a compromised and disoriented middle class guiltily conscious of its status, and then the mass of all the more self-confident petits bourgeoises. (Here Christa, already fairly sloshed, interjects a mocking “My husband is especially familiar with the highest circles; that’s where he grew up,” which Witte gallantly seconds “. . . and also married into. Prost, dear lady. In vino veritas!”)

  Rönnekamp remarks suavely that however anachronistic they may be, the miraculous reconstruction of German social classes is explained by the national talent for competition—especially in exaggerated imitation.

  Lacking an ear for Rönne’s irony, the art historian demands an explanation of that too and Rönnekamp points out how rapidly the Americanization of the country is progressing, while at the same time there’s a tendency to manufacture traditions at any cost. “Nowadays when you enter a house of the nouveau riche, you’ll find a lot of family portraits on the walls, supposedly great-grandparents from the nineteenth century if possible. Regrettably, however, the Anschluss is missing: no grandparents or parents. They remain obscure.” (Witte’s sister clears her throat.)

  A. watches Christa and feels an urge to pay her back for her snide comment. “If my esteemed spouse had the occasional goodness to listen closely, what I was trying to say in my monologue about the restoration of social structures might not have sounded so new to her. Its very specific character, I mean—”

  He’s interrupted by the combative art historian. “You aren’t seriously claiming we have a class system in the present Federal Republic?”

  No, says A., he wouldn’t want to claim that even as a joke, although paradoxically—as with everything nowadays—it would come dangerously close to being the truth. In any case, more interesting than the appearance itself is what it produces—(again interrupted by a sharp “Namely?”). “Namely,” he says, “the peculiarity that informs the national character like a specific crystallization informs a mineral. Whatever structures the Germans develop (and this is a truism, by the way) have a telltale signature—”

  “And what would that be?”

  “Philistinism,” says A.

  “Philistinism? What about our cathedrals? What about Dürer and Riemenschneider?” exults the art historian contemptuously, looking around for applause, especially from the senator for culture—

  “I’m talking about social structures,” says A. (“Isn’t art a social structure?”) “Philistinism doesn’t preclude grandiosity,” A. declares. “It’s quite capable of rising to that level, as it does in Riemenschneider’s case.” (Witte’s sister, outraged: “Well, I never!”. . . She too looks toward the senator in charge of the cultural desk.) “Moreover,” continues A., “we were talking about rebirth—or rather, the reinstitution of anachronistic societal values, which even if they are similarly preserved in other places, seem especially absurd in post-1945 Germany. And not solely because they’re the most idiotic, shortsighted, destructive way of processing the rubble.” (Witte’s sister: “That’s out-and-out Communism!”) “No,” says A., “but you’ve got to try to imagine what’s going on across the Elbe in the head of a citizen of the other, communistically organized half of Germany when he picks up one of our illustrated weeklies and skims the three pages devoted to an artic
le about the wedding of Princess Ilsebill von Hüblingen-Kreutznach-Hinterstetten with Count Wurmfried Wölflingen-Hassenroth. He really can’t take it seriously—I mean, if he’s someone living so close to present-day reality that willy-nilly, he has to see it—and isn’t blinded, like us, by the eyewash in the Americanized media.”

  “But blinded by other eyewashers,” Rönnekamp corrects him. “By the way, we mustn’t overlook the fact that the ladies and gentlemen in the Almanach de Gotha have to shill for a brand of sparkling wine.”

  “That would make it even more amusing,” A. concedes, “if it didn’t plunge me into despair.”

  “Oh well,” says Witte, “it’s the same old figures of fun: the petty prince and the grenadier of the guard. They were already degenerates in the old days.”

  “No, no!” A. protests more vehemently than he meant to. “That’s not what makes—or made—them comic models of remoteness from real life. If being a fool and even sheer stupidity were funny, we’d never be able to stop laughing and we wouldn’t need any help from them. It was always the specifically German thing about these lower ranks that made them more ridiculous than amusing—their philistinism. It infects even the highest circles in this country: their inveterate pomposity, bigotry, unworldliness, and absurd self-regard. And all that’s been carried over from the frozen, foggy hell of the Quonset huts into reconstruction and the Economic Miracle as a sort of structural legacy.” He turns to address his adversary directly. “We’re missing an art-historical epoch, my dear Herr Professor. We got tripped up in the rigid forms of the baroque. What we lack is rococo: the graceful form of being able to laugh about things . . .”

  What am I saying? What nonsense am I banging on about? I wanted to score one against Christa and her clique and once more got carried away, masturbation with my spouse, again and again! Why do I let myself get sucked into jabbering about culture? Please don’t listen, Herr Senator, just follow the course of the contest and my probable defeat. I presume you also regard the situation as a kind of sport: conversation (one of the delights of life, says Goethe) as a duel—Bang! That’ll show the guy who’s boss! Not a game in which one person catches the ball of another and throws it back, with every catch a reward for all the players—probably the only person here one can talk with is that boozer Schwab . . . Why the devil am I letting myself be interrogated like a naughty schoolboy—it’s the teachers who produce the philistines in this country, the inbred dyed-in-the-wool schoolmasters—

  A memory from the war: An air raid in Berlin, 1944. One side of the street is on fire. At the first building, air raid wardens have ordered people into a bucket brigade. Full buckets are being passed hand to hand from a hydrant on the corner up to the edge of the conflagration and the empty ones are passed back to be filled again, a pathetic undertaking. The water steams away before it ever hits the fire, but the dazed citizens, ragged figures with raw hands and eyes white in their soot-smeared faces, mustered from their cellars in the neighborhood, continue their irrelevant firefighting efforts undeterred while the air raid wardens bellow senseless orders and brandish their service revolvers. Above the roar of the fire stoked by every puff of wind, a constant murmuring and whispering can be heard: “Here you are, Herr Professor!”—“Thank you very much, Herr Professor!”—“Here you are, Herr Councilor!”—“Thank you very much, Herr Councilor!”—every time a bucket passes from one hand to the next—“Here you are, Herr Doctor!”—“Thank you very much, Herr Doctor!”—A bomb falls nearby with a mighty crash and a woman’s voice screams, “My God, that was more bad than the last one!” A male voice corrects her, “In the first place, it’s ‘worse,’ and in the second place, that’s no reason to interrupt the bucket brigade!”

  —and then there’s the opposite type: the buddies from the primal community—yes indeed, we always circle back to the laughable, pitiful, wonderful, primal community in the Nagel-Witte garden house, a pack of repeat survivors, wan from hunger, scruffy in worn-out clothes, eyes bright with childish confidence and cheeks flushed with turnip schnapps and enthusiasm for the good, the true, and the beautiful after the hell they’d been through, inflamed by the sacred will for the new, the better, purer, greedy for everything intellectual . . . and their beautiful utopias: We set up a kolkhoz, get them to allocate us a former parade ground, work together digging unexploded ordnance out of the ground, and plant carrots and cabbages and potatoes in its place. In the evenings we come together with clammy, numbed hands and bent, aching backs for a Hegel colloquium or to listen to Pachelbel and Hindemith on the radio while the womenfolk weave our home-grown flax into diapers for the collective brood, the germ cells of a new, natural society dedicated to culture, a German model won from the bitterest experience of defeat, humiliation, insight into our guilt, and self-recrimination . . . (to be sure, the womenfolk—right, Niemöller old friend?—the womenfolk, who live solely through and for their uterus . . .)

  (Quote from a 1942 speech by Hitler, speaking about the times of struggle at the beginning of the movement: “. . . and, my comrades in the Party, whenever you were almost convinced by the arguments of our opponents and felt yourselves starting to waver, it was the German Woman who sprang up and simply shouted them down . . .”)

  The womenfolk, right Willy? They wanted to get down to brass tacks! (Christa: “You’d do better to find me some bacon grease instead of guzzling schnapps with your crazy friends!”)—soon, ah so soon we had to thank them, the womenfolk, for the insight that the chance for the kind of unblemished new beginning we were imagining was lost, untenable from the get-go, the childish, sweet, foolish plan of our naiveté, the battle against the termite power of the philistines lost a priori, the perseverance of the myrmidons in their eat-in kitchens and allotment gardens, our visions laughably anemic compared to the tenacious vitality and swaggering pretension of the petit bourgeois and the petit bourgeois narrow-mindedness of the upper and middle classes, compared to the burgeoning life in the pelvises of their womenfolk—

  Although they’re all tattered and underprivileged, they’re equipped with the invincible energy of eternal strivers, constantly clambering over one another, eagerly struggling up the chicken coop ramp of traditional hierarchies—If you would be so kind, Herr Head Official, many thanks, Frau Head Official, if you would be so kind, Herr Assessor, many thanks, Frau Assessor, if you would be so kind, Dr. So-and-so, Many thanks, Frau Doctor, if you would be so kind, Herr Professor, your devoted servant, Herr von Krautjunker. Frau von Hinterstossen, Küss die Hand, Frau Baroness, an honor to meet you, Count Soand-so, Countess So-and-so, if I may be allowed, Your Serene Highness. . .

  all of it the precipitate of the spirit of schoolmasters, the essence of their promulgations, slicing with ice-crystal hardness into our visionary Ice Age, our naive Christmas at the crèche of the promised future, the spirit of schoolmasters a gift from the Byzantine East, conveyed by Professor Hertzog (“Hertzog with tee-zee, if you please!”), first of all to make us aware how un-seemly our behavior was: disheveled hicks just barely liberated from the army and the prison camps, roughnecks tramping—so to speak—with bare feet (although some, like our dear amputee Wilhelm Niemöller, with only one) into the salon of higher education—yes indeed!—in order to clap the titans of Western thought on the shoulder with rough-hewn familiarity, feed ravenously from their golden plates and drink from their crystal glassware and mingle our cowherds’ voices in their grandiose monologues and dialogues—

  shouldn’t our women be ashamed of themselves right down to their fallopian tubes? Especially Christa . . .

  Willi Niemöller, yes, the very one. Naturally, he drew the conclusions and simply took off. Of course, he had nothing constructive to suggest for the problem of the “new” societal order we were seeking, but he represents at any rate a lovely example of individualistic independence. He did put down on paper his insight into the genealogy of the schoolmasters, if not in the form of a novel like Nagel. Years later, around 1950, a postcard from Vienna arrived with a pictu
re of the restored St. Stephen’s Cathedral. On the other side, it read—

  My landlady also had a swine

  who got along with Freud just fine;

  for all sorts of reasons—

  in vaginal and anal seasons—

  now it snuffles psyches.

  Cordially, W. N.

  A folk poet, a genuine German . . .

  A. is surprised when Witte takes him aside after dinner. “Very interesting, what you had to say about problems of social structures. Could give a new direction to my advertising department, as Herr von Rönnekamp suggested. What we need are young people with ideas. Why not drop by day after tomorrow, Thursday the ninth—okay? Thursday is the ninth, isn’t it?—so drop by my office at eleven sharp.”

  • • •

  He’s my opposite in every respect: light-footed where I’m lumbering, elegant where I’m dull and average, suave where I’m awkward, nimble where I’m clumsy. He’s at home in any milieu but identifies with none, speaks every language, puts a good face on everything, isn’t intimidated by anything, and is always relaxed, with the nil admirari attitude of a sophisticate. Where I’m cold, he’s fiery; where I get excited, he stays cool. He’s indifferent where I’m sentimental, and soulful where I’m apathetic . . . He’s also proud, but from a sort of humbleness, not from hubris—

  in a word, he’s the spitting image of the me I dream up in literature.

  • • •

  Painfully awkward argument with Scherping: All of a sudden he finds our expectation of having made a literary discovery in A. if not unfounded, then at least exaggerated. “Take for example that treatment—right?—the one that I, uh, you know. . .” (suggestive bleat of laughter), “. . . what I mean is, it may well be that in an—emotively speaking—somewhat overheated environment, it struck me as something extraordinary—and you felt the same way, you’ve got to admit—anyway, on a second or third reading, it seems a bit thin to justify the assumption we’ve discovered some goddamn genius.” His gaze becomes restless as it always does when he senses an occasion to expose his real or imagined weaknesses (a strange sort of exhibitionism not mentioned by Sacher-Masoch). “Once again, of course, proving myself the lowbrow you rightly think I am, but I’d like to stress that I became a publisher—and not a potato dealer—from a certain higher aspiration. And although I may be below par intellectually, at least I don’t want all my motives to be seen as simply those of a business type focused solely on profits, even if I don’t neglect the financial part. With all due respect to great literature, it seems to me we shouldn’t invest blindly in something that at best holds promise of talent but with a fairly uncertain ending . . .”