Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  As if on cue, Carlotta lazily heaves her body out of the chair: “Apropos free minutes, it’s almost noon. Isn’t it time for a little pick-me-up?”

  Witte distractedly concurs. “Yes, of course, Carlotta, child.” And to A.: “Let’s try to concentrate in this monkey house. What I’d like to demonstrate to you is the brilliantly effective action of our detergent. It’s the same thing I’d like to get across to the housewife. Just as you will soon be able to convince yourself of it, the German housewife will be able to see concretely that our advertising is not hollow phrase mongering (although our slogan is neat, isn’t it? Wittewash Washes Whiter than White—alliteration, right? Richard Wagner uses it too . . .” Carlotta brings a bottle of champagne and glasses from the outer office. “What? A whole bottle?!” says Witte. Carlotta shrugs. “For three people . . .” She starts to open the bottle. A. jumps up to help her. Their hands touch—the most banal form of bodily contact. Witte accepts a full glass. “All right then, cheers! A little champagne’s always good for what ails you. Loosens up the coronary arteries!”

  As they clink glasses—“Prosit! Cheers!”—a stooped fellow, the representative of the sales director, appears. “A glass for you too, Colonel?” asks Carlotta.

  The person addressed declines with a morose “Thank you, no.”

  “Herr Kunzelmann is a retired colonel,” Witte explains. “Spent three years in a Russian POW camp.”

  The man thus apostrophized shows no reaction.

  “Well, dear Kunzelmann, have a seat, won’t you? You’re Schröder’s representative?”

  “Yes sir, Herr Witte,” rumbles the retired soldier, ignoring the offer of a chair.

  “All right then. Here’s an order straight from the general staff. Our guest here, Herr von Subicz from Romania, is interested in our products. The two of us have decided it’s necessary to present their advantages to the customer in a concrete way—”

  “That’s the business of the advertising department,” rasps the retired colonel.

  “I’m quite aware of that,” Witte replies sharply. “But I said ‘in a concrete way,’ and I meant it literally: demonstrated to the housewife in a genuine act of laundering—”

  “That may be necessary in Romania,” rasps the retired colonel again. “But the German housewife is already amply familiar with the use of contemporary laundry products.”

  “You say that, dear Kunzelmann, and I understand: thinking otherwise would offend your patriotism. ‘Reit or rong, mei Köntri,’ as the Tommies say. But just ask Schröder—you’re in telephone contact with him, right?—Okay then, just ask your superior if he’d reject my idea out of hand. You see? Even with a glorious past you’ve got to be open to new things. You really do. Are we able to give Herr von Subicz here—a descendant of the former royal family, by the way—can we give him a concrete demonstration of the fact that Wittewash washes whiter than white?”

  “What, now? Here?” The retired colonel lapses into a nervous shaking of the head.

  “Of course. When and where else? We must have a dose of Wittewash somewhere in the building.”

  “Probably. In fact, yes, certainly.”

  “You see? And probably a bucket too.”

  “You’d have to ask building services about that.”

  “So get in touch with the super. Or, wait a sec! Hang on!” Witte presses the button to the outer office and says to A., “I’ve got to do everything myself!” Then into the receiver: “Bussekins, call building services, would you? It’s urgent. I need a bucket and some washable rag, as dirty as possible, right away, okay?—What? Nobody’s there in building services? Well what about the cleaning staff? What’s that? The ladies only work from seven to nine?! What ladies are we talking about? That’s what it’s come to, that the dames who do the cleaning call themselves ladies! So at nine o’clock on the dot, their ladyships take all the buckets and mops home with them? Well it seems impossible to me too. So please see to this matter yourself, Frau Busse.” Hangs up with a heavy sigh: “This outfit needs a thorough reorganization from the ground up.”

  Carlotta to the retired colonel: “Won’t you take a little glass to loosen up your coronary arteries?” “No thanks! Already turned it down,” hisses the burned-out military man venomously. To Witte: “Might I ask to be represented at the pending demonstration by someone less busy at the moment? Personally, I’m awaiting a visit from Admiral Neuner—”

  “Sure, sure ! Another reunion of the old guard. Ain’t there a chief prosecutor in the group too? Please accept my application to make it a foursome!—”

  “In the name of the supply office of the Ministry of Naval Affairs, Herr Admiral Neuner has suggested provisioning the new fleet currently under development with our products,” says the retired colonel with great dignity. “We are in the process of working out our offer.”

  “Excellent! Don’t be too stingy about the percentage. See you later and thanks, Kunzelmann!” He gives an affable nod to the punctiliously withdrawing colonel. “But I could do with another drop of liquid refreshment, Lottiekins—and one for our guest too, of course—I don’t have to tell you not to neglect yourself.” With a nod toward the door, he says to A., “Typical how much the good fellow was impressed by your royal origins.” (A. starts to tell him it was meant as a joke, an ironic rise in his social level, but it doesn’t come to that since Witte drones on.) “These people have blind obedience in their bones. You saw it for yourself: the little formal bows and clicking heels. They’re not free Hanseatic citizens like us: civil pride before the thrones of power. And we have at least as much sense of tradition, but it’s Hanseatic tradition: connection to the wide world, not fixated on a single point. You can see it in our eyes; they gaze into the distance, the open, the future. I never knew my father; he died before I was born. My sister, whom you’ve met, was just two years old. But we were able to have a clear image of the old gentleman from the stories of our mother, God rest her soul. You wouldn’t believe it, but as a young man he walked all over the place as a Hamburg carpenter even though he wasn’t one. He was a swabbie, a seaman, but the sea wasn’t enough for him. He wanted to learn about dry land too—he hoofed it all the way to Morocco via Spain in the traditional garb of the Hamburg carpenters: velvet bell-bottoms, a velvet jacket with white buttons, a black, broad-brimmed hat, and a stick with a bundle over his shoulder. You can still buy ’em today: ‘We suit you up swell at Arthur Capelle’—good slogan, right? Could’ve written it myself. And he was so modest he smeared black shoe polish on his ankles so they wouldn’t notice he didn’t have any socks . . . By the way, Lottie girl, you could think of me too if you’re gonna pour another glass.” The telephone purrs and he picks up. “What? It’s already one thirty? Where was I supposed to be? The Regatta Club? We’ll have to cancel it! . . . Whaddya mean, not possible? Why’s it impossible when we’ve got this washing demonstration going . . . oh, our people are on lunch break?—now listen here: if I’m working through lunch myself, maybe the little apprentice who’s s’pposed to fetch a bucket can . . . Where the hell is he, by the way? We’ve been waiting here for hours . . . Okay, just have some sausage sandwiches brought up for us—and—Bussekins, we got another bottle of champagne in the fridge? Good. Carlotta’ll be right out t’get it . . .”

  Out beyond the glass of the big windows, the day was brightening.

  —does it seem so glassy because it follows so many icy nights? The star-spangled winter nights beyond the frost flower– encrusted windows of Uncle Ferdinand’s konak in Bessarabia, the ornamentation on the Saracen arches, topped with rustling palm fronds. When the reflections from the open fireplace dance on them they sparkle as if displayed on black basalt. The flames are also reflected in my operetta-ready cavalry boots. The old servant who claims to have known me as a child has polished them to a shine, for only thus am I allowed to present myself to Uncle Ferdinand. He treats me like family (just as he would any guest in his house, by the way). In his salon he receives only guests he can treat like
family. He counts me, the son of a whore, as a member of his household like his dogs, his horses, and his long-established staff of servants. His sharp eyes would notice if instead of wearing shiny boots I had painted my ankles with shoe polish—

  —and the nights in Bucharest under a fleece of snow, Stella and me on the Şoseaua Kiseleff, in the car with the motor running and clinched in a kiss as desperate as if it were the last before parting forever . . . (and before long it would be so: soon we would never see each other again)—

  —and suddenly, there’s a hard rap on the window, a flashlight beam stabs into the car—and I panic. Thank God I’m not in uniform. I know it’s the police. They lie in wait to ambush couples and can only be dissuaded from charging you with a public display of immorality with much pleading and more baksheesh—as a soldier, I’d be in for it and if they ask to see our papers, Stella’s reputation would hang in the balance. The wife of a diplomat is easy to blackmail . . .

  —And the nights of thin snow in Berlin with the wind whistling through the gaps between buildings and in the evaporating darkness, the sirens began their angry howl and soon the pale tentacles of the searchlights probed the black sky, crisscrossing and joining together at a single point and the clattering salvos of antiaircraft fire and the first bombs exploding and the edge of the sky beginning to redden—

  and the nights of biting frost in Witte’s bombed-out villa on the Elbchaussee and me holding Christa in my arms to warm her up—Christa, whom I loved and who couldn’t make much of my love because she was so cold and hungry—

  many, many such nights have clarified the day out there and cleared the lots so the city might rise anew in concrete and steel and glass. . .

  “. . . all of that used to be residential neighborhoods, mostly working class, you know?—so to that extent, just between you and me, the Allies did us a favor—I mean, as our friend Baron von Rönnekamp so rightly put it, if we hadn’t been able to start over again with a tabula rasa, we’d never have been able to carry out reconstruction so successfully—well, here you are at last! Man, is it possible that half a day has to pass before somebody scares up a pail in this cathouse? Carlotta, child, take down a memo right now that sales should send around a note to all our affiliates to always have a bucket and a washable piece of material on hand for the laundering demonstration—apropos: have you got a piece of material on you too?”

  The young man who arrived with the bucket produces an unspeakably greasy rag—

  “—Where’d you get that thing, in the garage? Well, dear friend, by all that’s right and fair, Wittewash is too top-shelf to clean off lubricating oil—”

  —while Frau Busse from the outer office helps to fill the bucket and get the laundry powder ready (“Didja remember t’get out another bottle too, Bussekins?”), they go searching for an acceptable object to launder (Carlotta: “Perhaps one of the younger employees would lend us an undergarment . . . !”).

  Meanwhile a waiter, obviously summoned from a nearby restaurant, is standing at the door with a tray of sandwiches, causing some confusion. Witte gives instructions to the secretary. “See to it he’s paid, Bussekins. Yep, from the postage money. Book it ‘For food and drink’ as usual.” Then he turns—at last!—to the bucket: “ ’Course, we gotta put some water in first.”

  A. doesn’t dare look at Carlotta. He can sense the danger that a look between them might trigger an uncontrollable fit of laughter.

  Frau Busse, who’d gone looking for something washable, reappears with something balled up in her fist: “It’s a hankie from a temp in bookkeeping who just had a nosebleed—” She unrolls the little piece of reddish brown, leopard-spotted cloth and offers it between thumb and forefinger to Carlotta, who waves it off in disgust. Witte gallantly takes it from her. “Outstanding. Blood is especially hard to wash out.” Frau Busse nods in agreement: “Hopefully it’s really from her nose.”

  That has an effect. A.’s laughter dies in his throat and hatred bubbles up—

  Cousin Wolfgang shared it with me—that hatred. He never admitted it. Unlike mine, his hatred was not directed at a class, at a particular kind of person shaped by society, at the type of person represented by this philistine Witte. When Wolfgang’s hatred broke out, it was always against Uncle Helmuth, his father; he loved his mother, Aunt Hertha, with an angry idolatry and suffered because she was “in thrall” to Uncle Helmuth. (“That bovine look! I can’t stand how she looks at him: as if nothing else in the world is happening in her field of vision except him. As if nothing is as desirable as suckling at the warm, comfortable udder of their togetherness . . .”)

  But he courted her, continually gave her signs of his love: all sorts of attentions, little presents, proofs of his devotion. And yet she was the essence of everything I hated and he hated too, but without extending it to her class: soulful stupidity, the certainty that she and her kind were the omphalos, the navel of the world, contempt for everyone who wasn’t her kind, innate suspicion, envy, malice . . .

  The characteristics of the middle class. Aunt Selma had none of them except anger, gnawing anger directed against herself, the anger of someone fallen in social status, which drove her to work like a indentured servant, “slave away,” deny herself—and to dream in secret: the nixie from the millpond bewitched into a cart horse—

  and her love for me, the bastard washed up on her shore, her silent admiration of the other, dead sister, the beautiful Maud who strayed onto the path of shiny, golden intoxication—

  —and her indifference to Cousin Wolfgang, which hurt him. He too could see that she was not of the same middle-class ilk as his parents—

  Sunday evenings they come home from one of their spiritist séances, hand in hand like a pair of siblings (“Hansel and Gretel in astral league,” hisses Cousin Wolfgang), their faces transfigured by supernatural gentleness as they lower them in thanks over their supper of sour pickles and kippers (prepared by Aunt Selma with an especially generous portion of Liptauer cheese for me). They close their eyes for the blessing; they’ve given up trying to persuade the three of us—Aunt Selma, Cousin Wolfgang, and me—to participate. Wolfgang always ostentatiously clears his throat during the “psychologically intrusive ceremony that begins so discreetly.” They don’t talk at table. Their experience is too valuable, their insights into the beyond too ineffable and harrowing, their encounters with those who have already cast off their mortal husk to enter into the pure transcendental element too revelatory to tell us about them. Only in passing do we learn what’s really happening to us—(“Of course sometimes, a soul voluntarily accepts the trial of rebirth although it’s already purified; but it does so to assist a dual who has incurred guilt and is condemned to be reborn—which is the case with Uncle Helmuth and me . . .”).—

  —and so he assembles electrical appliances in a big factory for starvation wages, which don’t suffice to spare the other half of the dual soulless drudgery as a bookkeeper for a moth-eaten little music publisher. They too “slave away,” those lofty souls, to support us, feed us poorly and dress us even worse, and provide us boys the worst possible education in the public schools—:

  The products cranked out by head teachers: cannon- and office-fodder, effortlessly manipulable by Podunk politicians, pettifoggers, snake-oil salesmen, and charlatans of every stripe—

  (“The leader of our séances, a spirit of the highest rank who has voluntarily returned to this cosmic form of existence, reports that a potentialization of our planet is imminent—i.e., that our earthly existence will dematerialize and thereby enter a higher stage of universal order—and that the spirit destined to fulfill this messianic mission, although in the opposite sense, has already been born—” Wolfgang stares at his father, flabbergasted, and can’t believe his ears: “And who’s that supposed to be? Adolf Hitler?!”—“Yes indeed, the same Adolf Hitler you illegally tag along after, one of the many brutal men summoned up by the evil counterprinciple while the pure spirit of National Socialism, as enunciated by Lanz v
on Liebenfels, is nonviolent, a purely spiritual power . . .”)—

  —and in the end, he’s right: the brutal men summoned up by the evil counterprinciple will kill one another and destroy the world along the way, but the spirit of the stigmatized philistines will triumph—

  John is right about them, the “bloody fucking middle classes” of every nation. They will rise phoenix-like from the rubble, the victors, the makers of the new world . . .

  All those in attendance take part in the act of laundering: Witte’s very own pudgy fingers stir the detergent powder to foam—not too much, not too little—just right!—in the bucket and Carlotta kneads the blood-spattered handkerchief in it until the red spots turn pale pink and at last disappear entirely. The result is convincing, but Witte isn’t satisfied yet. The red, white, and blue cockade of his burgher’s face is afire as he calls for more objects to launder. A. offers a snow-white cambric handkerchief (Jermyn Street, from John’s supply) and without hesitation pours ink on it before Witte can intervene. The detergent foam and the water in the bucket turn brownish-blue and have to be replaced. Frau Busse takes over the washing with a second dose of Wittewash-Whiter-than-White, and after four acts of laundering pulls the handkerchief, now perfectly sky-blue, from the suds. She refuses to continue, says she’s got to protect her hands, and Carlotta opens the fourth bottle of champagne.