Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  Despite a “not yet hundred-and-fifty-percent demonstration,” Witte is in high spirits, his ruddy face aglow, his sea-blue eyes twinkling: the champagne is having its effect. It’s five in the afternoon and the sandwiches haven’t filled them up. Witte orders lobster sent in (“Let lobster be our lodestar, eh? See, I can make puns too. Our mutual friend Baron von Rönnekamp even thinks me capable of better things. He says in English, ‘Za pun iss za wurst form uff Witt.’ Get it? Pun is the least of Witte’s talents.”) But the name Rönnekamp opens up a piquant field in which Witte whiffs the possibility of gamboling about and showing he’s familiar with “the intellectual principles to which I owe your visit, dear friend. I know you were angling at an opportunity to enter my firm. And why not? There’s always need for new blood. I wouldn’t entrust the cash box to you, but as I said, in advertising, why not, even if you may have a penchant for drastic measures, as you showed with your lovely handkerchief. But there were a few things that interested me in your remarks at dinner the other evening at my house, to which you were brought by your charming wife. I mean, what you had to say about the multiplicity of the social structure of postwar Germany. It’s true that the main emphasis of our current form of government and economy is on the bourgeoisie, and the old upper classes just have to fall in line with that, however much sympathy I may have for Baron von Rönnekamp—not to mention his outstanding talents as broker and financial advisor—but take that other gentleman he brought along, Count Lentzau-Wilmersbüttel: I mean really, not my cup of tea at all! That’s truly a kind of decadence you would seek in vain in solid middle-class circles—here in Hamburg, I mean. Or can you imagine Hans Albers as a homo? Mind you, a democracy should have a place for all kinds of eccentricities, and it does. Not being from here, you’d be astonished if I told you, for example, the rumors that circulate about one of our most renowned publishers whose name I’d rather not mention, and while such things don’t take place in public, they do in municipal establishments that are a testimony to our Hanseatic open-mindedness—we’ve seen just about every curiosity our globe has to offer and we swear by the well-known Bible verse ‘Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.’ Deviations such as those of the gentlemen in question may not be exactly rare in general. I’m not gonna get hot under the collar about it and I can even see it from a humorous point of view to a certain extent—I mean, those affected gestures just kill me—but as I said, their whole class is rotten to the core. Nowadays we have nothing more to expect from the aristocracy, especially us Hamburgers. Our best families proudly refused to be ennobled and it was likely our straightforward modesty that persuaded the Iron Chancellor to settle so near our gates, in Friedrichsruh—I understand your spouse is a regular guest there—no? Not yet. But given her family ties, it won’t be long . . .”

  He’s interrupted by the lobsters, three brick-red monsters on meadow-green lettuce leaves, surrounded by green wedges of lime and white-bordered yellow wedges of lemon (“Book it ‘For food and drink,’ Bussekins—and here, have a piece yourself. It’s easier with these shears!”)

  and while they fall to with plastic cups and paper plates scared up from somewhere or other—the lobster flesh is elastic and tender and conjures up images of anthropophagy; our fingers fishing it out of the shell smell of vaginal manipulations. We devour what we’re offered, and since Frau Busse’s gone home, Carlotta opens the God-knows-how-manyeth bottle of Söhnlein Dry. And Witte talks, keeps talking, and talks and talks and talks—

  —the sky in the large windows turns a dusty turquoise green and the light in the room is completely dematerialized, the lighting conditions of an abstract world,

  abstract as the presence of the woman lounging next to him in an armchair—no, she’s lying diagonally in leisurely siesta mode, legs stretched out and crossed. She barely moves, raising her arm only now and then to reach for her glass, fish a cigarette from her case, or support herself as she leans forward to have him light it—

  abstract as the condition of inebriation whose successive phases of euphoria I observe in myself and measure in Witte’s increasingly confused talk while outside the sky turns inky, first as pale as the final washing of his handkerchief and then, as if being run backwards, a deeper and deeper sepia—

  —and far below on the road, the motley trickle of tinny vehicles is embellished with a dance of white and red stars, the tail lights of the tinny vehicles trickling up and down, semiological signs for the presence of—what? of human beings?—in this abstract world—people I can’t see, people who have been absorbed by their shiny, motley, drivable crustacean shells

  and while windows light up “like crossword puzzles” on the stelae of high-rises here and in the distance across fields of rubble, construction excavations, factory sites

  —blue and red light begins to pulse through a tangle of neon tubes as if showing the blood vessels of the resurrected city. . .

  • • •

  But the nights, the nights . . . they were dark and gloomy and weighed on my chest. I had trouble breathing all night long. It didn’t help that I crept from the wall of boards that separated our miserably furnished rooms and the collapsed part of Witte’s villa on the Elbchaussee out across the bomb crater to the nettles among the crumbled bricks where no one would look for me—not Christa in any case, and Nagel couldn’t see me from his garden house either—and sat down there and stared up at the sky as if expecting deliverance. I couldn’t see any stars. Thick clouds pressed on my eyes. The nights were in league with my nightmare and left me no way out of my torment. Wherever I fled, the old woman was with me, even there in my hideout among the ruins of the Hanseatic past. The old woman herself came from the ruins of the past, even if not the Hanseatic past, but who could say for sure? She evaded all my questions. I never could discover what corner she arose from. I’ve been a night owl all my life, in the cynicism of my badly disguised Romanticism. Too often kept awake by daytime adventures, by too many people and events, by waiting for Mommy, who I knew was with one of her beaus (my “uncles”), by Cousin Wolfgang’s panting curiosity, and soon too by the scream of air raid sirens. The nights were never my enemies. I was never afraid of them then, as I was of these now. The nights of the pre–Ice Age were transparent all the way to the stars. I loved their stillness, feeling solitary in their immensity, alone in the world. I added my ambition to their vastness. We cobbled together what was my secret treasure: freedom from guilt and the pride of being—despite everything that might confront me—indisputably well born. I was never closer to my true self than at night in Uncle Bully Olivera’s villa on the Cap d’Ail. I slept with the windows wide open to the sea, and of course I didn’t sleep. Miss Fern was gone. I lay with my eyes open, looking down onto the restless, splintering silver on the black velvet of the lazy waves that rocked the fishing boats and caused their naked masts to scribble confused hieroglyphics in the violet sky. And I knew I wasn’t like my occasional playmates and wouldn’t become like the adults around me and had been granted a special path I would tread, head held high, to the amazement of all the others. And I still knew it when I returned to Bessarabia and, half-numb from exhaustion after Uncle Ferdinand’s tales of his crumbling Middle Kingdom, threw myself onto the bed, knowing that beyond the sparkle of frost flowers on the windowpanes was my friend, the lofty night, keeper of my secrets—the night that generously left it to the moon to spill its milky light over the humps of snow-covered willows in the Dniester meadows while it filled the vastness above with cosmic frost and the rustling light of its showers of stars. But already in Berlin, the nights defected. They no longer belonged to me alone. The mournful howl of sirens tore the sleepers from their beds and pillows and drove them into the cellars where they huddled together like a herd of animals in a thunderstorm, while outside the anemic tentacles of the searchlights probed the sky, crisscrossing and joining together and sometimes capturing a thing pale as a moth, and the clatter of the flak swelled to a thunder and flames billowed up where the bombs wen
t down. All that fierce action robbed the nights of their grandeur, constricted their spaces, and made the darkness dense and ominous, the night air choking. Turning away from the sunlit sky was not an invitation to contemplation, I said, it did not make us conscious of the isolation of the planets in space as it was revealed to the desert prophets when they had eaten their grasshoppers and gazed in unison up into the firmament. Night was the lightless part of a twenty-four-hour cowering under a deadly, humiliating assault, a daily recurring extension of the sentence for our guilty existence, and the nights remained so up to the last painful bite of the Ice Age in Hamburg, and even later. I don’t know how Christa came to terms with it. She slept like a statue in our marital lair, her curves and concavities a confirmation of Canova’s art. Her regular breathing calmed the world around her—except for me. I started up from a sleep haunted by wild nightmares and had to force myself not to flail about. I lay there panting, and the old hag lay next to me, her gray stringy hair smeared with blood and brains and pasted across her staring eyes. And although I knew it was nothing more than a dream—a nightmare vision that repeatedly haunted me—there was no trace of relief in knowing I was awake. She would not let go of me, that terrible old woman, it all surrounded me in a dreadful, timeless present: the office building devoid of people with its paternoster elevators whirring endlessly up and down. At any moment their empty cabins could be followed by one from which my pursuers would spring. The clammy clinker-brick walls of the cellar I had lured her into. She saw the pile of coal and a shovel and looked at me at the same time and didn’t take her eyes off me as I struck, transforming her face into a portrait by Bacon.

  • • •

  Letter to a Son

  Dear little man,

  I call you that because you’ve been born with the curse of being a man and being raised to be a man. I can’t spare you that, even if I wanted to. It’s your destiny to be a man one day, whatever I may tell you about it. I’m not very skilled at writing declarations of love. Ask your mother: she got only a few from me in writing, although I stammered countless ones into her ear, some in embraces from which she expected more concrete proofs of my love, some in the encoded form of monologues in which, in my masculine extremity, I tried to explain myself to her. Only in my youth was I able to give my love voluble expression on paper—if one can speak of youth in the case of a mixture of nostalgically retarded child and precocious misanthrope, which is what I was in those days. Mind you, a misanthrope from the noble line of a Karl Kraus (about whom I would have known little if Stella hadn’t hammered him into me, line by line and sentence by sentence). But you’ve only just been born and have no idea what I’m talking about. Talking too much, as usual. This letter is meant as a declaration of love.

  Back in the days of Stella I was capable of writing love letters. Manly ceasefire agreements, declarations of devotion to a feminine creature who was everything to me: lover, mother, deliverer from ignorance, midwife and wet nurse of my awakening intellect, teacher, doorkeeper to the world, comrade, and proprietor proud to display her pupil. Was it not imperative for me to be grateful to her? So grateful that even then, long—very, very long—before you were born, I wished you would meet someone like her before you were spoiled by the bias of having to prove yourself a man by excelling, unless it be intellectually.

  I bestowed upon Stella what my turbulent emotional life was boiling over with. I wrote and thanked her for showing me the way back to myself. Yes: to myself as a child, as a human being, a child of man. Still in a condition of innocence—innocent also of the offenses others had committed against me, not yet grown into the conflict between the son of a whore raised like an aristocrat and the poor boy condemned to live among philistines, still in possession of what everyone born of woman ought to be granted: an unfettered mind. Unfettered enough to be receptive to the virtues of humanity: freedom from prejudice; courage to be oneself; and above all, disengagement from oneself, insight into oneself, and the recognition that one is part of a great game—and the serene pleasure of watching the game even when it’s shitty, and laughing at it—laughing in the cheerful comfort of cynicism and including yourself in this liberating laughter.

  You will grow up, my son, and will come upon these pieces of wisdom from your father and find them to be annoying, tedious clichés more likely to hinder than help you be yourself. I don’t have to tell you that this situation is repeated from generation to generation. It’s not just resistance to fathers that is repeated, but rather resistance through them and beyond them, to the natural order of things in life and in the world. Resistance to life’s awkwardnesses, with which the fathers couldn’t cope either. Sons don’t grant fathers the right to speak wisely about things they themselves—the fathers—couldn’t cope with.

  And so, little man, I won’t pester you with the things that weigh me down, the insoluble problems of this world, one of which is the relationship of fathers and sons. I love you and want you to know that none of my loves—and there were many—was purer, more unselfish, more heartfelt than my love for you. When you were born, I picked you up and looked you in the eye so that in you I could see my resurrected self. Myself, cleansed of all the blemishes clinging to me. Should I enumerate them for you? It would be not just the story of a life with everything that made it understandable and perhaps also forgivable—the story of unfulfilled and falsely fulfilled dreams; the story too of chance occurrences, of circumstances inextricably tangled together over which the person caught in their net has no influence; the story of an era—and how could I explain all that to you except in a book? A book that would burst the bounds of all literary categories and be untellable in its diversity, complexity, and confusion. A book that could explain to you not just me, but also—in order to explain myself—the quicksilver spirit of the times into which I was born, in which I lived, live, and shall live, thousands of days of drawn breaths and breaths yet to be drawn, days that lend the contents of their predecessors kaleidoscopically new and varied significance, overlapping like the lenses of a telescope through which you can simultaneously see far away and up close, both magically abstracted from yourself.

  Must I confess to you, my son, that I’ve carried this book within myself from the beginning. That I live as if my existence was not real unless I said it—that is, narrated it in my book. What is it that forces me, allows me to hope, drives me to the certainty that I am only real when I abstract—subtract—myself from myself and go—where? Onto a few hundred printed pages? Will you be able, my son, to respect this form of existence for your father? Especially if it too becomes unreal? If he carries his book—his self!—within himself as nothing but a beautiful intention—worse yet, as a promise he doesn’t keep because he’s too weak to keep it. Not enough of a man?—or rather: too much of a man?

  You’re barely born and I already know I’m going to disappoint you, my beloved child. You won’t grow up like other sons whose fathers are not myths but rather stand before them, chock-full of reality: real men. Dynamic. Reliable. Honest and modest. No fibbers; no bullshitters. The son of a cabinetmaker, a locksmith, a lathe operator sees his father doing useful things at his workbench. Happy the son of a farmer, a fisherman, a businessman, a mason. He sees his father in the realization of what he does, even if that activity obviously isn’t completely fulfilling and something ineffable urges him to another, utterly useless activity—breeding pigeons, for instance, or spending years meticulously building a scale model of the Eiffel Tower out of toothpicks. It’s as if he’s creating something beyond himself, beyond the shoemaker, mason, lathe operator. Nothing useful, perhaps, just something playful, but even so, a worshipful accomplishment. Mind you, in the worship of a dubious god.

  Consider one thing, my son: even the sons of clerks and bureaucrats know that although their fathers produce nothing visible or tangible, they are—as my patron Witte would say—“plugged into the work process that keeps the whole shebang afloat.” It’s unfair of a son not to take any pride in the knowled
ge that his father is a postal clerk—without a doubt an honorable profession, but looked down upon out of class arrogance. At any rate, he—the son—sees his father leaving home with his briefcase and mid-morning snack, anxiously hurrying for fear of being late for “work.” And what are the feelings of the son as he sees his honorable progenitor off? Pride and deep respect, I would hope. Whatever form it takes, it’s well known that work ennobles and is—however badly—rewarded: it is the father whose work guarantees the existence of the family; even after his working life is through, his widow will continue to live off his work. Ask your mother: she’s in a position to describe it more convincingly than I can. She respects the myth of work well done and will try to plant it in you as well, thereby seeing to it that your father will not partake of the respect other sons show their fathers. But do they really show it? Or do they show it only when they watch their father building an Eiffel Tower from toothpicks in his spare time? When he’s worshiping the dubious god of idle play.

  You’ve been born into a thorny conflict, my poor son. Even at the tenderest age, you’ll already be suspicious of your father because he’s been pumped up by a false myth. He is a high priest of that untrustworthy deity of idle play and will be shown the respect the clergy of all churches receive. But only as long as and to the extent that he is also plugged into the work process that keeps the whole shebang going. If he isn’t plugged in with some visible, tangible accomplishment—and you need good eyes to see it and good senses to grasp it—every post office clerk can look down on him as a pariah. God—not the god of idle play but the god of the upright, the REAL, TRUE God who keeps the whole shebang going—will spit him from HIS mouth.