Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  When we arrived at her building (a ponderous Second Empire façade, the thick leaded-glass panes of the entrance door safeguarded by numerous iron-rod flourishes crowned with brass buttons), she became affectionate but refused to ask me up. Nevertheless, there was some erotic grappling, and since Schwab appeared to be fast asleep in the back, we were not exactly cautious. I complimented her on her beautiful lips and said I’d love to give her a white rose to munch on—and she must have misunderstood, for she took me at my word, even though the bud was really cyclamen-colored.

  I don’t know what came over me. In any case, I felt myself veritably shuddering with lust for this mountain of chocolate-brown flesh in jingly jewelry and a Balenciaga tailleur and sporting the ridiculously arrogated name of a Romanian princess. Perhaps it was something utterly subliminal, the perverse notion that I was morally ravishing something abstruse, a sideshow curiosity like the Trunk Lady or Sheila the Elephant Girl. Whatever the case, I behaved quite uncontrolledly, moaning loudly and grinding my teeth. Finally, unable to hold back any longer, I bit her mahogany neck so that she too emitted a series of tiny, lustfully painful cries. Then, very confused, she fled into her mammoth bourgeois palace, and I drove Schwab to his hotel.

  When we arrive, to my astonishment, he is sitting bolt upright in the back seat and his eyes are open. He doesn’t say anything. Nor do I. Finally, not without effort, he creeps out of the car, trudges around it, sticks his head in at my window, takes my hand in his two hands, squeezes it ardently, and says emotionally, “Thank you! Oh thank you!” Shaking my hand, he keeps repeating, “Thank you! Oh thank you!”

  Then he vanishes into the hotel entrance. I drive through the dead streets to the George V. It’s four a.m. and the dawn is budding. At eleven, he rings me. He’s made up his mind to fly back to Hamburg.

  I drive him to the airport. He shows no sign of remembering anything. I have to give him a blow-by-blow description of his accident, though he’s at least managed to understand that his car was wrecked and he did what was necessary to have it towed away.

  We drink a farewell whiskey at the bar. When his flight is announced, his eyes fill with tears. He can barely speak. He holds my hand again and stammers, “Thank you! Thank you for everything!” Shortly before going through the gate, he turns back to me once more, reaches into his pockets, and hauls out fistfuls of bank notes, which he presses into my hand: “Adieu! And thank you! Farewell! Adieu!”

  That’s how reality presents itself to me.

  4

  So that was my friend S.’s last visit to Paris—in fact the last time I ever saw him. He flew back to Hamburg, where by means of a devious combination of alcohol and every kind of upper and downer he sought to inveigle Mother Nature into sparing him the embarrassing circumstance of a suicide. Within a few months he had succeeded. By the end of December of that same year (1964) he was dead.

  You, Mr. Brodny, will probably fail to grant him your respect. Please bear in mind what a delicate case he was. Even when I first met him in Hamburg in 1948, he couldn’t get over how unpredictable mankind was, and how confused the world. A Gottfried Benn fan, you see. A Benn reader believes in the power of the mind. Of course, he knew about the mind’s vulnerability. I wonder how he would have endured the present (and with it the ever more clearly looming future). How would my image have changed in his eyes? I am not speaking about the curious fact that the easygoing chocolate-brown giantess was to be Dawn’s successor in my heart and my ardent mistress for two years before she too passed away. By the way, her mother really was a Romanian princess and called Jahovary. But more about that later.

  As for the confusion of the world: even the documentary value of notes like those presented above is questionable. I have in my possession certain others (along with many more, which were meant to serve literary purposes) concerning Schwab’s visit to Paris a year before the visit just described. At that time, I made a point of opening his eyes a little to the childish expectations he came here with whenever he fled Hamburg and its philistinism (only to plunge into a spiritual low when he went back home, an abyss with an alcohol pond waiting for him at the bottom).

  This was not an entirely pleasurable business. It really took it out of me, I can tell you. He was already rather ragged when he came from Hamburg—came looking for me: his chubby German hand reaching out for Mama’s apron string. I picked him up at Orly. If a first glance was not enough to tell me what a state he was in, then he would have betrayed it on the ride to his hotel in the rue des Beaux Arts. (Though I was trying to drive at a snail’s pace, as much as the curses and shaking fists from the vehicles around me permitted: Parisians prefer their traffic to flow smoothly.)

  Schwab’s baggage had been lost; it had been flown somewhere else—I believe to Caracas. Running around after it, waiting for hours and filling out lost baggage forms and insurance questionnaires, had reduced him to hysteria. I had to bombard him with nonstop gin and tonics to prevent an outburst. He was wearing a heavy turtleneck sweater (not a Hanseatic outfit but, with corduroy slacks and a beret, the guild costume of German intellectuals in the fifties, which costume he carried on into the sixties—typical of people who are behind the times but consider themselves avant-garde!). He was sweating like a cart horse; it was October, but as warm as summer. During the drive (his fingers clutching the edge of the dashboard, his nose pasted flat against the windshield, beads of sweat on his upper lip), he told me he had had a row with Scherping. About me, but originally about Nagel—an unspeakably ridiculous business:

  He had had a few weeks of intense, highly stimulating work during which he hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol (had even seriously thought of finally beginning his own book) when Nagel came along with something that caused him profound embarrassment. Nagel entrusted him with the first hundred and fifty pages of a new novel (the seventeenth in sixteen years) for a first reading, with an urgent request for absolute secrecy, especially in regard to Scherping. He, Nagel, was fed up with the renowned (Hemingway-like) directness of his narrative art and had tried a stylistic experiment that he wanted to present to Scherping only when he was sure his gamble had paid off. Magari!

  In reading these pages, Schwab plunged into abysmal melancholy and hence into a battery of Saint-Émilion 1957, which I had once brought to him in Hamburg—two dozen bottles. It was a smooth, mannish wine, not all too heavy, yet full of strength, a true friend and comforter. Nevertheless, while making his way through the first dozen bottles, he did not dare venture out of the house, because he feared (correctly, no doubt) that Nagel was lying in wait to hear his verdict. He was living on old rolls and liverwurst and a tiny remnant of cheese, and he wouldn’t answer the phone when it rang. Schelmie, his secretary, had been told to spread the news that he had gone to Bückeburg. (Why Bückeburg of all places is still unclear.)

  By the time he came to the second case of wine, he was no longer able to leave the house. He lay on the sofa under a pile of rustling manuscript pages and had no intention of ever getting up again. But he had got up enough nerve to act—albeit not enough to look Nagel in the eye or even call him and tell him man to man what he thought of the form and content of his work in progress. (Even now, at my side, telling me the story, his goggle eyes widening in fear each time I innocently moved out of another car’s way, he expressed himself rather evasively.) He did not want to write to Nagel; a letter would be too formal, too callously depersonalized, and also too blatant an admission of his cowardice (déformation professionelle: the written word is reduced to a sheer defense barricade and we withdraw behind it). So, in order to show that he was a warmhearted friend, a sympathetic human being, and even in need of sympathy himself, and also to demonstrate his fine detachment from the message itself, he selected the modern device of the tape recorder—a flight into abstraction for which he would pay dearly.

  Ingenious man! With the timbre, the brio, the tremolo of his abstracted voice (a voice at anyone’s disposal, so to speak), he hoped to express all the things that
would excuse his lack of enthusiasm. Not the words but the voice alone was supposed to document his sincere interest, the honesty of his involvement, his conscientious perusal of the manuscript, the ordeal of reaching a verdict given the complex situation; likewise his admiration of the risk Nagel had taken, his hope that a second, carefully composed attempt might lead to eventual success . . . In words, this sounds quite discouraging, you know; but the voice ought to quiver in paschal promise, expressing everything that the meager word distorts . . .

  and yet, forty-eight hours of isolation and the thirteenth bottle of wine gummed up his speech faculties rather badly. The first tape, he now surmised, must have sounded faltering. It probably consisted mostly of pauses, heavy breathing, tortuously begun and hastily concluded verbal digressions, frequent harrumphs, coughs, sudden spluttering assurances of sympathy—in short, everything that would try Nagel’s patience and annoy him in the extreme when he heard it—all this interspersed with the annoyingly undefinable noises of a smoker, matches being struck and cigarettes being put out too energetically in an ashtray, new cigarette packs furiously ripped open (his fingers already trembling violently; this increased the softness, anxiety, femininity, sensitivity of his hands, which, by the way, were very beautiful), and of course the clinking of glasses and bottles, gurgling, splashing, swallowing. (And Nagel had been teetotal for years now, never even touched a woman anymore, in order to devote himself entirely to his art—like that little Algerian painter, late at night at the bistro counter behind the place Pigalle: “Je donne tout cela à mon art!”)

  For all that, the first tape was a highly interesting acoustic document. I proposed that he get it back from Nagel and send it as an experiment in avant-garde music to the Donaueschingen Festival. But my suggestion did not have the liberating effect that one hopes for from humor. Schwab remained despondent, distraught. He was brooding about what was to come.

  He moaned. It must have been at around the fifteenth or sixteenth bottle (the fortieth minute on tape) that he finally got down to the nitty-gritty—namely, the difficulty, nay, virtual impossibility, of writing today. Writing in general and novels in particular. The insane presumptuousness of writing novels after Joyce. And certainly niting wrovels, hmm, excuse me, of, clink clink clink, blubblubblubblub clink swallow-swallow-swallow, heavy breathing, of writhing navels thorough-attack-of-whooping-cough clink clink in a totally sanforized pardon me standardized society. And at this point, he felt he had to come to Nagel’s request. But now he feared he might have already pronounced a scathing condemnation of Nagel’s experiment. (Indeed, Schelmie later claimed that it did sound like one.) And so he quickly began to flog his theme, but then he lost the thread of the argument as well as his temper, becoming very offensive, even insulting—but that, thank goodness, was articulated only to the extent that the seventeenth and eighteenth bottles permitted. Besides, he had already been in the dream dimension of slow motion for a long time.

  Still, he had enough strength left to call up Schelmie and, in a slurred voice, to tell her to pick up the tape and deliver it to Nagel promptly, and not to listen to a word of it or breathe a syllable about it to Scherping. After that, he was unconscious for the subsequent forty-eight hours—he was a strong man.

  Fortunately, I do not have to introduce Nagel or Scherping to you, honored Herr Doktor J. G. Brodny. (Doctorate from the University of Czernowitz? German department? Improbable; more likely Berlin, late twenties, nonracist intellectuals’ paradise of the cursed Systemzeit; degenerate art; art deco. Fluorescence of the already rotten Geist. Romanisches Café. But that would require a whole biography, with the migration story, so let’s omit the “Herr Doktor.”)

  In any case, you are familiar with both Nagel’s irascibility and Scherping’s vacillating hysteria. (After all, I had a carefully considered reason for imagining you as being partly clued in and familiar with the milieu—whereby it occurs to me that you may know about the incident I’m describing. But that wouldn’t matter much.) Thus, I can save myself the trouble of depicting what happened to Nagel when he played the tape . . .

  In our early period, during the Hamburg ice years right after 1945, when Nagel and I were still friends and he still drank our home-brewed turnip schnapps in manly nonchalance, he once, as impetuous as ever (a Sagittarian), almost swallowed an Alka-Seltzer tablet (black-market item) without water. I picture his reaction to Schwab’s tape as rather similar. As Schwab remorsefully recalled, the foaming Nagel instantly hopped into the car (button gearshift for amputees) and drove to Scherping’s, brakes screeching. Together with the chief bookkeeper, the head of production, and the sales manager—three solid German men with correct haircuts—and with Schelmie as a witness, they listened to Schwab’s tape. Needless to say, Scherping swore on a stack of Bibles that he would finally can this editor, this increasingly uncontrollable drunkard; he would dismiss him on the spot without notice or severance pay; he would drive him in disgrace from the publishing house. (Nagel allegedly demanded this, and indeed it occurred seven months later.)

  However, what occurred the next day was something that Schwab, in turn, did not have to depict for me—conosco i miei polli. When Schwab showed up at the publishing firm, he was not bewildered, crestfallen, intimidated—as he was now, here, at my side, in the Paris lunchtime rush hour (he did not know the meaning of fear, only fantastic anxieties, such as the anxiety of my killing him in my car). Towering upright and gazing straight ahead into space, disdainfully slamming doors with his provocatively pointed “Good morning!” he showed up at the office, still half-plastered and irritated by an acid stomach, angrily craving beer, his rumbling belly filled with leonine courage that recently (just when?) had spurred him to some daring deed he simply couldn’t recollect no matter how hard he tried (a tape? but what had he done with it? he hadn’t sung on it, had he?). At first, Scherping was speechless. Completely.

  Completely speechless and filled with dark bliss, I assume. For that was exactly the situation he had been hoping for, had fantasized about time and time again. (“If you only knew to what far-fetched and insidious lengths we go to get our pleasure,” he once confessed to me.) Finding himself powerless before an underling whom he intended to push around, being tormented, humiliated, treated like a little pile of shit by him—that was a night of love. And Schwab was the very man whom Scherping dreamed of for the part. Far more, oh, ineffably more sly, stealthy, secretive than even the most severe woman: he was the FATHER in his heavy demonic nature, the Dostoevskian starost in his dark power (Schwab when the Slavic strain—his mother’s maiden name was Mietschke—began to predominate in his bespectacled Luther-head. “A mountain with a stormy peak,” Schelmie once said, frightened but poetic).

  And if I knew my duck, he with his keen erotic instinct must have gone along with the part that was offered him, the old slut . . . In any case, he said it never came to an argument between him and Scherping about the Nagel affair. Before the subject could come up, he declared rather brusquely that he could no longer work for Scherping if he was not granted an appreciable sum to encourage the projects of certain authors. Scherping, who smelled a rat, asked, “Which authors?” pleasurably lying in wait. Schwab named not Nagel, as expected, but me. Scherping screeched out his fury into Hamburg’s anemic autumn air. (It was the time of the asters, and Schelmie had opened the window on Rothenbaumchaussee to let in a bit of afternoon sun.) Now, his fury was vented against me. For fourteen years, raged the pain-tested, pain-loving publisher, he had been waiting for my manuscript. The multiple advances were reaching astronomical heights. Meanwhile, he raged on, I had absolutely no intention of writing even one more line of the novel, I was still prostituting myself disgracefully with the movies. If he, Scherping, took the bait and forked over a new advance, the recurrent and promising beginnings I kept sending in would cease altogether.

  Well, and so forth. An old and—alas!—all too true tale, after whose telling a completely unleashed Scherping vanished for special treatment with Gisela, in
Whores’ Alley. Schwab, however, hopped the next plane to Paris.

  And now here he was. In shock treatment because of my drag-race driving (yet I can swear I drove no faster than normal, even if S. maintained that the curses and shaken fists had been provoked by my inconsiderately cutting off, dangerously passing, and illegally squeezing into gaps in the lines of cars). He clutched the dashboard, longed for his baggage, and perspired.

  I had to stop at the Deux Magots—one hundred and fifty yards from his hotel—because he needed another gin and tonic to moisten his glands. Before I could catch him again, he dashed across the boulevard to the nearest drugstore. Meanwhile I got entangled in an exceedingly unpleasant argument with a motorized policeman sporting an insect-head helmet (Death’s messenger in Cocteau’s Orpheus) who was trying to flush me out of my parking space. Then S. came back with a bulky armload of big and little boxes; generously littering the street with wrappers and bits of cardboard (and ignoring the now acute risk of becoming a traffic casualty), he pulled out vials, phials, and tubes and stowed them away in his baggy trouser pockets.

  In the hotel, after demanding the room in which Oscar Wilde had died (it was a different one each time), he gobbled up pills from his bare palm the way insane Nebuchadnezzar devoured grass. Even before we went for breakfast in the Rose de France on the Île de la Cité (he loved the little square that opens up to the monument of Henry IV on the bridge), he quickly had to down yet another gin and tonic. Now he was staggering along in wavy lines, which he occasionally interrupted with a surprising side step. We ordered some rosé d’oignon for our meal, and he used it first to wash down another handful of very tiny, nasty-looking tablets. Then, as he told me with a sigh of relief and a bitterly twisted mouth, he was sufficiently fortified to let Paris collapse upon him.

  This was my moment. This was what I had been waiting for. I affected a bored mien. I said indolently, almost casually, “It’s chic to see you here—to welcome you in Pöseldorf parlance. (After all, stopping cold-turkey could lead to withdrawal symptoms, mightn’t it, psychological disturbances due to a sudden change of environment.) Anyway, grand that you’re here, as I said. But don’t expect too much from the therapeutic effects of a sojourn in Paris. What you see before you here—this sun-dappled, life-teeming Paris, this energetic, challenging city with its tremendous traffic and busy crowds, a city of noble tradition, of course, a French reality beyond any doubt, this shiny world that allows you only to be a marveling, admiring spectator—is nothing but a myth you have brought with you. Imported from Hamburg-on-the-Elbe. Sheer deception. Dragging the past into presence. The truth these days looks slightly different.