Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  He offers to drive me back to the Left Bank. His car is parked in a garage a few steps away on the place des Ternes. I beg off. I’m at the end of my tether. I want to be alone. But I tell him, “If you’d like to come with me, I’m going back on foot.”

  He cheerfully agrees. “I’d love to.” And gently takes my arm because I am about to run down a baby carriage. All along the avenue des Ternes, he chats away at me (with constant gentle grabs at my arm to steer me past hindrances). But eventually he lapses into silence. He only asks once (when I stumble), “Shouldn’t we really take a cab?” I retort that as a good German infantryman I marched from Ukraine to Mount Athos, but I get the words out only in fits and starts.

  The redhead is still standing by the Madeleine. I shake him off. “Excuse me, but I think I’ll go off with this girl now.”

  He says, “I’ll be waiting for you in the café over there.”

  For a moment I feel like punching him in the nose. His eyes are as imperturbable as when he gazed along the Seine. But he gives the girl a small, encouraging smile. She makes a face at him: “Salaud!” Then she takes me by the arm.

  Half an hour later I am standing on the street again, alone, a bit ransacked, humiliated. I am thirsty and, heedless of screeching brakes and invectives, I veer across the square to the café. He is sitting at one of the outside tables, waiting for me. I join him wordlessly. He doesn’t speak either. I order a cognac (saying, with venomous pride in my French, “Une fine de la maison”). He has a drink too. The jets droning in my ears are unendurable. I see his bright, imperturbable, alert eyes. “Ready?” he says in English. I stand up (not bumping the table this time, but the chair behind me topples over and he catches it). I say, “The perfect nurse.” He does not answer. He picks up the bank note I threw on the table and presses it into my hand. It is the last one the girl left me.

  He heaves me into a cab. I say, “Leave me alone!” He tells the driver the address and gets in next to me. “You will sleep marvelously. Call me up whenever you like. After all, you know I’m waiting.”

  I hear myself say, “But not for my call.”

  He says, “For your call.”

  I bow and kiss his hand.

  6

  Et vous vous en foutez, monsieur. Lei se ne frega. You couldn’t give a bloody fucking shit.

  And of course you’re perfectly right. You’re in the business. It’s your century. It’s your world. And if I feel lost in it, that’s my problem.

  Only I would like to trouble you a bit with this problem, dear Mr. Brodny. Look: As an outsider by calling, predestination, and vocation, I am accustomed to running through the world in one abstracted way or another. The pretty prelude to my unfortunately still uncompleted book may have suggested as much.

  But now I am speaking about Paris, dear friend—a city still at the heart of Western Civilization, one would think, and not at its extreme periphery. Yes, it may even be considered its throbbing heart; still the center of its cultural life, the termite queen of Europe. Yurop, sir. How do you spell it? Why-You-Are-Oh-Pee-period. Yurop—a remote American province, as we now all know, as everyone knows, down to the last sneering oil sheikh, but nevertheless a province that is said to have been the cradle of this renowned Western Civilization, the homeland of our fathers, mothers, all our blindly self-assured, dynamic, expansive forebears. Of course you and your fellow bearers of stars and stripes know it in another way. For you it became an integrating component of the world only recently, as the theater of WWII—a vile abbreviation for a collective suicide, by the way. A world the half of which always belongs to America: half of Korea, half of Vietnam, half of Germany. . . and believe me, it makes quite a difference if you think of a continent as homeland or as a theater of operations. The European Theater, as it is rather characteristically known in the (military) trade. Enter at your own risk, albeit with a guarantee of an honorable funeral—even if your body parts are scattered and far flung during the spectacle—on so-called V-Days (Vee for Victory, mon cul).

  For you, sons of the New World in your youthful freshness, masters of one half of the globe—for you, the charm of this unhealthy, sporadically iron-filled part of the world probably consisted in the liberating dynamics of the landscape of catastrophe: the panorama in which fields and forests, marshes and meadows are wasted by storms of fire, battered by hailstones of iron; shacks and castles, churches and privies are equally smashed to rubble, and dead cattle and household goods drift in the yellow rivers—half a roof and perched on it a cat that fled up the chimney, for instance; and so it makes no difference whatsoever where you shit cook screw play with an orphaned puppy for a short while puke up your booze or kick the bucket.

  But for us, if you please, this was once the sweet core of the world, a sturdy world, a world whose morbid charm and kitschy beauty you and your kind could scarcely have come to know in their juicy freshness, not after the steel tempest of WWII. Despite the efforts of people behind the times like Schwab and little old me, you could at best assimilate those values into Disneyland. Indeed, it was a wonderworld of many-towered cities, teeming with colorful people in colorful costumes (bourgeoises placidly strutting about among them, the biggest one a man with a skew nose, clipped mustache, polka-dot bow tie and dachshund: a man and his dog tried and tested in disorder and early sorrow). Our souls lived in that old world of faraway times, when Nuremberg was renowned for its Lebkuchen and its toy boxes, not for its trials and the subsequent gallows: the gingerbread houses crowded in intricate confusion around the cute dignity of the stepped town-hall gables, shadowed by the heavenward soaring of cathedrals. When the intimacy of town and country would be enjoyed in an Easter promenade along the city walls (with many-voiced bells ringing for Beethoven’s deaf ears and the seductive devil playing around as Schopenhauer’s black poodle). When the vast countryside was lovely with its silent lakes and ponds reflecting the cloud castles of the minnesingers and the poetic Wittelsbachs on the mountains. The lead-glistening light of storm-brewing, grain-ripening summer afternoons long ago; the murmuring of brooks under alders and hazelnut bushes, from which beautiful Melusina peers out, palely glimmering in the evening, when the birdsongs go silent and the wan sky over the forest has kindled the first star. Melusina, mind you, and not the radioactive refuse of the nearest chemical factory . . . And Alpine peaks, whose glaciers shine over King Laurin’s rose garden and not over the Munich–Venice highway, which even South Tirolian separatists approve of. The fragrance of firs over Fontane’s sandy marches and Stifter’s timber forest of spruces, amidst the mourning torches of cypresses at Duino and on D’Annunzio’s Versiglia shores. And Mozart, Bach, and Handel, and crisp golden-brown Viennese Backhendl with fresh green lettuce . . .

  Right, Mr. Brodny, old pal? That was Europe for us. Or rather, that was us. We were Europe. We carried it within us, in our thoughts and feelings, in the self-assurance of everything we did, the way the French carry France and the hard city of Paris within themselves, though with the slight difference that we, at that time, were alive, were made of flesh and blood. Europe—that was the native soil of our style, continuously producing new forms, our always definite, specific essence, the this-and-no-other way of our existence.

  And the many-domed, many-towered city of Paris, her roof slates glistening like dragon scales under the capricious sky: she was one of the constellations by which the course of that world was fixed. More than any other city, she was the spirit of our spirit. She came directly from our blood as almost no other city did. Yes, indeed, you heard correctly. I say: we, us, our—our spirit, our blood. For I include myself, despite all the snide hardness of the French today. I consider the city of Paris not only as a city of Frenchmen. It still belongs to me as well. I’m conceited enough to consider myself a child of Western Civilization, albeit a foundling, if you like, or a stepchild, since the lost half of my life belongs to the half of Europe that did not pass into American hands; still, women in Kishinev did not wear veils—Pushkin hated the place, but h
e occasionally visited it to see classics like Racine, Molière, and Scribe. It even had an electric trolley line (not in Pushkin’s time, of course, but during my childhood). I may be wrong, though: the droshkies had the same foot bells as the streetcars elsewhere, and perhaps I’m even confusing this with my memory of Jassy or Czernowitz. You can certainly correct me here, Mr. Brodny . . . You see, I left Bessarabia at a tender age; I was brought up in Vienna—in less than ideal manner, admittedly, but still in European traditions, intellectual attitudes, emotional norms (intellectual errors and emotional failings, if you prefer). We never managed to establish with any certainty in which church of the Christian denominations, and indeed even whether, I was baptized. But anyway I’m not circumcised. Indeed, my Viennese relatives were out-and-out anti-Semites. If my cousin Wolfgang had not died a hero’s death very early in WWII, he would most certainly have occupied a high office in the SA and, after denazification, in West Germany’s judiciary . . . With a probability verging on certainty, I can claim to be pure Aryan, albeit not raised in the cult of Wotan. I was urged to fear God and love his sweet son—with a beard on the cross, and without a beard as dear baby Jesus. I speak four of the main European languages quite fluently, plus a few less important ones (for instance, Romanian and Yiddish) rather glibly. Not to mention my infamous talent for imitating any dialect in a highly entertaining fashion. I can sing songs from Hungarian, Romanian, and Greek operettas. My Balkan culture, which I sometimes even exploited professionally, was the true substance that I gave to my formative years in Vienna. Still and all, I have read around in seven literatures, I eat with a knife and fork, shave daily, suffer from the same tooth decay as Tintoretto, Blaise Pascal, and Oscar Wilde. I can’t simply be dismissed without further ado as a Levantine stranded in the West, some member of an auxiliary nation, like a Volhynian German resettled in the Reich, a type having as great a right to asylum here as a Tartar abandoned by Barnum’s International Show of Shows. I presume to be as much at home on this side of the Elbe as on the other. By no means—I don’t need to emphasize it—am I an American. I was, alas, not so consistent as you, Yankel Brodny. I did not become what our sort logically had to become after losing our other half. And yet fate would have it that I have to run around in Paris as a stranger, and, on the other hand, converse with you, J. G. the American, as if you were my brother Abel!

  I am, evolutionarily speaking, just as obstinate, just as behind the times, just as anachronistic as the French. And yet, dwelling among them here, I feel as if I’d been cast away among the lotus-eaters. Here, Jaykob Gee, here in Paris, here in the brightest jewel in the diadem of cities that once crowned Europe, here in the one true metropolis left in Yurop, here I remain a stranger, and I become more and more of one the more I recognize it as spirit of my spirit, form of my blood, the more intimately I find it within me, the more ingrown every pissed-on cornerstone and little pile of garbage is in me. Homeland—its scent of exhaust fumes and empty vegetable baskets, its dove-blue and lemon-yellow light, the pale salamander bellies of its scrubby plane trees, its murderous car races in the streets, its witty sky above the dragon scales of roofs along the Seine . . . Under this sky, sir, in whose moods and whims I am greeted again by all the promise of my childhood, all the delights I expected of the world, all the yearning of my adolescence, all the urgent eroticism of my youth—under the sky of my life’s other half, which I refuse to give up for lost—under this sky, I and everything around me become more and more abstract, more and more unreal, lose more and more density. As though the world were stretching out, spreading its material thin, flying apart in something like a universal molecular expansion. The things that were solid are starting to flow and the things that flowed are volatilizing in the ether. The boulevard Haussmann—a white stream, shoreless like the Rio de la Plata. The place de la Concorde—a Turner bay in which an obelisk is melting. Do you still consider this Paris, monsieur? Do you still believe this is Pearris, Freanss, a place in the core and heart of Yurop, our old quondam Europe? Geographically at least still on this continent, built on terra firma, and not an island floating in the unfathomable depths and distances of no-man’s-sea? . . . I, for my half-part, am no longer certain. I cannot gain a foothold here. I’m lost here just as mindlessly as the German drunkard Schwab. His plight is my plight. I have nothing over him. True, I have lost half of my life, it was amputated. But I am lying when I say I have forgotten it among the lotus-eaters. It is a lovely phrase that is meant to be touching, the opening phrase of a book that has never been completed. In fact, I have forgotten nothing of the flesh-and-blood reality of the world of yesterday. I still carry my Europe within me. But a decade slips in between its image then and its image today—ten years that I likewise cannot forget, that afflict me in nightmares and daytime visions, all kinds of brutalities amid fantastic light effects, all kinds of incomprehensible events, which—alas! alas!—also belonged to the all too warm-blooded living reality of the world of the past. For instance:

  Salzburg, November 1938. Sheets of rain.

  We have come to town from our cuckoo-clock cottage on the Mondsee. Stella is preparing to return to Romania. John, entrusted with mysterious diplomatic missions, has left us to our own devices all summer. We have weathered the Sudeten crisis and the spectacular Munich Agreement with complete tranquillity. We learned of them from illustrated gazettes in which the grocer wrapped the cheese and from the mailman’s political comments. (“You see? When they saw they couldn’t put one over on our Führer, they dropped the Czechs, those bastards, those lousy sonsabitches . . .”)

  World events reach us here in late echoes, thinned by the mountain air and soothed by the indolent ringing of cowbells and the humming of flies in the summer heat above the lakeside meadows. World history hangs over us as remote as the thunderstorms that arise daily between the glacier peaks, rumble a bit, and then are dissolved by a dazzling sun back into the sheer washed-out blue of the Alpine sky. But were that history to take place over us, with us, we would pay as little heed. We do not exist in the world of others but only for each other. We have no eyes for what is happening around us, we see only each other. We have no wants, no wishes except for each other . . .

  Nevertheless, Stella is wise enough to tell herself (and me) that our refuge from a reality that is gradually becoming ominous is due to John, and that it is advisable to follow John’s directions.

  These directions are very precise. In a letter from Warsaw (where he was transferred from Prague), John writes that it would be advantageous if Stella came to Bucharest. There it could be proved through my elective and nominal uncle Ferdinand (who had vanished from my life for twelve years) that I am a Romanian citizen. John feels it would not be advisable to come to Bucharest myself and take the matter in hand, for I would most likely be drafted on the spot. It would be better if I dealt in some other way with this irksome business—which can most likely be deferred but is unavoidable in the long run. I should approach it in such a manner as to leave myself elbow room later on. Uncle Ferdinand (who, incidentally, is delighted to hear from me), says John, will know how to settle this satisfactorily through his connections. In any case, given the circumstances, I would not be safer anywhere than as a friendly foreigner in Hitler’s Greater Germany, so I am to stay where I am: on an Austrian lake that now is part of Greater Germany. However, says John, Stella’s presence in Bucharest is imperative.

  This means separating from Stella for a certain time, probably an unendurable period for both of us. But for me it means definitively cutting the umbilical cord to my Viennese relatives. (Uncle Helmuth—in high dudgeon because of my relationship with a Jewess and, through her, naturally, with all sorts of foreign plutocrats—has already cited his rights and duties as a guardian several times.) Meanwhile, we have packed our bags.

  It is raining in Salzburg. We park the car at the Österreichischer Hof, where we plan to spend the night. There are almost no people about. I have trouble finding a porter at the hotel to carry our bags from t
he car. No one cares to show his face—and if he does so, then sullenly. Something is in the air.

  Stella asks for a newspaper. We learn about the murder of the German official vom Rath in Paris and about the spontaneous reaction of the German people, who have avenged themselves on Jewish stores, homes, and synagogues.

  On our way through town, we occasionally step on fragments of glass. The huge panes of a dress-shop window have been smashed. In the ruined display, a mannequin has been stood on its head, naked. Some wag has thrust a chicken-feather duster between the legs. An SA man, with a grim chin strap around his extortionist face, is guarding the artwork. His eyes follow us like those of a distrustful watchdog as we pass by so closely that we almost graze him. He gapes at the small blue-yellow-and-red Romanian flags in the buttonholes of our raincoats.

  We are expected for dinner at the home of Stella’s cousin, who has been living here for many years, married to an official in the provincial government. No one (least of all he) has any illusions that he will keep his job with a Jewish wife. She does not, incidentally, look at all Jewish. She has nothing of Stella’s thorough-bred looks; she is blond and rather plain. What makes her attractive is a fine touch of sorrow, mildly set off by diligent kindness and friendliness (“an incredibly dear dumb goose,” says Stella).