Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  The husband is the prototype of the former Austro-Hungarian civil servant, the son of a privy councilor, the grandson of a department head, a man of jittery, almost servile politesse behind which he absentmindedly thinks of something completely different. He is dry and yet no doubt profoundly sentimental, much more intelligent, much quicker, and also wittier than he cares to seem, likewise much more reserved and arrogant. (Stella says, “At first glance a milksop, but at second glance he’s full of surprises.”)

  They both adore Stella and treat her like a princess who occasionally deigns to step down to them from her grand world. They emphasize their modest provincialism with an insistence that is not without a certain irony, especially since their allegation so sharply contradicts the discreet refinement of their household, the exquisite food, which is limited to the most traditional dishes of the Viennese cuisine, the collection of choice and lovely peasant furniture and other folk art in their home, and their extraordinary musicality and knowledge of literature.

  They have cooked up an explanation for my constantly being with Stella and whisper it to anyone who might be surprised at my hanging around her. They say that I am probably John’s son; in any case, he was more than just close to my late mother. Of course, they do not hide the truth from themselves about the nature of my relationship with Stella and about the circumstance that John could not have been the only candidate for my beautiful mother’s favor and thus for the possibility of fathering me—indeed, he would have to share his candidacy with a good dozen other gentlemen of his age group and financial position (including, last but not least, “Uncle” Ferdinand). However, Stella’s kinfolk merely require an alibi to be as kind, as amiable, and as overpolite to me as to anyone whom convention does not force them to reject.

  The maid opening the door for us, a middle-aged rustic innocent who has served them for a long time, is visibly abashed and embarrassed. When Stella asks after her health, she is taciturn, though she normally melts under Stella’s sumptuous gratuities. To our astonishment, we find the parlor filled with people. A slightly awkward circle has formed; from its center, at our entrance, a count towers up. The bearer of a grand name closely identified with the most glorious defeats of the Austro-Hungarian army, he is the host’s childhood friend and classmate from the Theresianium. He too admires Stella and has known John for ages. His handshake is warm. He is wonderfully elegant in his folk-costume suit, gigantic in his corpulence. An antediluvian breed of man.

  We are introduced to the others. To judge by their names, noses, and accents, they are all undeniably Jewish. Berlin Jews, rich ones, who fled to Salzburg before the Anschluss and are now trapped here. One exception is an extremely dapper, crisply stylish man in his mid-forties who must have come to Austria from Lemberg or Kecskemét. The host and hostess let on that these are not expected guests; the events of the previous night have brought together people who are more or less strangers, a sort of catacomb community.

  The events are discussed in great detail, and the count is of the opinion that such outrageous vandalism would not have occurred without the annexation of Austria’s much fiercer anti-Semitism to that of Germany. When contradicted, he heatedly insists upon his view, as though defending a privilege that may be taken away from Austria, which has already been shamefully pruned and now even incorporated into a despised Germany. But soon he lapses into silence, intimidated and visibly disgruntled, as the Berliners inundate him with a torrent of horrifying examples of pure-German cruelty, launching into a sort of contest as to who can come up with the most fearful atrocities. The elegant room, decorated with Alpine art objects, fills up with dreadful tableaux of gorilla-like SA men putting out their cigarettes on naked female breasts (“and such lousy brands too!” quips the Kecskemét dandy, who can barely stay in his chair, he’s so eager to get a word in). They forget about His Lordship. This is private shop talk. We three Gentiles—the count, the host, and I—are soon excluded from the animated conversation about hair-raising cruelties. To be sure, it is not so easy to picture them in their full terrifying measure: the people who are narrating them (and who are also identifying with the victims) are physically intact, indeed obviously mindful of their bodily well-being; they are well groomed, luxuriously nourished, expensively dressed. It would take a very active imagination to visualize them cowering under riding-crop lashes in latrine ditches or kicked into bloody mush under boot heels. The host (quite reserved anyhow) occasionally ventures to ask, “Did this happen to you personally?” Or, “Did you witness it?” And each time, he is put in his place by an indignant retort in Berlinese: “Oh God no, but these are the facts mister, everybody back home knows all about it!”

  Altogether, there is too much putting-in-place and impatient one-upmanship in this colorful Berlin speech, with its delicate undertone of Semitic singsong. These trapped émigrés are cultivating it with some verve, and eventually it becomes unbearable for Austrian ears. The increasingly irritated silence of the Aryans would have long since warned more keenly perceptive urbanites that a regrettable and perilous trade-off is in the making: namely, that a virtually physical repugnance toward anything Prussian is creating an alibi for a perhaps suppressed but no less ingrained hatred of anything Jewish. Stella is the only one who appears to sense this. She remains sovereignly neutral; and wherever she can, she mellows the fervor, which lets justified indignation degenerate all too often into tongue-lashing. She has skillful objections and intelligent arguments ready, but she makes no headway against the passionately concentrated Berlin snottiness and certainly not against the obnoxious wittiness of the élégant from Lemberg or Kecskemét.

  He is a lawyer, he claims, and sees things as a professional who has given up wasting even one iota of his intellect on the perversions of justice committed by a horde of savages (he calls them “Hitler’s brown mob”). “So what d’you want, anyway?” he yiddles spiritedly. “When dey let the goyim go after us poor Jews, it’s alvays de same thing, I tell you. Whether it’s de Inqvisition in de thirteent’ century—” “The fourteenth,” the count corrects him. “I’m talking about the Spanish Inqvisition, but t’ank you anyway,” the snappy dresser from Kecskemét parries. “Didn’t it go on from around 1230 till 1834? A good six hundred years, if you please—even if it wasn’t always against us Jews—de killers also went at each other’s troats. And in our enlightened twentieth century, it’s exactly the very same thing. De goyim like their blood, they relish it. So should we tear our hair out thinking whether things are a little smidgen less just here or a little crueler there than for de past two thousand years? I ask you.”

  He, by the way, is the only one here who is personally acquainted with the Nazi authorities’ rigorous methods. He was arrested right after the Anschluss and held in custody until recently. His experiences have left him—to the general amusement—with a wealth of anecdotes, which he tells very wittily, leaving open the question of whether one should be enraged at the stupidity and inventive cruelty of the examining judges, guards, and attendants or follow his example in taking the whole thing stoically and ironically, as an absurd nightmare.

  “Yet still and all, you were examined by judges?” the host throws in ambiguously. But the breezy lawyer crows proudly, amid universal jubilation, “What do you want from me, I’m no political prisoner, I’m a criminal!”

  One of the women from Berlin leaps up and kisses him spontaneously: “Darling, you’re wonderful! You I love!”

  This is the signal for the count to rise (his head almost bangs against the ceiling) and to beg the hostess (who is suddenly very embarrassed) to please excuse him: he must, alas, go on to a late meeting. “But we were expecting you to stay for dinner,” she pleads helplessly, looking at her husband. But she gets no support from him, instead is tersely informed, “I suppose Max must have misunderstood. In any case, his meeting is more important.”

  The host reaps a thankful glance from the count, who now tremendously and corpulently bows over Stella’s hand. With an emphatic amiab
ility that excludes her from the others, he says, “I am inconsolable, my dear. I was so looking forward to seeing you. Please give my very best to dear John. And let’s get together very, very soon!”

  Pirouetting with elephantine grace, he spirals up from the hand kiss, managing as he twists to bid goodnight to the others with a gesture of apology, as though to indicate that his size prevents him, in this constricted space, from making an individual farewell to each person without greatly inconveniencing everyone else. Now, having turned his back to them, he leaves, throwing his tremendous arm around the narrow shoulders of the host, who sees him out of the room. We hear their muffled speech behind the door and their occasional bitter mirth.

  The hostess desperately tries to catch Stella’s eye, but Stella is gazing absently into space. The Berliners too have lapsed into dull silence, and not even the breezy lawyer from Kecskemét has a quip at hand to dissipate the general embarrassment. This awkward tension is further heightened when the returning host, instead of rejoining the group, peers rather ostentatiously at his watch and then goes into the next room to switch on the radio for the eight o’clock news.

  But this exposes a pugnacious streak in the hostess. With a candor that almost makes her pretty, she declares that she was expecting only a few guests—namely, the count, Stella, and me—for supper. But if the others would be satisfied with something improvised, then they’d all be welcome. However, she says, she has to ask them to pitch in and help because her maid gave notice this morning—she need hardly explain why.

  Her suggestion is accepted with enthusiasm all around. Everyone goes into the kitchen, where the Lemberger or Kecskeméter and the Berlin woman who declared her love for him prove to be proficient and inventive amateur chefs and have soon put us all to work. The atmosphere becomes downright boisterous, especially since the host, an old-time Austrian, is incapable of rudeness under any circumstances. Making the best of a bad situation, he serves an excellent Veltliner wine—but he turns away in disgust when one of the belatedly invited guests calls it “swell booze.”

  In the dining room, the table is quickly set for twelve instead of five, and naturally we do without being placed—everyone sits where he likes. The meal has the relaxed mood of one eaten in an Alpine hut, which leads some of the Berliners to shed their coarse Salzburg loden jackets, to which they are obviously unaccustomed. The wine connoisseur talks away at the host, who is seated rather far down the table; he assures him that there are two things he finds charming about Austrians, whom he does not exactly hold in high esteem otherwise: the Viennese Heurige and the informal, natural ways of Alpine inhabitants, especially the Salzburgers and Tyrolians; he can’t quite get along with Styrians and Carinthians. The host listens with the expression of a man suffering from a toothache. He also winces each time his Berlin neighbors bang a piece of cold meat or a dollop of potato salad onto his plate, telling him he’s too skinny.

  The meal drags on; more wine is brought. The Kecskeméter picks his teeth as his appraising eyes pass over the baroque treasures of the dining room. And needless to say, the general conversation soon swings back to current events. The focus is no longer the persecution of Jews but rather the figure of the archvillain and quintessential enemy of mankind: Adolf Hitler. One of the Berliners, dispossessed of his huge department store on the west side of Berlin (“I managed to scram in the nick of time—and now they’ve caught up with me here”), draws a disastrous picture of the German economy, a catastrophic situation that he blames solely on the stupid, obstinate, amateurish interference of the Führer (he calls him “Gröfaz,” a traditionally Jewish-sounding portmanteau of “Größter Führer aller Zeiten”): “Let’s not kid ourselves: German thrift, German industry, German organization would make the economy work even with this top-heavy rearmament, if that swollen-headed Austrian peasant didn’t stick his nose into everything . . .” Then comes example upon example.

  Similarly, the foreign-policy problems of the Third Reich are harshly criticized. No one makes any illusions whatsoever that the peace just saved by the Munich Agreement is anything but a delay of the moment when the “Gröfaz” will feel like starting his war. And finally, they get down to the personal and the private. They cite psychological data about the character of Adolf Hitler, speculate about his relationship to his parents and about his abnormal sex life. The woman who kissed the Kecskeméter claims that the Führer is a sadomasochist: he gets his satisfaction by finding some pure, blond female, scantily clad in velvety deerskin, and forcing her to confess that she wants to sleep with him; he then insults her in the most disgusting way and drives her out.

  The hostess cannot refrain from saying, with an uneasy sigh, “What a dreadful man!” And oddly enough, it is this relatively tame comment that sends the host into an unbridled rage. Beside himself, trembling and foaming as if in an epileptic fit, banging his fists on the table, making the glasses and plates jump, he screams in a hoarse, breaking voice, “I won’t tolerate this any longer! I won’t allow such remarks made about this man in my home! This man is loved and honored by millions of people! He has restored human dignity to millions of people!” He shakes his fist at his wife. “To me this man is a saint, do you hear me? A saint! . . .”

  Bessarabia, winter 1940.

  This is an early winter of the Ice Age, which began one day in March 1938 and will last in two phases for the next ten years to come, until summer 1948.

  The world is still full of beauty, albeit frozen. A blue-white-and-gold world. The deep-blue Romanian sky is as spotless as the snowy land beneath. There must be a powerfully shining sun, but I cannot place it in my memory. Its light is everywhere, dazzling from the great white waves of the swaying fields and from the twist in the river valley, from the furry hoar on twigs and boughs and on the crooked snowed-in fences of the village, where the house walls of old, weathered wood glow like gray silk under the snowy burden of the roofs—a light like molten brass and so cold as to be brittle and seem fragile.

  I am a soldier: I am serving my country with a weapon in my fist, as the national rhetoric puts it. We have ridden out on a drill, have stuffed newspapers under our greatcoats and into our boots, and still we writhe in the biting cold. Nevertheless, our spirits are almost recklessly high. We are serving our people rather comfortably. We play at being soldiers, whilst elsewhere the war has long since become deadly serious. We too are armed to the teeth and have live ammunition in our pouches, but we are not yet confronted with an enemy to measure ourselves against. We know that our Fatherland is threatened on many sides—and most directly here in Bessarabia. But this is cant, just as our willingness to defend the Homeland with weapons in our fists is still nothing but cant and posturing.

  We enjoy the sublimity of this cant, the nimbus of heroism it adorns us with. But even more, we enjoy our rough youth and, unconsciously, our blessed anonymity in the collective. In our uniforms we are Lieutenant Jonescu or Volunteer Popescu or Private First Class Petrescu only for the sake of functional differentiation. In reality, we are all young men doing military service with no responsibilities except toward certain cant. Serving in this way, however, we are sons of the people.

  They creep from their huts, these people, swarming to greet us, bringing tzuika—mild, oily plum brandy—and delicately rancid cakes: a people smelling rancid in their sheepskins, with deeply notched peasant faces, children peeping timidly from behind their mothers’ aprons, silver-haired old men, trembling, dribbling, with broken voices, and here and there the cherry-dark eyes of a girl, the double humps of firm breasts under an embroidered blouse . . . We have dismounted and are chatting with the people, who have their hands in the sleeves of their sheepskins and are stamping from one foot to the other in this awful cold. War? Yes, soon there will be war here too. Those fellows over there, across the Dniester, don’t want us to keep this good land. But we’ll show them that it’s our land, our Romanian earth. We, the sons of the people, will defend this soil with weapons in our fists . . . The cant comes trippin
gly over my lips, well drilled. I am so proud, so moved, so delighted to be a son of a people—whose language I hardly ever speak, whom I hardly know, whom I have hardly ever seen or experienced except in such a folkloristic genre picture as this one here: costumed farm laborers with backs crooked from bending over furrows and before all kinds of masters, servile people with friendly grins, people sprung directly from their soil, with hair like grass, with skin like bark, with hands like tree roots—and young girls plump as cherries.

  And we among them in our uniforms and helmets, warriors hung with sabers, lances, and carbines, with our hoary, steambreathing horses—it all looks like an opera set. The music is supplied by the dogs. There must be hundreds, to judge by the din. They are barking their lungs out. They are yanking so hard at their chains that they turn over in midair. They snap blindly, furiously, into the blue winter sky, drooling, foaming . . .

  until someone finally notices that this raging is aimed not only at us and our horses. The dogs are pulling in another direction . . .

  whence a boy comes running and screams, “Lupu! Lupu!”

  He claims he’s spotted a wolf.

  This causes the genre picture to break into dramatic motion. All the men dash toward the end of the village where the boy came from. All the women scatter like chickens and chase their children to yank them into the huts. All these people are screaming as if impaled.

  It being our duty to defend the Homeland against all enemies, with weapons in our fists, we have, needless to say, raced ahead of everyone else. Right behind the last of the handful of huts, we sight the wolf.

  It could also be a very run-down dog—after all, it is quite improbable that a wolf would show itself so close to a settlement in broad daylight. But there is no time for such reflections now. We have already torn our carbines from our backs; rifle shots are already lashing the air, swirling up tiny fountains of snow around the “wolf ”—I catch myself firing bullet after bullet without really aiming, much less hitting the mark.