Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  I cannot escape him and his murmuring talk. He will follow me after breakfast when I stroll through the park, and the trees cover the tangerine-edged mother-of-pearl tones of the winter morning with the fine craquelure of frosted twigs and branches. He will have a servant help him into a fur coat that will enshroud him in otter from the ears to the ankles; the tremendous collar will prevent a heavy cap of the same otter skin from sliding over his eyes down to his nose. And he will walk along with me step for step and talk to me. He will accompany me when I take a shotgun and a couple of hounds and comb the river meadows for wild duck and hares. Why, he will even be at my side when I try to escape him on horseback: two stableboys will lift him into the saddle of an age-toughened, Roman-nosed hunter; his endless skinny legs with straightened locked knees will be rigid in the stirrups, and his globular spider body will still rise bolt upright on a steely spine. Clearly indifferent to the grim cold that brings tears to my eyes, he will stay at the right edge of my field of vision in the swiftly passing winter landscape. He will sway gently when walking his horse, seesaw up and down when trotting, and finally vibrate at a high frequency when galloping—and his voice will be unremittingly gentle, elegant, tenderly ironic, and casually conversational as it murmurs past my eardrum.

  There is nothing thematically or even chronologically coherent in what he has to tell me. His talk does not follow the laws of axial structure as in a crystal; it has no beginning and no foreseeable end. This is life immediately rendered, illogical at a longer, wider range, randomly experienced in a fusillade of impressions, arbitrarily plucked out, reproduced in mental leaps and fragments. Yet all these things make for a full world and for reality, so fascinating that I am soon spellbound. I find myself woven into them, more and more densely, and paralyzed by them. I keep thinking of the flies that Stella and I tossed into the cobwebs of an old lakeside bathhouse a year and a half ago (summer 1938) in the Salzkammergut, and the loving and tender care with which the fat garden spiders wrapped them in their threads until they were swaddled like mummies . . .

  Uncle Ferdinand reports on his Middle Kingdom even at lunch-time, when we eat a light repast of four courses and three wines, still in the bright breakfast room. But the age-palsied footman playing the maître d’hôtel here is already wearing his tails. (Is this the same man about whom my mother used to say, when talking about faraway Bessarabia to the amusement of the entire Côte d’Azur, that it was easier to squeeze him into his tails than to teach him not to appear in them barefoot?)

  And afterward, while we sip black coffee in the library, Uncle Ferdinand will open out the perspectives on what he told me during the morning. He will show me the albums, the photos of houses, yachts, hunts—the scenes where it all took place. We will contemplate various snapshots of the people involved and study their genealogy, their relatives in the Almanach de Gotha, in Burke’s, in the Libro d’Oro, their business connections in Who’s Who . . .

  I soon know the personnel of the Middle Kingdom by heart. After all, I’m well prepared: I recall many of the names from my childhood; I know the personalities, characteristics, spleens, likes and dislikes, vices and virtues, thanks to the social chitchat that I snapped up as a child and that was recently brought à la page again in conversations between John and Stella. Why, I even know some of these people; I can quite vividly recollect them; I used to call them by their first names, address them as “Uncle Bully” or “Uncle Agop.” Even if they only barely recognized me, they might still remember delightful Maud (my mother’s stage name, her real name being Ilse; but I am convinced that she plied her loose trade with sufficient artistry to have a certain right to a nom de plumeau).

  in short: I am predestined for the legacy that Uncle Ferdinand wishes to leave me. Not his name, his fortune, his position in the world, of course, but that which can remain of those things when all their earthliness has crumbled into dust that the wind carries away: the myth of his bon-vivant world.

  For simplicity’s sake, we also have tea in the library. The table is set with the same silver as it was in the days of my childhood. My mother loved the intricate and practical odds and ends: the toast racks and beehive-shaped honey pots, the hot-water-heated plates and bowls for pastries and canapés, the little silver muffin baskets. She was responsible for the English look of the tea table, while Russia and the Near East prevail in the huge samovar and the Sèvres porcelain fabricated pour l’Orient.

  Aside from the chintz sofas and Queen Anne furniture (which I presume replaced the rug-covered divans and Boulle consoles that, before her time, adorned a country estate in the realm of the Sublime Porte), I wonder whether her taste has left its mark on other things in and around Uncle Ferdinand, starting with his tweed jackets, going on to his not really Eastern European passion for ocean sailing, and ending with his liberal choice of friends.

  Incidentally, Uncle Ferdinand has an interesting cultural-historical explanation for the latter. He says, “We, the survivors of the cataclysm of the First World War, who were clever enough to amuse ourselves until the outbreak of this second one, have been accused of toppling the boundary stones of morality and opening our homes to people of questionable background and contestable reputation merely because they entertained us. By so doing, we supposedly undermined the foundations of society. But one can see this in a different light. Putzi Cottolenghi told me that when his grandfather was a young man, he called upon the Vicomtesse de Fegonzac in order to present himself to her. She was already eighty years old, and she received him with the words ‘Don’t you find, monsieur, that the nicest object on earth is a sturdy, erect penis?’ That was still in the best eighteenth-century style, aristocratic through and through. We tried to win back the same freedom after middle-class Victorianism had so dreadfully strangled any natural expression of rapport with life. Épater les bourgeois! was our motto. And today, no one is grateful to us for our efforts . . .” And, having become truly pensive, Uncle Ferdinand adds, “A society preserves its ethical landmarks by ruthlessly expelling anyone who dares to transgress them. He is henceforth cut by one and all. But how can you do that in an era when people have taken up the American custom of drinking cocktails before meals, so that before dinner is even served, everyone is so drunk that no one recognizes anyone, or everyone is ready to hurl his arms around the nearest perfect stranger? . . .”

  Uncle Ferdinand stares at me with his round, hazelnut-brown eyes nailed fast by the black pinheads of their pupils. His gaze does not plead for agreement; it is downright demanding. After all, he is presenting his Middle Kingdom not for my critique and analysis but as a costly gift, and despite the exposure of its internal dynamics, he is delivering it in its wholeness and unique givenness, as a happening, so to speak. I therefore abandon myself to the experience without offering resistance.

  I gaze at the happy-go-lucky rich of the blissful years of truce between the two world wars. Not only do I peer into their lives, backgrounds, pasts, into their brains, their nooks and crannies, their bank accounts, their businesses and business methods; I am soon initiated into their games, with their often intricate rules, including those games that are not played at polo grounds, tennis courts, golf courses, or roulette and baccarat tables. I know the internal structure of this easygoing world of players, even the view from within this world to the world outside. (For instance, the geography that is a phenomenon of “seasons.” “There are,” says Uncle Ferdinand, “people whom you see on the Riviera in spring and then in London for the season, and afterward, of course, for grouse-shooting in Scotland in August. And in between, there are others whom you see in Biarritz or on the Lido or sailing in the Aegean or in Scandinavia—it all depends on whether someone prefers the sun or the rough sea. And then again, you see others in Deauville for polo or in Merano for the races, or at the autumn hunting in the Ardennes and in Hungary and God knows where else. And others in Egypt during the winter or for skiing in the Engadine. Yes, and then there are people whom you see all year long and everywhere—your frie
nds, in short, the ones who really count . . .”)

  I am also familiarized with the secrets of those spherical hierarchies: the innermost circles from which the closer and farther circles of friends radiate, intersecting and intertwining with the closer and farther circles of other inner circles—I know them all as intimately as if I belonged to each circle right at the center and nucleus . . .

  of course, I know them so intimately only from hearsay, albeit very thorough hearsay. After all, John and Stella talk about them constantly, naming, mentioning, quoting someone or other whose renown and guaranteed wealth plus no doubt quite reliably similar outlook on the world and on life would place him, as a matter of course, in some system of rings of friends in the Middle Kingdom (the manner in which they are named, mentioned, quoted, hints at differences in rank and degrees of intimacy down to the finest nuance) . . .

  and this could mean that even John and Stella, incessantly and almost against their will, at any rate without the slightest intention, are weaving away at the myth of the Middle Kingdom—John and Stella, the independent ones, the completely unconcerned ones, without the slightest social ambition, who demonstrated ironic indulgence, at best, toward the conspiratorial innermost circle of Uncle Ferdinand’s playboy world, and who do their assiduous best to avoid other, more rigorously closed systems of circles of friends of the upper ten thousand (for instance, with very few exceptions, the North German aristocracy)—even John and Stella, I say, did their bit in weaving away at the myth . . . and I can’t believe they did this only because their wealth, background, and education automatically made them part of the cosmos of these rich, renowned, and influential people and sent them wandering like nomads through the closer and farther circles of their world within the world.

  20

  This makes me pensive, and I have the leisure to brood about it when I am permitted to retire for three quarters of an hour before dinner in order to bathe and change.

  A guest of this reality, which seems more and more unreal (hostile armies are deploying behind each of the inner circles of Uncle Ferdinand’s Middle Kingdom), I lie in the huge, old-fashioned tub in the middle of the bright, cheery, spacious room that my mother fixed up as a bathroom for me. In the fourteen years of my exile from the world of wealth, I never tired of describing it in detail to my cousin Wolfgang, because it was so utterly different from the damp, narrow hole in the wall, smelling of detergent, with its cold tiles and dripping, half-rusted water pipes, in the dark Viennese apartment where we bleakly vegetated through our dreary days (together with Cousin Wolfgang’s parents, my foster parents—Uncle Helmuth and Aunt Hertha—as well as Aunt Selma, my real foster mother). There, the bathroom was a place in which those tasks necessary for physical hygiene and regarded as important in one’s general philosophy of life had to be performed behind locked doors as an embarrassing necessity to be discharged quickly and prudishly. Here, it was an almost sensuously cozy room filled with comforts that pointed more to play and dawdling than to harsh cleansing, and you left as if you had just stepped out of a bandbox, with an aura of fragrant freshness, whereas there you came out steaming and scrubbed red but tired and tending to sweat. Chattering with Cousin Wolfgang, I gushed on about my childhood bathroom in Bessarabia. I was no less enthusiastic about it than about the park “in the faraway Balkan land,” as Uncle Helmuth called it, sarcastically. I described the sumptuous delights of that bathroom: the huge, prewarmed bath towels, in which one could wrap oneself from head to toe; the gigantic sponges, feather light and crunchingly brittle when dry, heavily dripping when soaked in water; the fragrant soaps and pungently prickling colognes . . . but this, of course, elicited merely a disparaging shrug from Cousin Wolfgang, who was above such mollycoddling and used the toilet as a study where he could be relatively undisturbed.

  Nevertheless, while cozily soaping my limbs in the perfumed water here, I cannot but be moved at the thought of my Viennese relatives. I think of the prophetic threats that Uncle Helmuth uttered—to Aunt Hertha’s and Aunt Selma’s chorus-like approval and even the tacit agreement of Cousin Wolfgang (who by now has, alas, perished as a hero)—ranting on against “plutocrats”: those corrupt, degenerate exploiters of the have-nots, among whom he also counted John and Stella; those devils who pulled me back, despite all my enlightened upbringing with its sound views and true values, into the debauched world where my mother had gone astray and given birth to me, a fatherless child, and where, when she soon perished justly and shamefully, I would have been callously left to starve had not they, my Viennese relatives, taken me in.

  In fact, there was little to say about this other than that it was correct. But it would never have induced me to hate that admittedly vile but nonetheless bright, cheery, spacious world of the rich, whose bathrooms I yearningly recalled, or to love the hard, confused, detergent-smelling uprightness of the benefactors forced upon me. Nor did it stop me from observing that Uncle Helmuth’s upward tantrums, against the plutocrats, were no more violent than his downward ones, against the proletarians, and that we, the educated have-not bourgeoisie, were hated from below, in the concierge lodges and back courtyard pens of our apartment house, as much as Uncle Helmuth hated the society people still putting on a show of aristocracy, the “snobs,” as he wrongly called them.

  In this respect too I disappointed if not betrayed my foster parents. If they assumed that I, the bastard who had popped into their home from the taboo world of the rich, would become at least an ally in their even more violent dislike of the back courtyard proletarians, then their hope was lamentably misplaced. Aunt Hertha lamented this frequently and bitterly. How could she have known that Miss Fern had cautioned me to stay discreetly aloof from the “simple people” because I might otherwise embarrass them, and that these constant admonitions had aroused my burning curiosity to get to know these susceptible, hence obviously extremely sensitive people, get to know them as soon and as well as possible and find out what there was about me that could make them lose their composure, perhaps even assure them that there was no real cause for their response. Now that no visible social barriers separated me from them, I had the best chance to do so. So much childlike naiveté was bound to be beyond Aunt Hertha. And of course she could not know that the gray-faced men with collarless shirts, the haggard women in aprons, the snot-nosed children from the bedbug caves in the apartment house to which I was now exiled, were paradoxically the only people who had any sort of connection to my past life. Aside from the princely households of my mother’s friends and patrons, I had known only such humble people. They were far more familiar to me, far more of a homeland, than the almost equally limited, equally gray-faced, grouchy but demanding and overpowering philistines with their baroque moral code and their egotism, who, arrogating the right to control my thoughts, feelings, and actions, styled themselves my benefactors and exacted gratitude from me.

  I needn’t bother saying that my actual attempts at openly approaching the people merely unleashed a fusillade of insults and vile imprecations. One of the mothers whose children I ventured to speak to pounced on me because their screams made her think I was trying to attack them. Furiously she grabbed my hand, yanked me up the stairs, and delivered me at our apartment door to Aunt Selma, paralyzed by such an affront to her, a lady. The mother poured out a verbal torrent, and since my German was lacking in those days and the barked-out Viennese dialect rendered it all the more unintelligible, I could only just make out that my relatives were well advised to keep this piss-elegant young dandy under control, otherwise there was no guaranteeing my safety.

  Two or three years later, I did manage to break through after all. This happened in the course of a friendship I quickly formed at school with a boy who, to Cousin Wolfgang’s endless and scornful delight, was the son of a trolley conductor and lived, not far from us, in the rear building of another tenement. By now I recollect very little about this friend; I can barely remember his face. I recall only that his features darkened sadly when Cousin Wolfgang, wh
o, as a gymnasium student, also despised us for attending the much less highbrow real-schule, shouted after us, “Next stop Wieden, transfer to the Circle Line, please don’t push, keep the aisle clear! . . .” But I will never forget a summer Sunday that I was permitted to spend with the trolley conductor’s family in a suburban garden near Mödling: a day of Maupassant-like nostalgia and enchantment, woven entirely of trivial things, with a picnic on the grass, during which the father’s undershirt and the mother’s stockings, rolled up under her fat knees, did not arouse any feelings of social repulsion. Rather, they made me forget about the bad clothes I had to wear after outgrowing the Little Lord Fauntleroy outfit I had arrived with from Bessarabia. We had a hearty sip of wine with our sausages and munched green apples from a tree and did airy gymnastics on a shed the roof of which Father Trolley Conductor had nailed down with fresh tarpaper. We spent hours fishing for tadpoles in a small brook and then drank a delicious glass of clotted milk in the evening, while Mother Trolley Conductor hollowed out a pumpkin for us, cutting eyes, a nose, and an enormous, toothy mouth, so that we could stick a candle inside and frighten the neighborhood children. First, however, to my great delight, Father Trolley Conductor gave an artistic performance. He placed the candle in front of the wall, and his hands created the most entertaining shadow pictures: barking dog heads and ear-wriggling bunnies and similar delightful things.