Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  I toast her. The stuff she’s told me so far is small talk, so to speak. But the last sentence establishes a personal relationship. I desire her intensely. I suggest going to the sofa again. Any time, she says, without batting an eye; naturally, I have to pay for the second time just as for the first. “Even after the bottle of cognac?” I protest. Even after the bottle of cognac, she replies, unruffled. “But you’ll have most of it left.” Not even jokes can soften her heart. I shell out the bills on the table, and she instantly rises, pulling her sweater up over her head and the velvet hotpants down.

  During the year we were friendly (until the birth of Christa’s and my son, when a fit of philistine morality persuaded me to break off these friendly, intimate relations with a brothel whore: after all, our son was a born Hamburger; his respectability was paramount)—during that full year granted to us by our cheerfully carefree, often exuberantly fun, always stimulating, high-spirited friendship, I never once succeeded in sleeping with her without first paying the set fee. No matter what I did to try to change her mind—cunning, tenderness, violence, surprise—she was adamant, as if she would be violating an oath by giving herself just once without payment, and as if it would bring the entire structure of her goals and plans crashing about her ears. . .

  and I insisted on it stubbornly, obsessively, as if my fate hinged on a victory over her, over her implacable refusal—my entire fate, the realization or failure not only of my personality but of all my goals and plans . . .

  for it was then, during the early weeks of my tempestuously erupting friendship with Gisela the whore (the Ice Age was clamping down one last time, and the teeth of the winter of 1947 cracked and splintered: I can recall sudden puffs of soft spring wind wafting unexpectedly through the days)—it was then that it happened, that I left something behind in her room, the copy of my treatment for a big movie project at Astra Art Films, commissioned by my primordial piglets Stoffel and Associates; and one of her clients, the then rather small-scale but later big-time publisher Scherping, found the manuscript and read it and excitedly passed it on to his editor J. S., ordering him to track down its author immediately, so that this genius, evidently as yet undiscovered for belles lettres and hence lying fallow, might instantly write a book (to wit, about wartime experiences, which I did not have, to be sure, but which were dealt with in the film treatment) and thus give mankind the masterpiece of the era, the great novel of the waning century. . .

  and how we laughed at this, my accomplice, the whore Gisela, and I! How amused we were when she first described Scherping to me, with his quaint bonhomie and transparent slyness, his yokelish cunning when he got her to impose and inflict punishments on him, as if he himself had not invented the reason for them, had not begged to be punished (for Gisela now specialized in discipline, and word of that sort of thing gets around quickly in the appropriate circles) . . . our bliss when she told me about his blubbering (“If only just once I could be beaten, whipped, tormented for something I really had done”—for Nagel’s best sellers, for instance) . . .

  and Schwab, Scherping’s emissary, striding through the red-light district “like a blind seer,” head thrown back, fish-blue eyes looking neither to the right nor to the left, pride in his high thinker’s brow, humility about the mouth twisted in disgust, slippery desire in the soft, moist flesh of his twitching lips. Later he would become my friend and fellow sufferer in literary limbo, Johannes Schwab, whose mighty appearance I did not tire of describing. (Oh, but during those last months of the Ice Age, he was as Reichsmark-lean as anyone else: truly, it was a slender nation of Germans in the year 1947!) Schwab, I say, with his large, clumsy frame and ungainly Martin Luther head, with the wind of culture blowing in his luxuriant (still flaxen) hair, his Coke-bottle eyeglasses and ill-fitting baggy-seated tweed suit. He was such a model of the world’s idea of a German intellectual that when he first appeared in Whores’ Alley, the cry “Herr Professor!” leaped from window to window along the entire street, from one thickly reddened whore’s mouth to the next . . .

  and one of the girls, lovely Heli, still young and warmhearted as freshly baked bread, trustingly dedicated to the foolish faith that the world contains a God-willed, occasionally disturbed, but always gloriously restored order, in which a small, well-to-do portion of mankind, better instructed in the spoken, written, and printed word, is, in moral terms, superior to the larger, poorer, less educated portion and determines which among the lower born it will raise to its level—lovely Heli fell hopelessly in love with Schwab: the “educated man,” happily able to read and write . . .

  (what a blessing: to be loved by a whore, who submits to anyone, whom anyone uses unhesitatingly, and to be loved by her because of your superior dealings with language, which is similarly a whore, whom everyone (aside from a chosen few) uses unhesitatingly; to be loved by her unreservedly, giving herself with all the power and powerlessness of feeling, beyond the never wholly dissolved remnant of hatred and disgust that lurks in every love, beyond the struggle between the sexes, a battle never waged to the point of purification . . . how greatly I envied him, Johannes Schwab, the Scherping Publishers editor, sent to me with the evil angelic tidings of literary conception, and how often and how excitedly we spoke of it, Gisela and I . . .)

  for what we had—no: it couldn’t be called love. It would never have occurred to us, Gisela and me, to call it that. Mutual attraction, affection, great liking—yes: all that. But not the mawkishness of love. Not its moistening need for tenderness. No suffering whatsoever at the withdrawal of that tenderness. No urging and shaking and quaking to find entry into the soul of the other (who doesn’t even know what you’re talking about). No metaphysics, but all the brisker, all the more pleasurable copulation: the fixed advance payment eliminated any possibility of misunderstanding even here; it was sexual intercourse without dross or sediment, an art form with itself as its own subject, so to speak, not “it means” but “it is.”

  No: it was not love, thank goodness, that made Gisela a pure joy for me (and perhaps me for her), more cherished in memory than some of my great passions. We were quite in control of our well-tempered, well-balanced, well-wishing and -meaning emotions. Between our brain glands and our reproductive glands (both delightfully animated), our metabolisms functioned perfectly: no increased blood pressure because of spiritual exuberance, no diaphragm flickering from psychic interference with our calm metabolic rhythms. Our mutual affection was as cool and deep as a well, and we didn’t even try to wage the battle of the sexes; we confronted each other in an armed-to-the-teeth armistice in which sex did not interfere but ran conflict-free on the ball bearings of financial arrangement, ruffled neither by the transcendent nor certainly by the transcendental.

  So we were also spared the torments of jealousy; our friendship was purged of this mire. Moreover, the idea that she slept with other men or helped them to achieve pleasure in a different way (always pasteurized by financial arrangement) did not deflate my ego; instead, it inflated and expanded my experience, for the ones she found worth mentioning were not lovers glued to her by the mucous filaments of sentiment but interesting cases of sexual psychology.

  (Cousin Wolfgang, taking the volume of Krafft-Ebing from my hand and thoughtfully weighing it, says: “For me, dear cousin, this is nothing but the grossest obscenity,” and I, quoting my favorite verse from Romeo and Juliet, “Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptiz’d . . .” )

  sometimes those lovers were authors of felicitous linguistic creations, which we preserved like objects found on a stroll along the beach, seashells and colored pebbles (the dockworker, a heavy man, who as he ejaculated cried out, “Trials and tribulations!” or the retired cavalry officer expressing his delight at the fullness of her breasts with the words “If a flea galloped over those things, it would split a hoof!”)

  and the endless fun of wandering through Hamburg in quest of adventure. It was summer (it seemed like the first summer in decades), and the miracle of the currency cut ha
d taken place, the shops were beginning to fill up; production was not yet going full blast, spewing out junk, like today, so there was still prewar merchandise from secret warehouses, handmade things, “one-hundred-percent” genuine; and she went shopping with me. She had astonishing amounts of money and she spent it judiciously on top-drawer, durable goods chosen to last: leather coats, fine furs, handmade shoes, silk stockings (not by the dozen but by the gross), cosmetics by the carload, jewelry (completely flawless one-carat diamonds); she paid cash for everything and was treated like a princess—

  and the shock, the terror, the stupid confusion in the eyes of a salesman or store manager who recognized her, who might have been her customer the day before; the inner struggle in the decent, law-abiding citizen, for whom business interests won out to the exclusion of all else . . .

  We rented a car, and I taught her how to drive. We motored deep into the Holstein countryside and the Lüneburg Heath, fetched up at rustic inns, lay under firs in the sandy grass (yes, indeed; even when I was overcome by libidinous stirrings there, I had to pay in advance), hiked barefoot through the silt of Baltic beaches, danced at farmers’ festivals and on the casino terrace in Timmendorf—

  and the incessant awareness in our conversations, in our laughter, in our delightful mutual silence, in our thoughts of one another when we were apart—the heart-lifting awareness of an extraordinarily sovereign, utterly unassailable situation

  (“What can happen to me now?” she used to say. “Disease, death—fine, that’s nature. But otherwise? So what if the Russians come. I’ll receive them like anyone else. With champagne, if they want it—and pay me for it.”)

  the ether-clear awareness of living at the extreme boundary of existence, on the razor’s edge, in perfect freedom—this intoxicated us like a drug.

  I was giving her a driving lesson along a country road, and we stopped at the entrance to the highway, where I was to take the wheel. It was late afternoon, and she had to return “to work.” We had had fun and were in a good mood. We liked the open car; she wanted to buy one just like it—if she ever needed a car. Before changing seats, we smoked a cigarette. With her head tilted back, so that her full hair dropped over the back of the seat, she blew the smoke into the air. “You once told me that if ever I got fed up and didn’t want to work in a whorehouse anymore, I ought to tell you, and you would try to get me an editing job in the movies. I’ve done a lot of thinking about what I would really like to do; I’ve thought about what would be fun and what would be sensible. You know what it is? I’d like to have my own brothel.”

  •

  Happy days before the Fall of Man; before I was stricken with the passion for writing. Happy days in the Eden of immediately lived reality, of firsthand experiences that were real, even if these concrete experiences were merely a threadbare pretext for the more powerful abstractedness behind them. Days of innocence, before the vice of writing abstracted even the abstractness into material that could be experienced at second and third hand: into book-page reality, in which the pseudologic of art forges the infinitely multidimensional logic of nature into the theatrical metal of arbitrary, confected artifice. God-affirmed days, in which the world still fell into the self like a summer morning through a window, not mirrored out of the self as a multiply broken reflection of self, a spectacle making its own producer and lead actor and sole subject, performer and stage all at once and all in one: the world and the self were identical to the point of loss of the world, worldlessness of the totally isolated self lost to itself beyond measure . . .

  •

  I loved Christa then.

  I loved her even though our marriage had become as bleak, as dreary, as hopeless as the ice-gray diurnal life in the rubble fields around us—which for me, however, for Nagel and our kind, and even for that fussy man Schwab, was a constant adventure, a frontier existence in a no-man’s-land to which we could lay claim, a deeper and deeper daily penetration into a state of unconditionality, which seemed precious to us because in its desert emptiness, open to all winds, it was full of possibility, hence full of promise, an undaunted Promised Land that we would build into a new Garden of Eden once we had fully reconnoitered it, once its borders were established and the claims were staked . . . but for others, of course, for Christa and her kind, it was damnation in limbo, an everlasting routine of poverty, joyless, colorless, with the ever same nagging necessities and miserable chores, a trudging on the treadmill of hopelessness, merely to deal with the same lamentable troubles and the same woeful needs.

  It certainly saddened me that I had to count Christa among those others—the poor by nature, so entangled in their woeful needs and lamentable troubles, so doomed to the wretched daily routine that, as Nagel was to write later in one of his best sellers, “They could not brace their spirits for a festive tomorrow . . .” Nagel, the flatfooted poet! Christa appreciated him for that, had to admire him for his wonderful verbal power; it was part of her cleaving to workaday routine that she loved craftmanship; it was the only thing that took her out of it, the poor thing . . .

  Sometimes I was overcome with a hot wave of pity when I saw the despair in her eyes—in the radiant aquamarine of her childlike eyes!—because, of the four pounds of potatoes she had managed to scrounge somewhere, three pounds had been frozen and were half-rotten, or because the fuel for our alcohol burner was used up, or because the wall of the room we lived in at the bisected villa on the Elbchaussee was sporting a new crack, and dampness was seeping through. Granted, things like that can be awful, but looking closer they didn’t seem so bad; almost everything was ruined anyway; we could just as easily have laughed about it, especially since I knew that Christa would waste no time routing me out of a wonderful conversation with Nagel (precisely at the point when our spirits were “ardently bracing themselves for a festive tomorrow,” of course, a tomorrow that would be hers too, after all!) in order to get more potatoes or fuel, never mind where or how; or, ruthlessly stubborn, demand that I do something about the damp wall; remove the crate of ludicrously useless slipcovers and damask curtains from her family’s home in East Prussia—treasures that some fool of a fleeing relative had rescued from a fire and proudly dragged west—and replace it with my books and watch them molder.

  “If you could at least make something pretty from these pieces—an evening gown, for instance . . .”

  “An evening gown?”

  “Well, okay—some clever housedress . . .”

  “A housedress? To wear in this creaky dump? I’m already freezing to death in ski pants and a sailor’s sweater.”

  “Then throw the junk away!”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it! Somebody will take the slipcovers in exchange for beans, peas, turnips, cabbage . . .”

  Ah, no, my pity never lasted long, even though it had been the origin of my love for her: the sudden yearning and understanding of human weakness and humility in a fellow creature and spontaneous identification with it, the physical commiseration of my tenderness when I had seen her chewing and swallowing the American Army chow in the canteen for German witnesses and defense attorneys at the court in Nuremberg—chewing and swallowing with a dedication that was so totally, so unconditionally, so definitively and finally only physical as to leave not a sliver of space for any lofty inner life, for the mind or soul, for the enjoyment of the “bread one doth not eat.”

  In Nuremberg the sight had moved me to tears, as I’ve said. I felt I was watching the basic truth of the condition humaine. The dreadful existential plight and exposure, the heartrending destitution, of the zoological species Homo sapiens, everything this naked and exposed creature undertakes beyond coping with the immediate existential necessities of finding food and shelter, mating, raising offspring, all its grotesque spiritual leaping into the metaphysical realm together with the proliferating madness of its artistry and intellectuality—all these things seemed futile and therefore poignant.

  Such an insight (I had discussed it with Christa often enough!) shou
ld have brought us together all the more humbly. It should have made us love and protect each other in this state of exposure, aid and assist each other as much as we could. At those times, people truly met at point zero, as the term goes; thus they could have easily laid down arms, formed an alliance, jointly confronted an existence under spiteful conditions. But precisely because we were—albeit only legally—joined in matrimony, the knowledge remained one-sided and hence ineffective. Right after the passage from bridehood into matrimony, that is, right after the legalized transformation of favors into actionable duties, Christa saw me no longer as a fellow traveller through the earthly vale of tears but simply as the archenemy of women, a failure on all fronts, a man who with others of his kind had started a war and shamefully lost it; and now, in this devastation, instead of putting a decent roof over our heads, he was nattering on about a beautiful future—and, to make matters worse, had gotten her pregnant, thereby adding one more extortionate, helpless mouth to the existing hungry ones.

  Nevertheless, I loved her very much. Only I saw, alas, that I could not count on her as I could count on, say, Nagel. I could not count on the same understanding, at least. It should be said that not only was she of that order of women who on principle try to tie us down to accursed earthliness, she was of a different race entirely: despite her good background, she was one of the poor in blood, the gray-faced, rummaging through the rubble fields, looking for the remnants of their property, instead of being delighted to be rid of it and able to begin a new, unencumbered existence. I had no sympathy with these people, though day in day out they were a vivid reminder of the condition humaine. They did not rebel against it. To use a literary expression that does not come from Nagel, they ate the flour even after they themselves were put through the mill. Rather than react with sovereign scorn towards the tremendous injustice of life, they strained and made the harness all the tighter; they moaned under the lashes of real and imaginary ordeals, but put their heads in the yoke.