Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  They were our natural enemies, Nagel’s and mine, as it struck me at the time, and they hated us as profoundly as we hated them. It was a time of promise, in which (as Nagel was later to write) “we readied ourselves for the adventure of renewal,” and they turned it into a workaday grayness, which ultimately nipped our confidence in the bud. We lived in the frivolity of the saints, like the lilies of the field—for “whatever one may say about the ludicrous weakness of the human spirit when confronted with the relentless conditions of nature, that weakness does give us the strength to transcend our plight, even if only temporarily and with fictions” (Nagel) . . .

  So, we lived like the lilies of the field, Nagel and I, and they, the flatfooted race, heaped shit over our loveliest blossoms. For us they were what they had been for Uncle Helmuth: the wicked OTHERS. They spoiled the dreams of the dreamers, the fictive happiness of the enraptured. Even before, when they had been so well housed and sated that the fat on the backs of their necks burst their rubber collars, they had lived shabby, workaday lives, and they would go on like that once they were sated and well housed again. Even now, with their world shattered, they did not face what had happened as a challenge. They took everything as a stroke of fate, which for better or worse had to be weathered with heads bowed. Whatever was to come—even if it wasn’t worse but, unexpectedly, better—theirs would be the same maggot’s existence in the same roll of neck fat. They could not picture, hence could not bring about, anything better. Unlike us, they lived without the Easter promise, lived instead with the tenacity of termites, which was far superior to our childlike-fantasy ways. For them, the future was not a sublime vision, its rays transfiguring even the gray present, but something they trudged toward; it could bring them at best a more sated, more corpulent, more stably housed, although equally dismal present—and yet still they were certain it was theirs, no matter whether the terrors lurking in it were the same old terrors or even worse.

  Incidentally, I do not know where we overexcited windbags, we visionaries around Nagel—or rather around the homemade turnip schnapps in Nagel’s garden flat—got the idea that we’d been given a mission. We truly believed we were meant to find the solution to any conflict, plight, evil, stroke of fate in human existence (we called them “problems”). We played ourselves up as if we and no one else had to find the key to the future of Germany and thereby, per Major General Baron von Neunteuffel, to the destiny of the entire world. We searched for the “spiritual foundations of a new humanity,” even before Professor Hertzog supplied us with this rousing formulation. Meanwhile, the other race, Christa and her ilk, concerned themselves with the rationing stamps for a special allocation of barley. They did not think beyond the next day, but, petty, sullen, and tenacious, they spared no effort to ensure that the next day would at least be no worse than today. We dreamers and windbags viewed this narrow-minded scorn of the spirit as a danger for the day after tomorrow. But while we were talking about how to stave off that danger, they kept puttering and pottering on in their obligatory dreariness, creating the foundations for their world—and the day after tomorrow was then as empty of hope as today and tomorrow.

  Thus time passed. Time passed over all of us, utterly sovereign. It didn’t give a whit about our conflicts, our different opinions and ways of life. Time did the only thing it is supposed to do: it passed, and made everything that lived in it pass as well. As usual, it did not do so in a steady series of developments but was seemingly inconsistent, leaping unexpectedly, tarrying whimsically now and then, sometimes even taking a step backward after two steps forward, as in a dancing procession, and eluded precise observation as it whizzed along.

  In those postwar Ice Age years, time seemed to have made up its mind to tarry, and whether a man brooded dully on his hunger or drew from it the fanatical fire to blather on about the spiritual foundations for a festive day after tomorrow, the harsh time lost nothing of its grimness. Whether we lived through a morose daily round of petty, sullen, and tenacious efforts or in the Easter expectation of a new humanity, we all lived in an odd state of waiting. Even the most hopeless gray faces in the Quonset huts, for whom tracking down potatoes was a fairy tale and gleaning coals on railroad embankments a quixotic quest—even they were waiting for something, whatever it might be, good or bad. We all were waiting just outside reality, waiting as if we weren’t really living but were being lived by someone or something—or better yet: dreamed of by something or someone, nightmarishly dreamed of by some mysterious “it”: destiny or divine providence or whatever one might call it, or merely a collective spirit that shaped the era—in any case, something from somewhere outside of us and our realm of perception.

  And all the while, time was dribbling away from us without our noticing it. We breathed out our existence, day in day out, and the days, objectively speaking, truly were gray and grim and cold and clammy, like the watery puddles in the bomb craters, whose dead surfaces shuddered and raised goose bumps under the raindrops during the so-called mild seasons and, during the biting icy winters of those legendary years, froze into blind eyes that gaped sightlessly into the stony sky over the city ruins.

  And all the while I loved Christa. I loved her body, even though she let me have it only as if it weren’t worth the trouble to refuse me. She developed a new habit: no sooner did I slip into bed with her than she would raise her arms to her face, her right hand clutching her left shoulder and her left hand her right shoulder, so that her elbows stood before her mouth like two bastions in the wall of a fortress: she did not want to be kissed by me anymore. A kiss demands emotional connection or, conventionally, presumes it. This, as she would have put it, was “not in the cards anymore.” But I was allowed to luxuriate all I liked in her full breasts and further downward. It wasn’t even worth the trouble for her to deny her senses an involuntary participation in my passion, and she permitted herself an occasional thrill, sometimes even the churning up of an outright orgasm; thus my nightly masturbation with my spouse often achieved a perfection that almost amounted to a true act of love.

  But afterwards, of course, there was a certain emptiness which after a while made me turn spiteful. It seemed like the most sublime kind of castration, the way she made me so acutely aware of how abstract the role of us men is in a process that, presumably, constitutes the only, or at least the quintessential, meaning and purpose of our existence: the preservation of life by means of the preservation of the species. In zoology, of course, this is known as mating—what mockery! It is actually the separation of Homo sapiens into two utterly different species. The fruit that our first parents picked in the Garden of Eden gave them the knowledge of their separation into two total strangers. In the moment of utmost bliss, Christa was as remote from me as Saturn. She let me know what tremendous spaces I was trying to bridge with my ridiculous striving for spiritual union.

  Very well: I learned my lesson. Soon—we hadn’t been married for a year—I scarcely dared approach her, lest I alarm her with my warmth, annoy her with my tenderness, my need for some token of her affection, understanding, indulgence, some small gesture that would let me feel that I was more to her than merely the man whose task it was to ensure her physical well-being, to which end after all it was not entirely insignificant that I had something dangling between my legs that relieved the occasional itch between hers more effectively than her own middle finger or the candles of her teenage years.

  It could hardly be denied that, as a provider, I was a nothing. As for my ability to ensure the rest of her well-being, I soon no longer even dared wonder about it. One way or another: I was put in my place. My ego shrank to the measure of what I was biologically: a seed carrier, a drone, nothing more. It struck me as presumptuous on my part to have any other claims and to seek any but a purely physical union with a daughter of the Great Mother, a world-bearer, able to resurrect mankind from within her body—to reduce, inside her belly, millions of years of protozoan-to-primate development to three-quarters of a solar revolution, to mold
a human being perfect in all faculties of body, mind, and soul, and to release him into life, letting him become Messalina or Saint Cecilia or Adolf Hitler or Jesus Christ or anything in between.

  My goodness, what a difference in realities! How unreal, in contrast, was our male contribution to this extension and continuation of the world, of life! . . . How meager, what a wretched crumb from the table: a few angry minutes of dark sweet pleasure, a few moments of effacement, of cramped discharge, while, in several ejaculatory thrusts, that wonderful, for us ever-incomprehensible, ever-mysterious, essential, actual something took place—beyond our awareness, snuffed out in a few instants of blissful near-death, in the dazzling of utterly sweetened pain . . . and then basta, finito, done! Well, that was that again, thanks a lot, don’t worry about the rest, ci penso io, dottò . . .

  After that, our hunger for reality ought to be comprehensible: the insatiable hunger for immediate realization, for tangible proof that we men, too, are real, that we, too, can achieve reality, actuality, with our own actions—

  “. . . but you can,” said Christa, with her sapphire-blue, round, childlike eyes. “All you have to do is go and find a little wood to chop.”

  “Saw, sweetheart, saw! You’re misquoting. The original goes: ‘Men saw wood—one pulls, the other pushes, but they’re both doing the same work; by decreasing, they increase.’ Granted, a rather silly image from the Corpus Hippocrates for the identity of creation and disintegration. But what can you do: statements about the archai can’t be worded in rational terms, because they are ir-rational and prim-ordial; such statements can only be figurative, isn’t that so? . . . But I for my part would like to take part in creation, and in a less destructive way than I am allowed by this so illustrative image, do you understand me? I do not care to limit myself to the male work of destruction in order to contribute to creation. At the risk of sounding like a screaming queen, I’ll say it loud and clear: I would like to give birth. Freud gave you women dick envy to explain your inconsistencies. Allow us men to envy your uterus. I do not wish to have to reinvent, reconstruct reality in order to experience it: I want it to be immediate . . .”

  It was love’s labor lost. She understood every word, but not the meaning of what I was saying; she simply thought I was crazy. And I must admit, those were muddled thoughts I was voicing—voicing in my way, furthermore, which was an intellectual patchwork, figuratively speaking, stitched together from age-old commonplaces; I am almost ashamed to be writing this down now.

  Meanwhile, indulge me: That was not yet a time like today when people can draw ready-to-use intellectual material from paperbacks and cultural radio and television programs. We were troglodytes. Those who—like myself, like Nagel and our buddies around the bottle of turnip schnapps in Nagel’s garden flat (later, the nuclear group around Professor Hertzog; I shall give a detailed account of this elsewhere)—those, I say, like us, from the juiciest generation of cannon fodder for WWII, whose best years of learning and education were suddenly interrupted by that historic event and who were left behind with the always insatiable hunger of the half-educated and the autodidactic—such people, in their poignant attempts to analyze the spiritual bases for yesterday’s catastrophe in order to destroy the seed of evil and perhaps eliminate it from the spiritual foundation of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, felt like pioneers and rubble-rummagers and refuse-recyclers. We continued to feel the naive need to explain everything ex ovo—even age-old commonplaces and platitudes—to ourselves as well as everyone else. For not only had the commonplaces and platitudes become extremely questionable but also we could no longer count on understanding them without an ex ovo explanation—or on being understood when we did explain them. We were troglodytes and lived among troglodytes—not like the spoiled youth of today, in an environment that obtains its well-founded knowledge and reliable intellectual depth in oversize paperbacks and educational TV channels with all the paraphernalia of prefaces, fore-words, and introductions, notes, addenda, and bibliographical data (home delivery free of charge). Far off still lay the present day, in which the satisfied highway rest stop person might, figuratively speaking, transpose the elegant atmosphere of the champagne advertisement into cerebral experience and—in fashionable comfort, aristocratically leaning back in his plastic-bolster sofa, clutching a beer can, listening to the cultivated voice of a moderator—mentally follow the most exciting philosophical paper chase (forgive the shallow metaphor; it forces itself on me!) with a cheerful Husserl, behind the pack of yapping Jasperses, cross-country over Heidegger and Wittgenstein; for him, the sovereign self-servicer in all other situations of life except for the unacknowledged intellectual situation, our lederhosen-boy-scout ponderings in the prehistorical year of 1947 must seem like a quaint folksong.

  But, as I have said, time only appeared to be stagnating in those days. What lay ahead moved one hour closer to us with every revolution of the clock’s hand. Of course, the star of Bethlehem was in the winter sky of 1946–47—thanks to a need, intensified by the lack of real bread, for the “bread one doth not eat.” But as the winter of 1947–48 drew to a close, one could tell that this bread had no hope of keeping up in the race with the bread one doth eat, as soon as this last appeared in sufficient quantities and thickly stacked with cold cuts. Soon the black market was running smoothly, new democratic parties were a reality, the press and the publishing world were flourishing, and instead of the star of Bethlehem the star of Astra Films had risen over Hamburg. The interregnum of the Quonset-hut intellectuals ended without anyone’s noticing.

  Only a very few, who were fervently seized with the spirit, as if they were making amends for something—a remnant of the nuclear group around Professor Hertzog and, needless to say, the psychopomp himself—kept on, although now they had company pension plans; they were working in radio or in the new magazines, newspapers, publishing houses; intellectual subhumans like your humble servant wound up in the movie business. Only the uniquely bold and intellectually pure, like Nagel, raised the lance of the free intellectual creator and ran boldly henceforth against the windmills churning for future highway rest stop people.

  And in keeping with this pregnant age, all my lamentable attempts to explain myself to Christa were doomed. To be sure, I tried with what I thought was a great deal of tender care. After all, I loved Christa: I took her in my arms and cradled her like a child. At times, I even thought of interpreting our disturbed or, rather, never properly established relationship not only philosophically, as a symptom of the zeitgeist, but also as a personal failure on my part, admitting that although my stoic attitude toward the general situation in the rubble landscape might be to my credit, it left those who had bound their destiny to mine rather on their own, and that this might have contributed to the misery that had developed in our love relationship, which Christa too had originally seen as promising the realization of certain atavistic ideals and expectations: a lifetime alliance of deep mutual affection, kindness, understanding, of unconditional belonging and security, of appeasement in and with each other, hence, a harmonious home, a sunny bearing-and-breeding place for happy offspring, the nuclear cell and fundamental element of future society, a freer, happier, more just, more humane society. . .

  I was speaking not only to Christa but also to our child within her, to our future in her body, which had swollen up with that future, turning white like a fat maggot, but which I loved nevertheless and would always love, even though my love soon threatened to become incestuous—“You’re molesting a child, and your own flesh and blood at that,” she said, but she let me be, so long as I didn’t try to get pushy, emotionally speaking, and urge her into anything more than lazily letting me be. My God, there was even a certain kindness in it, in her swinish, lethargic letting me be, and maybe all my blathering on was actually the cause . . .

  she probably didn’t think it annoying at all, my blathering—as I stammered into her flaxen hair, pathetically wanting help, a blather zooming into flimsy universals, preposter
ous metaphysics, verbal gruel of spiritual distress; as I held her in my arms, warming and protecting her—I, who was writhing in pain, I who was flayed, I who had nothing to hold on to, the ground gone from beneath me . . . I held her protectively, cradled her, with my arms crossed over her belly and my hands placed gently on her heavy breasts, cradled her and her child within her and in this child myself . . . and she didn’t think it was annoying at all, she let my splashing verbal gruel trickle down her; phlegmatic by nature and nourished with nothing more fortifying than turnip juice, she endured my monologues with the same dull equanimity with which the Germans, believers in the spirit, listened into the ether to hear the hissing and honking of educational radio broadcasts or read the Cassandra-like articles promising disaster in the feuilleton, as if all these things were part of the background noise of everyday life, like the clapping wheel of a brookside mill where one has grown up and still lives or, on a more contemporary level, like the traffic din in city streets before a few carefully laid carpet bombs brought silence. Since she left the lower reaches of her body to me, together with the supply of oxytocin occasionally flowing, upon certain stimulations, into the muscle fibers of her uterus, it no longer mattered if I also profited from the patience of her eardrums in the upper reaches—

  and I spoke and said (said the same thing over and over, in all sorts of verbal combinations, spoke of the same thing incessantly): “You know, darling, you’ve got to understand me when I tell you that your only duty as my wife and beloved is to keep allowing me to experience afresh that I am a man—only please, don’t let me experience it to the point of despair. I want to be your man, for you! More than anything, I want to be your man! I am proud to be your man—but I am afraid of the curse of being a man. I am afraid of being made all too conscious of my utterly male condemnation to unreality, to invention, to feigned reality, to the reality of fictions: in short, to the creation of the world as an as-if. I’m completely in your hands. It’s up to you whether I experience myself as a real man: strong, courageous, reliable, above all: overwhelmingly erotic, irresistibly virile . . . I have to believe this, even if I know it’s not actually true: I have to think it, in order not to doubt myself when I go about my man’s work of reinventing and rebuilding the world. I need faith in it, in order to endure the fact that even as the strongest, most courageous, most reliable, most manly man, I am nevertheless merely a manikin of life, a tiny means to an end, a tool. I must delude myself, in order to pretend that I do not have what I am now holding in my arms: the life-reality in you with our child in your belly. I share in that life-reality only in the unconscious moment when you and, inside you, the Great Cosmic Mother Nature use me as a tool—an indispensable tool in the process of creating life, for the moment, but still of secondary necessity. . . I as such am abstract and with no true reality. . . can you follow me? Can you understand how important it is for me to be strengthened in my self-confidence by your love, your longing, your trust? . . . Granted, I cannot be denied as a part of the world, as a tool in the tremendous process of creating and perishing; but as a tool, I naturally view the world as a workpiece, something that must be worked on, altered, and re-created by myself. Created on my terms—for you, for all of you: for us and our children. It is my intrinsically male mission to work on the world as if it had an order. Unordered Nature at all times threatens us with annihilation. We cannot exist in chaos; we must oppose it with the as-if of an order. To deck out Nature with the fictions that enable us to exist in it—that is men’s work. But it is work that must be done in the security of absolute self-confidence. We sleepwalk across the chasms of insight into our true nothingness, into our fission-fungus role in the events of life: splitting reality into truth and fictions, we deceive ourselves about it with our fragile visions and illusions; but the least appeal can terrifyingly rouse us out of our life-delusion, and we then plunge into despair; we then find our reality and realization only in destruction, because destruction too is a reshaping, a reinventing of the world: an enactment of our own transience, only not abstract, not merely feigned, but undeniably real, at last . . . Do you understand, my darling?”