Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  “and I knew I wouldn’t find it, because I was isolated from the others and I hated them. Always and everywhere, I found only the past, life already lived, striking me as livelier than present-day life. Cultural refuse. Testifying to a history that had become fiction. I sought Paradise and found that I had lost it. Eventually, I gave up running through the city and I went only to museums. Hence the bit of culture that I can display.”

  •

  Chatting thus with my dead friend, I had soon covered the distance to Kehl and driven across the Rhine—once again Germany’s border, not its river, as a couple of disagreeable nightwatch policemen and customs inspectors, of the “We’re not really like this, we’re just doing our jobs” sort, so vividly forced me to realize. I left Strasbourg and its cathedral tower rammed like a thorn in the flesh of the night as it veered to my right in the blackness behind the blue-tinged halos of arc lamps; then I once again slit open the wind-blasted nightland with the beams of my headlights.

  By the time I neared Reims, the gaze of the Munich girl had bored so deep into me that I sprang a leak. I yearned for human contact.

  I had driven into a rainstorm. The windshield wipers cut two tiny shiny segments out of the night, now interwoven with silver threads of rain that shot through the headlights and scattered on the hood. Watery veils enshrouded me. Beyond the roadside trees, whose branches rattled against the darkness, the landscape tossed and turned in a nightmare. Every clod of earth here was fertilized with the bone meal of two nations.

  Claustrophobia overwhelmed me in my bathysphere. I wanted to feel people around me. Even if it were just through a warmly lit windowpane or through the brittle wall of artificial non-acknowledgement that diners in a restaurant raise against other diners. And so I turned off toward Reims, toward the halo over the city where the city’s heart seemed to glow white as in a crucible.

  But it was a cold heart. Obliquely illuminated by spotlights fixed on the surrounding houses, the cathedral stood cadaverously mute in the deserted square, wanly scattering the reflection of its charnel-house yellow into the darkness behind the shivers of rain, which had now become misty and fine. I knew a hotel somewhere close by—the one where I had once spent the night with Schwab—but I also wanted to stretch my legs after several hours of hard driving. So I parked the car, took out the essentials for overnight, locked up, and walked across the square—

  and above me floated a great angel, smiling blindly into the night.

  The city was dead, except for a group of three men and two women about to climb into a car at the end of a line parked along the curb. One of the men was unlocking the car door; one of the women wore a hat that recalled the style of the 1920s; its narrow brim cast a shadow over her eyes; the nose and lips underneath were well shaped. Walking past, I tried to drill my gaze into her eyes, but they were undiscernible beneath the shadow, which lay upon them like a domino mask. She turned away, saying, “. . . et si tu penses qu’ils te font payer trente mille balles pour une nuit, tandis que dans le Midi tu as une très belle chambre pour quinze mille maximum . . .” (Beloved! And together we could’ve counted up the stars! . . .)

  In the hotel, which reeked of wine, like an old barrel, from basement to roof (the restaurant was already closed), I took a room, fell into bed, and dropped off instantly.

  •

  I awoke from my dream at dawn. As usual when it had taunted me, I lay paralyzed for a while until its images drifted away, one after the other. Having sucked their fill of my marrow, they slipped back into the unwatched world whence they had crept up. What lay here now was like a negative of myself: it bared black teeth at me from between white lips. I had devoured the ashes of my confidence in life. For a fragment of the instant that shattered on the threshold between dreaming and awakening (when I realized with holy terror that I had dreamed the truth and had indeed truly killed someone), I was—without illusion or delusion, without guile or ruse—myself. I was, in an innocent, childlike way, ME. But with the next splinter of this instant, my certainty (and ME with it) was already dissolving, and what was left of my dream was merely an echo and eventually merely the memory of an echo, like the empty after-feeling of pleasure following a night of love. And I was again what I usually am: an echo of the SELF that I had been at some time or other (a time untraceably lost in oblivion, and perhaps even then only an instant).

  I wasn’t awake yet, merely on the verge—that is to say, exchanging the immediate for the mediate, exchanging lived reality for words. The more consciously I awoke, the more verbal I became. Images were replaced by vocabulary. What I—my SELF—had been waned. The remaining vacuum filled up with the gruel of the effable. Filled up and became the bit player who, each morning, under my name, tackled the daily existence of a forty-nine-year-old with literary ambitions:

  —in the daily betrayal of the genius in us, who is at home in the fable world of dreams: where fish have voices to speak to us, and flowers eyes to look at us, and where we, passionately open like listening children, experience ourselves in inconceivable anxiety and bliss, suffocating because of nameless guilt or fleeing from unnameable threats, rooted in the ground and turned to stone, or lightly floating over smiling lands and domed cities . . . and unamazed, because all wonders are natural here: the immaculate conception is taken for granted, as is the resurrection of the body after death; of all possibilities (which are realities gravid with the miracle of life here), only one never fully comes true: falsehood, because, encapsulated in itself like a glass vessel, it is always transparent as illusion, always appears as itself, simply as falsehood—until, in my awakening, the images are replaced by words, which force us into grammar and thereby back into time: where, in the unceasing decay of the present into the never-again of the past and the not-yet of the future, we become victims of a self-imposed illusion, an abstract reality that we have created and in which we soon yield, even with our souls, to the necessities enjoined upon our bodies—

  and thus, pedestrians instead of flyers, girded with cant, hiking boots laced with locutions, and knapsacks full of commonplaces, we march, supposedly rational, towards our lightless destiny—

  The night’s poetic expression. But I was soon awake. The reality of October 12th was ready to receive me as though it were the first day of Creation.

  I surprised this day when it was still embryonic. The light still had something of the sap-milk of buds. The night had not entirely defoliated; its colors had not yet fully emerged and its contours were only just becoming firm. But day’s capsule was already breaking open. The objects around me celebrated their rebirth into the visible. Over the small, worn carpet in front of the bed, the lightly flowing sunshine of a French autumn day poured more and more amply, insinuating a shadow into the sérail motifs of the pattern, the shadow of an obscenely bent chair leg in Louis Philippe style, the chestnut-brown wood absorbing the rays and letting them blaze up on its embossments.

  This, and the tenacious smell of wine, which the sharp air, penetrating through the open window, could not completely drive out from the discolored crimson rep of the curtain, sufficed to place me immediately in the here and now and to conjure up the things around me: the well-worn plush-cushion luxury of the provincial hotel room, the bright street with the two rows of (now leafless) lindens from which the first sounds of car engines would soon come, the cozy old town behind them, laced tighter and tighter in the corset of iron-concrete construction (hence shorter and shorter of breath), the still vast and broadly rolling, now autumnally fire-red wine-grape-land in which it lay. . . and above all this, the hard dome of a sky that grew more and more spiritual the closer I came to Paris—

  Paris, damn it, Schwab! . . .

  and instead of putting up with this as if my dream had merely changed its theme and motive (once, ages ago, this was how I had known how to live: effortlessly gliding from the reality of dreams into the unreality of days), I now frantically tried to hold on to the terror of my dream in order to wrest from it the key to the incompreh
ensibility of my waking existence, and in so doing, I plunged more and more hopelessly into the vortex of the verbal; I transformed image substances into notions, which instantly hijacked those images from their magical realm into logical connections, in which they lost all meaning; I got tangled up in word structures that shredded conscious experience into temporal and spatial processes; I used the polished and prepared surgical kit of concepts (murder, disgrace, conscience) to shoo away the reflections of what I had felt and with which it had provoked the echo of meaning.

  Thus I lay awhile, immobile, enfeebled, and discouraged, still throbbing from an assault by deep fright against the center of my essence—and I was already mentally wandering again down side streets and dead ends, after myself—

  I thought, for instance, Just what am I? Am I what just now so dreadfully afflicted me in my dreams? This caricature of Raskolnikov: the craven murderer who kills an old crone because she sees through his baseness? Or am I in reality not that . . . not completely at least . . . or but then again am I what is lying here and thinking about itself? The body, which is self-familiar to me with its needs and urges, its gradually commencing disintegration (which makes me love it all the more tenderly), the brain—this clown!—whose monkeyshines and escapades, conjuring tricks and acrobatic feats, I know so well, no willing, reliable, systematic worker like Cousin Wolfgang—like you, dear Schwab!—but a skillful climber of smooth walls, a nimble jumper, a good, swift diver, a fearless reconnoiterer and fabulously cunning thief? . . .

  Naturally, I am both the one and the other and all this at once; and, beyond this, a wealth of other possibilities that could take form in certain situations . . . But whatever I may be, it can be uttered, it is articulable: it congeals as something shapable—

  except for an ineffable remnant, which is really I—my SELF.

  and now I ask: how much textual material does it take to select any one of the human possibilities and present it in words, clear-cut and unmistakable?

  It is obvious that the tens of thousands of words in a language allow for an infinitude of combinations, enough to revive even the very finest nuance of a human existence. The great literature of the world has proven it without a doubt. So it is better to ask: How little does it take? If we focus on the gospels individually, we can see that each is barely the length of a brochure. Hence, for young Werther, an almost luxurious extravagance was deployed. Yet King Lear, for example: he’s there in just a few dozen lines. And besides: who wants to go that high? For a normal case, all we need is a brief excerpt from Lao Tzu, and editorials, Art Buchwald, Bambi, and a biblical verse . . . What am I saying! All it takes is simply the utterance of a name or simply and plainly the little word I . . .

  •

  Thus I lay there and was soon reconstituted from chatter with myself into that which I really am.

  •

  Besides, now the day arrived in earnest. I had to go to Paris. I got out of bed and went over to the washstand to look at my face in the mirror above it. The more thoroughly I nailed down my stare, the more vacant my face became. I was able to confirm that my eyes are an intense blue (I have been told so repeatedly, and I ought to resign myself to sharing my outstanding physiognomic feature with popular depictions of the Mater Dolorosa and the Hitler Youth). But despite utmost concentration, nothing else about myself came to mind. The scouting trip through clefts and fissures left by life in my epidermis proved as abstract and fruitless as a theoretical promenade along the footpaths shown on a landscape relief map in a spa pavilion. If absolutely necessary, this man could be expected to kill, to murder, but the likelihood was neither revealed by a special sign nor excluded. I soon gave up on myself and began to shave.

  The day was as bright as it had promised to be. The sidewalk glistened metallically with rainwater that had not yet evaporated, and oval drops glittered on the roofs and hoods of parked cars. The cathedral looked like an art-historical disabled veteran that Professor Sauerbruch had patched together from several disabled veterans. I went to my car and unlocked it—

  and above me floated a great angel, smiling a Mona Lisa smile into the autumnal sky blue.

  During the drive to Paris, I examined my dream systematically. Earlier, whenever that nightmare had ambushed me, such efforts had proved fruitless, and this was the case again. The images could be summoned, but not the terror. I know the sequence by heart. I can run it forward and backward like a film at the editing table and linger on any detail: It is always the same giant office building, with empty corridors leading to empty hive cells, and elevators whose empty cages float up and down like bubbles in slowly boiling test tubes. Somewhere high up under the roof and deep in the basement, they change their minds and directions, rattling and rumbling through cyclopean cogwheel innards. The risen ones now sink downward, the sunken ones rise up again, and so on for all eternity: even in my dreams, I’m a shabby symbolist. It is night. I have let myself be locked in, unnoticed by the building guards, and I am lying in wait for the cleaning woman. She is gray and worn out with slaving, an old woman. I can picture her body: worm-eaten flesh hanging in four skin pouches from the leather-covered skeleton; two of the pouches dangle in front, on the monkey bars of her rib cage, two in back under the primeval pelvic bone-butterfly—a beggar costume of a body, as in medieval danses macabres. She covers it with slovenly oldcrone clothing: coarse, urine-stained underwear beneath strata of sweat-yellowed smocks and aprons whose color has been leached out by laundry water and caustic detergents. All this fills me with violent disgust. Nausea chokes me. But I wait for her, smiling. It is a murderer’s smile, sharpened like a pencil . . . And while I try to lure her to the basement under some flimsy pretext, I realize that she sees through me. She knows what I am planning to do to her. Knows that I want to silence her. Knows that I know that she was the witness to an unspeakable baseness, and that I am going to murder her for that reason.

  She knows then what will happen when she steps across the threshold to the cellar into which I force her. By entering, she is the one who lures me to my crime.

  So she wants to convict me: I still haven’t revealed my intention and yet I am already in her hands.

  Panic seizes me: only now does my vileness become manifest and grow in enormity. . .

  I hold a coal shovel in my fist. It bears dreadful witness against me; I see it in her eyes, see myself in her eyes. By showing me myself, like a mirror, she forces me to admit to what I am. I have to murder her because I am a murderer.

  I lift the shovel. I could put it down again, I could pretend I was indulging in a gross practical joke—but her eyes are relentless, they shriek out my condemnation. If I let her escape now, then I’ll be done for. The first stroke hits her across the skull and smears her gray oldcrone hair with brains and teeth, but does not snuff out her eyes. Now no amends can be made. Now she will merely testify the more dreadfully against me . . . I smash away at her in an impotent chaos of shame and pleasure and disgust. The more surely her bones break and her abominable and atrocious flesh becomes one with the tatters of her clothes, the more irrevocably I become one with myself; the more terrible is the truth that she has recognized in me . . .

  And here my horror bursts through the dream. I know that I am just dreaming all this—and when I flee into awakening, I am attacked by recognition: I know that this once really happened.

  And I have thereby lost it. Only its echo resounds in me.

  •

  I drove through one of those blue-and-gold autumn days that make us believe that the world of children’s picture books still exists. That we are capable of restoring this world. Somewhere in the countryside, where the high trees are reflected in a small pond at the edge of the fields, beyond which distant mountains stand blue, and where we shall all settle someday when we have had success in life and the condition of our coronary arteries has not yet forced us to live near a hospital: in some village that has remained as true to nature as possible, and that the influx of movie people and hit songwrit
ers has preserved from violation by modern barbarity and refurbished with rustic authenticity . . . where the world shall once again be as it was in our childhood, though autumnally mellowed, wisely purged, days following one another as full and pure as the vesper bell tolling. Days of the harvest of life, in which the plain and simple things are gathered in, the things we take for granted. In the morning, the rooster on his command hill of dung greets the sun with the saber blade of his crowing, the barnyard dog stretches with a wagging tail, the ducks quack their way to the pond with wiggling asses. Noon light dapples the fieldstone pavement under the lime trees by the barn, the windowpanes reflect the rusty foliage of the walnut tree in the blue of the sky with its cumulus cloudlets, and the silvery threads of Indian summer drift over the fields. Behind the violet of the faraway mountain range, the evening kindles a cold glow, over which the bell of heaven tolls sootily. The lime trees swish, the cows moo in the byre, the farmhand leads Farmer Brown’s horse to the blacksmith—

  Whose cock was all rectangular,

  But love showed him a guile.

  He stuck it in a vise to file

  It smooth into a cylinder.

  That is the goal of our hard labor. This beckons as a reward for an upright life of crookedness—it already beckons to me; I feel I can grasp it. A movie starring Nadine Carrier could not possibly fail. A movie that has not bombed is bound to pull the next one after it. So: three solid scripts for Madame Carrier (if possible with a percentage of the gross), and everything would be hunky-dory. You can get a small farm in cider country: very easy what with the rural exodus; they’re a dime a dozen. And all my sins would be forgiven. There’d be a house for my son, and he could say, “This is our house.” Maybe Christa would come back to us. The old woman of my dreams would be killed off and all the dead would stay dead. I’d finally have peace and quiet to write my book—