Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  •

  It was yesterday. I did not get up or open my eyes. I lay motionless and tried to guess what time of day it was: was it early morning? late afternoon? Somewhere within, I was seized with the desire to get up quickly and go to the Madeleine, where the girl I had left last night might still be hanging around. But there was time for that tomorrow. I kept lying there. What absorbed me was the lost note.

  It was, of course, nonsense to imagine it could contain any tidings of salvation, a magic word that would be the key to my book. Yet all my thoughts were fixed on it. It seemed to me I should have thought of it when, with the first note about Schwab to come into my hand, the terror of my dream and the recognition of my murder pounced on me. And this, I felt, signified that the two were mysteriously connected: the dream about my murder and the lost contents of the note. I ought to recognize this connection so that it might become clear: the it that was about to express itself through me.

  As far as I could recall (and it was now enormously important for me to recall), I had slipped the note on the conversation back then (when?) into the folder marked Hamburg—Miscellaneous: presumably as the model for one of the fireside chats in Rönnekamp’s salon: the cultural chitchat—so cultivated as to be stageworthy—of old pederasts in front of disdainfully bored young homosexuals (boys with breathlessly husky voices and skulls clearly marked in their smooth doll heads, exotically beautiful, like Siamese cats) and ordinary seamen dragged over from the docks (stupidly blue-eyed, sweat-fermented, with laborer’s fists like hammers, sexual apparatuses bulging out of snug flies, rosebud-like carbuncles where their Sunday shirt collars sawed into freckled necks . . . all these things in Folder C).

  In those days (happy days of innocence!), I took a schoolboy-like pleasure in describing such causeries, and enriching the ghostly self-exposures—the regular Saturday-night stripteases down to the bone of Wilhelmine, Hanseatic humanism, which Carlotta watched with her lazy eyes and sensually puffed cheeks—with small fragments from my occasional exchanges of ideas with Schwab . . . A malicious act against S., of course, a despicably cheap betrayal and, for that, twice as painful to his virginal mind, a treason against our intimate intellectual rapport . . . He would surely have understood immediately what I was driving at when he found his remarks (chastely costumed as questions: “Don’t you really think that it might possibly be different, namely. . . ?”) placed apodictically into Rönnekamp’s tart auntie-mouth—

  Rönnekamp’s pale, sharp private-eye profile (Arsène Lupin, avenger of the disinherited—the main reading material of my formative years in Vienna) and the fanatically cold vanity in his tropically lashed eyes when he snapped in his hard Baltic accent: “This, gentlemen, is simply the very antithesis of art!”

  Happy days of my youthful callowness, when the sketches for my book were still briskly drawn from human life (and who would ever have dreamed back then that it would not be granted me to present it to Schwab in a finished manuscript and relish my first triumph in his beautiful envy)!

  At any rate, and be that as it may: now the notes were lost. In the past few days, I had meticulously, yes downright hungrily combed the folder marked Hamburg—Miscellaneous, and had not come across the note. Nor had I missed it when going through the folder, even though an obviously related list of idiotic questions about the philosophy of art had come into my hands:

  Does the supposed distortion of a Romanesque lion have an artistic aim? Or did the Romanesque simply “see things that way”?

  Is art a by-product? That is: Did Giotto paint his frescoes as an artist or as a pious Christian?

  To what extent would the literary value of Samuel Pepys’s Diary be greater had it been fiction?

  (and so on)—

  These things could truly have been uttered in Rönnekamp’s salon or even in Witte’s refined home: as at a round table of Kultur-bearers, among whom Christa appeared like a regrettably mute unicorn, quite properly manipulating a knife and fork (what exquisite things she would have yielded had she been granted the power of speech!). Grouped around her: the director of the School of Arts and Crafts with his wife (a former ballet mistress); the publisher of the Financial Gazette with his wife (a doctor of philosophy); a cybernetics teacher with his wife (intimidated petite bourgeoise; incidentally, the only one who got Christa to speak, three brief sentences about a pudding recipe). And at the high point of the discussion, somewhere the question “Boots, you feel, are a Freudian symbol?”

  Which is patriarchally rebuffed by Witte: “Please, not at the table!”

  Again, and yet again: happy days! For just imagine if I could have had that dance of death published back then, that macabre postwar German round: Christa, Rönnekamp, Witte, and Carlotta: the victims of the resistance movement and the sodomy law, the economic-reconstruction miracle, the Financial Gazette, arts and crafts and cybernetics, Doktor Oetker’s pudding powder and Professor Doktor Jaspers’s philosophy hand in hand, and: reach for the violin, Dame Past! Kultur starts playing in an Isadora Duncan dress. A bit moth-eaten, of course: the ivy is growing out of Kultur’s eye sockets. But these are true values, salvaged from the rubble, dusted off and freshly polished:

  but, no doubt about it, that list was part of another (fragmentary) note that I had found floating loosely in the folder labeled Magma and transferred to the new folder labeled Schwab (although I can no longer recall my intention—certainly not as a model for a conversation with him? Impossible!):

  —in literature too (militant since Dada) the tendency to emulate artificially the immediacy of involuntary production. Naturally, then, a reliable judgment on the aesthetic value of such products presumes a critic outside the species and genus, as remote from such products (and their authors) as the man is from the snail’s house whose beauty he recognizes: at the very least, it presupposes a person at a reliable distance in time—as, say, we to the art of Romanticism. Hence the question: How many centuries (or decades—the gap is shrinking visibly) must pass for us to be able to appreciate correctly the style of an era? the thing that adheres without exception to each and every one of its artistic creations, so characteristically that one can fairly recognize it at first sight; namely, the thing that is produced along with it, unconsciously and involuntarily, as if the zeitgeist were guiding the artist’s hands (so compellingly that a mediocre contemporary copy is harder to distinguish from the original than a masterful copy done in a subsequent era; and this later copy, in the different penmanship guided by the zeitgeist, reveals itself to be a copy no matter how brilliant the copyist or counterfeiter)?

  So far so good: scolding idiots for cultural chatter: Europe transformed into prattle (which is what had made Christa yearn for America: “They at least have their feet on the ground”). The topic for a Round Table Discussion. Participants: the art historian Frau Doktor X, the sociologist Professor Y, the sculptor and Ernst Barlach Prize laureate Professor Z, and the successful writer Nagel as moderator . . . And now for the bubbling, foaming, and fermenting of the cultural experience:

  We are blind to the peculiarity in the expression of our own era (its so-called style). Today, nothing enables us to discern what will subsequently make a painting by Kandinsky attributable to roughly the same time as one by Augustus John—while we can already see that Corot and Seurat were contemporaries, not to mention David and Delacroix. And the further back we look, the more clearly we see the common features in the character of this epoch’s handwriting, and the more modestly the individual distinctions in handwriting recede into the background. We also involuntarily retreat from the style of the immediately preceding era (when we have sufficiently detached ourselves from it to discern it). We regard it as unbearably mannered, dusty, trivial. A breaking of images commences, an iconoclasm—until the gradually increasing distance uncovers that era’s charms and lets us read between its lines, as it were. This too proceeds in undulations of presumably measurable frequencies and interfrequencies.

  So much for the extant note: a pulverized feuil
leton, which could be preserved in its dryness, ground into word-gruel, and stuffed into the mouths of characters in novels. Frail Calder mobiles orbit overhead, and the cybernetics man sits in the corner of the sofa with crossed legs and chats about art: “The phenomenon as such, mind you, is highly interesting—may I have a bit more sugar for my coffee, dear madame . . .”

  And though I knew that the lost note could scarcely contain anything more essential, I now missed it with an impatience that drove me to despair. But that meant again that I was thinking of my book, as if I did want to finish writing it after all. It was still alive within me, then. I was alive. In spite of Schwab. In spite of Brodny, whom I had seen, hated, offended, and boorishly left before I encountered the girl at the Madeleine. I was intent on writing my book in spite of him. In spite of my murder. I wanted to live on in my book . . . And I hadn’t yet destroyed everything connected to it, there was still a pile of beginnings, outlines, notes—except for the one.

  •

  Let’s keep one thing in mind: I had only just awoken. I thought, saw, felt all this in the moment of awakening itself: it was my awakening; it coincided with the signals: vanishing dream—hotel room—Paris—now—here—today—I—my—SELF—

  my consciousness was still rubbing its eyes at all this; it was still surprised at, and almost caught unawares by, the things it had to register: it was not fully operative; in pajamas, so to speak, and not yet in pants. Its hair was still disheveled, and it was still chewing its emotive breakfast bread: the foster mother in the flower cup, the fear on the building ledge, the plunge and the salvational gesture of waving from far below, the erotic tidings contained within . . .

  behind these things, however, everything else was already seized and stowed, waiting to be processed: a fermenting gruel of images, perceptions, thoughts, associations, emotions, reflexes; the tremendous mass of surging abstractions that a brain must cope with to set a man’s day into motion—a writing man, who feeds it with himself.

  The accursed nut kernel–shaped beast under my scalp was already roaring to be fed again. It was already raging in its shell again, this disgusting, gluttonous heap of soft, pale, skin-covered, inwardly twisted, layered pudding mass marbled with bloody veins and arteries. It plopped down heavily again upon my existential creature comfort, squeezing the bliss of vegetation, a bliss as warm as cow’s milk. It was already eating again into my divine filiality, that fat caterpillar, eating me off the Tree of Life . . .

  And I rebelled against it, offered my animalish body against it: my proud morning glory: my SELF-towered SELF: the warmth of my limbs under the blanket, which I had pulled up all the way to the tip of my nose, my dear skin smell, the resilience of my sinews, the solidity of my muscles, the sweetness of my saliva, the vital sustenance of my breath. I mobilized my gonads, which were quite active anyhow: I reviewed the gamut of last night’s erotic images and sensations, of other nights of love, untold nights of love, real or dreamed—all this to withdraw my brain’s food: me. To save myself from myself, carry me into a different greedy center of my life and being, abstracted from myself into the throbbing, swelling, tensing, urging of a stiffening member—

  but it now throbbed, tensed, urged into emptiness, into nothingness . . . the images remained images, abstractions; the emotions dissolved in their own echo; the juices produced shot back and operated as poisons: the nourishing juices of abstraction—

  what remained was an impatience that snorted, stamped, reared like a stallion: a powerless desire to realize myself, to redeem myself in some way from this existence in a vacuum; from this life in abstractness, which my brain mass reflected for me before immediate life.

  What the hell had happened anyway? I had once again mislaid, lost, destroyed a note—in any case, done away with it. Who cares? What was it anyhow? Some hot air about art.

  Art. When I hear the word, I first see Gaia before me: Gaia in a flowery hat. Whenever a conversation spirals up into cultural heights, I see Gaia before me with that hat: a giant chocolate doll with a peony cake on its head. Gaia, the powerful, the splendid-bodied: a dark height of six feet, seventy-seven kilograms live weight, one hundred fifty-four pounds of mahogany-brown, vanilla-scented mulatto flesh, shimmering corn-gold at the curve tips and darkening to brownish violet in the shadowy spheres, corseted, ruffled, bowed, and ribboned into a gigantic sofa doll: chubby little hands raised delicately with crooked pinkies, as though wielding a small, invisible baton to accompany her precocious, amazingly knowledgeable, extraordinarily suave and sophisticated sentences . . . The whole thing superdimensional, however; gigantic: Gaia, the chocolate caryatid, bearing upon her head the dusty, disheveled, magnificent patchwork array of blossoms, the blossoms of Refined Culture . . .

  And because her skin was earth-brown covered with corn-gold and not anemically colorless; because the mystery of a different race flashed in her enameled eyes, in the glittering rows of her teeth, in the mirroring patent-leather of her hair, denouncing every word of her cultural blabber, giving it a wild, unused naturalness, a red originality of the blood, which still surged under paw strokes and predatory shrieks, close to the earth, which craved to drink it up—because, of all these things, she was barbarously beautiful, cannibalistically ornamental. . .

  Yes! She could afford to chitchat about art. It suited her, the misunderstanding that makes the holy effort of banning chaos appear to us as an intellectual competitive sport. It complemented her resplendent exoticism, made it poetic: palm-filled atolls fanning on the blue sea, sugarcane plantations rustling under aromatic breezes, sails billowing: the word “culture” regained its literal meaning: became colonial . . . A Negro in a leopard-skin loincloth is a savage, but a Negro wearing a tuxedo dickey and starched cuffs becomes a poetic picture-book Negro: becomes art—while a lymphatic paleface prattling on about art, a watery-eyed mealworm-skull, who attaches to it reflections on the philosophy of culture—why, these are mere particles in the vomit that this mortally ill white race keeps throwing up—

  And I have bathed in this vomit: have taken it for dragon’s blood that makes the skin invulnerable—alas, a linden leaf dropped between Siegfried’s shoulder blades (from the arbre par-dessus le toit, perhaps, who knows?) from somewhere out there in the golden blueness that filled the fog yesterday and is now so brightly illuminating the shadows in the air shaft . . .

  A mood-moment, in any case. This sort of thing should not be underestimated. The weather yesterday was still affecting me. In the weather I recognize myself in my paleontological strata.

  Let’s keep in mind: for me, weather has always been more of a psychological than a meteorological phenomenon. The days of my childhood, for example (which I count as having lasted until my mother’s death), were never marred by even the smallest cloudlet. Sparkling blue sky everywhere (particularly dense, of course, above the Côte d’Azur). The stolidity of my formative years in Vienna was something I allowed to pass over me with my head drawn in: I no longer remember when it rained or when the sun shone. Unusually clear weather (clear as glass and almost painfully cold) prevailed in Vienna in March 1938, at the so-called Anschluss, the annexation (or upheaval), and it remained sunny throughout my summer with Stella in the Salzkammergut. Distinct changes in the seasons (childlike delight at the ardor of the snowmelt, for example, at the black crumbly earth thawing free underneath, the starry-eyed primroses sprouting in last year’s wet yellow grass, the first bright, tender green on the birch branches and so on, the leaden sky under which the white balls of cherry blossoms explode, weeks of summer heat thick with flowers when the horizons flicker like fire lanes, apocalyptic downpours whipping the silvery, surging cornfields, lightning flashes and thunderclaps, then abrupt silence, a steaming sigh of relief in Nature—the end of the world was only playacted, everything is sparkling again, the red poppy glows again in the yellow of the wheat next to the truehearted blue of the cornflowers, a blinking dripping from the leafy roof of treetops with the clouds rolling apart overhead, the day mistily b
rooding to a close, a magical mosquito dance as the shadowy webs of evening weave thicker and thicker, then the moon rises big, round, and clarifying, yes, indeed; finally, the blue-and-gold self-immolation of autumn)—these pleasures, long since anachronistic, I could experience after my childhood only upon returning home to Bessarabia. But then, it was almost winter.

  And oddly enough, this winter has already skipped across a few years of military events (I spent them under arbitrarily changing climatic conditions, like a mouse zigzagging around inside a cage of predators where the beasts pounce on one another: one had little opportunity to consider the weather). It was the Ice Age anyhow. But true winter—a crisp snowland, in which the kneeling world turns its back on you in the sweeping storm of ice crystals, the angels are frozen to the earth, they cannot raise their eyelids, frozen stiff over their blind eyes—true winter, I say, resumed for me only when the weapons fell silent.

  •

  As we know, it wasn’t only the weapons that fell silent back then. The cities fell silent too—that is, what was left of them. They were nothing but chains of streets leading through rubble fields, acres of brick debris, mortar, cement fragments under bonnets of snow: white, hilly districts where the frost softened and leveled the harsher contours with its pitiless grasp. Here and there a cracked lighting pole showed its dangling wires, here and there a section of wall loomed, with its back to the horizontal sweep of the ice wind. Basement caves that weren’t filled in were tenanted by people. They too were silent (understandably).

  I was granted this winter experience in Hamburg-on-the-Elbe (frozen over) in 1945–46, 1946–47, and 1947–48.

  Needless to say, various mild months occurred in between. At times, the rubble landscape even donned a camouflage-green-splotched frock. Perhaps, people even sweated there occasionally, healthfully sweated out the excessive water content of cabbage, potatoes, and fodder beets—ultraviolet sun rays might have eased hunger edema—but all in all, the winter withdrew only temporarily and soon returned with an even icier grip on the ruins of the city.