Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  . . . this jerk runs across the street and the light’s still yellow—crash! he’s flopped over a car hood: screeching brakes delayed reaction thud (Jesus! Did I pay my last insurance premium? . . .) Hey, watch it! Watch it yourself, you’re behind me, don’t tailgate me, I wasn’t, give me your insurance number, it’s only a slight dent, yeah but my car’s in the garage for the weekend my wife’s gone off to visit her brother-in-law, what’s wrong up front there anyway? windshield debris on the asphalt, an indolently winding trail of blood—goddamnit, the poor bastard really got it, why that’s illegal, crossing when the light’s still yellow—and the way the pedestrians mob the scene, like flies around shit . . . well, we’re in for it now, the road’ll be backed up for at least a quarter of a mile: cops signals whistles yellow lights siren squad-car ambulance: they’re shoving him in like a loaf of dough into an oven—is he dead already? And I’m going to be late to work, that’s life . . .

  (And these are the folks I’m writing for.)

  And yet how do they feel that they’ve experienced this life? How does it present itself to them in that other dimension, which, so to speak, races alongside reality in parallel vibrations and against reality in the amplitudes: always one step ahead of reality, a step of hope, of expectation, of preconception? Always one step behind, a step of transfiguration, of dramatization, of twisting things aright?

  How do they experience this fleeting, flickering, monotonous chaos in their wishful notions, their daydreams, their deceptions, their obsessions? How do they rationalize it in their figments, lies, solaces, euphemisms, distortions?

  Ultimately as a meaningful order? As a dramatic, dynamic course of events that always correspond to some idea, always pursue, or at least bring about, a specific purpose? Thus are always effortlessly identifiable as a series of causes and effects?

  —as if the events that charged down upon us chaotically could be broken down into individual components from which we need only select those that can be threaded in a narratable chronicle and strung on the guideline of a learned notion of life—threaded and strung according to a completely arbitrary event-value that we have established—

  whereby we would experience our lives as (hi)story: a florilegium of episodes that, containing literary elements, are culled from the wealth of occurrences and carefully cleaned of all the weeds of anything casual, undramatic, or dramatically inconsistent or superfluous:

  so that the episodes are ultimately threaded into a novel-like garland of anecdotes, stories, epics, rhapsodies, comedies, tragedies, woven into compellingly thickened peripeteias and rhythmical arses and theses, to be boaed around the person of the SELF and form his myth—

  Even the maggots use the literary in order to overcome the chaos. Even they live literarily—

  and I’m supposed to make the devising of tales a matter of conscience?!

  So, carefree, I attack the keys of my typewriter: my piglets want a story that reads both simply and grippingly, an adventurous, entertaining, and yet meaningful reality, so that even the distributors will be carried away and actually understand what it’s all about

  (a story, then, that can be told in three sentences)

  at your service:

  Till the Last Woman

  Berlin, April 1945:

  The roomers in a boardinghouse, which is actually a front for a whorehouse under the experienced direction of the owner (Kitty Schmidt), look forward to the arrival of the Russians and the expected surplus of vodka, cigarettes, money, and food period end of the first sentence

  In the basement, however, honest people have also hidden, and the girls, seeking protection from the shelling, witness the rape of a mother-to-be by drunken soldiers, whereby the mother-to-be kicks the bucket period end of the second sentence

  This affects them so profoundly that they resolve to give themselves freely wherever a decent woman is threatened semicolon they thus sacrifice themselves each in turn M-dash till the last woman colon Kitty Schmidt herself, who at first opposed this sacrificial effort by her girls third and last period end of story

  •

  This I can write. With virtuoso life-interpreting fingers, I hammer away at the keyboard of the little Olivetti Lettera. Nothing inhibits me.

  This stuff won’t get in front of the camera anyway. It is merely spirited out of thin air and laid into thinner air—as a cornerstone for the cloud-cuckoo-home that is known in the piglets’ lingo as a “project” or even “our next film project”—

  a little fiction, that’s all. If it’s ever “realized” (i.e., filmed), then in any case it will be as something entirely different.

  Then, real money will be involved. Then, fiction and reality will mate. Then, my piglets will become anxious and will therefore work doubly hard. Then, to play it safe (“Damn it, in a movie every image, every line of dialogue, every scene must be foolproof; it can’t be left up to one person”), we’ll start the teamwork.

  Then, the startled swarm of producer-boarlets will be joined by the hefty cattle from the distribution side. Then, the reluctant cinematic legal advisers in the moneylending banks will bring along vest-pocket literati, with flat heads barbered à la Bertolt Brecht, as literary advisers

  (“. . . Herr Jorguleit was very successful doing this for the radio and he will henceforth be available to Victoria . . .”).

  Then, amid cigarette smoke, cigar stains, and expense-account brandy, the “project” is subjected to a collective process of intellectual predigestion:

  every scene, every image, and every line of dialogue is multiply analyzed to shreds, crushed, insalivated with the psychology of the trade, and thoroughly chewed up.

  Everybody adds his bit. Everybody draws on his own knowledge of reality and reality-creating fantasy to inject juices that will make the soon boneless subject ferment into a mash for consumers—so that, finally kneaded and streamlined for the public taste, it may slip through the sphincters of the take artists and lens pullers.

  Fine! All I’m after is the check (even if they’ve clipped three-quarters of the amount originally agreed upon).

  My name will then stand as the person responsible for a work of cinematic art entitled KITTY’S GIRLS AND THE RUSSIANS—

  the story has been changed to the extent that Kitty’s girls are no longer employed in a Berlin cathouse, but are now the wards in a boarding school for aristocratic young ladies in Potsdam (“After all, highborn girls interest moviegoers more than hookers, you have to admit that yourself—something like the Empress Augusta School—right?. . .”)—

  So Kitty (von?) Schmidt is no longer madame la patronne but now teaches local history in the aforesaid institute. (“Just think of GIRLS IN UNIFORM—a worldwide success, American remake, et cetera . . .”)

  “Well, and then when the Russkies come, the whole thing can run along as it did before—but wait a minute, we don’t want to remind the audience of unpleasant historical events like the raping spree; my wife, for instance, she doesn’t like to think about it. Besides, we don’t want to spoil our prospects in the Eastern market right at the outset . . .”

  So: the girls merely fear being raped, but a lieutenant of the advancing Russian company, Ivan So-and-so-vitch or what should we call him? Gimme a real Russian name—huh? Karamazov? No, Karamazov sounds too much like a battlefield; that’s what it’s good for, a battlefield—THE BATTLE OF KARAMAZOV. But not for us. What? Raskolnikov? I like that, Raskolnikov—you too, Herr Müller-Kapetown? You’ve heard the name already? So what. In the new version, the character’s completely positive; you don’t have to worry about issues with libel . . . Well, anyway: Lieutenant Ivan Raskolnikov has expressly told his men not to rape any woman, but the guys ignore his orders, the delirium of victory and the booze unleash their passions—

  “Well, and now Fräulein Schmidt—von Schmidt? Uh-uh! What for? We have to emphasize the social contrast. Previously, Kitty wasn’t very popular among the girls because she isn’t highborn, you understand? That’s what makes the story
so up to date; otherwise there’s no topical message—well, now Fräulein Schmidt throws herself in front—what? Winkelried? That’s what you wanna call her? I don’t like Winkelried, too pretentious. Besides, Schmidt sounds better for bringing out the social contrast—and she kicks the bucket . . .

  Oh, she suffered

  poor Miss Schmidty

  ’cause the soldiers

  sliced her titty . . .

  “Come on now, knock it off with the jokes! . . . What happens next? The first victim is brought, and then—

  “Well, and the girls? The girls are saved by Lieutenant Raskolnikov himself; that makes it a lot more ecumenical, bringing nations together and so on; why should we keep fighting with the Russians after so many umpteen years? Doesn’t make any sense in the long run . . .”

  Certainly not. My Supreme Piglet Wohlfahrt (not for nothing is he the business manager and sole owner of Intercosmic Art Films) is once again talking pure gold.

  So: in the end, Ivan Raskolnikov marries the girl in Fräulein Schmidty’s institute who hated her most because she wasn’t high-born—what should we call her? Effie? Effie sounds good, I like it—and now for a real Junker name—what? Von Briest? Von Briest is great. So: in the end, amid the ruins of the garrison chapel of Potsdam—pretty good, right? symbolic and so on—in the end, Lieutenant Ivan Raskolnikov marries Fräulein Effie von Briest

  “. . . And when you see the two of them in the last shot placing a simple bouquet of wildflowers on Fräulein Schmidty’s grave—and the Iron Cross First Class—no, wait a moment, why the Iron Cross First Class? The war’s over, damn it! It doesn’t exist anymore. A simple bouquet of wildflowers, a lot more poignant—I tell you: with the final shot, there’s got to be snot and tears, that’s the alpha and omega of cinematic art, as old Erich Pommer used to say. . .”

  •

  Fine! Good luck! And tallyho! I was merely doing my duty as a man: showing my brood of piglets that they can always count on more pearls from me (“the guy is difficult, granted, simply because he gets too many ideas at once—his imagination runs away with him, you just have to rein in his thoughts, then he functions right”)—

  I wrote the pile of bothersome obligations off my back: the alimony for Christa (“I have nothing but sympathy with your situation, but my lawyer won’t hear of it: after all, he’s in the film business himself, he knows how much you make”), the tuition for our son in his plutocratic prep school in Holland, the rent, the auto insurance—

  I can even think of paying off some of the most embarrassing of my debts—

  all this with the labor of a few filthy weeks . . .

  I’ve finally written myself free for a few more weeks and I can maybe tackle my book again . . .

  which is what happened in these past eight days and nights—with a more stunning debacle than before, to be sure, although the conditions weren’t necessarily success-oriented . . .

  •

  But this time the debacle was more thorough, the failure far more spectacular than ever . . .

  What happened?

  Something occult, if that’s what you want to call it (Uncle Helmuth, his eyes shining, would have called it that):

  A Schwab released from the body of cells and floating in air as a pure metaorganism had been annoying me since my return here like a fly stubbornly buzzing around my nose—and I didn’t want it to alight. It came from some carrion. My dream had hatched it—not the dream I had only just slipped away from, being absolved by the shy smile of my foster mother from the flower cup and redeemed. It was actually the other dream, the cellar dream, where an old bag of a cleaning woman lay murdered, her face smeared by a shovel into a Rorschach splotch . . . And whether it was a dream or a repressed reality—whether (and if so, in what way) Schwab was connected—I did not wish to be bothered by it now.

  I lay in bed, keeping my eyes shut. For the time being (at last! after all the tortured days and nights), I was not available to ghosts—to any transcendental individual, no matter how interestingly he manifested himself. At least for the brief moment of my setting out into a richly creative day (and all its failure and frustration), I wanted to be untroubled by any sort of basement reminiscences: wartime air-raid basement experiences, Viennese occult basement existence, reality-constructing catacomb societies from the Reichsmark era, basement children of the new Neunteuffelian reality disguised as film producers, the topography and atmosphere of the basement in which I killed that dreadful crone in my dream (and where in reality?). My foster mother’s smile from the flower cup (un sourire presque espiègle) had exonerated me for the moment: I could take a few breaths without lifting the weight of a sin with each. I could afford, then, to think quite soberly about the contents of my notes, and try to restore the one I had lost, which I missed as if it were the key to my book.

  It was easy to recall the train of thought. Snails produce their houses at the command of the species; they have no biological choice, as it were; but still, their houses have individual peculiarities. One can tell by the changing styles of art-historical eras that human beings obey such biological orders in the way they express themselves collectively. And one can see that these orders are cyclical in the way they change; that they repeat certain elements of expression in the changing of the expression, reiterate them in terms of time symmetry, as it were (every art-historical phase ends in its baroque) . . . That was roughly the gist. And oddly enough, it completely calmed me down. I enjoyed the notion of a tide-like now-and-again, of something breathing, pulsing through the world, making mankind lean alternately in one direction, then the other, like a wheat field in the wind (and the winds, as if sparked by Aeolus’s divinely musical sentiment, truly blow first from here, then from there into the various cultures). This notion virtually carried me away from the planet, putting me far beyond it, in a demiurgical contemplation:

  showed me this mankind en bloc in space and time: billions of tiny particles, coagulated into a gray mass that is moved by an invisible power and forced into the strangest ornaments. And this did not frighten me. Quite the opposite: it was an old, familiar thing, like a lullaby. I had hopped into the lap of the world spirit, as it were, and now, relieved (because I was released, for now, from personal responsibility), I curled up in metaphysical relish—

  and I watched the grand spectacle purely through indolently squinting eyes:

  It proceeded from the primal beginning and encompassed the entire universe. For the force that leads the teeming of mankind to and fro and occasionally pulls it together and drives it apart like iron filings on a piece of paper under which one moves a magnet, this force, operating on an inexhaustible play instinct of forms, was presumably the same one that formed the first cell from the primal slime and then went on to develop Brehm’s fauna and Linnaeus’s flora, ultimately crowning the astonishing variety of such creation with man, the untiring builder of the city ANTHROPOLIS. The planet was infested with mites, which first appeared in dots and specks, then spots and splotches, growing out, soon proliferating hypertrophically, covering the entire surface of the globular shape (slightly flattened at the poles) with mange . . . And it must have been the same unnameable power that had hurled this planet out into the universe among myriad others with their moons and satellites, making this powdering of the stars dance chaotically in a tremendous juggler’s act . . . Nor did it make any difference whether one of them or a million, with or without mites, died or burst like soap bubbles.

  This potency toyed with such riches that if galactic systems emerged or perished in the cosmos, they did not need to be given even a fraction of the significance attached here on earth to the hatching or crushing of a louse. In light of this, it would have been childish to speak of free will, decision, the importance of any action or inaction—of ethical purpose and commencement, of moral action, of the causal relationship between guilt and atonement . . . And it would have been absolutely hilarious to imagine that one could, as an individual, produce something that was not already prov
ided for in the collective expression; for instance: write a book that was not being tackled, indeed had not already been written, by a hundred, a thousand others with an urge to express . . . It was simply a joke of the world spirit that someone lay there in despair, racking his brain about a lost note—

  It didn’t help. There was no way out anywhere. Man is free, but his will is not: anything he does takes place in terms of the all-creating, all-destroying divine game—and thus I am, thus you are, not only God’s most obedient servant and dearest menial but also HIS partner: we put our noses to the same grindstone . . . And I for my part lay satisfied in the bosom of the LORD and could hope that sooner or later, as his most obedient servant and dearest menial, I would do my biological duty by throwing Madame on her back in some corner of the Épicure and sticking a nice bun into her oven—a little French bastard who would soon be practicing with a plastic machine gun so as to take part in the game of the great world spirit . . . and if I writhed like a fly on flypaper because my conscience wouldn’t let go, whether because of a murder that I could not entirely forget, because of the lost promise from the catacomb era in Nagel’s garden house and Neunteuffel’s New Reality, because of my dead friend whom I had cheated, or even because of my book that I would never write—

  was it not boundlessly vain and trivial of HIM who fed on worlds like a whale on plankton? . . .

  “This,” I said to Schwab, “is the result of my search for God. If HE does exist, then HE has indulged in a bad joke at my expense. I find that HE has gone a bit too far.”