Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

I sensed something quite unusual piercing my lids, which I kept shut: some light narrowed to the sharpness of a knife. So I opened my eyes.

  •

  The light (like the wan city light in my Viennese relatives’ murky apartment) came through a crack in the shutters (I usually keep them closed even in the daytime: I live by lamplight: that is how I elude time).

  I could not tell whether it was the ethereal and as yet unthickened light of the first hour of morning or the self-transfigured, renunciatory light of a gloriously waning day of sunshine shortly before evening. It seemed to be neither, and yet it was so fluid and bright, such as even the most glorious day of sunshine never is. Like a sword blade, it sliced through the twilit darkness of the room and cut into my eyes. I had to close them again, and I sniffed and listened (one can hear the quality of time in silence).

  It was silent. (It is always almost uncannily silent in this filthy hotel—its sole advantage, by the way. It is so silent that at night I can hear the humming of the telephone on the switchboard in the handsome Pole’s desk two floors below me.)

  I compared this silence with the memory of other silences into which I had occasionally listened (the dull, heavy ones at night, when everyone was asleep; the brooding, ruminating ones of afternoons when the always freezing Algerians, in coats with turned-up collars and army-surplus scarves to the tips of their noses, crept into their beds in large family groups, and traveling salesmen entered their daily balances in their notebooks or, with intricate knowledge of amorous positions, were inside the women they had picked up; and especially a silence in which I had endured sublime misery three years ago in this very room, when I had waited in vain for Dawn to call me to her). . .

  an unbelievably eloquent silence, which contained Paris like a dissolved pigment

  —the essence of the city in its silence, as if it were not merely that certain forms, colors, images, sounds, noises, and smells worked together to produce its specific, unmistakable impression (the Parisian quality of Paris) but that the myriads of continual, conscious, half-conscious, and unconscious perceptions of a here and now with which the teeming human swarm out there, in the streets and buildings, experiencing themselves as in Paris, were weaving themselves into something objective, empirically ascertainable, positively material, which entered the people as it did the breathed air, the squares, the trees on the boulevards, and every single stone of this city; and as if this aura of the Paris that is unmistakably to be perceived as Paris first became truly free and perceptible in the silence, so that if one brought a deaf and blind person here without telling him where he was, he would instantly have to sense it as specifically Parisian—

  The silence this morning was exactly the opposite. True, it also contained the city, but not that aura. You could hear Paris in it, but it was an abstract, panoramic, tourist-picture-book Paris. It contained no people experiencing it. Streets, squares, monuments, gardens, gables, and ledges had a Sunday glow to them—and were accordingly empty. Each house was freshly painted, so to speak, with sparkling windowpanes. Each street corner was meticulously swept. Each leaf on the trees in the boulevards was varnished. It was a toy Paris: beautiful, perfect—and, as I have said, abstract. The silence emanating from it was sterilized. It lay there, scoured clean, like a lovely shell on the beach.

  Curiosity seized me, and I got out of bed and went to the window, pushed open the shutters, and stuck my head into the air shaft.

  It was filled with bright nothingness.

  This bright nothingness almost made the air shaft burst. The walls seemed able to stand the tension no longer. They had narrowed, losing their gravity and density. The bright nothingness scattered their molecules.

  I looked up. Very high above the rectangular cutout of the peep-show box to which the air shaft had shrunk, the sky was stretching in a deep polar blue. I looked down. Below, on the dirt-encrusted glass roof of the first floor, frost lay along the iron beams. Razor-sharp coldness cut into my skin. I looked up again—and was yanked aloft like a balloon cut free.

  For what happened next, the experienced novelist has a few idiot-proof, well-cemented phrases at his disposal, but he cannot use them unless he wishes to be regarded as tasteless:

  his heart contracted when he realized—

  with a stroke that roiled his innermost being he perceived—

  an insight struck him like a fist—

  as though an inner turmoil had shaken the scales from my eyes—

  thus, I recognized the light and the silence.

  They were the silence and the light of the days when the German troops marched into Vienna (in March 1938: it was known then as “Hitler weather”: an icy cold blue sky and a Sunday glow over the empty, silent world).

  •

  Those days were still sharp in my memory (and kept fresh by repeated and highly detailed reports to Schwab). There was no reason why their recollection (even, so to speak, from an ambush: on the morning after an honestly bought night of lovemaking and looking ahead to a joyfully productive day here in Paris) should rattle me. (After all, it was not unusual to have frost in October. The political situation—according to hearsay; I don’t read the newspaper—was as precarious as ever, but not immediately alarming; and sudden clear weather was no excuse for drawing the parallel to historic dates marked by extraordinary climatic conditions.)

  March 1938 was altogether different—I mean more unusual, more surprising. I knew it by heart, like certain notes for my book. Dozens of times—if not more often—I had told all kinds of people (not just Schwab) about those days, finding attentive and then soon reflective listeners, whose moved state had lifted my description to artistic heights. During the quarter of a century that had passed since these memorable days, I had turned them into a showpiece whenever the conversation turned to politics and recent history (for I understand nothing of the former and I live past the latter; in order to join in, I tell about the peculiar weather back then):

  How overnight (that is, toward morning of the day of the Upheaval or Annexation), Arctic cold had fallen upon Vienna despite the clear blue sky; and yet I stubbornly maintain that the lilac shrubs were already blooming in the Heldenplatz and in the Volksgarten. They were trampled down a few days later when one or two million enraptured people—the exact figure doesn’t matter (I still believe that even today, despite a considerable population boom, one could pack all mankind in a one-cubic-kilometer crate and throw it into the Grand Canyon so that mankind may collectively bite the dust)—as I was saying, the shrubs were trampled down when an entire big-city populace boiled together into a seething gruel of spastically dislocated limbs, twitching arms, hands, and swastika armbands hurled high and thrashing about as if drowning, with undulating banners and roaring mouths. They were welcoming Adolf Hitler, leader, unifier, and expander of the Greater German Reich, to ex-Mayor Lueger’s imperial city. . . But more of this later.

  The bizarre thing about the weather was not just the coldness but, above all, the dematerialized light. With such a brilliant blue sky, one naturally expected the sun to come out at some point during the day—even as just a freshly polished brass disk, simply for the sake of the picture-perfect order of the world, which had suddenly gone crazy. But the sun did not show itself. The events took place in a light that did not emanate from the sun’s rays. It was the illumination of total emptiness. It was the light of abstraction. The coldness, so razor sharp it cut deep into the marrow of your bones, peeled out the objects, which were more or less logically lumped together, peeled them so very subtly along the contours of their isolation. It penetratingly clarified them as things. It drove connections apart and turned them into adjacencies. All at once, everything was displayed openly and lucidly. Not, of course, in the interflowing tonal values of a brilliant painting. Everything was separated thing by thing, like a pasted silhouette of colored paper. Despite all the particolored variety in the world, an unbelievable simplification had come about . . . I repeat—and I am ready to swear an oath—the sun
did not come out for three days. It had stopped in the heavens, as on the occasion of biblical military actions at Gibeon or Jericho, but it had not stopped over Vienna.

  Nevertheless, it was light outside. So light that your eyes hurt—for three days. Until the Führer and Reich Chancellor entered the city.

  •

  Naturally, I take the liberty of squeezing historical events together a bit for the sake of poetic truth. It could just as easily have been the fourth or fifth day when the Führer and Reich Chancellor entered the city. But that doesn’t matter. For when the sun remained suspended somewhere else in the sky (only not over Vienna; perhaps over Berlin?), time stopped too. I tell you, for three whole days.

  That was the bizarre thing about that light: it was not only beyond matter but also beyond time. An everlasting Sunday had commenced and was shining over the world. Had my friend Scherping been present, he would have said, “Now that’s a sky! You could fry an egg on it.” (He would have been wrong: the sky was more likely to freeze those who were sickened by the times and wanted to survive past the next few centuries, in order to thaw out again when medicine could guarantee eternal life: the SS would subsequently perform the most interesting experiments in this connection at Dachau.) And Vienna was lovelier and more Sunday-like than ever before. It looked as neat as a pin, fresh, with a new coat of paint, as if straight from a toy chest. And empty.

  •

  An especially effective vignette in my story was the one about the flower woman. She appears on the first of the three days. All through the night, the soul of the people had boiled. Describing something like this is a choice morsel for a novelist, and I didn’t miss my chance. For instance, the encounter with my cousin Wolfgang in a battery of marching columns (they had massed as unexpectedly as the hosts of iron men that King Laurin stamped out of the soil, and they had marched through the streets to the Rathausplatz, crowding more and more ominously), an encounter that was not without the macabre humor that properly highlights something horrible. (For the postwar German cinema, to which I offered the story on many occasions, the mass spectacle was too costly, although they probably could have found a lot of useful newsreel material; at any rate, my manuscript requires only a bit of tightening and revising to be considered masterful; if I remember correctly, it is filed in the folder marked Prehistory: Vienna IV, with the description of Wolfgang’s funeral.)

  The coagulated flood of iron men smashed the groves on the Rathausplatz and soiled the monument to Ritter von Sonnenthal, presumably because King Laurin’s warriors smelled a Jew in the name. They did not sing, however (as they usually did on such occasions). The columns mutely set out again, threading their way in murky order toward the Ringstrasse. At their head, in accordance with tradition, marched a division of uniformed employees of the Municipal Streetcar Company (the trolley conductor of my childhood was not among them). They pulled the monstrous thing along behind them: a worm as black as nightshade, crawling along on thousands of legs, aglint with the will-o’-the-wisps of thousands of eyes in which the pale fire of an hour of decision was glowing.

  It now crept out of the trampled-flowerbed earth and grew longer and longer and had no end in sight . . . crept past Parliament and past the Opera and past the City Park and, at Aspern Bridge, into the curve toward the Danube Canal and up the canal to Schottentor and then into its own tail. It thus placed a ring around the inner city.

  And thus the Walpurgisnacht celebration began, and lasted until dawn.

  At ten thirty on the day that had thus begun, I strode through a completely deserted Vienna.

  It unfolded very agreeably before my tearing eyes (tearing from cold, you see, and because I hadn’t slept and had seen all kinds of things through the night, things one sees in oppressive dreams; also, the light hurt my eyes).

  Vienna flapped open before me in piercingly lucid, brightly colored individual pictures (the colors of Emperor Joseph’s time: yellow and copper-green and sky-blue and glacier-white and streetcar-red-whitered). The city flapped open like one of those panoramic folders sold at railroad kiosks to foreigners passing through, so that they know where they have been:

  —a townscape in its own notation, so to speak: in which the extreme simplification limits itself to indicating tonal values, and in which, even with the most banal and most arbitrary chaos of heterogeneous and contrasting motifs and styles (cathedral and railroad station, soccer stadium and stock exchange, hero’s monument and zoo), a certain rhythm is inscribed, a rhythm that takes up the melodic moods of the individual views, combining with them into a musical theme that is ultimately the same as the one you hear in the complicated orchestration of the city after a lifetime of intimate acquaintance: just as the theme “chicken run” of course has a simpler and more pure sound to it in a children’s book than it does in paintings by all the Dutch masters who trained their eye on farm fowl; and especially than all the chicken runs that we have to put up with in real life.

  This Vienna was painted by a highly conscientious Sunday painter with a frozen soul (a Danubian Vivin) and patched together into a booklet of picture postcards. And I wended my way through it and took it in one last time in its brilliance and empty glory: Vienna: capital of Austria and old Europe, now scoured by passing time and washed up on its strand.

  I took it in, bidding it farewell, and filed it away with the things that had become a part of my being and had become abstract along with it:

  its tenacious, buckhorn-button Middle Ages and its chamois-leather baroque; its edelweiss-starred rococo and postmasterly Biedermeier; its grand bourgeois Greater German kitsch and its whining petit bourgeois knavery:

  —fanfare-loud, panache-sporting self-assurance petrified into state-chancelry emblematics; the ore of imperial sobriety forged into playful latticework; Spanish draconic severity wine-drunkenly dissolved in perioecian placidity . . . and proliferating from all these the amalgams of engineering and Wilhelminia: ungainly monumentality and frivolous intimacy, opera and operetta in cast iron and mortar: the Lay of the Nibelungen on apartment houses and the imperial double eagle hanging at trolley stops as a sign of Heuriger wine: in bridge arches, middle-class pride bloated into the swank of paunches bearing watch chains, and, in administration buildings, the grace of courtiers demeaned into the humility of pensioners . . . and, over the Virginia cigar, an insidious wink—

  The Sunday glow of the city was piercing. Naturally, I had known since the previous night what it meant: Vienna had surrendered and stood ready as a bride to receive the groom. A noisy stag party had taken place, a boisterous bridal shower, and this was an hour of the most delicate reflection. Vienna took one last look at itself in the mirror.

  And yet it was frozen. A completely transparent block of ice encompassed Vienna and its spring air:

  the Old German neo-Gothic town hall with the cast-iron knight on its spire, from which a long red flag with a black swastika in a white circle was now licking down like a devil’s tongue with a pill marked “poison.” The slender octagonal tower of the Minorite Church over the lilac clusters of the Volksgarten. (I am not mistaken: For what’s important here isn’t the botanical question of whether it’s possible that lilacs would be blossoming in Vienna in March; rather it’s a question of heraldry. Thus, the papal tiaras of the blossom candles most certainly stood white and yellow in the green balls of the chestnut trees on the Ring: the Vienna of hand kisses and fiacres bade a proper farewell to Straus, Strauss, and Hofmannsthal.) The grille-toothed titanic maw of the Castle Gate, which only yesterday had gargled with rickety taxis, grief-wrinkled fiacre nags, and bicyclists with chamois “shaving brushes” on their hats, was now caught in a gaping yawn, as if it were trying to swallow all the stony lion-clubbing and angel-cloud-billowing drama of the castle and the Michaeler Church into the void of the Heldenplatz behind it. The Graben with the kidney-shashlik skewer of the Plague Column and the tower of St. Stephen’s Cathedral looming so spectacularly over prosperous façades . . .

  heading down
the Spiegelgasse, I turned off to the New Market, and there was the flower woman.

  She was the exemplar of the Viennese flower woman, as round as a barrel and (not just because of the cold) wreathed and wrapped in untold layers of petticoats, vests, jackets, coats, shawls, as well as scarves crisscrossing her bosom and back; bluish red like a tulip bulb and with fingers sprouting like fat root ends from her knitted wristlets.

  She had left her baskets of primrose, violet, and narcissus posies, and they stood there tempting any dog’s leg, while she ran—no, rolled—in a drunken zigzag across the empty square. Only Raphael Donner’s smooth fountain nymphs, so beautiful and motionless in their slender grace, were watching her twirl and whirl and swirl, while she flung up her sleeve stumps with the root ends, as though trying futilely to take wing—and she shrieked, croaked, panted, “Heil! Siegheil! Siegheil!”. . . and although Viennese flower women have voices like Anatolian mule-drivers, she sounded very woeful, indeed stifled in the resonance of the huge void, like the lament of a hare drowning in a rain barrel.

  Only then did it dawn on me that something extraordinary had occurred: an era had come to an end.

  •

  I once saw a city in flames (Emperor Nero would have kissed his perfumed fingertips):

  There were so many flames that they looked almost dainty, even loving. Quick as a cat’s tongue, they licked out of the blackened window caverns of the houses and up the walls. They flared up wildly in dark smoke and crackling flurries of sparks only when a building collapsed. Then they whooshed and flickered over the glimmering pile of rubble. But overhead, the sky was a dark glow: the incubator of the Apocalypse—

  And I stared till my eyes were red, that the image might be seared into me. After all, you don’t see that kind of thing every day.

  I told myself, “Hey! People are burning in these houses. The basements they’ve crept into are buried. The heat is boiling the juice out of their bones, they’re shrinking into little black monkeys. But if they manage to break out of their cellar holes, then the burning wind will raise them aloft like dry leaves and whirl them into the flames.”