Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  “It happened on the second of the three days on which the sun did not appear in the sky (although it gave all its light, all its bright radiance—but not itself or its warmth. It came to pass that the emptied city filled up with human beings again—pig swill, I can tell you: a compactness, a suffocating excess of people. Never before had Vienna choked so much humankind out of itself. It rolled out of all the streets, foamed across all the squares, filled every cubic yard of free space from Hütteldorf to Mariahilf to Schwarzenberg Square. It hung in clusters from the cast-iron poles of street candelabra, was baked into druses on the wall cornices, proliferated in umbels out of every window frame, tasseled over the railing of every balcony, and it seethed and simmered. A human gruel so thick that the spoon stood up in it (as in fairy tales about poor people living it up for once) . . . What had driven them out into the streets? The Reich Chancellor and Führer was coming.

  “Okay, Austria had been annexed. Vienna was coming home into the Reich. All well and good. This was—I can only repeat it—not so surprising or overwhelming. People had known that this would happen. It had always been the most ardent desire of the people of the Alpine lands. The cowherd in the picture in my classroom depicted it very graphically. Every second town councilman, to the Aryan core of his being, had always been stuck up to the hilt inside Germania . . . Of course, the national guard had fired cannon at workers’ bastions and policemen had beaten their rubber clubs with equal violence on Communists, Jews, and illegal Nazis. But these had been carnival free-for-alls, in which nothing of importance was carried out that had not been carried out in reality long ago. In its mind, its soul, its Eros, Austria, or rather Ostmark, had long been part of Hitler’s Third Reich.

  “Well, then, what was happening now? Why had the people of Vienna and the Austrian federal states gone crazy overnight, sizzling in ecstasy, in delirium, foaming over like freshly tapped beer? Certainly not because something long expected had arrived, something long consummated had now finally become evident! . . . No, no. Something more significant was happening. It had something to do with God’s breath, or, if you prefer, with the mysterious whirlwinds that your ancient Greeks talk about in certain speculations on nature . . . In any case: it was happening . . .

  “It was happening in a strangely inhuman way—I want to say, in a way that transcended the human. Over the seething human gruel hung its noise, veiling, weaving, echoing—like the croaking of myriad frogs in the ponds around Băneasa during a moon-rapt July night—surging across the dappled surface of thousands and thousands of heads, pulling up the faces. Every cry that mounted, every voice that rose, every word that emerged from a gaping jaw, was caught up and carried further, like a stone hurled flat across a watery surface, danced off with hundreds of thousands of other cries over the ecstatically raised heads. These were no human sounds; this was a telluric din, whole gravel slopes were ricocheting and being covered by ones that were caroming back—and others were covering these . . . And then the spring tide roared up from Mariahilf, coming closer in an eardrum-shredding gush—raging, roaring, thundering ahead of a motorcade that zoomed through the chasm in the wild boiling human gruel, a chasm that opened before it like the Red Sea for the Jews. Pharaoh’s plumed chariots shattered and perished when the walls of water collapsed upon them, sank with broken wheels in the tumult of helplessly struggling horse legs . . . But this time the water opened before them, they passed through with dry feet—and speedily: they flew by like ghosts: three, four, five large black open bulletproof Mercedes escorted by rattling motorcyclists, a couple of plainclothesmen clinging like monkeys off the back of each car; inside the cars, wasp-gold on brown Party-bigwig uniforms, blood-red trickle-stripes on generals’ uniforms . . . And in the middle, standing upright, his skull weighed down by an oversize doorman’s cap, automatically throwing up an arm like a jumping jack whose other arm has been ripped off—HE: crookedly pasted ponce hair over a doughy face, snuffling morosely on the small black stench of his mini-mustache . . . It all whooshes by, and the flood closes in on you, you sink with pharaoh’s Egyptians, are torn into the depth, struggle, are struck, punched, kicked, and poked, squashed; you gasp for air and your throat is full of your shriek, you choke it up, throw it up with stars before your eyes. The spring tide has rolled over you, and around you everything is swimming, houses, towers, treetops, streetlights, the human gruel in the writhings (afterwrithings) of a collective orgasm. The men have dark circles under their eyes, their mouths quiver slackly, the women have wet spots in their panties, their hair hangs over their faces. Please explain that to me! Something isn’t right here. This isn’t the way of an explicable world, the kind that’s in the news every morning . . . Even back then, the newspapers were incapable of describing what had happened, words failed them, reason failed them, common sense—at least mine. All I knew was that I had witnessed a natural event—had known it, in the biblical double meaning of the word. Together with Viennese humankind, the Alpine German humankind, I had known Nature: in a tremendous mass coitus—my ears were still buzzing, my knees still buckling, red circles were still dancing in front of my eyes . . . But what do you want: we had known Mother Nature: BIG, STRONG, HIGH-HANDED Mother Nature . . .

  “She had enjoyed giving us all a brief thrashing so that we finally knew what ‘procreation’ meant—namely, not a private pleasure, or even a biological duty in the termite’s contribution to the universal process of procreation. No indeed. It was a metaphysical event: a cosmic incident, against which even a solar prominence is nothing more than a fart in a bathtub . . . Certainly, the GREAT MOTHER allows us our little pleasure—I imagine that the myriads of second-long ejaculations in the big beautiful world trickle and prickle agreeably through her sense of life. But occasionally, she lets out a big, full, whole fuck: simply to make us see how serious the matter is: to show us what our real mission is here on earth—just why we were created in the first place . . .

  “Oh, I tell you, she made her presence felt very strongly in those days, this powerful lady: she called the shots, she conducted the orchestra and was also the great theme and leitmotif of the festival performance. She was mirrored in the bright Viennese windowpanes, she leaped at you from the adolescents’ red cheeks and powerful leg hair—the young people who suddenly walked with such extraordinary self-confidence—right into your line of vision; she resounded toward you from the whir of voices—in words like “renewal of life,” “growth,” “people”—and she created the backdrops in a weather that made your pupils pound: ten below zero Celsius and a bright spring splendor in the air . . . And she acted hearty and homey and housewifely: she tied on the blue sky as an apron and rolled up her sleeves for a big spring cleaning. It was as if all the Alpine glaciers had come to Vienna, mountain wind was sweeping out its nooks and crannies, every smashed Jewish skull burst open into an edelweiss . . . Ah, you would feel differently about former followers (more kindly; less scornfully) if you could have witnessed this festive mood of cosmic spring cleaning. You would be more sympathetic, empathetic, you would understand the subliminal homesickness of an upright North German detergent manufacturer like Witte for such an Eastertide whisk of a scouring cloth by Nature (I repeat: Nature!). For everyone was seized by it, by this sudden need for fresh air, order, cleanliness, purity. . . Even Stella, who was Jewish, after all—even she inadvertently said, ‘I’m not surprised that the sky doesn’t darken and split into flashes of lightning. We’re not so childlike in our faith in God that we could believe He would do that for our sake . . . But this freshness, this fragrance of a house that has finally been aired out and put in order—it makes you almost reel. . .’

  “Stella: the intellectual, who had spent her girlhood in the fabled city of Berlin; Stella, who as a child had sat on Flechtheim’s lap, and Reinhardt’s; Stella, who had corresponded with Kandinsky and Else Lasker-Schüler and received a love letter from Archipenko every year: ‘My beautiful pageboy . . .’ Stella, who kept coming in and out of Berlin with her diplomatic passp
ort (in the piquantly mysterious aura of John’s obscure missions) and who ought to have known what a very different play was being performed in the wings. Stella, the standard-bearer of ANTHROPOLIS, spoke these words . . . And you still find it incomprehensible that Nagel (that ship’s hobgoblin of the categorical imperative) whipped his arm up for four years as an example to his fellow soldiers in an enthusiastic up-and-at-’em march-march—until one fine morning when his arm was shot off? . . . And you still brood about the fact that Professor Hertzog was a brigadier general in the medical corps (like Gottfried Benn, incidentally, whom Stella knew so well)? . . . Or that Rönnekamp, the Zarathustra Nietzschean, spent the year 1948 with genitally attached comrades, catching up on the officers’ banquets that he had, unhappily, been forced to miss in the concentration camp from 1939 to 1945? . . . Yes indeed, where were you in those intoxicating weeks and months that followed March of the year 1938? Not in Vienna, I know. But presumably in your student garret: German literature and journalism, eh? . . . At any rate, you were not in Ostmark when it was finally attached to the Reich. Ostmark, which was suddenly much more robustly Alpine, much more costume-happy and indigenous, much more imperial in its cultural mission than Old Austria had ever been since the days of Archduke John of yore . . . For if you had been there, you would have learned straight from the (mountain-fresh) source what extraordinary resistance it took to keep from giving in to a certain twitching restlessness—how shall I put it? The itch in your skin of a universally powerful mood that included not only the urge for peaks, for pure, thin air and a clear view of distances, but also risk and the pleasurable bewitchment of vertigo—and then into the Alpine hut and into the Alpine dairymaid—goddammit! Into any old black hole, into the big black mother hole of blindly breeding, blindly devouring Nature.”

  •

  In the summer following March 1938, I found myself in the Salzburg region with Stella. John now had a lot to do in Prague, and he had rented a house for her on the Mondsee, where he occasionally spent the weekend: a wooden house like a cuckoo clock. We lived a rather earthbound Alpine life there from April to September . . .

  One might have thought that we had screwed enough a year earlier (the summer of 1937 in and around Bucharest)—but no: we mated like rutting wildcats, spitting and howling, in the detritus and under the firs and dwarf pines, clawed and clamped into each other, rolling down the forest slopes, panting and climbing up to the peaks to survey the heights and pouncing on each other there like vindictive demons—in mountaineering costumes, if you please: I was the cowherd up there on the slope, wearing lederhosen (very practical because of the fly) and a quaintly green stitched jacket with stag-horn buttons (whose imprint we then found on her breasts—her behind bore the imprint of the pine needles.). I rocked my mountain-lion manliness on bare suntanned knees—and she, she was the sheer Puster Valley with her narrow, dark head (I bit her neck when I discovered the first white threads in her raven hair: Ô vraiment marâtre Nature, puisqu’une telle fleur ne dure que du matin jusqu’au soir!). Her almond-eyed Bedouin head rose out of decrepit fringed shawls (great-grandmother’s trousseau: we were supplied by every antique dealer on either side of the Inn and over and under the Enns). Tiny wood anemones were embroidered into her silver-buttoned velvet bodice; she laced them in with belts plated with copper and silver like the harnesses of brewery horses. And out of them, the heavy linen skirts (printed on wooden forms) and silk aprons (interwoven with golden threads) billowed into a brood-hen basket. Your highly honored compatriots from Neustrelitz, Brera, and Winsen-on-the-Luhe, who back then were swarming into Salzkammergut, gaped and gawked when they saw us at the tavern garden in the evening . . . And if we then exchanged a few Romanian words, their spoons fell into the mounds of whipped cream they had dished up (in the Old Reich, you see, whole milk had already become scarce). There was agitated murmuring (“. . . a certain Latin touch in specific isolated valleys here—that probably explains the aquiline nose . . .”), and this amused us no end. I couldn’t reach fast enough under all that peasant textile wealth; I yanked my almond-eyed, black-haired, milking-stool princess behind the nearest bush, shoved her behind the closest rock protuberance, and with my wild farmhand paws peeled her bare Jewess body out of everything that was homespun, handwoven, embroidered with churchgoing swank, worn out by wedding-night work. I tore her alien-race nakedness free, spread open her cable stitch–stockinged legs . . . We committed an act of miscegenation that was not provided for in the Nuremberg Laws: we rutted blasphemously with all of Alpine nature . . . And when I was gasping my last breath and only my chamois-leather suspenders were holding me together, and she was lying in the moss among the crushed fern as though she had toppled from high up on the mountain wall and crashed down here, her arms and legs bent in a swastika, her head dangling to the side, only the not quite closed lids still trembling (she’s truly been dead for twenty-five years now, and that trembling of her lids still reaches me—Stella in Alpine moss: overhead, in the star-seething heavens, glittering fist-size fragments: URSA MAJOR, ursa minor, Cassiopeia, Betelgeuse, hazy galactic whey—who knows what was already dead while its trembling light still reached us? . . . And cold, white, sawtoothed peaks, towering dark masses shoved right up close to us, megatons of primordial rock squeezing upon our chests . . . and, in the tattered black of the firs, a sublime soughing . . .), when we gradually began to gather our shattered limbs and torn-off antique costume buttons, when we, so weary with wandering, began to drag ourselves back to our cuckoo-clock cottage to sink into the checkered featherbeds (only to be riveted into each other again)—then we knew why we were doing all this: out of fear . . . Not out of fear of Adolf Hitler and his brown squads and gray iron men and knackwurst-shaped civilian officials with huge killer hands (what did we care about them? we were both foreigners: Stella had a British diplomatic passport and I a conscription order to join the Royal Romanian Army as a one-year volunteer). What we feared was: the big cat.

  We probably didn’t realize how correct our feelings were. And we weren’t the only ones. Something had come into our minds, something that left everyone around us in a state of panicky rapture, a furious midsummer-light fear . . . And that something, lurking in everything, in all people, all things, all events—like a picture-puzzle face inscribed in them, inhumanly huge yet terrifyingly human—its name was NATURE. We were overwhelmed by it. We served this big, strong Alpine nature, served it with our bodies from dawn to dusk. We never let go of each other. If we occasionally needed to recover a little, we walked hand in hand to the modern boathouse in the reeds along the lake. There, we had discovered gigantic cobwebs in the timberwork under the planks of the pier. We lay down by the webs, caught flies, and tossed them in—and, hand in hand, like Hansel and Gretel, watched them as their struggles in the net of the web signaled to the spider in its funnel-shaped hideout, we watched it stick out its nasty head and then jerk out its thick, furry body . . . watched it shoot out and, with a cruel technical perfection (which raised goose bumps on the backs of our necks), secure the torn rib threads of the web, then scurry toward the trapped fly, paralyze it with a cunning sting, and start to wrap it up in spinning whirls . . . Our hands stuck together, sweating, while we watched the powerlessness of the fly in this hammock spinning tighter and tighter . . .

  and when the fly was finally spun solid, looking like a caterpillar in its cocoon, we killed the spider and destroyed the web. There were so many, after all; they kept us entertained all summer.

  Said Solomon to Sheba

  And kissed her Arab eyes

  “There’s not a man or woman

  Born under the skies

  Dare match in learning with us two.

  And all day long we have found

  There’s not a thing but love can make

  The world a narrow pond.” . . .

  “Yes indeed, my friend,” I said to Schwab, “that’s the sort of thing Stella was doing in those days. Stella: it’s not surprising that I was capable of that—I am
and always have been an avowed nature lover. But Stella! . . . However, we must bear in mind that our actions were in keeping with the collective behavior. Something had happened to Stella that happened to pretty much all the people on our old continent: she no longer dreamed about ANTHROPOLIS, the City of Man. The zeitgeist had turned. The cities were dying. Humanity was building its New Jerusalem outdoors. In the middle of nature. People were striving to return to the Great Mother. She was the new model in their souls—thought up for the era by our confrère D. H. Lawrence: a magnificent female with fat piglets on all her teats. A perfect specimen of fertility; the goldfish jumped wherever she pissed. A housewife, I tell you, never emitting a fart without instantly transforming it into chlorophyll . . . THE GREAT MOTHER—it was actually she who was being celebrated in the Alpine land of Ostmark. The purpose of the radiant Yule night of March 12 in Vienna had been to conjure her up. The millions of termites, drunk with light, ecstatic with fresh air, had danced their termite dance for her alone. She had sent out her favorite son, from Braunau-on-the-Inn, so that mankind might celebrate her and so that she might soon show her true face: her dreadful carrion face. That blood-and-lymph-dripping maggot-sack of her body. The sky-high pyramid of skulls on which she sits enthroned . . . That was she, our dear Mama. The Führer guaranteed that she did not stir only in the wombs of German maidens, in the hopping of little goats on the flowery meadow, in the blissful sour-milk vomiting of babies, in the testicle-shaking rigid marching step of our boys; she also had to show herself in the full majesty of the Omnivore, who needed only to growl briefly like a predator to have a couple of Jews tossed into her mouth—a couple of thousand, a couple of million—and then, if need be, if that wasn’t enough, then a couple of million Aryans in the bargain: one’s own sons, one’s father, one’s mother, the grandchild in the cradle . . .