Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  The good silence between Gaia and me. Our even breathing. A word or two exchanged now and then. The calm question whether I’m writing anything else besides my work for the piglets. Yes, a book. (Shamefaced confession.)

  “A novel?”

  “I’m not quite sure. There’s so much chatter about what a novel is and what it isn’t that I don’t know anymore. In any case, it’s a story that begins with the childhood of its main character and ends with his death.”

  “Is it very important for you to write it?”

  “My friend—you know who I mean—”

  “I know. . .”

  “Well, he died because he couldn’t write it.”

  “Is it his story?”

  “Mine, of course. Who would dare write anything but his own story? Yes—stories. The kind of stuff I write for the movies. Pulp romances—no end of them. I have another friend, a man named Nagel. He churns out three a year. He’s a candidate for the Nobel Prize.”

  “How much of your story do you have so far?”

  “Nothing that’s finished. I’ve begun a few chapters. Several hundred pages. Several thousand notes.”

  “So no outline.”

  “A sort of notion of the form, all the same. But it’s assuming a form all on its own. Or rather, an antiform. An explosion, consistent with the zeitgeist. A hybrid cell growth. After all, cancer too is just an explosion in slow motion.”

  “And this keeps you from completing it?”

  “Sooner or later it’ll complete itself—somehow or other.”

  “Why don’t you make it happen right away?”

  “Because I love you. Because I can’t write and I don’t want to write when I’m in love. Because right now I want to live. Make love, not literature.”

  “But I’ll soon stop loving you if you don’t do what you have to do.”

  “I know. But if I do it, my piglets will get very mad at me and not give me any more money. Then I’ll have to live on your money, and you definitely won’t love me then.”

  “Don’t forget that I’m a professional promoter. I make a good amount of money financing talent.”

  “Musicians. Do you know what a writer earns on a book?”

  “A lot of prestige, with which he can squeeze a lot more money out of his piglets than before. I know. I’m the piglet of my musicians.”

  And naturally this ended in a paroxysm of amorous blisses and the solemn promise that I would start working first thing in the morning.

  •

  Everything that begins with a lie, says Dostoevsky, has to end with a lie. In this case, it was that I soon started putting page numbers on every abortive draft, every commenced and aborted, recommenced and reaborted chapter, every lengthy note, and finally every bit of even slightly bedoodled paper. I could no longer bear the disappointment in Gaia’s voice when she looked over my shoulder and said, “Toujours à la page treize, mon ours!” I had to make her believe I was forging ahead. After all, I was writing for her and our love. Hence, unassailed by everyday cares thanks to her, I had to write fluently and toward a foreseeable end . . .

  And meanwhile, the hybrid cell growth was running riot not only in my papers, but in her too—in Gaia’s chocolate-brown giantess’s body.

  But this wouldn’t come to pass until later. It was still in the future. I wasn’t yet carrying it inside me, carrying it always, like all of the past. And added to this now was Schwab’s funeral, and it made the burden heavier. The day was already past on which he had lain under his hill of blossoms, waiting to be delivered to the fire in the belly of Ohlsdorf Crematorium in order so to speak to rise through the chimney in a different, airier state and merge into the clouds of Hamburg, like Stella in her time at Theresienstadt.

  •

  Thus I had come from Paris to say good-bye to my friend S. and to be witness to Hanseatic chivalry, according to which you pay last respects even to an enemy, so long as his life can be falsified and re-purposed into an edifying testimony to your own favor in the eyes of God. I squeezed along the wall of the cremation temple and saw myself through Christa’s eyes. Still and all, it would have been nice if she really had nodded at me and smiled:

  Christa, the relentless woman on whom I had failed so miserably—without ever reaching her, like the sailors in the fairy tale about the magnetic mountain, which pulls the nails from their ships before they can land, so that the ships fall apart in the open sea;

  Christa, who always remained standoffish, alien, and who, no matter how hard I tried to get her to forgive me (after our love was lost) had proved so unyielding that my despair made me do all the mortifying things that make any helplessly demanding lover despicable,

  the ultima ratio of the no-longer-beloved, whose lamentable inconsistency draws sympathy to the side of the standoffish,

  the begging tenderness and the feigned coldness that yearns for its own thaw,

  the false magnanimity with the schoolmaster’s hickory stick held ready,

  the mistrustful understanding geared to recognition and the rage with an eye out for reconciliation,

  the tears, torment, and torture, and—the worst disgrace of all!—always putting the other in the wrong

  (as though a stubborn demonstration that the other is full of failings must ultimately arouse his self-knowledge, which reaches into the depths of his awareness, from which, with all other virtues, mercy too is bound to spring),

  in any case, always far too much talking,

  the monologues flowing along, as wide as the Volga,

  the cascades of chatter, released by the most trivial things and never coming to a standstill until every possibility of bypassing them is washed away by a flood of words, of which—when the verbal torrent has finally ebbed—the vicious words remain, decaying and poisoning the ground;

  and all this constant instructing, moral reproving and edifying, preaching of salvation and disaster in the breathless urgency of the indignant man who asks for justice (while sentences bubble out of him like blood, shrieking “Staunch me!”—and all the shamelessly flaunted misery that makes those who are appealed to—and hard of hearing—even more hard of hearing:

  because silence is the ultimate haven for dignity).

  •

  That’s what had become of what had started as love, and I regarded myself in Christa’s eyes accordingly, and her smile could have exonerated me. Mais hélas!

  I saw myself through the eyes of the others, saw myself squeezing along the edge of the black block of mourners, along the milk-and-lily-whitewashed wall, on which my wet raincoat was probably leaving an ugly streak. It wasn’t hard to guess what those who had known me for years were seeing: hair that had grayed and thinned, a little extra weight, even a certain casualness in the clothes that had once (as Schwab had phrased it) been indecently elegant. They were also, I assume, paradoxically familiar with the alien streak in a man who is a stranger not only here but abroad as well—an alien streak intensified by this alien quality, even though he had returned home. They saw runes of life, which may have given them insight into themselves.

  Scherping, seeing me, was cut to the quick, I could tell, at the thought of advances running to tens of thousands of marks for a book that would never be published. But, experienced as he was in many kinds of wile, he most likely could not fail to applaud my frequent success in unbuttoning his pocket. Such relationships, he knew, also lead to a friendship of sorts. So he saw me as embodying something of the obstinacy of money: if you surrender to it on a large scale, then it will always demand some irrational interest from you on a small scale. Perhaps he was even grateful to me. He knew this femininely stubborn pettiness of money, accepting it like a good husband who overlooks minor defects in a wife with a number of merits and pleasant traits. I thus made him feel generous. So he took on the air of a generous man. He looked upon me not without a certain delight. A warm feeling in his chest brought out his better nature, so to speak, and with it, his checkbook.

  •

>   And Carlotta was at his side, barely aging, the hint of the future matron barely in her face, in the slightly puffy cheeks and tear sacs, under the bovine gaze of a nymphomaniac. She might have been thinking about our first meeting, eighteen years ago, in Witte’s office: she was Witte’s secretary at that time and his dame de compagnie, although still married to Schwab, while I was married to Christa, who had talked me, a young man full of ideas, into taking Witte up on his suggestion and entering the advertising department of the Wittewash Company. Naturally this was not the result of my visit to Witte’s office. But it did lead to meeting Carlotta (and, at a certain point in the “conference,” to our launching into a fit of laughter that nothing could suppress or arrest). It led to one of those light-as-a-feather relationships never dramatized by either partner, whose basis is for many years the nearest bed or sofa, and which, unmarred by any other demand, prove to be the most durable and most useful friendships (Gisela).

  Presumably, then, Carlotta (her real name was of course Hannelore, but she had sloughed off this prosaic name as an adolescent during a three-week sojourn in Florence, where she had assumed the more rigorously formed name)—presumably, Carlotta was not overwhelmed with emotion on seeing me again. She merely sized me up and down with a sober eye to check the extent to which my physical decay, undeniably commencing, could spoil the tastiness of the morsel that she had sporadically inserted into her erotic diet over a long period of time, a quite variegated diet at that. She liked me; that was certain. Besides, she had never put on a show for anybody.

  In those days, I had greatly disappointed Witte; furthermore, my separation from Christa, his protégée, had convinced him how fatefully correct he had been to feel qualms about “part-time artists” (he meant, oddly enough, artistically gifted men who were careless with their talents; who lacked the ethical strength to devote themselves totally to art, commit their entire being to it). Witte, of course, had completely excluded me from the precincts of his role as God the Father, promoter, and protector. I figured at the periphery of his Middle Kingdom as a troublemaker; but ever since he had filled his flock almost entirely with full-time artists—ceramicists and interpretive dancers—I did not get all too close to his cock-of-the-walk feelings. He had (like most other people) viewed Schwab’s friendship with me as the expression of the non-middle-class leanings that one must accept in a full-time artist (for Schwab’s assignment to this category was due to his death, which had proved once again to Witte that a genuine artistic temperament will brook no compromises).

  Here too Witte could, quite appropriately, play the generous man. And this, as usual, moved him to feel sentimental about himself. Only the strict obligation of a Hanseatic man to act reserved (and perhaps also the suspicion that a news photographer might be present and could possibly publish the photograph) prevented him from waving me over to shake my hand with deep concern.

  In private, he would most likely have been rather glad to own such a photograph. One of his favorite words was “tolerance.” Even in his early days as a committed National Socialist (of the Strasser type, to be sure; i.e., an outspoken opponent of Hitler), he had never gone so far as to demand explicitly that the world be cleansed of my sort. In his heart of hearts, he may have counted me among the things and people against which and whom the Wittewash Company was pursuing its campaign of whiter and whiter washing, more and more thorough detergents. Yet his profound feeling was dominated by the generous forbearance of the royal merchant who, when I married Christa, had said to her, “You’ve danced a bit out of line, dear child. But still, you’ve got an interesting partner.” He couldn’t help letting out a sigh when he saw me.

  •

  So much goodwill on all sides began to make me feel ill at ease. It bolstered them against the past the way their padded coats bolstered them against the autumnal fog outside. Old Miss Wiebke, Schwab’s wonderful aunt, who had once been engaged to Witte in some lost mythical past, looked at me with loving melancholy, in which nothing recalled that while her adored nephew Johannes was alive she had regarded me as the evil spawn of the lowest cynicism. Had her life’s dream come true and she become a theater director, she would have cast me in the role of Mephisto in a modern-dress staging of Faust, daringly based on 1920s Berlin Expressionism (and she would then have screwed me out of my salary with the clearest of consciences). Now, she seemed ready to view me as foster brother to her protégé, who, because of me, had sometimes treated her even worse than usual. And oddly enough, her indulgence was now sincere. Not just because of her grief, which was no doubt profound. There was also a sense of salvation in her. It was as if her nephew’s death had released her from something that had prevented her from being herself—had released her from a life-lie.

  Fräulein Schmidschelm behind her, Schwab’s secretary Schelmie, could relish her own triumph. Now she would be the leading lady at Lücke’s. The field was hers. Earlier, Schwab had dragged his aunt along on his boozing tours (against her will, it turned out), finally landing at Lücke’s, where unspeakably ludicrous scenes of rivalry had taken place between Schelmie and the poor aunt. The latter would wear housekeeper blouses buttoned up to her chin, with a brooch and a corseted waist, as though she were still an actress and had gone out right after the performance (of say, Mrs. Warren’s Profession) without bothering to change, in order to pop into her regular pub and gulp down a jigger of something or other. For all the popularity that the aunt thus attained (and that was far greater than the popularity she had enjoyed in her theatrical days), she must have felt that this role was forced upon her and that Schelmie more authentically played the part the aunt was trying to play in her old-hen love for the nephew, who had left the nest prematurely: the part of a drinking companion and (in the fog of intoxication, in which everything blurred together) occasional bedmate (also dimmed by the subsequent hangover, like the memory of vomiting and similar embarrassments).

  Now, the aunt sat between Schwab’s niece Uschi and her brand-new fiancé, Klaus (with Herr von Rönnekamp standing at his side as an auntie-father). The old lady had finally become something she may never have wanted to become, but that she had to be and was actually meant to be in accordance with her true essence and true vocation: the upper-class daughter who never married and made herself the pillar of the family. The tavern original of the past twenty years (the former grande dame, known to everyone and always trailing after her boozy nephew) was merely the cross between this actual life-reality and the life-dream of a career on the stage. And even though (or because) it had been a life-lie, it would now give her a certain glory in a life-reality that had finally come true. She was the one predestined to become a myth for the family, and not the star-crossed nephew for whose sake she had lived past herself and then in the end to herself.

  •

  They would always be victorious in their way—these honorable tavern denizens and sedate brothel regulars, from whose angular shopkeeper-skulls their grandfathers’ eyes peered, clear as water (grandfathers who had tilled the marshland between Pöseldorf and Ohlsdorf). The god who was their mighty middle-class fortress never allowed them outside its ramparts. Even their most daring fictions rooted them all the more deeply within its walls. As a result, their major and minor fictions—from world improvement to persecution complex, from artistic intention to manic conformism—all these life-dreams and life-lies, all this constant as-if, were somehow repulsively perverse, a gamble of the imagination with only a seeming risk, an art pour l’art of spiritual gesture that turned their lives into the caricature of authentic drama. I now understood the core of John’s dislike for what he called the “bloody fucking middle classes,” and I understood how fundamentally different they were from the Middle Kingdom of Uncle Ferdinand, Sir Agop Garabetian, and Bully Olivera. “Psychology begins with the bourgeoisie,” Stella used to say.

  I now also understood what Schwab had meant when he said that the German novel, as the bourgeois art form (self-destructively aimed at the bourgeoisie), has to have someth
ing of the barbarian splendor of the German renaissance: its country-squire gaiety, through which the still lumpish severity of the middle ages still shone; and at the same time, something of Richard Wagner’s kaleidoscope technique, in which leitmotifs, within an extraordinarily complicated structure, produce order, clarity, and recognizability out of heterogeneity. All these people lived in a nonuniformity and noncompatibility of wishes and desires and, consequently, in a steady spiritual volvulus; this twisting of their bowels could not be depicted more lucidly than in an arabesque from which they themselves regularly kept peering out as their own actual leitmotifs.

  Here too, by trying to see through me, my trials and possible tribulations, they looked at me through themselves. Herr von Rönnekamp (black hat, but cream-colored gabardine coat with mink collar) let his private-detective gaze, rising darkly from his own private sphere and diving deep into mine, play over me with an ironic smile of sweetly puckered lips, in order to catch me slipping up and thus giving the lie to my claim that I was not occasionally afflicted by homoerotic stirrings. His protégé Klaus, fermenting in more and more densely, more and more darkly hirsute young manhood (which was about to expand to tavern-bouncer dimensions), dreamed of himself in movies through me. And his fiancée, Uschi, Schwab’s niece—who could never say no, thus suffering spiritual torments that emanated from her like a sharp body odor, so that any man, from the milkman to her doctoral adviser (her major was German), felt impelled to lay her on her back—Uschi hated me for being one of the many men who had done so. Then, behind these people, I saw a tearstained face—and there she was at last, my nixie, who had announced herself with Christa: Lovely Heli.