Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  I kept my concluding statement as short as possible and then, quickly as I could, returned to my penitent’s stool.

  •

  Meanwhile, however, the black-and-white pastor-blossom had ambulated over to Schwab in his new condition; perceptively, he stationed himself at the putative feet, far away from the microphone, and now he chewed a small portion of consecrating verbal gruel. At almost the same time, the downtrodden cousin twice removed began to play the organ; and while he made a steep fugue of pipe tones rise into the vault, I saw—first with terror, then with mounting delight—that Schwab was sinking into the pit from which he had been looming, and I saw two curving walls at his flanks, and they closed over him, forming a small barrel.

  He had passed into his element.

  CAIN

  The Last Manuscript

  Translated by David Dollenmayer

  EDITOR’S FOREWORD

  THERE IS no basis for the claim that the finder of the manuscript presented here knew what it was the minute he laid eyes on it. Although the attorney Dr. Fritz Engelhardt appears to be an astute reader of my books, his knowledge of them presumably doesn’t go beyond the Tales of Maghrebinia, and it is doubtful that the names occurring in the pages he discovered—Schwab, Scherping, Nagel, Witte, etc.—would have led him to guess their connection to The Death of My Brother Abel. Only the preface by the producer Wohlfahrt—which was meant to be an introduction but by accident was stuck in at the end of the folder instead of the beginning—must have suggested that a happy chance had put into his hand Folder C of the manuscripts of Aristides Subicz (or rather, Schwab), which had been missing and thought lost for almost thirty years. (Folders A and B were published in The Death of My Brother Abel.)

  Upon closer inspection, however, various inconsistencies and even contradictions began to emerge. According to Aristides, Schwab’s secretary Fräulein Schmidschelm turned the folder over to him after Schwab’s death, yet it contains passages in Schwab’s hand that were obviously written after his body had been cremated at the Ohlsdorf Cemetery in Hamburg in 1964, as described in The Death of My Brother Abel. Fräulein Schmidschelm—a secretary in the editorial offices of Scherping Publishers and known to everyone affectionately as “Schelmie”—had unfortunately also passed away in the meantime, so that she could not be asked to clear up the discrepancy. To increase the confusion even further, moreover, Wohlfahrt, formerly a movie producer and subsequently a publisher, declares in his presumptuous preface that he regards himself as the legitimate owner of the folder from Aristides’s literary remains, namely, as compensation for a prepayment he claims to have made for a film script entitled “The Lost Daughter,” which was still undelivered when Aristides lost his life in an automobile accident in late 1969. I do not intend to get into how grotesque it is that Wohlfahrt exploited this supposedly “legitimate literary possession” to switch from movie producer to publisher. It is highly implausible in any case that he could ever have expected to find a script for the movie “The Lost Daughter” in Folder C. A review of the evidence has revealed that that was an intentional misdirection—unsurprisingly, given the bankrupt Wohlfahrt’s customary business practices. Fragments of a treatment for the script in question have turned up among the papers of his French coproducer, but that does nothing to explain the contradictions in Aristides’s manuscript, to say nothing of the fact that all the names in Aristides’s writings—presumably including his own—have been replaced by made-up ones. Not all the personages who appear there are identical to actual people living today or alive at the time of writing; the same goes for the events depicted vis-à-vis historically documented occurrences. Incidentally, to insist they be identical would mean forbidding the novelist an imagination.

  In this case, however, investigations were able to be conducted on the basis of reliable information. Dr. Engelhardt purchased the house on the Tegernsee where the folder was discovered from the producer Wohlfahrt (or rather, from the actual person who bears that name)—fully furnished and containing surprisingly complete files of commercial documents dating back to 1959—shortly before the producer (undoubtedly identical to the “supreme movie piglet” in Aristides’s Death of My Brother Abel) fled the country under multiple indictments for fraud and tax evasion. (Dr. Engelhardt surmises his current domicile to be somewhere in the Caribbean.) Full as they are of crackpot (if not intentionally fraudulent from the get-go) movie projects, the files clearly include not a single film with the faintest similarity to the one in Wohlfahrt’s preface, also described by Aristides in Abel, namely, the one entitled “The Lost Daughter.” In fact, both Wohlfahrt and Aristides make many implausible assertions about production details, especially that Nadine Carrier would play the lead role. But perhaps we can attribute that to an attempt at obfuscation by Aristides, which Wohlfahrt was all too happy to seize upon in order to substantiate his grotesque claim to the manuscript. In any event, as was to be expected, attempts to make inquiries of Madame Carrier were fruitless. The very number of individuals who had intimate relations with her over the years made a precise sifting of the evidence out of the question. The diva could not be cajoled into reading and commenting on the relevant passages in Abel (“There’s been so much written about me . . .”). So how did Wohlfahrt get his hands on Folder C? One thing the files from Wohlfahrt’s house on the Tegernsee prove beyond a doubt is his connection to the long-serving editor at Scherping Publishers, Johannes S.

  Who he might be—or perhaps, who the publisher Scherping stands for in reality—doesn’t need to be disclosed: it’s all too obvious. By the same token, however, it’s evident how Aristides (or the author concealed behind that pseudonym) understands the concept of “reality.” His skepticism toward this “most protean of all abstractions” is a leitmotif running through all his works and he leaves not a shred of doubt that for him, however fictive it may be, “literary reality” seems to come closer to the actual truth of what’s happening than the multiple interpretations of the factuality of events. This makes it a priori impossible to read The Death of My Brother Abel as a roman à clef; to be sure, its supposed transparency would allow us to recognize the flesh-and-blood models for the figures and occurrences contained therein, but we would lose sight of the meaning of the book. And of course, the same goes for Folder C. In my capacity as editor of the writings in Folder C, its distinct “literary reality” seemed to me more important than finding a key to the factuality concealed in the fiction, a key which—as Dr. Engelhardt assumes with forensic persistence—could possibly correct if not totally eliminate the discrepancies between the accounts in Folder C and those in The Death of My Brother Abel. All it takes is a few pages from Folder C and one soon falls under the narrative’s spell and has to admit that the apparently accidental and heterogeneous arrangement of its accounts actually represents a carefully structured and coherent literary product with a thoroughly justified claim to unmediated authenticity. Even such a puny intellect as Wohlfahrt’s, whose own sense of business ethics often tends to manipulate and relativize the substance of reality, recognized that what we have here is not a supplement to or, if you will, a completion of the book The Death of My Brother Abel, but an independent piece of literature in its own right. Let the grotesque nature of his preface bear witness to that fact.

  Surely the motive behind the notes in Folder C that seem fragmentary and, at first glance, unrelated to one another is the same as in Abel, namely, an attempt to get to the bottom of the act of writing—that is, novel writing, the authentic invention of reality. Aristides’s various approaches to this problem, his “wrestling with the angel of truth in the ‘as-if’ ” and continual failure in the attempt, as agonizingly and tortuously reported to the literary agent Brodny and to Schwab in Abel, seem to be continued here, although they stay closer to the topic, deteriorate less into blather, and thus seem more disciplined and orderly—small wonder: they are pieces of work that Schwab collected and sequenced with a view to completion and eventual publication which he, Schwab,
would have overseen as an editor at Scherping Publishers. Aristides could at this point interject: it’s a job Schwab would have had, had he not died. But that was not the case: Schwab was still alive when the cover of Folder C was closed.

  I leave it to the reader to solve the mystery hidden therein.

  —G.v.R.

  INTENDED AS A PREFACE

  by the producer Heinz Wohlfahrt

  WHEN I hereby release the manuscript of “The Lost Daughter” in printed form, I do so in unimpeachable legality on the basis of the authority vested in me as sole proprietor and CEO of INTERCOSMIC ART FILMS, Vaduz, Principality of Liechtenstein, P.O. Box BX 391, whose executive and sole proprietor I have always been and remain to this day. Thus it is not some shady deal, as has been claimed in certain quarters. It has always been—and up to the present moment still is—my principle to invariably honor obligations my firm has undertaken, even such as are against my better judgment, but also vice versa. I’ve stuck to that in good years and will keep it up in times of crisis too; some may call me crazy, but I was fanatically devoted to the beautiful profession of filmmaking—however, even the gods strive in vain against a wall of opposition.

  There have been some hostile comments made about me recently which I here wish to publicly repudiate. I would like to again lay out the facts, one after the other, in chronological order, especially for the gentlemen from a certain newspaper for egghead superstars, a.k.a. intellectuals, who’ve suddenly discovered a supposed genius in Herr Aristides, even though they knew him before without noticing anything of the kind.

  Herr Aristides (with a person in his line of work you can never tell if that was his first or his last name or if he really was called something else entirely) was a victim of driving at a speed that even I have to call irresponsible, and I like to drive fast myself. He lost his life in a crash in which no one else was injured, thank God. It was in France, thirty kilometers or so beyond Avignon, on January 13, 1968, between 5:30 and 6:00 p.m. precisely. That exact date—probably the only certain one in the life of a man like him—has stuck in my memory so well because it was when the disagreeable arguments began with my French coproducer at the time, arguments that led to a falling-out (which, as far as I personally am concerned, has been flawlessly resolved) and so to the collapse of the Lost Daughter project and thus to the provisional liquidation of INTERCOSMIC ART FILMS, all because of a certain Herr Aristides, today celebrated as a poet by those of his ilk.

  In point of fact, at the time of his accident my screenwriter Aristides found himself, under my contractually stipulated directive, en route from Paris to Cannes. Waiting there for him and the completed script for the film The Lost Daughter was a camera-ready crew—everyone from the cameraman to the best boy and the actors under a renown, first-class director—which it was my job as producer to have up and running. I was staying at the Hotel Martinez and punctually at 11:00 p.m., I received a call from the highway patrol advising me of the accident and cause of death. On the spot and still in my tuxedo, I personally set off directly from the bar to the scene of the accident, which—on account of extremely adverse road conditions in what will be remembered as that unusual winter of 1968—I did not reach until 2:00 a.m.

  I herewith declare under oath that, despite personally conducting a thorough search, I did not turn up among the papers found at the accident scene a script entitled “The Lost Daughter.” Nor did such a script emerge during later searches of Aristides’s paltry literary remains in various third-rate hotels in Hamburg and Paris. The one and only thing contained in the folder marked “The Lost Daughter” was the manuscript being published here.

  Claims to this manuscript have been asserted by a lawyer representing the mother of Aristides’s underage son (they divorced in 1952) as well as by Herr Klaus Scherping of Scherping Publishers, Hamburg, and the stockbroker von Rönnekamp, also Hamburg, all under the pretext that it is not simply a movie script but a literary masterpiece and that it belongs to them.

  Be that as it may, it only shines a harsher light on the dark ignorance of those ladies and gentlemen, who are not even aware of the fact that in this manuscript their friend Aristides depicted with microscopic precision the roles they play in it, such that from the very first page, anyone with half a brain knows with one hundred percent certainty what I suspected from the very first, and which Aristides even has the gall to admit himself—namely, that with their total support it was his intention from the beginning to double-cross INTERCOSMIC ART FILMS—a.k.a. in this case me, Heinz Wohlfahrt—in the most cynical way, by never intending to write a script but a work of literature instead.

  That is confirmed by the statements of other equally experienced, top-notch experts in film production whom I have consulted. Their unassailable conclusion is that not even one of the madmen who were yesterday dubbed the “New Wave” and today find themselves on top—not even one of them could make the manuscript in question into a movie, much less a box-office hit of the kind our financially high-risk industry is dependent on, for better or for worse.

  And now they expect me to sacrifice my interests to their opinion? Even though it was against my express warning and opposition that the fellow was contracted to write the script on the basis of—if you can believe it—nothing more than a treatment of three (3!) typewritten pages. My French coproducer insisted on it in consultation with the distributor against my vote as executive producer, because Aristides’s oral presentation of his idea was supposedly so brilliant that he was to set to work immediately on the shooting script, skipping the treatment that is standard in the industry. I have a memo of September 4, 1967, as proof that the distributor agreed with the French coproducer and therefore put pressure on me at this time of crisis to pay an advance out of my own personal pocket (certainly not the usual practice for unknown authors in my country) and promise to take over half the costs once the script was ready. These partners were then content to get an occasional look at only a few pages of the script that was purportedly in progress. The contracts for the actors were drawn up from a cast list handwritten by Aristides. Here I want to stress that this unthinking lack of caution was encouraged by the influence of the female lead, Nadine Carrier, whose relationship to Aristides he himself depicted in a way that leaves little to the imagination.

  If I am now going to be accused of possibly being at fault in the early death of a writer who would have restored the global role of German postwar literature à la Böll and Grass, despite the fact that no one else but INTERCOSMIC ART FILMS—i.e., in this case me, Heinz Wohlfahrt—ever had need of his artistic talents, I can only respond coolly that it’s quite possible that Aristides—at the time utterly unknown and financially dependent on my advance, having pumped all other wells dry so that even his friends Scherping and von Rönnekamp (as he regretfully admits himself) wouldn’t advance him another red cent—caused the accident intentionally to cover up the fact that he had not met his obligations to me. From my personal examination of skid marks at the accident site, I can affirm that the facts are otherwise. The results of the police investigation at the scene, where I was personally present a few hours later, as well as the unimpeachable statements of credible eyewitnesses unambiguously show that the trailer of a truck had begun to skid on the icy curve, forcing Aristides’s car, approaching from the opposite direction and, as usual, traveling much too fast, into a dangerous maneuver, and Aristides himself at the wheel tried everything he could to regain control of his vehicle before it crashed into the concrete mast of an overhead power line that crosses the road at that point.

  Which leads me to this conclusion: not only did I have absolutely nothing to do with the accidental death of Aristides in a traffic accident; instead, he violated my trust, which gives me the right to regard myself as the sole legal owner of the only known copy of the recovered manuscript of “The Lost Daughter”—as has also been determined in an injunction of the state court in Hamburg—with all the customary rights to translation and publication in other langua
ges, distribution in film versions, radio and television broadcasts, as well as in all future media of the same or similar kind. Fees resulting from any of the above will serve solely to compensate me for damages suffered through Aristides’s breach of trust.

  No one can accuse me of the slightest misuse of my authority as the legal owner and publisher of the written—not the filmed—work entitled The Lost Daughter. I have not altered, deleted, or added a single syllable to the manuscript, despite the fact that the manner in which Aristides writes about the movie business—and especially about my person or the person of Horst-Jürgen Stoffel, doyen of the reconstruction of postwar German film, or for example the way he presents certain men like his Gerdjochen Witte, doyen of Witte Laundromats, when we know exactly who is concealed behind that pseudonym, namely, one of the most respected figures of Hamburg’s business community—would have caused anyone else to truthfully gloss over the bald facts. Unfortunately, the facts speak for themselves and against him. After all, it’s well known that in their politics our so-called intellectuals are more on the rosy-red left wing and therefore have no real contact with leaders of the business community. I hope I will be forgiven for this publication because Aristides’s manuscript is, after all, more poetry than truth. That is attested to by the testimony of a highly intelligent young man who unfortunately has not yet made a name for himself but surely will going forward, a certain Dr. Wieland Haslitzsch, PhD, professor of German, whom I have hired as an expert consultant on literary matters for INTERCOSMIC LITER-ARIA. He writes, for example: