Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  At this point, the pimply dramaturge pipes up to say that a story like this contains the elements of Greek tragedy—namely, an ethically and morally unresolvable conflict in which all involved must perish, engendering pity and terror. Clamorous protest from the bankers, who can’t agree to such a pessimistic outcome. Stoffel sides with them. (“The moviegoers will stay away in droves after the premiere.”) Astrid objects that, however the conflict is resolved, she still doesn’t know how to “visually conceive” the end of the film. Nagel growls that it’s very simple: you’ll see the woman either being untied or dangling from a branch. He’s become quite grouchy. Trying to help my friend out, I say you have to leave it up to the viewers to sort out the clash of two ethical principles. Let them talk it through in the pub after the movie’s over. You can’t ask more of a film than that. Again, I’m met with blank stares. “Whaddaya mean? What kinda clash?”

  I say, “Imagine yourself in the following situation. All of you have a highly developed sense of the need for moral improvement and at the same time a lively feeling of responsibility for correct rules of engagement in war. So let’s assume you’re a missionary—in Borneo, say—and have spent long, weary years laboring to persuade a tribe of Dayaks to solemnly forgo head-hunting. A great ceremony has been planned to mark the historical importance of their pledge. Just at the culminating moment, a commissioner of the colonial government appears and promises the Dayaks five pounds per severed Japanese head. They’re at war with Japan and fear an invasion. How would you react?”

  That remark unleashes a paroxysm of enthusiasm. None of them is willing to see that my story was nothing but a sort of inversion of Nagel’s, with the same dramaturgically insoluble outcome: no ending is able to be completely satisfactory to those involved. Stoffel loudly and illogically announces, “That’s exactly the solution!” And even the bank stiffs nod in agreement. “Solution to what?” I ask in confusion. Stoffel’s meaty hand wallops me on the shoulder. “For the movie, man! We’ve got you to thank for how to get this done. Aside from making the awkward parallel to Germany’s fate much harder to see (do we have to be condemned for our past even now, when the world has moved on in a totally different direction, toward freedom and democracy?)—I say aside from that, your version makes a tangible product so real I can taste it.” He waxes visionary, starts to show off for the bank guys. “Borneo sounds like a long way off, but it’s under British administration. Our occupiers will certainly have a more lively interest in it than in Mato Grosso or anywhere else in South America. I could imagine involving an English company in a coproduction. Astrid has good connections to Rank Films through her old friend Billy Fletcher. I’ve got an exchange between occupation zones in mind too: I think we could shoot in the studios in Munich-Geiselgasteig. The Yanks won’t find anything to object to in a film like this. Hamburg doesn’t have big enough studios and besides, in Munich we can interest American distributors. And Borneo is just a spectacular location: jungles, the safari experience, and so on . . .”—I can already picture him running off to the tailor to get measured for bush jackets—“Although, the weather in Borneo is unpredictable. We’d be in trouble if the rainy season started too soon. I see that I’ll need to go out there myself . . .” To do what? Teach German punctuality to the clouds in the sky?

  He forges ahead with visionary plans. I’ve given up trying to straighten out the misunderstanding that has stretched its tentacles like an octopus into every aspect of the topic. I shrug and nod in agreement when he asks me, “Are you prepared to write me a treatment of your story? I assume the content isn’t copyrighted; it really happened, no? So we won’t have to purchase the rights?”

  Just to Astrid, I say, “Sorry my location is exotic too. But for sure there’ll be a lovely role for you to appear wearing a flower behind your ear and topless,” and get a look in return, a look that a woman at the turn of the century would have coupled with a sharp rap from her closed fan—

  and with all that going on, I have failed to notice that Nagel has left the room, fuming mad, presumably. It’s too late to run after him. I don’t find him in his garden house either, and he remains invisible for the next few days. I respect his anger and wait for it to cool down. It’s pointless to explain that it truly was not my intention to poach on his territory. He won’t believe me anyway: what strengthened our friendship from the beginning was his frank distrust of me. Christa is equally skeptical of me as a screenwriter. “Not a very respectable job.” What else should I do? What could I do? Write ad copy for Witte’s laundromats? He’s hinted there might be a job there for me.

  • • •

  Handwritten note:

  For later:

  The history of film projects during reconstruction:

  Either: The producer has an “ idea” for the subject matter—a title—doesn’t matter where it comes from. The first thing he does is secure all the rights. So he also owns what the screenwriter thinks up and writes under that title. At best, the producer pays for the treatment written on the basis of a short synopsis, which is never paid for.

  Or: The screenwriter suggests his own subject matter. Again, the first step is a synopsis. With luck, it gets expanded into a treatment. Since other writers, the producer himself, usually also a dramaturge working for the financing bank, the actor chosen for the lead, to say nothing of the presumptive director and in Stoffel’s case, the producer’s wife, all also get involved, the treatment gets so worked over and discussed to death that the screenwriter who initiated it can’t claim any rights to it.

  At this stage, the final product, the movie, is completely secondary. What’s important is the “project.” At the latest with the treatment, it begins to have substance, i.e., negotiations with the financing bank have begun. According to whether they take a positive or a negative turn, the treatment gets changed, that is, gets made more palatable for the money people—the banks and distributors. And even if a screenplay finally gets written, it only serves as a basis for negotiations to extract more money. The screenwriter doesn’t get paid until final acceptance, i.e., hardly ever, since in most cases the “project” is not completed—nor does it need to be, for the producer has in the meantime gotten together enough money to keep himself and his company afloat. To cover the monies obtained for this project but not spent, he starts a new one.

  If it happens that a movie actually gets made, the backers are steam-rolled by the avalanche of cost overruns. The screenwriter has long since been tossed overboard, but the production company is flourishing. If the project fails before a film is made, the intellectual property rights can be sold to some other production company.

  Wohlfahrt: “Keep the rubles rolling, man, that’s the main thing!”

  • • •

  Because whoever resurrects an event in order to place it in relation to the past and the future—and in the end to eternity as well!—is performing a moral act. I would even say the moral act per se. Doesn’t our conscience operate in the same way, by measuring what we do or fail to do against previous good or bad deeds, with regard to future deeds, and all in relation to the timeless absolute, eternity? Thus a story is the mother of morality, and the telling of stories is morality in practice. And so we will end up on the cross with our practice of morality—all of us who take the stories we tell seriously.

  • • •

  Dream:

  Christa, S., and I are standing on a bridge suspended on steel cables high above a river. I know they are about to snap. I want to test the tension in the midsection of one of these cables. I pluck it and listen to it vibrating at a high pitch, like a violin string. I’ve never played an instrument in my life and I’m enchanted. I discover I can play like a virtuoso; it sounds like a harpsichord concerto. S. is also ecstatic. Even Christa marvels at me. I become aware that under my fingers, the cable is fraying. With every pluck it gets thinner and the tension increases. I know it’s about to snap and the bridge will collapse, but still I keep on playing without warning S. and Chri
sta. Below, Nagel is waiting. He won’t catch any of us.

  • • •

  Handwritten note:

  Select and tailor one’s figures so they become stereotypes—or rather, phenotypes.

  But is there any other way?

  • • •

  Caught myself trying to move as I imagine he moves: lightly, elegantly, gracefully, without affectation. Fell deep into alcohol at the shame of it (and also haunted by dreams: my murder!). Ran into Schelmie and my aunt in the pub. Their intimacy (at my expense) is very suspicious. Was unintentionally quite rude; embarrassed to think how I played the big boss toward Schelmie, the lowly employee. Even more shame. Back home, an auto-da-fé: destroyed everything I’d written in the last week. Lost all idea of what it could be good for.

  GISELA

  She is a living testament to the truism that a woman is never humiliated by what she does, but only by what happens to her. She never talks about where she comes from but she doesn’t keep it a secret either. She thinks it’s insignificant and not worth mentioning whether she comes from a middle-class, lower-middle-class, or completely unclassifiable family. Her existence begins with the decision to become a whore. She didn’t fall into this profession by accident. She chose it as her best chance to survive—and not just survive, but do so without being exposed to what could have happened to her (at the very least, to be seized, forced to submit to a man or several men: the inescapable fate of a poor, solitary, and very beautiful girl). The times were hard. We are already beginning to forget that back then it was possible to starve to death unnoticed. Only two years: the day that separated the two worlds was only one of them ago.

  She describes the dumbfounded expressions on the faces of the vice squad when she went there to register as the occupant of one of the whorehouses on the Reeperbahn, tells how one of them jumped up to offer her a chair, tells of the respect with which they took down her particulars, the dignity with which they repeated her name, birthdate, and previous addresses. And then the glances: each one a potential customer. She describes the spontaneous camaraderie of the girls who resolutely embrace the calling of whore and the envy and resentment of the others who have arrived at this point from desperation or carelessness. And she chooses her customers too, but seldom turns one down because she doesn’t like him: professional ethics. She has no right to be picky, makes her choice based only on the desired specialties. And so she became Grand Mistress of the Order of Sadomasochists. Hardly ever sits in the window to lure customers anymore. Works mostly to order. By arrangement. She took me on because none of the other girls were free. We got into conversation thanks to her lightning-fast recognition of my intentions. First reluctant reaction: Let’s get down to business! Don’t waste my time. But then immediately relented once the financial arrangements were taken care of. “It’s not just my physique that’s for sale. I’m well paid for fantasies and sensitive to the psychological needs of my customers.” Maybe it was my understanding of her motives that won her over: the principle of fun. That’s how our cold friendship became close. I don’t need to pump her. She knows my curiosity is germ-free. We both enjoy ourselves.

  And she is wonderfully discreet. Never a personal question. What I tell her—or could tell her—about myself wouldn’t be compensation or an exchange of confessions. Our subject is the world of her experience. She examines it with me and through me with the same detachment and observational interest. We are most amused when one of her regular customers is at the next table in the swank restaurant I’ve taken her to—ideally with his wife and children—and is on pins and needles fearing she will expose him.

  Her bearing is similar to Christa’s: slim and straight as a reed. In Christa’s case, to appreciate it fully you have to see her in dressage. Gisela has a freer stride. For the rest, it’s still an ironclad rule that I have to pay every time I want to sleep with her. I think it would be easier to borrow money from her than to talk her into a free fuck.

  • • •

  The stars have turned senile . . .

  Hamburg, 1950: Ran into Herr von Rönnekamp on the Jungfernstieg. Cordial reunion: his detective’s face (Arsène Lupin, avenger of the dispossessed) steamrollers you with amiability. In his rich Baltic accent with the swallowed umlauts that earned him the nickname “the Bütch” he declares, “Hoven’t zeen you in a dock’s edge!” Invites me to a “little chat” in the pastry café of the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten. On the way he tells me about the tragic fate of another member of his brotherhood: Unhappily in love with a young man he picked up on the street and hired as his servant only to be swindled and robbed in every possible way, his despairing friend had decided to kill himself. At the moment he’s raising the pistol to his temple, his servant-lover enters the room. Caught in the act, the startled suicide shoves the pistol into his pants pocket. It goes off and shoots off “bows nuts, chust sink off it, shoots off bows testikels.” Tableau. (From his narrow mouth “testicle” sounds like the name of a Baltic landed estate: “For seven hundred years, the Rönnekamps have been the lords of Testikel.”) What moves me is not the tragedy of the man who shot off “bows nuts” or rather “bows testikels,” but the love story behind it. So that sort of thing still exists—although probably only among queers. Rönnekamp too won me over with his capacity for love. Unforget-table times in his gingerbread cottage in Pöseldorf: him in the midst of his lover-boys—of the teenager or ordinary seaman variety—muscular young lads with fist-sized boils on the backs of their necks beneath their yellow Lorelei-manes; him boasting in his Baltic aristocrat’s manner that tenderness is unmanly and laughable, and an immediate, rising chorus of young male voices: “You? How can you say that? You! Just a little kiss and you’re right down on your knees!”

  (Handwritten note: Attention! cf. Abel)

  I see him standing at the window, in his hand a book he’s going to recommend to his favorite, Dieterkins (a mechanic’s apprentice). (What heterosexual still falls in love with a girl from the “people”? Romanticism flourishes only in tennis clubs these days. With predictable consequences.) Rönne’s anguished attempt to explain the beauties of Joseph Conrad to the dull-witted boy. Loving instruction. Wanting to give the best one has. His knife-edge profile bent in Pre-Raphaelite humility.

  In the pastry café (coffee and cake for him; cognac for me in the absence of whiskey), talk turns to the days of the primal community in Nagel’s garden house, where we met. (General Freiherr von Neunteuffel, in whose company he had turned up, is in Bonn by now, busily engaged in the project of rearmament.) What Rönne articulates with fetching impersonality is an excellent analysis of events since 1945: at first, paralysis after the shock of total defeat (Nagel’s “Craterland”), then the primal communities born out of it, gatherings of fanaticized starvelings too inept for black market business. Escape into the intellectual sphere, the cultural and political spheres. The latter especially—a playground for the utopians; equally fertile ground for sharp-eyed strivers. Everyone who barely managed to survive—scruffy, tattered idealists with their heads in the clouds, disabled sleepwalkers, eternal students missing a limb or two, dyspeptic intellectuals, exploiters of ruined ideologies—they all devote themselves to intellectual reconstruction. Including the cobweb-shrouded Weimar Republicans rounded up by the western Allies from liberated concentration camps, state prisons, agricultural forced-labor camps, and other hiding places as pitiful proof of originally humanitarian war aims, in order to give them a quick dusting off and introduce them into the mother liquor of apathetic turnip eaters as catalysts for the hoped-for crystallization of a new German democracy. Although officially appointed, they too operated at first in an airless environment outside the bounds of general awareness—until, in fact, a sort of crystalline precipitate formed (similar to the famous Karlsbad salt) with a crust of professional politicians surrounding it. This new race is now determining the new German reality. Its first coup was the currency reform of 1948.

  However, Rönne says, this process would not have bee
n possible without the distracting maneuver that every magician uses to divert attention from his actual manipulations. It was produced by the inter-regnum of the intellectuals. The radio dominates reality. An enormous backdrop of chatter is erected. The most obvious evidence: Professor Hertzog and his intervention in the intellectual magma of the primal community, his distracting game of supposedly bringing order to the chaos. The radio broadcasts journalistic imitations of it in the evening while actual politics (e.g., Bonn’s appointment of General Neunteuffel) takes place behind a curtain of threadbare news reports.

  When Rönnekamp talks, his incisors drop down from behind his upper lip and appear very large. Does he have not very well seated false teeth? Very disconcerting. I have to force myself to pay attention to what he’s saying and not to the epiphany of his front teeth.

  Herr von Rönnekamp thinks that given the currency reform, the intellectuals can be dispensed with. Protesting loudly, they’ll recede into the background of what’s happening. The new German world time—shelled so wonderfully out of the preceding time by the de-valuation that there is absolutely no remaining connection between yesterday and today—is now in step with universal world time. Gathered home into the American Reich. Hertzog a prime example of that as well: his remorseful (Rönne says “raymorzfoll”) return to the Freudianism he had opportunistically sworn off during twelve Nazi years. Among the survivors of the primal community, its founder (actually only its host) Nagel is also an example of developments: from fiction to film. Rönne prophesies an age of media.