Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  Poor Christa! That I succumbed to the enchantment of the young equestrienne (the female edition of the standard bearer in The Lay of the Love and Death of Cornet Christoph Rilke? What an illusion!) in the canteen of the Fürth courthouse is all too understandable. How could I resist? What primal privation had led this pretty young woman to wolf down the canteen slop? It was terrifying to watch her stuffing it in, utterly preoccupied in chewing and swallowing, so completely absorbed in ingestion that her entire being had trickled into this process and only her sapphire gaze, glazedly turned inward, bore witness to a bewitched higher form of existence . . . It was enough to melt a heart of stone. But her? What delusion took her in? She was the victim of a much more banal misapprehension: if it wasn’t going to be a prince from the fairyland of the Allied press corps come to rescue her from the humiliation of German defeat and a starveling existence, it might as well be her stateless mess companion under British protection. In any event, somebody with access to the heavenly delights of the PX (nylons, Hershey’s chocolates!) and the cocktails and floor shows in the Grand Palace Hotel Excelsior (or whatever it was called). At any rate: “Something else for a change,” as they used to say in her circles. Big mistake!

  I could read this lapse in the eyes of the constant, ant-like trickle of her innumerable close and more distant relatives and friends—friends of her parents, friends of her youth, bosom buddies, friends of her friends—who came to see us in Witte’s half-destroyed villa on the Elbchaussee. Hamburg is still a refugee center and transit camp for nobility from east of the Elbe who’ve once again managed to more or less survive or make a precautionary getaway; even today I still have occasion to read in the eyes of the Junkers my existential error. Most of the young gentlemen are somewhat injured—but I’m used to that from Nagel. He left an arm of his own in Russia, and I don’t have to feel guilty for every amputee. Of course, the whole lot of them (like Nagel) are dripping with medals; all sorts of Knights’ Crosses with and without oak-leaf clusters, all sorts of Iron Crosses and German Crosses in Gold, Close Combat Clasps, and Lord knows what else—but that’s not all they have over me: I’m a Homo novus among them. Not just a nonparticipant in the war, but of dubious type and background. They quiz me accordingly. Christa doesn’t come to my defense, quite the opposite in fact. She listens in malicious expectation. Regularly, a meaningful exchange of glances occurs between her and my interrogators, and from it I can deduce why most of her kind, including her, see me as “out of line.” Whatever it is about my exotic appearance that they consider deceitful, or about what I say that sounds suspicious, is a downright provocation for Christa’s social equals. They are tempted to dismiss it as a bald-faced lie probably in the service of some sort of swindle, a clumsy attempt to associate myself with an even higher caste, and moreover at precisely the historic moment when their caste is about to drown in current events—typical for some nameless, rootless sort without traditions, the opposite of fair play and never kicking a person when they’re down. But who would expect fair play from someone like me? That was only to be found among their social equals. At any rate, no one knows me or anything about me, but they discover that one of their kind has married me in an unguarded moment and thus I’ve invaded the citadel of what used to be the Junker class, settled in without being able to show any document that would give me that right. Accordingly, suspected from the get-go of being a fortune hunter if not worse.

  “As a Romanian you must have been in Stalingrad. You were our comrades-in-arms, right?”

  “At the time of Stalingrad I wasn’t a Romanian anymore.”

  “No? What were you?”

  “You could call me a Russian, if you like.” (Quick exchange of glances between the questioner and Christa.)

  “A Russian? How so?”

  “I come from Bessarabia and it became part of Russia in 1940.” (Pact between your friends Ribbentrop and Molotov.)

  “But you were living in Bucharest, right?”

  “Yes, at the time. Shortly afterward, in Germany.” (Exchange of glances.)

  “Why weren’t you interned?”

  “We were comrades-in-arms!”

  (Distraught look at Christa. Irony is malice.)

  “And your compatriots, the Romanians—you just ditched them?”

  “My mother’s Austrian. So I was one of the so-called ethnic Germans.”

  “But nevertheless, you didn’t get drafted?”

  “No. I didn’t get returned home to the Reich with other ethnic Germans, so I had a pass declaring me a stateless person.” (And all sorts of other equally dubious papers.)

  Christa locks eyes with the questioner. “You could have exchanged it for a German passport.”

  “Nope. In wartime you couldn’t become a German citizen without being a German soldier. And vice versa: you couldn’t be a German soldier without having German citizenship.” (I could have added that, bastard that I was, I had no father to show either. I might not have been—God forbid!—pure Aryan, might even have been half Jewish or at least half Gypsy. After all, my mother’s family was from Bosnia. But out of consideration for Christa I didn’t say so.)

  “And so?”

  “And so I was a stateless person in a Germany at war and that’s why I couldn’t get out of Germany.” (I could have added that thanks to Uncle Ferdinand, I was working as a multilingual interpreter in the Romanian embassy, armed with more than transparent documents that were, however, plastered with enough seals and stamps to awe the German officials. Nor did I mention that at the critical moment when my cover—my whole beautiful camouflage system—was about to be blown, I had, as it were, volunteered for the German Army—cynically, knowing full well that I could never be inducted. The Gestapo was getting ready to take a deeper look into my situation. But volunteering made me a hero on the home front.)

  “And you just watched while others were putting their lives on the line?”

  “For what?”

  “Well really! For Germany, naturally. I mean, everyone for his ideals, of course. For Volk und Vaterland. For his traditions.”

  “I have neither the one nor the other.”

  “Right. Exactly. Remarkable in any event.” (Drawn-out exchange of sympathetic looks with Christa.)

  “And how did you end up in Nuremberg?”

  “As a witness.”

  “Witness to what?”

  “Murder.”

  “Murder tout court?”

  “Murder tout court.” (Somewhat paltry for Nuremberg, I admit, where if you couldn’t testify to the murder of at least a couple thousand, you didn’t even rate a spoon in the canteen.)

  The questioner now turned to face Christa directly and look her in the eye. “What about you, Christa? How did you get to Nuremberg?”

  “I was with Grandma.” Blinking her round eyes. “She had to testify about Grandpa being executed for the Twentieth of July plot.”

  Head nodding sympathetically: “Did your grandmother know anything about your grandfather’s heroic resistance?”

  “Not much. She was too busy keeping house and running the estate. Canning and such. We were self-sufficient.” (A paradise from which they were driven by the Russians, as everyone knew. A bitter fate. I could have added, moreover, that this was after the German comrades-in-arms had killed Christa’s parents.)

  The questioner, facing me again: “An interesting life you’ve led. And now you’re going to write a book about it?”

  “I don’t think they’re expecting a book about my life. Probably something else, I’m not quite sure myself.”

  (To be precise, Stoffel’s expecting a story for a movie. What S. expects only he can know. In any case, his interest is what reawakened Christa’s interest in me. Should I too perhaps abandon the mundane writing of film scripts and become a serious writer like Nagel?)

  “Well, our sort could tell a story or two as well. How things used to be, and then the war, fleeing our old homeland, etc. . . .”

  For the sharing of stories
that follows I don’t count. All I can do is listen and learn which of their close or distant relatives, acquaintances, friends of their parents, of their youth, bosom buddies, friends of friends from their good old lost homeland a few miles across the Elbe is still alive and who fled to where and found refuge or is still a vagabond looking for a place to stay. It’s been just four and a half years since the end of the war and the refugee crisis is not over yet. (“You’d think that people of the same class would eo ipso show some solidarity. But surprisingly, experience proves otherwise . . .”)

  Christa says it was a piece of luck that we found shelter in Witte’s bomb-damaged villa. Not of the same class of course, Witte, and not a Hamburg patrician either. Comes from a humble background, mother ran a little steam laundry, but by his own initiative he’s joined the business elite. “It’s a well-known fact that the old families of Hamburg councilmen were too proud to accept patents of nobility. . .”

  . . . but I really did love her. It wasn’t just being moved by her appearance in the canteen in Nuremberg or my deep sympathy with this fellow creature whose conscious sense of self consisted of nothing else than the almost forgotten pleasure ingestion and digestion produce in the alimentary canal—

  as though the World Spirit could be fulfilled on its way through her maw—

  It wasn’t just the German tragedy in her childlike face that tugged at my heart, not just the fairy-tale eyes and beneath them the small, tight mouth whose one end the conflicted tension between self-pity and arrogance forced to droop as steeply as Hitler’s signature—

  it was also quite concretely the beautiful, lissome young equestrienne with smooth skin and hair bleached bright by the sun of morning rides—

  and how does Schiller put it? “When I encounter a body I also see a mind.”

  Well then! My mind has rubbed itself sore on hers, but that doesn’t alter the fact that I loved her body with a love that is too large to end and so continues as hate—

  a gnome’s love: With hungered flesh, obscurely, he mutely craved to adore

  and I can’t blame her for having higher expectations of me and being bitterly disappointed—

  because except for my gnome’s urge to clamber all over her at night whether she wanted me to or not, I’m an underachiever. The heavenly delights of the PX (nylons! Hershey’s chocolates!) were abruptly at an end after I confessed to John that I intended to marry her (“Oh, well—my congratulations!” and not another word), and then in the following years of the harsh fade-out of the Ice Age in Hamburg, I let her starve as if I was the one who’d lost the war and personally responsible for the ice-covered condition of the world—

  the world around us, which lay in silence. But we blatherers in Nagel’s garden house talked ourselves dry with cracked lips about our dream of the future, of at last reshaping this world to be good and beautiful and true

  and the bitterest disappointment is that I am not reviving that dream, now that everyone around us is revivifying a dreamland of unfettered consumption.

  and yet I had so many interesting things to offer from the world of film (a friendship with Astrid von Bürger, for instance. A Woman Plays Foul). If I wasn’t going to blossom out into a serious novelist, at least there was a lot of money to be made in film—

  And how can I explain to Christa that the movie money, which (provisionally promised) I first have to earn before I get it (and thanks to the arithmetic of my swinish bosses will probably get only a fraction of, if any at all)—that this money is a much more dubious currency than the old reichsmark was; although it’s sometimes paid out in hard deutschmarks, it slips through my fingers before I can hang on to a fistful—

  and now S. is the sole bearer of all her hopes—S. and the book I’m supposed to write (Nagel’s already gotten an advance on his third book; they say by now he has some gold bars stashed under his bed in Witte’s garden house)—

  I notice Schwab exchanging looks with Christa too. He comes to see us often now—that is, he “drops by” after visiting Nagel in his garden house. Nagel doesn’t come with him. The gatherings of the primal community under the direction of Professor Hertzog (Hertzog with tee-zee, if you please) are almost legendary today. Now Nagel lives for nothing but literature: short stories, novellas, books, and plays for stage, screen, and radio. He’s not on speaking terms with me since I stabbed him in the back with Stoffel in front of Astrid von Bürger. In his fury at that, he has left the Stoffel field to me. Even his passion for A. v. B. is snuffed out. Nagel, the super-grouch. If he still had his right arm he’d try to “bash my face in.”

  So S. and Christa glance at each other when talk turns to my past. But that has less to do with the fishiness of a “stateless individual of obscure origins” than with my fantastic stories and the tissue of lies that makes me doubly fishy. And yet that is exactly what I’m supposed to do from now on: tell fictitious stories about myself. In book form. S. is waiting for them. He spurs me on to tell stories, any stories, like a new Baron Munchausen. Even if it leads Christa to secretly take me for a confidence man.

  S., on the other hand, admires my stories, my endowment of poetic inspiration. (Is he perhaps a bit envious?)

  “Show us something from your magic box,” he says and bores his Germanist’s eyes, half-blind from reading, through inch-thick lenses into Christa’s sapphire ones. They are always wide open, those round, bright blue eyes. When Christa blinks, her shining azure winks on and off like the blues on a police cruiser, but whenever her gaze plunges into another pair of eyes to seek and find agreement, no blinking eyelid extinguishes it for even a fraction of a second. It stays open and beaming, offering itself in crystal clarity, penetrating its object with superior knowledge of the truth. It’s not the gaze of an augur, no, it’s druid fire from the depths of the sea . . .

  (And in its presence, me: a ragged Scheherazade, a fibbing Punch. How well I understand why S. has also fallen under her spell!)

  The “magic box” is my only possession. The dowry I brought to the marriage with Christa; accepting it is the last thing she’d do. I’ve hung onto this box through all the perils of the last few decades: the prewar, wartime, and postwar years, through all my wanderings and escapes from inopportune surroundings and historic events drawing uncomfortably near . . . More by accident than on purpose, it’s stuck by me. Whatever else I may have lost, thrown away, or squandered in deserts and depravities, Ice Ages and Ages of Gold, it has survived. No wonder Aunt Selma watched over it like a treasure; it was the travel case for the jewelry of her beloved sister Ilse who had gone (enviably) astray. The legendary “Maud.” The high-class courtesan. Loved and spoiled by the most frivolously wealthy and powerful men of her day. A source of shame for the Subicz family (and of daydreamy reliving for Aunt Selma).

  Aunt Selma, the cart horse who knocks herself out to schlep the poverty-stricken Viennese household of Subicz descendants—herself, Aunt Hertha, Uncle Helmuth, Cousin Wolfgang, and me, the son of a whore—through our mundane existence. For an—alas!—all too brief interlude she has laid her hands in her lap. Uncle Helmuth and Aunt Hertha are “at work,” he at some factory with gigantic machines, she in her moth-eaten music publishing company. (A university graduate despite being an underpaid employee, he has some claim to professional respect; she has double pretensions: by birth a Subicz and a von Jaentsch on her mother’s side. “I kiss your hand, dear lady!” The bankruptcy assets of the Imperial and Royal Habsburg Monarchy readily absorbed into the lower middle class.) Cousin Wolfgang, that model son, is at school like a good boy. I’m playing hooky (or have a cold, an upset stomach, or something else that releases me from the drudgery of that institution of public education). Between Aunt Selma’s hands on her lap, on the coarse linen of her apron, lies the magic box. Crocodile leather, even then fairly well worn. It no longer contains any jewelry. Gone are Mommy’s thick strands of pearls, her diamond necklaces, headbands, bracelets, jeweled clasps, her rings with solitaires—emeralds and rubies. Now the box is full of p
hotos gradually going yellow. Aunt Selma and I have looked through them for the gazillionth time: the glory days of the deceased Ilse Subicz, my mother, who had given herself the showbiz name (nom de plumeau?) Maud. We spread the photos out before us as if they were solitaire cards: pictures of society events, gala dinners, balls, parties, and receptions, portraits of my mother, portraits of her beaus, snapshots from the daily lives of hedonistic idlers (beach scenes, tennis and polo matches, snowshoeing, casinos, masked balls). They are the visual catchwords of a legend that reads like a dime novel: A beautiful girl goes astray, lives life high on the hog, and dies young, leaving behind a bastard child destined for great things. As an artist he will come into her intellectual inheritance. Every artist had a whore for a mother. Aunt Selma weaves the backdrop for this saga. There’s always something else to fill in, explain, place in the right context.

  “Even as a child she was something special . . .” Massively spoiled by their father, my grandfather Colonel Subicz (he too was a legend, fallen in the very first days of the First World War), also spoiled by their mother, born a von Jaentsch (“I kiss your hand, Frau Baronin!”). An army brat whose reputation as a pleasure-loving beauty preceded her in every garrison to which the patiently starving Subicz was posted between Przemyśl and Ljubljana, rising through the ranks from cavalry captain to major, from major to lieutenant-colonel, and finally, decades later, from lieutenant-colonel to colonel while his three daughters grew more and more beautiful and the youngest most beautiful of all. “. . . and our father told her repeatedly, you’re something special, not made to be submissive. You’ll always dominate, give orders, have your way. . .”

  And then plunged into penury: their father’s heroic death, the hardship of the war years, defeat, destruction of the world of the Subiczes and von Jaentsches, years of hunger, inflation, and inexorably miserable existence. “She couldn’t stand it, so she escaped . . .” (So goes the legend. In fact, the wicked girl gave in to her urge for freedom even earlier. I was born in 1919 so she must have already run off in 1918. John was serving in an international commission at the time. In any case, she ran off . . .)