Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  (S. might be able to recognize himself in that image if his similarity to Cousin Wolfgang was not more blatant—)

  —and the lad in front of the Palm House has something wolfish in his gaze, a hunger for life that’s out of the ordinary, not to be fobbed off with bourgeois adventures in emancipation—

  “And forget about the laughable Steppenwolf of your much admired colleague Hermann Hesse—have you ever read anything as ridiculous as his characterization of metaphysical starvation in the lines

  I’m Steppenwolf, trotting and trotting,

  the world is white as snow,

  a raven wings from the birch tree,

  and nowhere a hare, nowhere a doe—

  Isn’t that laughable? No, dear friend, even if such distress makes the tears roll down your cheeks—nowhere a hare, just imagine, nowhere a doe. What’s left but to traipse through the world of philistines and find comfort in a group fuck? Self-discovery! Liberation! From what, I ask you? From starched collars and sleeve protectors? Ask Uncle Ferdinand or John if they ever felt such an itch. No and again no, honored friend, that was not my kind of wolfishness. The tropical world of a tamed jungle in Schönbrunn’s enchantingly beautiful iron and glass palm pavilion is not a symbol for some world of adventure that I was missing out on and searching for back then like our friend Nagel, the round-the-world yachtsman. No iridescent parrot “wings” from the agaves, suggesting there’s no aardvark and no gazelle for poor hungry Bingo, and for the time being no group fuck in the apartment blocks of Vienna’s Twelfth District that could redeem his suffering soul. No, no, that was not the impetus behind my trotting and trotting (a Rilkean cornet hoofing it) through the lovely town of Vienna. My hunger was not for the usual needs. I was not hunting for my Tom-Dick-and-Harry-, my Jean-et-Jacques-, or my Ivan-Ivanovich-identity like your Hesse’s Steppenwolf; nor was I after some lost paradise: Bessarabia and the Côte d’Azur were my inalienable possessions. What I was searching for was the meaning, you understand?—Back then, same as today, I was looking for the meaning.”

  (Consternation. Sweet revenge for their exchanging glances. I take my anger out by making them uncomfortable. If S. now looks at Christa, he’s not seeking her agreement but trying to convince himself that she doesn’t notice his confusion. She notices, of course. And what a joy it is to make her lose her stirrup too, as the equestrienne in her would have put it. The eager young man I’m presenting can’t be observed from an ironically skeptical distance like the mythic little prince of my childhood years. The distress he suffers is a phase everyone is condemned to live through. Involuntarily, one goes through it with him in the recapitulation and S. and Christa wait fearfully to see how I’m going to chop this psychological state into pieces.)

  First, a meticulous depiction of the milieu. S. doesn’t know Vienna and probably imagines some Alpine version of Dresden, “Old gold like a stem of Kaiser’s crown lost in a green meadow,” he says. (Christa’s sapphire eyes betray no inner image whatsoever, to say nothing of her parsimonious mouth. She’ll agree with any cliché.) I drape their beautiful vision with tattered, grayish-yellow Habsburgian baize, moth-eaten to a filigree by the inflation, and against that background paint an autumnal late nineteenth-century Bruges. But in place of Beguine Sisters silently scurrying down deserted canyons still as canals between neo-Gothic palaces of finance, we have potbellied, goateed old Socialists in frock coats worthy of privy councilors marching in silent protest against the rise in the subscription price for public soup kitchens. From the darkly reflective windows of coffeehouses lined with plush smoke-stained as a meerschaum pipe, they are followed by eyes that clamber over the top of yellowed newspaper pages with the sluggishness of clock hands and after a wintery, flat trajectory sink back, unsatisfied, into their nests of printed letters.

  I say, “Please don’t believe what you hear: there, no ‘quiet songs implore you.’ It’s dead silent in Vienna. Music needs sky to rise into, and there’s no sky there. Above Vienna is a vault of iron and glass, a train-station ceiling over the Danube city that isn’t even on the Danube but on a sewer-like side channel of that river of waltzing waves. The city’s character is the inevitable consequence of this geo-political situation. Vienna is the last exit on the Nibelung line, its rails petering out soon after Fischamend. To be sure, Germany’s number two river of destiny was and is imbued with a tenacious attraction. Before and during my time, it pulled one Balkan-wards, and a correspondingly high number of expressive, artistic values had already drifted in the same direction. Schubert had long since transferred his activities to the Gellert Spa in Budapest; Haydn fiddled for the Telekis in Transylvania; Mozart—today en route to a long-term guest appearance in the Palestinian protectorate as a public-relations agent for the Bösendorfer piano factory—was at that time sojourning in the valleys of Kirtschaly where Richard Strauss cultivated roses. In the meantime, the eastward undertow of the cultural province had drawn Richard Wagner to the racially impeccable Linz, from where he directed operations. The Rhine Maidens, born in the Bohemian forest, built the Café Vindobona under the cast-iron ceiling of the Hauptbahnhof, much to the comfort of travelers to be sure, but unfortunately not to the promotion of the arts, as originally expected. Music, which rises, soon condenses on the volkishly antiseptic tiles and trickles down to coalesce on the folkloristic station mosaics to the tune of the Fiakerlied or the Radetzky March, or drains off into the Danube Canal in accordion chords of Schrammel music. The river swallows them in accord with its official duty as effluent drain, from time to time unofficially, at the end of the work day, and in pond-like aplomb, merely belching up a few bubbles of primal Viennese sound, the uatch-ewop-guop-shmoatz of a Heuriger song which, in strict adherence to the bylaws of the Schrammel guild, may only be performed by cleft palates.”

  I banish the last crepuscular sun beam from the imperial town, sweep its corners free of chestnut blossoms and countesses and expand the night, give it echoing room above its well-still waters whose stony banks I clamp together with the heavy clasps of the bridges. I weave mist over their dark depths in which the five pale stars of each embankment lantern float like milky, suddenly luminescent colonies of water lilies.

  And for good old Schwab who listens with bated breath, right there in the middle of the mind thus prepared to accept it, I place an enhanced copy of myself (or himself?)—like the egg of an ichneumon wasp that will hatch a murderous larva—projected in perspectival regression back into the purer element of boyhood, of the pale waterlily moons of Endymion to whom was given eternal youth but not immortality. . . and yet we have passed the threshold to the next, less pure phase of life, afflicted by wild dreams. No longer is it the beautiful boy; it’s me—me as I sit here like a Norn hunched over my magic box—but less impure of course, absolved of fourteen botched years of my life, not the twenty-nine-year-old of the here and now, Hamburg on the Elbe, in the half-standing villa of a merchant king—but rather me transported into the magic illumination of times gone by, purified in the mythic fountain of youth: orphaned prince of the blood, torn from the royal fatherland he has forgotten like a castaway in lotusland—a fifteen-year-old with my features, but ennobled and refined, a skinny adolescent with my character, but without the wolfishness, dreamy and bewildered, knowing and innocent, pious and disappointed and grieving from the beginning of time, wearing a wreath of Maytime confidence yet with dismay at the suffering world already in his eyes: a desperate lad in his thin schoolboy coat, driven out into the night by the bestial rectitude of his dutiful relatives.

  Suicide? How could it be otherwise, I ask you! Of course it was a temptation, luring me into the canal’s black mirror. With relish I tell how I clambered down the steeply paved embankment with the desperate intention of drowning myself, but comically afraid I might slip on the cold wet stone and fall into the cold water, afraid of the policeman up on the bridge whose dumpy silhouette (together with that of the man he was inaudibly talking to), surrounded by a bloodless aureole, dug a dark hole in the thi
ck fog glowing in the light of a streetlamp—a double hole, since the plump, lightless volume of the cop cast a large reflection into the foggy light. The silhouette was thus transformed into negative space: negative space of negative light and its pale echo; lightless, hollow pattern and its material reverberation as light. Yet both are weighty: weighty the dematerialized core of negative light and the husk of etiolating material light, weighty-unweighty in padded, cylindrical volumosity; the thick winter coats of the two men bulging rollers of negative light with handles of bulging roller-sleeves, raised up on bulging pant-leg pads; the dachshund on a leash frozen hard as iron, a sausage-roller; the policeman’s cap a sausage slice on top of a sausage wheel; the man’s Tyrolean hat a sausage-end; the breaths of man and cop a sausage bubble finely integrated into the crackling light, blown delicately as glass into the Christmas Eve glimmer of frost-heavy fog, breaths united in a cloud of rime. (Of course, I hadn’t eaten anything all day, just roamed around against my Christmas Eve yearning in the mirrored lights of the canal; of course, I was sick with hunger; of course I was cold in my thin little coat . . .)

  And then, the other thing, compacted of deeper, more formless and sinister darknesses: a blackened double creature at the base of the bridge arch, something indeterminable lying heavy and motionless on the footing, and indeterminably joined with it something uncertain bending over it and preparing to—what? Murder it? Shake it awake? Throttle it? Rape it? Copulate with it?—And no way for me to escape: impossible to scramble up the slick blocks of the embankment, impossible every step backward on the narrow ledge . . . (rising from the water the crypt-like breath of cold putrefaction)—

  —and the roller-policeman on the bridge turns—swinging his overcoat-roller around its axis, taking leave of the roller-man on the bridge who raises his sausage-end and is dragged off by the dachshund-sausage at the end of his iron rod—he turns and strides off weightily, growing smaller as he disappears into his endlessly increasing light echo—

  (—and I feast my eyes on the entranced, despairing childlike eyes of S., his empathy for my—his—suffering, the boy in distress; his pained poet’s eyes that envy me, the liar in his glory—)

  —and me at the bridge arch, chilled and feverish in my thin schoolboy’s coat, my pale young face taut with cold, the pounding of my heart in my temples, my breath hammering on the anvil of my larynx, planted in my tracks, driven like a thunderbolt onto the narrow footing of the embankment with stringy mandrake roots of fear, trembling with every soundless step of the retreating policeman on the bridge—

  —I stood and, with the bird of my fear violently fluttering against my chest and eyes, held my guilt captive—my guilt for everything happening to and around me, for what was going on there in the darkness at the base of the arch, for the cry I never uttered that did not bring back the policeman, for my intention to drown myself, and for the fact that I never would drown myself, the guilt in me for everything the monstrous body of night was pregnant with—indecipherable, uninterpretable, unspeakable.

  Driven onto the embankment’s footing by the trip hammer of my heart, trembling at its every beat, I glued my eyes to the pregnant belly of night, riveted my gaze on its dark fruit, hoping to eviscerate it, to decipher the indecipherable, interpret the uninterpretable, suck speech from the unspeakable . . . the meaning, the MEANING . . .

  And in S.’s hand, the involuntary gesture of resistance, of overtaxed patience. . .

  Since he doesn’t know what else to do, he says in a mockingly forced falsetto, “It really happened that way?—Or did you just this minute make that all up?”

  I’m exultant: “You’re trying to persuade me to write a book, no? So what’ll it be? Ideally something after the heart of your boss-man Scherping, right? Something for the series Truth Is Better Than Fiction? Maybe the refugee tale of one of Christa’s relatives and friends—the good old days and what happened to them. At your service: I can do that. Get it off my chest. As we all know, the poet sings just like a bird: today—splish!—deign to lend your noble ear to my humble song; tomorrow—splash!—onto the great guano pile of world literature. Why not give it a try yourself? You’re hatching a book plan in your head. I can tell by looking at you: you’re not making notes every second for nothing. Well then, what’s holding you back? Juvenile literary retention out of respect for the false idol Art? Because creating is valued more than plain reporting? But then where does that leave friend Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom we both so admire? Still on his pedestal? Because it doesn’t depend on what you have to say, but on how you say it, namely, as self-sacrifice. As a butcher’s counter of author’s ego-entrails, and the reader as haruspex . . . You see? So you’ve got to leave me a little room for embroidery too. Content’s easy to come by. If you’re coming up a little short, feel free to borrow some. What’s mine is yours. The main thing is that the report retains its confessional character—just like in Master Jean-Jacques. This is just for your ears, dear Diary—and leave the print run to Scherping. Whether it’s authentic or not concerns at best only the arch-idiots of literary history. What does ‘authentic’ mean, anyway? Don’t try to tell me you didn’t see yourself in the boy who wants to drown himself in the Danube Canal! You, the Endymion of pale water-lily moons in the black-mirrored water that terrifies and attracts him . . .‘From the starry pond the angler pulls a big, black fish, face full of cruelty and madness’—right? You, the congenital orphan yearning to go home to the womb of Death until a good citizen holds you back with the words ‘Life is beautiful!’. . . You’re asking me if I really experienced what I was telling you? But of course I did: I experienced it—in your eyes. You experienced it for me while I told it. Isn’t that authentic? Take something authentic from my magic box: that picture we looked at and you thought was me—and the camera lens doesn’t lie, as we know—here it is. Actually, it’s a picture of my cousin Wolfgang who looks so much like you he could have been your twin. Does it matter at all that he was in Vienna and you were in Hamburg at the time? This picture—if I may—is you: the strapping adolescent with the blond thatch and fabulous grades and glasses so thick your eyes look perpetually astonished, with young man’s fuzz on your upper lip, a pimply chin, calves with more than fuzz, and a cowhide briefcase which—thanks to misplaced sandwiches and damp swimming trunks—has taken on a disagreeably cheesy smell that announces the model student’s return home from school, soccer field, or organ practice in the chapel when he’s still coming up the stairs, a little out of breath under the load of pounds of books, every one of them a thick, crabbed tome containing pure intellect—is that a portrait of me, of you, of Cousin Wolfgang, or simply the image of a prototype, the stereotype of a social situation? Unfortunately, I never had the honor of knowing your honored Papa—he was a German professor, wasn’t he? Beg your pardon, a classicist—but I seriously wonder if he wasn’t in the depths of his being any different from Uncle Helmuth. In him, in Uncle Helmuth, you have the stereotypical father of the stereotypical son—

  “Take a look at this engineer’s face marinated in active spiritualism. It could be included in the natural history collection of every middle school, but it wasn’t among the visual aids in mine in the Thirteenth District of Vienna—included as a deterrent, I mean, a catastrophe of the West: the millenarian engineer, slide rule in his vest pocket, The Foundry: Handbook for Engineers in his bookcase, a disciple of Madame Blavatsky, Teutonic knight under the command of Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, who believed in the renewal of the world by Adolf Hitler . . . Your honored papa the classical scholar probably didn’t. On the contrary: he probably detested that popinjay with the artistic lock of hair falling across his forehead, but the category is the same: bourgeois fathers—John had a nasty name for them: ‘bloody fucking middle class’. . . and here, by way of comparison, another of my so-called uncles, Sir Agop Garabetian, the oil billionaire in a thousand-and-one-nights getup aboard his yacht off Cannes. It perhaps gives you an idea of the simultaneity of various worlds and of the reversal of env
ironments I was exposed to at such a tender age! It bewilders the mind, my dear fellow. One struggles to unite such basically dissimilar realities, but it only works with the assistance of the imagination, and in the process, the authenticity of events becomes of secondary importance.—Here, take a look. Yes, that’s me as well. I admit, it’s an almost unbelievable transformation. The metamorphosis of an unkempt schoolboy into a Bond Street dandy—Stella’s doing—here we are in Stella’s car. In the summer of 1938—so already after the so-called Anschluss of Austria—we were still cruising around the Salzkammergut and surroundings in her open Hispano-Suiza—that’s right, she always wore a dirndl to go with that Old Testament profile: Sarah, Esther, Rachel . . . as for the Nazi stiffs, the car just took their breath away; a miracle of elegance, already almost ten years old at the time, from the absolutely best era of automobile manufacture—what lines, eh? And the thing ran like a gazelle. Too bad we didn’t know each other back then. It would have been such a treat for me to go speeding over the Grossglockner Pass with you—whereas you once told me your Volkswagen had to sweat even to make it over the Geislingen Pass in Swabia . . . of course Cousin Wolfgang, the son of his father, turned down an excursion in that vehicle of the Jewish plutocracy. . . And now let’s look a little further. Look how what you call authentic reality develops by leaps and bounds: this is a miserable photo of me with my “Teterist” buddies—comes from T.T.R., Tânar cu termin redus, the official designation for the one-year volunteers in the Romanian army—so me doing my military service. No, not in the war. God forbid!—I have to confess I misunderstood the zeitgeist’s charge to my generation. While my buddies marched straight off, heads held high, into a wonderful vision of the future and the open graves it contained, I turned on my heel to look back and understand what had happened, what was actually happening . . . to grasp its meaning, you see?—the sense that all those things were happening in order to be said—you understand what I’m saying, don’t you? The sense that it would never have happened if I didn’t say it—can you already see it in the way I look in this photo? Move your finger a second—yes, that’s me: third from the right in the standing row. The one with the wolfish gaze, in honor of our colleague Hesse! Nevertheless . . . I told you about the wolf in Bessarabia, didn’t I? . . . What became of my Viennese relatives? They were all buried in the rubble of a bombing raid in 1944: Aunt Hertha, Aunt Selma, and Uncle Helmuth all together. Cousin Wolfgang had already died a hero’s death for Volk und Vaterland three years earlier.”