Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  • • •

  I declare that I have a name: Aristides Subicz. Subicz from my unwed mother; Aristides from one of my many potential fathers. (Aristides Blanc, the operator of the casino in Monte Carlo? Also one of Mother’s lovers? Possibly. At any rate, a close friend of John’s.)

  By the way: Johannes Schwab. Also fits very well. Remains to be seen if I can conceal myself behind it.

  • • •

  At Home

  From the 1821 travelogue of Count Karaczay: This region, bounded by the main branch of the Moldova, the Dniester, the Black Sea, and the Danube, consists partly of gently rolling hills, but is mostly level and extremely fertile. It constituted the province called Bessarabia. The principal town was Kishinev, the seat of a princely clan ruled by Benderli Ali Pasha. Before the Russian invasion of 1807 under General Mayendorf, Bessarabia was inhabited by Volga Tartars who migrated here in 1568. They cultivated the soil, raised livestock with especially great success, and were known for their honesty, kindheartedness, and bravery.

  In the warm seasons of the year, the land suffers from drought. The valleys are marshy and full of reeds. There is no woodland, not even scrub growth, and a bushy grass called burian as well as reeds are harvested, dried, and used as fuel. Winters are very harsh.

  Under the general name Government of Bessarabia, Russia has incorporated this country into its empire and the little town of Kishinev, not far from Dubasari and almost exactly in the middle of the country, is the seat of government. Bessarabia is bordered by the Wallachian Moldova and thus constitutes a Romanian region despite its separation by the Pruth River. It is administered by Greek princes, the so-called Phanariotes installed by the Turks. The Moldavian peasants are of sturdy stock. The men wear linen shirts, long trousers, and wide leather belts; in summer a white or blackish-brown jacket made from a material prepared by their womenfolk, and in winter sheepskin coats. Their hair is cut short and their usual head covering is a sack-like cap of lamb’s wool. In rainy weather they take their caps and stuff them between their shirt and belly, where they also often keep their lunch, which always consists of a sort of polenta of cornmeal (called mamaliga), and then pull the hood of their jackets over their heads. In summer, the apparel of the women often consists of a simple smock with a light belt, and a white kerchief on their heads. Sometimes their underskirt is replaced by a striped apron, usually of black wool, tied around the waist. This apron is sometimes tied with a narrow wool belt, usually of a bright red color. Their chemise is long, reaching almost to the ankles, very close fitting, and of a fairly fine, well-bleached linen, made at home of fine-spun yarn and often interwoven with stripes of cotton or silk threads as decoration, and always embroidered, often very richly. There are no unembroidered women’s chemises among the peasantry. The embroidery is of silk, and sometimes spun gold and silver or even glass beads are worked in. The primary embroidery is on both shoulders and always at least a hands-breadth wide. In addition, two stripes run left and right down the entire chemise and on the sleeves one often finds many straight and slanting embroideries, and frequently red and blue flowers as well. The white kerchiefs on their heads are even finer than the chemises. They are the masterpieces of the women’s handiwork. They are usually white and often embroidered with colors, with very tasteful decorations worked in along the edges. The way they arrange this kerchief on their head without a mirror and even without pins is a tribute to their good taste. It covers the head more or less like a nun’s wimple, but without stiffening or constraint. Its ends hang down somewhat and are secured at the throat and halfway down the breast by a number of clever folds. The free ends are usually thrown over the left shoulder. One sees women and girls thus attired coming to church or into town, but also working in the fields. Especially when the weather is cold, some wear a sort of sleeveless vest of silk material usually trimmed with a narrow band of fur. Their bare feet are a striking contrast to this quite fetching costume, especially when it’s muddy. Only on holidays and in the winter do the women put on boots of strong yellow morocco.

  The apparel of men of elevated rank is extremely costly and very Oriental.

  The Moldovian and the Greek shaves his head and wears the red Turkish fez pushed forward. His undergarment is of costly silk, and the wide gown with open sleeves reaching only to the elbow is of the finest English cloth or costly Persian wool or silk.

  His undergarment is belted with a genuine shawl, of which he has dozens to choose from, worth 100 to 200 ducats each.

  His head is covered by a light, padded cap of gray lamb’s wool representing a Turkish turban, or frequently by a shawl wrapped very much like a turban, so that at least from a distance, one could take him for a Turk. Scarlet red Turkish pants and yellow slippers of morocco with soles of the same leather complete his attire. The love of fancy clothes appears to be widespread, and an aristocratic boyar may well show himself in the course of a day in two or three different outer and undergarments, one more elaborate than the next. The rich wear costly furs, usually sable, but only in the winter; by contrast, a man of the next lowest class will wear a very wide, short-sleeved Oriental outer garment, usually of silk lined with ermine, all year long.

  The fairer sex has a lively, fiery temperament, very susceptible to feelings of love, and clinging to the beloved with burning passion, no sacrifice too dear to preserve his affection. However, one would be making a great mistake to think that this high emotional energy was a source of sensual error or excess. On the contrary, these tender and passionate creatures possess an extraordinary degree of restraint. No matter how powerfully their spirit is convulsed, their exterior always maintains a calm and dignified appearance and anxious modesty accompanies all their actions. But alone with their lover, they surrender themselves all the more completely to the storm of their long-suppressed passion.

  In the highest echelons, one finds individuals of the most refined customs. Both men and women are fluent in the French language; many even speak German, and some boyars possess not inconsiderable libraries.

  • • •

  BESSARABIA, WINTER 1939

  Uncle Ferdinand speaks of last things:

  “From physics, we’re all familiar with the law of conservation of matter. Now, this raises the question: What is included—or not—in the concept of ‘matter’? Water is matter even if it’s converted to steam. Every gas is still matter, quantitatively measureable, even if it’s very volatile. So that must allow us to assume that completely dematerialized materials—so to speak—also exist in limited amounts, even if they’re so dematerialized they can’t be measured by the means available. What I’m talking about is the soul. In our Christian faith, it too is a substance inhabiting the living body, which it leaves when the body dies. You can see that in the frescoes of monastery chapels, but not just there; it’s also expressed in the fact that at the head of graves in burial grounds of very early times, they erected poles, not crosses: tall wooden poles and later stone stelae, as the first thing the soul just escaped its body could shinny up, so to speak. And what’s more, they planted trees nearby, as though souls were birds that could perch in them. You get the impression that the soul of a recently deceased person first had to become accustomed to the new element of freedom after departing the cage of the body. I mean, it can’t just take off at the drop of a hat. Many can’t do it at first. Instead, they flutter around nearby for years or decades—some even for centuries, if you believe the ghost stories you’ve heard—but time doesn’t make any difference to them. They can haunt the place until we’ve become spooks ourselves. Personally, I myself have never encountered a ghost (leaving aside my first wife, but at least she was still alive, even if really terrifying). However, they say that Putzi Cottolenghi actually moped around for years after he died. They had to sell the house, one of the most beautiful palazzi in Ferrara. He’s said to have behaved obnoxiously and already fallen out with his entire family while he was still alive; they were furious with him because of the inheritance—or ra
ther, because there wasn’t any—he’d spent it all. But despite that, I don’t believe in spiritualism and the kind of humbug you told me about in your Viennese relatives, or what that Nostitz woman was up to in Vienna and God knows who else from society in other places. They all fell for Blavatsky and she was an out-and-out fraud—that’s been proven in the meantime. But what I wanted to say was this: it can’t be that easy to sum up all the souls of the dead. Just think about it: since the beginning of mankind—and that means for millions of years, as science has now shown—souls are supposed to have left their bodies and floated around freely in space, billions and billions of souls. Now I ask you: even if they’re dematerialized and not a measurable substance, there must be something there that’s released and then accumulates somehow. Our churches teach that the soul first goes through purgatory and then to heaven or hell, and you can see that too, very vividly depicted, in the frescoes of monastery chapels and in primitive art in general; but even if you think of the Kingdom of God—I mean the one in the hereafter, right?—as being infinite, it seems to me there’s a hardly believable quantitative discrepancy. And the stuff’s got to come from somewhere. It can’t just renew itself on its own from age to age. Don’t misunderstand me: it’s conceivable, and even quite amusing. It would be a genuine perpetuum mobile, an energy constantly giving birth to itself, breathed into all living things and then liberating itself from them. But not only does that conjure up the idea of something present from the very beginning—an insubstantial ur-substance, so to speak—I don’t mean to call it GOD; that would be sacrilegious; the Creator stands on the side, so to speak, observing himself. But I mean, that’s exactly what argues against that substance arising from the void and becoming more and more and more and returning back out into the void . . . That would be nothing more or less than a blasphemous image of the Creator as a creative void. I don’t mean to say that. On the contrary, I consider God to be an extraordinarily efficient engineer, at least as far as his creation Nature is concerned. There, everything is most minutely interconnected and proceeds in constant circulation—yes, of course, help yourself to more cognac. Don’t wait for me to offer or even pour it out for you. That’s what it’s there for. Or would you rather have some calvados? It’s very good. I got it from Fégonsac.—No, thanks, no more for me . . . Where were we? So the observation—right?—that everything runs along in an eternal cycle, nothing gets lost, everything fulfills its purpose—all that led me to the idea that that’s also the case with the substance—if we can call it that—of our so-called soul. I mean, the Indians think of it that way in metempsychosis—the transmigration of souls—or rebirth, or whatever. For them it’s simple: the soul that becomes free at death remains homeless for a while (but as I said before, time plays no role at the level we’re talking about) until it slips into some other body, and I’m of the opinion that that’s what happens. Mind you, the new form it takes is not verifiable. Take Putzi Cottolenghi for example: once he’d croaked to annoy his family, he wouldn’t be reborn as his niece’s dachshund or anything like that. Or take my first wife, bless her soul! She wouldn’t come back as the operetta soubrette she always wanted to be. But instead, as substance, as a part of the universal inspiriting substance, whose amount would thus remain constant and plugged in to the eternal cycle. That explains a lot, for example, the fact that today, when there are millions more people on earth than in times past, much less of the substance seems to be in the individual than before. You need only compare some desert prophet with—let’s say—my overseer, who’s a very competent fellow. Of course he steals, they all do, but as a person he’s simply an oaf. And just in general, wherever you look, they’re a miserable lot nowadays. But naturally, that can lead to the incorrect hypothesis that because there were only a few people on earth back then, each individual automatically had received more human substance than the likes of us, so a Neanderthal, for example, must have been a much more valuable person. Of course, there are differences. It isn’t all equally distributed—but if you’re tired, go ahead to bed. It’s only—what time is it anyway? Three thirty?—So if you need to get to bed, go right ahead . . .”

  Note:

  Nothing can be learned about Uncle Ferdinand’s whereabouts. All that’s definite is that in 1940, when Bessarabia had to be ceded to Russia as part of the Hitler-Stalin Pact—Aristides was a Romanian soldier at the time and had retreated across the Dniester with his regiment—the prince refused to leave his house and estate. It’s assumed that the Russians transported him to a camp as far away as possible, probably in Siberia. Not even John managed to find out anything definite about his fate. For his part, once back in Bucharest and provisionally demobilized, Aristides takes advantage of the lack of clarity about his background and, with the help of Stella and John’s connections, remains there for a while until they succeed in shunting him off to Berlin to keep him out of combat. (Stella’s role in Bucharest: a Romanian Jew but married to the English diplomat John; once Romania enters the war on Germany’s side, she has to leave Bucharest. Soon thereafter, her crazy attempt to meet A. in Berlin.)

  • • •

  Trivia:

  A.’s attitude toward money: After the bitter penury of his school years in Vienna in the care of his relatives, Stella teaches him to spend money without a thought; docilely he falls back into the frivolous extravagance of his childhood milieu, cares as little about the relative value of money as about where it comes from. He loses it too, casually, just like his mother misplaced or lost pieces of jewelry. (A childhood memory: John tosses a string of pearls into the lap of the beautiful Maud. “Here’s something for you to lose.”) Perhaps in closing, a reflection on money as the deity of today, the only true religion of the West. It determines contemporary life to the same extent as, for example, religious faith did in the fourteenth century. Every offense against money is a sacrilege and gets punished more severely than anything else.

  Sylvio Gesell’s “shrinking money”: could that have been a topic of conversation in Nagel’s garden house?

  • • •

  Handwritten:

  . . . what exasperates Scherping is a common misunderstanding caused by my unfortunately large and ungainly appearance. (Is it so completely separate from what’s “essential,” however? And what would the latter be?) Carlotta calls me “the starosta,” but that doesn’t fit; I lack the necessary charisma. My “aunt” sees it more accurately, if all too poetically: I’m like the surface of a bog pond that doesn’t disclose how deep or shallow it is. Indeed, I know what I owe to that fact: without lifting a finger I’m able to dramatize myself. And after all, I’ve got anguish to spare. All I have to do is open the sluice gates and it surges over me. To more or less save my skin, I need to mobilize the beast in me, the “wolfish nature” I ascribe to A.: the sheer bestial will to survive. In the end, it drags me out of seething despair and saves me—all too reliably, however. And so I practice a deception to fool myself: a cold, pacified despair that gets staged to give the hysteric in me a playing field where he won’t be in immediate danger of collapsing into himself. (A.’s ironic smile and shrug as wishful thinking that may not be so unattainable.) At any rate, my insight into this ploy is irritating enough to drive me to the nearest bar. (Most drastic experience at the front: a bottle of cognac while under fire from Stalin’s organ pipes.) Paradoxically, I can only get free of myself when I—as here—project myself onto a piece of paper.

  • • •

  Nagel encounters God (from the novel Craterland):

  . . .

  She strokes my empty sleeve. “But you can still feel in your stump that you had a hand with fingers?” The precision with which she expresses herself fit with her Slavic accent.