Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  The objection I raise (morosely, I admit) is that in the meantime, I’ve had the opportunity on several occasions to become convinced of A.’s brilliant mind and extraordinary powers of observation—moreover, A. himself doesn’t regard the treatment that fell into our hands by such a peculiar accident as a sample of his talent. He says it was a playful attempt to present the producer Stoffel with something reminiscent of the era of Expressionist film (“National-Socialist Ufa Studios Star Astrid von Bürger as the Bride of Dr. Caligari”), a joke he played to see how the spanking new mogul of the silver screen would react. Besides, we have other examples of his linguistic agility and after all, the sum I suggested as an advance is not exactly earth-shaking—in short, all my bubbly efforts to defend my plan to lure A. into writing a book (which I’m very vexed at my obvious difficulties articulating, due to a heavy dose of gin and tonic on top of too much Allonal) is only water for Scherping’s mill. Not without sardonic asides about my condition (“Do you think it’s wise to smooth out your psychic ups and downs with self-administered substances? Or should I put in a good word for you with Professor Hertzog? The fellow has a great deal of sympathy for alcoholics”) he gives me a lecture “about the new situation in the publishing trade—in case all of us who still believe in the book as a means of education and communication—but also as the noblest of pastimes—don’t want to go miserably belly-up.”

  Namely, the situation has changed drastically. (“You see that even I am following your fellow poet Gottfried Benn by recognizing it.”) We are approaching the dawn of a new age of bookselling, “in which belles lettres, what the Anglo-Saxons call ‘fiction”—you follow?—so, mainly novels, will to a great extent take a back seat to nonfiction, reportage, political analyses, celebrity memoirs—even literary criticism, philosophical essays, and similar kinds of what may strike you as bullshit from your seat astride Pegasus’s saddle.” (I have to struggle to conceal my trembling hands; what’s especially embarrassing is that in a “situation” like mine, my thirst becomes unbearable in the face of his hectoring. He seems to notice and gets even more lathered up.) “Don’t be blinded by the current fad for reading. You’ve got to cater to people’s need to make up for emotional lost time—are you with me?—especially vis-à-vis that old standby, love as the axis of the novel—with special circumstances, for example, the experience of war, as confirmed by the success of Nagel’s books. But in the long run that’ll probably also turn out to be old hat—actually, it’s already been old hat for ages.” (Suddenly, he lowers his voice.) “Unless of course—” (his face assumes an expression of vulpine cunning) “one approaches the subject from a somewhat more interesting point of view—I mean, love as a primal experience of pain.” (Another explosive bleat of billy-goat laughter.) “Because there’s one thing you’ll be good enough to concede: I may be a bumbler in Logos, but I’ve earned my spurs in Eros.”

  (The only thing I suffer from anymore is his language, the slipshod, unkempt words swept up from all the dusty corners of what’s possible to express, the practically sleepwalking semantic assurance with which he nearly but not quite hits the nail on the nose—it’s almost seductive, insinuating itself into my thinking and corrupting my language. Involuntarily I imitate him and have no idea how to express myself better.)

  I stopped listening quite a while ago. Together with a furious increase in my need for another long drink (I’m dying of thirst. It’s eleven o’clock in the morning, so still two hours to go till I can get out of here and into the nearest bar), I’m bowled over by the truth: Scherping is right that in fact, there is no guarantee that A. is capable of writing a serious book—or even intends to write one at all. I realize what drove me to suggest that Scherping give him an advance—and an unusually big one too. I am moved by Christa’s fear. She’s no longer up to living from one day to the next without the least prospect of even a minimal regular income; she’s sold the last pitiful remnants of the girlhood jewelry she saved from the Russians and her relatives are impoverished themselves. She would be too proud to ask them for money anyway when she already has trouble deflecting their mistrust and unconcealed dislike of A. She defends him with less and less conviction, her arguments sounding increasingly lame. She regards his scriptwriting as a frivolous game and so does he. Aside from the fact that it always involves so-called “projects” that never come to fruition, the amounts that the producer Stoffel pays for a treatment are laughably measly and slip through A’s fingers before he has time to recall that Christa doesn’t live in the same “holy frivolity” as him. It never occurs to him to think about tomorrow. (“Don’t expect me to perform the same collective somersault this nation carried out after the currency reform of 1948: yesterday, still shaken to the core of their souls by the terrors of the apocalypse and as a result compassionate, sympathetic with the sufferings of others, and self-sacrificing in the hope that from the ruins could arise something utterly new, rational, and humane; today, driven by insatiable greed, ruthlessly clawing their way over one another like crabs in a basket, and prepared to commit mayhem and murder if their jobs and pensions are threatened . . .”) What Christa fears—and I along with her—is his incorruptibility, his penchant for sarcasm. Sooner or later, Stoffel will discover that with A., he’s got a louse in his fur that he can’t get rid of without a good scratch.

  For the time being, of course, A. is enjoying his role as the prankster Till Eulenspiegel, surely partly out of a schoolboyish spirit of revenge against his one-time friend Nagel who has turned his back on him in order—as A. believes—“to no longer be disturbed in his endeavor to participate literarily in what everyone else is doing: namely, chasing after the illusion of success on all fours, with hands and feet, by whatever means and in whatever ways necessary.” If I try to use his overt critique of Nagel as an opportunity to get him to discuss his own ideas about literature, he mounts a frontal offense against me (Clausewitz: the most effective defense). “I hope you’re not spending your time trying to answer the question of what literature is—that’s taboo for editors. If you deviate even a millimeter from the notion that literature is simply anything that can be sold as such, you’re sawing off the branch you sit on. Your Protestant ethic requires the conviction that any aesthetic measure of the protean character of the subject will end in boundless relativity, ergo all that’s left is what can be concretely read from the sales figures. Literature is what readers regard and consume as such, and your job as middleman is to evaluate the various kinds of demand.”

  I’m caught in a double bind between him and Scherping. His writing me off so disdainfully could be irritating, but curiously enough, it animates me. I even find it enjoyable. (Is Scherping’s hunt for a sublime increase in pleasure rubbing off on me? Rönnekamp claims that any relationship between two men is in the end homoerotic and sadomasochistic.) “What should I write about?” A. asks me. “What is there left to say these days? After Beckett. The same thing, only more banal. I grant you, a wordier, watered-down, muddied version makes it more comprehensible for the average reader. It bolsters his resistance to perceiving his essential self by a gradual approach to the shock of recognition. All well and good. But am I supposed to stoop to interpreting for idiots? Or be a miserable epigone of yesterday’s colossal mediators of reality—Proust, Joyce, Musil, Broch? We kneel before them, but should we strive to imitate them? With a bush jacket over our hairy chest like Ernest Hemingway? Goes down like butter—et ça passe le temps, as my legendary patron Uncle Ferdinand would have said. It’s well known that reading is the best pastime. It can even become a vice. In the years between 1939 and 1945, while your kind were forced to carry out mass murder, this malingerer was doing nothing but reading, day and night, in and out of bomb shelters, whence my modest knowledge of the subject. In any event, it’s brought me to the insight that a person with even a half-developed feeling of modesty isn’t permitted to pinkle his own, personal contribution into the already existing oceans of fountain-pen and printer’s ink. Am I not expressing
exactly what you think and feel? You’re also a world sailor on that murky sea. Would you venture to increase it with even a half bottle of Johannes-Schwab-Trocken-Letter-Auslese?”—

  Nothing makes me more convinced that he will write. He’ll have to, so as not to kill himself. I tell that to Scherping and curiously enough, he understands and agrees with me.

  • • •

  Draft:

  He goes to Witte’s office at the appointed hour. The headquarters of Witte Laundromats (“Wittewash Washes Whiter than White!”), a brand new high-rise put up on the rubble heap of the old building from the turn of the century, replacing that hybrid of neo-Gothic fortified villa and barracks, with glass and concrete in Le Corbusier style. The windows of Witte’s office (he sometimes refers to it with the old-fashioned term “countinghouse”) on the fifteenth floor look out across churned-up construction sites populated—for now!—by backhoes and cranes, all the way to the duty-free port which also still displays the unhealed wounds of the bombing.

  A. tells the assistant secretary (Carlotta is with Witte, taking dictation) that he was asked to come by “at eleven sharp.” Half an hour passes, then Witte appears at the door, turns, and recognizes him. “Ah yes, of course—just a moment and I’ll be right back!” And he bends down to the secretary and whispers something in her ear. She nods, gets up, and disappears behind the door to his office that closes silently but smartly. A. is alone. Another twenty minutes pass. It’s a sunny day, clear and pale except for the unceasing trickle of vehicles along a stretch of street visible from so high up, tiny beetles in loud, synthetic colors.

  The door of the “countinghouse” opens, Carlotta sticks her head out and announces loudly, “You may come in now.” She remains standing in the door, holding it open for him with the doorknob in her hand. As he goes past, their bodies almost brush against each other before she lets go of the handle. She doesn’t need to close it because it closes automatically. The look they exchange confirms a sort of genetic agreement.

  Behind his mammoth desk, Witte barely looks up. “Afternoon, my friend. What was it you wanted from me?”

  A. looks at Carlotta but at the thought of the shameless way Christa and Astrid von Bürger play games with their glances, he lowers his eyes and gently points out that it was Witte himself who asked him to come by.

  “Ah yes, yes, now I remember. You suggested introducing a little more aristocratic nonchalance into our advertising. Sounds interesting, but overlooks the fact that our job is first and foremost to educate the public. Once that task is accomplished, we can contemplate the next step into the aesthetics of advertising. The average housewife can’t keep up with the advancements of science. Detergents like Wittewash-Whiter-than-White are based on avant-garde formulas that eclipse all previous detergents. Have you ever had the chance to convince yourself of the effectiveness of our detergent?”

  A. must admit he hasn’t and avoids looking at Carlotta whose eyes—he can sense it—are riveted on him.

  “You see!” Witte exults. “Although it’s safe to assume you’re no housewife and so don’t need to know the first thing about fine laundry detergents, nevertheless, as you so rightly remarked at dinner at my house the day before yesterday, if I remember correctly—that was when it was, right?—the social structure has changed. There’s an increasing development in the direction of including the husband in housework to a much greater extent than was previously the case. Though we mustn’t exaggerate in this regard, and it will still be quite some time before the German husband ties on an apron, or rather, until the German wife surrenders the scepter of the household regime, in the meantime it’s our duty as farsighted, future-oriented entrepreneurs to sniff out future trends and adapt to them. Meanwhile, even in the present sociological situation, our mission is basically didactic: how do I educate my customers about the quality I’m offering them? You, my friend, are a prime example—I won’t say, of ignorance, for I can’t assume that you ought to be familiar with our products already—but of our own failure to inform the public. Have you ever observed your charming young wife doing the wash? As it is, it’s a crying shame that such a well-born creature has to contend with such menial housework when that is truly not what she was brought up for. Well, that’s precisely where we can help her out. I’m going to demonstrate how for you.” He turns to Carlotta. “Carlotta, child, be so good and have the secretarial pool call the advertising director. And please tell Fräulein Busse to put calls directly through to my office.”

  Carlotta rises languidly from the visitor’s armchair where she had seated herself collegially next to Aristides and walks to the door in all her corporeality to relay Witte’s wish to the secretary in the outer office. A. can’t figure out what her role is here. The leisureliness of her movements is provocative, with a slatternly elegance, animalistic and unwholesome, a demonstration of erotic power. The way Aristides watches her does not escape Witte. With a little edge he says, “Frau Schwab is my personal assistant.” (Schwab? A. swiftly weighs the possibility that she is S.’s former wife. S. has never mentioned her, in fact, but Rönnekamp has said something about an ex-wife named Charlotte. As she comes back, A. regards her with new eyes.)

  Witte uses the time that passes until the advertising director arrives to continue his lecture. “My principle is to give my people complete independence to do their jobs—assuming a certain minimum of control, of course. But I myself determine the course of the company, which requires a strictly centralized organization. If you will, we’re the brain cells in the organism of our affiliates. If you don’t look after every shitty little detail personally, you go broke. Only unambiguously clear leadership determines the profile of our brand and makes it resistant to the crushing competition of the big national firms—Henkel, for instance—and also from abroad. Of course, our advertising is crucial to the struggle, especially its . . .” He’s interrupted by a knock on the door. “Ah, here he is already!” With a jovial wave of his arm, “Come in, come in . . .” (his good mood increases with the possibility of favorable self-presentation) “. . . May I introduce the director of our advertising department, Dr. Fiebig? Herr—what was your name again? Subicz, of course!—Herr, or rather, Baron von Subicz.”

  Neither the one nor the other, A. assures him.

  “The Subiczes were a Bosnian royal family,” A. says mischievously, “who died out in the fourteenth century.” Now he can’t help stealing a glance at Carlotta and reaps ironical agreement in return.

  For a moment, Witte is struck dumb. Then he clears his throat lightly and continues: “The idea of raising the aesthetic level of our advertising already occurred to me quite some time ago—but here’s Dr. Fiebig. Show us what we’ve been doing up to now.”

  He’s interrupted by the purring of his phone. He picks up, says several times “Yes? Yes? Yes! Wait a sec,” then presses the button for the outer office and says, “Frau Busse, connect this guy to sales and don’t bother me with such stuff for the next half an hour!” He turns to A.: “A former admiral with connections in the navy—pure bullshit, but what can you do? These guys need to make a living too” and to the advertising director: “Well, Dr. Fiebig, fire away.”—”With what?” asks Dr. Fiebig.

  “With what we’ve been doing in advertising. Herr von Subicz wants to be informed about it.”

  The director of advertising doesn’t try to hide the fact that he has more important things to do than spread out the entire advertising material for a visitor. At the moment, he says, they’re concentrating on the campaign “Wittewash Washes Whiter than White” initiated by the head of the company, Herr Witte himself. “Yes, yes, of course,” Witte interrupts him, “but I just had the idea that we are basically doing nothing concrete to illustrate that slogan. Have you ever considered the possibility that we could put on a sort of public washing demonstration, not as a big event before a big audience, of course, but with in-house demos from door to door?”

  Dr. Fiebig stares wide-eyed at him. Witte gets impatient. “R
emind me of the subtitle to our slogan?”

  “The up-to-the-minute detergent with modern suds: not too much, not too little—just right!” Dr. Fiebig intones.

  “There you have it! You can’t just make the claim, you’ve got to demonstrate it. The housewife has to see it with her own eyes.”

  With a glance at his watch, the advertising director replies dryly that such a plan—or rather, the possibility of putting it into operation—could not be managed within his budget. It would need an organization that would have to be discussed first with the director of sales, and only then could the details of the campaign be contemplated.

  “Okay then, let’s get the sales director in here—what? He’s on the road at the moment? In the provinces? Well then, his representative—he’s got to have a representative, doesn’t he?” Dr. Fiebig declares himself prepared to seek out his representative and speedily takes his leave. Witte turns to A. “You can see how things function around here. It just eats up all my time.”And in fact, the telephone purrs again. Witte picks up and hisses into the receiver, “Didn’t I tell you . . . What’s that? Aha, yes, put me through.” After a short pause, “Yes, Witte speaking—I’m honored, dear lady! Yes of course—yes—with pleasure—what was that? Do I recommend it? I certainly do! The castle itself is first-rate—a fairy-tale building—yes indeed, the former Empress Friedrich—excellent, really, the cuisine is A-1—that’s right, all-inclusive, we all got an egg for breakfast—oh, my sister and I, of course, ha ha, no one else—” shoots a look at Carlotta—“as I said, a stupendous atmosphere, very pretty rooms, very cozy, large lounges—but of course, happy to do it—hope to see you soon, dear lady!” He makes a little bow while still holding the receiver, presses the button to the outer office, “Bussekins, take down this lady’s number. That’s all.” And turning back to A.: “You can see, not a free minute!”