Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  • • •

  Back then I’d known Schwab a fairly short time and only spoke to him about Nagel because I assumed that, if only for professional reasons, he would be just as interested in him (the newly minted author) as I was for the personal reason of our friendship (was friendship my only reason?). And I wasn’t mistaken. Schwab listened very closely to me. His massive face remained impassive. As usual, his sensitive mouth lay like a haughty pasha between the soft cushions of his cheeks, and above it the pale blue carp eyes of a man bespectacled since early childhood (and a regularly relapsing dipsomaniac) stared without expression through his thick lenses. And then all the more unexpected was the malice of his quiet interruptions, questions of perfidious personal provocation, for example, “Was it Nagel the storyteller who disappointed you or Nagel the lover?”

  I admit that in those days, my place in the bourgeois order was not easy to determine. I had no profession, wrote occasional treatments for the successors of the late lamented STELLA FILMS (Stoffel has disappeared, Astrid von Bürger grows gracefully older, and the industrious little movie piglets I work for confine themselves to making plans). My free-time activities also left something to be desired. I didn’t play soccer or tennis in a fancy club, to say nothing of golf, not even hockey and not bridge in any case. I was ignorant of soccer pools and didn’t watch TV or play skat at the kitchen table with buddies in shirtsleeves. I didn’t fish, bowl, ride, hunt, row, box, or do gymnastics. I didn’t sing in a men’s chorus, collect donations for the Red Cross—not even for thalidomide cripples or wheelchair polo players—didn’t read a newspaper and wasn’t interested in politics. I couldn’t tell the CDU from NATO, the Monroe Doctrine from the Hallstein Doctrine, state capitalism from the Comintern, and hopelessly confused the EEC, FDP, SPD, and SED. Whenever I said something about current events, Christa blushed liked I’d felt her up. I couldn’t care less about German universities or space travel, didn’t give a shit about the Oder–Neisse line. The Wall of Shame in Berlin was okay with me (it’s only logical that if the Jews have a Wailing Wall, the Germans have a Wall of Shame). I thought being a manager was great: it absolved me of the responsibility no one had asked me to shoulder in the first place. Engagé art, literature, radio, film, and theater left me cold. I had no past to come to terms with except my own, and it was spurious anyway. I left the topic of the kibbutzim to Nagel, compensation for the Arab states to Rönnekamp and his business associates, and the question of rearmament to the chancellor, Pope John XXIII, de Gaulle, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and his wife Jackie, Khrushchev, the Lorelei, Willy Brandt, the neo-Nazis, Dr. Albert Schweitzer, and Edith Piaf. I hoped to survive the Cold War just as I had the hot one (and this time, my chances were considerably better). Both intra- and extramaritally, I shoved the birth control pill in with my middle finger. There were already enough people preoccupied with the Red Army Faction as well as with the victims of the Twentieth of July plot, even though they had nothing to do with either one. I hadn’t had the pleasure of hearing Pastor Thielicke’s sermons. I’d already read most of the novels Rowohlt started reissuing as cheap paperbacks after the war. I hadn’t seen the DOKUMENTA exhibition. Like so many other things in life, the results of the Ecumenical Council would be made clear simply by the passage of time. Had water polo already been accepted into the Olympic Games, or when and how and by whom would that be decided (and would the teams from the GDR and the Federal Republic—i.e., the anticapitalistic and capitalistic, anti-imperialistic and imperialistic aquatic acrobats—splash around in the pool together or separately)? Whatever the answer, it didn’t move me a hair’s breadth from the conviction that it was utterly unimportant. Philosophically and politically and athletically I wasn’t on the left or the right or the middle (I hadn’t noticed the disappearance of the latter, by the way), not even on the right wing or left wing of the right, to say nothing of being on one or the other extremes—so I lacked any sort of spatial orientation, so to speak.

  “Tell me, do you actually exist at all?”—Yes, alas, you’ll be surprised to hear that you can exist despite all that, one can exist. I can, for one, although I leave the question of deciding between Romain Gary and Robbe-Grillet, or who’s to blame for the First World War, up to King Solomon, while the question of whether the Protestant hymn has a future is best left up to the infallible wisdom of the pope or Marilyn Monroe—what do I care—WHAT DO I CARE?! . . .

  Of course, this attitude comes with a certain loneliness: it has an isolating effect if you have nothing to say about the Hamburg Derby or the Formula One races on the Nuremburg Ring, much less the Berlin Festival or the launch of Sputnik I, II, III—

  Incidentally, nowadays such events problems scandals threats are delivered abstractly right to our door by the press, radio, and TV. Their emotional effect is almost identical, their informational value in fact is even greater than when you’re an eyewitness, so why should I exert myself? There’s a few things I can even admit ingenuously, for example, that culturally I’m a philistine, I don’t travel, and so I’ve never been to Baalbek or Samarkand or Angkor Wat, or—to my shame—even Crete, although that shows up prominently in organized tours, but on the other hand, it’s strange that as a rule, in museums I only look at objects I’d like to steal and have no intention of following the traces of the Hittites or learning about the creators of Cycladic sculpture or pre-Columbian pottery. That’s odd for a so-called intellectual.

  —but what is that anyway? A profession? What does “an intellectual” mean? Basically, it means I can’t come home with the housekeeping money on the first of the month, taxes already deducted and accident, life, retirement, and health insurance as well as burial fund all paid up; rent, telephone, light, and gas bills all automatically deducted from my bank account; installments laid aside for the new car, patio furniture, Mom’s fur coat, the dentist, the Klepper kayak, refrigerator, TV set, floor polisher, and electric iron. I was shamelessly delinquent on all that, left it up to the repo man. If I ever happened to have some money, it ran through my fingers like water, which led to terribly embarrassing scenes. (“The child asked me in front of everybody why the man had put seals on our furniture—he said you told him it was a trademark like his teddy bears with the button in their ears—what kind of nonsense is that? You’re giving him the wrong ideas. . .”)

  to whom could I possibly explain that all that didn’t count, that I expected something else from myself, required it—as an intellectual, if you will—even if it was the book Schwab was demanding from me like an existential debt . . .

  • • •

  Note:

  The volatility of his intellect. He is hypersensitive to all impressions, most of which are lasting: he is surrounded by immediately available memories and is constantly in search of connections, of what he calls their meaning. What has kept him from writing up to now is the obsessive notion that he can only begin when he has found this meaning.

  Sometimes he reveals himself. In drunken dialogue with S.: “And so you’re trying to persuade me to write a book—would it floor you to learn that in mortal terror I think of nothing else, dream of nothing else, wish for and expect nothing else . . .”

  On the subject of Nagel: “He may well be destined for something great, good old Nagel, namely, for something not even remotely connected to writing—what do I know? Maybe as a leader of men, a politician. Just imagine what an immensely valuable role he could play at a party convention, a hobgoblin of the categorical imperative who puts the fear of God into the pilots of our state. Back in the days of our primal community, he often played that role in his notebook. But he’s not destined to be an artist. For that, he would have had to experience fewer bloody spectacles and more quiet, would have to see less and listen more—like the blind Homer, for instance. We all know that the Iliad includes not just the immediate reality of the battle for Troy, but also the core that partakes of the stillness of eternity: the discord of the gods . . . An artist needs ears to hear that, not GOD THE FATHER�
�S all-embracing love for mankind . . .”

  And he added: “Your subtle smile tells me you think you know very well why I get so riled up—but believe me, it’s out of pure sympathy for our friend. Whoever wishes Nagel well ought to keep him from writing for the very reason that he probably has some talent for it and has the best intentions to do good. That’s exactly what will prevent him from fulfilling his greatest aspirations. He’ll remain a middling scribbler suffering the disastrous effects of success. For if there’s one thing that from the get-go stamps people who set out to write as second-rate and parasites on humanity, it’s their good intentions to uplift it—humanity—morally. Nagel’s an ethicist, that’s all there is to it, and he won’t be able to resist beating his readers over the head with it. Admittedly, he’s a mighty good pal, a most foursquare fellow with a crystal-clear character, the stoutest, most upright person, striving to do the impossible. He accomplishes things even with only a left hand. In person, sitting across from you with his white-toothed smile and his chesty drone, marvelously vital yet with a manly, gallant sensitivity—and all that in a compact format: five foot three in his socks, size seven shoes—he’s a jewel of a human being, a gem of the finest water. But on paper, alas, a character in a book for young readers. . .”

  • • •

  Imperious, indolent, voluptuous, they filled the rows of mirroring windows flowing into one another along the half-timbered facades of the sagging, gabled little houses with the trumpery of their tawdry coiffures, feather boas, fringed bras, and froufrou; filled to overflowing the silk receptacles of their bodices stretched tightly over wire and whalebone forms with a gaudy bounty of female flesh, pushed-up breasts, rolls of fat, powdered shoulders and arms, burst out of them with powerful thighs that funneled into obscenely crossed legs in black net stockings. They filled the glassed-in, dollhouse interiors of the humble cottages with the trumpery of their female scent, the smell of powder and cheap perfume, filled the vitrines shining in the darkness of Whores’ Alley with the shrill trumpery of their make-up, false eyelashes, locks of hair pasted to their forehead like a flamenco dancer’s, and hennaed quiffs: duenna, matriarch, and mousie, child bride, tomboy, giant baby, she-werewolf, spider, wasp—each one the overly sharp copy of some woman once desired, loved, never possessed, the shamelessly revealed ur-image of a female type, the brazen mask of an anima—

  thus they filled the short Whores’ Alley, screened off at either end by a wall of corrugated iron, with light and color, with the pattering rain of the keys they tapped against the window panes to entice customers, those magnificent augurs of happiness—

  and all around, the concrete desert sprung from bomb craters, the faceless crowds, the lava of tinny vehicles rolling through the streets, the icy light of the arc lamps reflected in glass and steel and enamel, the trumpery consumer products filling the wasteland of department store windows

  • • •

  I knew I was drunk, but I stubbornly kept talking all the more. I said, “Try to express that in a comprehensible way—in images, I mean. You intend to write about that yourself sometime, right? Okay then, you won’t rise to the bait—I’m not going to either, no matter how hard you try—by the way, did you ever try offering cash? A check signed by your employer Scherping—given the right circumstances that might tempt me to take up my pen. Go ahead! Do as my swinish film bosses do: they get me to write with false promises too . . . But I mean, just for the fun of it: where would you find the images for a gripping novel of the present day? I mean, a present that’s not decoupled from the past. Where would you begin? Probably in the death camps, where guilt and enslaved innocence, terror, fear and deprivation and insanity, the madness inherent in human beings were raised to such a monstrous level that they assumed the character of a dream; where they had metastasized into a surrealistic nightmare; where hundreds of thousands died senseless deaths without the slightest chance for a litmus test to prove their will to live and a consideration of the murderers’ motives had become almost laughable. How does a potential author provide a vivid image of all that? Those who survived don’t like to talk about it, and if they do, then quite inadequately, for language can’t cope with that telling. Especially not with the encounter with GOD. He wasn’t much in evidence there behind the barbed wire. For the great majority of others however—namely, the ones who strung the barbed wire around the camps—the spectacular thunder, lightning, and fire of their experiences at the front and in the nights of air raids in the cities obscured this core reality of the past. The benevolent Veil of Maya, right? Fitfully illuminated by exploding bombs. The terror bombing of German cities, the wild escapes, the loss of the Homeland, the rapes of German women and girls by Asiatic subhumans, etc., such are the novelistic themes that obscure the essence. This incursion of physical ur-reality into metaphysics had a positively cleansing, liberating effect: the horror latent in the epoch was happening at last, quite widely recognized although not yet as directly experienced as inside the barbed wire. But that still was not enough to leave one stone upon another. Not enough to avoid anything of what followed: the reconstruction of the possibility it would happen again. Peace—you’ll protest—a cleansing of conscience, democracy, etc.—those were nothing to sneeze at, were they? Granted. But what about the guilt that continues to grow in the background? The catharsis that never happened! Still charitably veiled by Maya? And you intend to continue to weave that veil and with GOD’s help give a leg up to tomorrow’s reality? So that it doesn’t see? So that the future discovers it’s as blind as ever! Is that what we writers are destined to do? Never to speak the truth! Always weaving the veil of Maya—and all the tighter, the more vividly we depict the terrors of the world of men . . . Many thanks, dear sir, but count me out!”

  • • •

  Scherping was in America and has returned with plans for countless books, among them a translation of a recently published biography of Sonja Henie. Purely out of spite, Schwab refuses to support the plan, declares absolutely that if Scherping Publishing is moving in the direction of athletes’ biographies, he cannot remain as lead editor. Scherping, who enjoys torturing him, calls Sonja Henie “a genius.” Schwab ironically quotes Robert Musil’s “genius of a racehorse” from The Man without Qualities, which Scherping doesn’t get at first and then—after it’s been explained to him—he takes painful pleasure in his own philistinism. Aristides, bored to tears, stops listening to them. His thoughts stray: Sonja Henie, spinning like a top on the toes of her skates, takes on the shape of Uncle Ferdinand. The scene is the park in Bessarabia in the depths of winter. The pond is frozen, the ice swept clean and smooth as a mirror. Under their load of snow, the weeping willows on its banks are as bent as peddler women. The rowboat with its ornamental cast-iron seat back is stuck in the icy reeds and covered with snow. Uncle Ferdinand in a belted Norfolk jacket, knee britches, and woolen stockings and, like an adolescent, a fur cap on his head and his hands in a muff, has strapped ice skates onto his high lace-up boots. His left leg raised and gracefully bent at the knee, his hands in the muff in front of his chest, he executes a rapid spin on the toe of the other skate. His high cheekbones are burning with frost, the centrifugal force of his rotation combs his mustache in the direction of the spin. The image is so vivid that A. has the impression of a “manifestation” (as Uncle Helmuth described them from his spiritist séances). He clearly hears his mother’s ironical voice: “Isn’t he unspeakably ridiculous? He’s trying to bore his way through the ice to poor me. He always had to come to me through the ice, always on tiptoe . . .”

  • • •

  A sudden insight whose absurdity strikes his innermost being connects this image of Uncle Ferdinand with Schwab. His mother’s words seem to apply to Schwab and himself. He has to shake himself awake.

 

 

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