In Hamburg, Subicz sets to work as a novelist, but with Reichsmarks worthless and Deutschmarks scarce—and a wife, and a son, and mistresses, and a prostitute habit—he takes on sideline gigs scribbling scripts for the “piglets” of the German film industry, eager to revive the glory, if not the aesthetics, of Weimar’s Ufa.

2

How many Abels are we up to by now? Definitely Cousin Wolfgang, definitely Stella. Didn’t Hollywood request a third sentence, though—a third death sentence?

Schwab.

The major postwar presence in Subicz’s life is a man named Johannes Schwab, who like Subicz is a frustrated writer, but unlike Subicz isn’t cheap enough for film, and so he goes to work as a book editor. Pity the earnest German, he thinks he’s being honest.

Schwab, in fact, is Subicz’s book editor—meaning that he vouched for Subicz’s talent and got his author a series of advances. Needless to say, not a single page has ever come in.

Schwab, who also lives in Hamburg, though the name marks him as a Swabian, is the German “brother” to Subicz’s errant “Austrian.”

Schwab’s first appearance is more like a diagnosis: “He was wearing a heavy turtleneck sweater (not a Hanseatic outfit but, with corduroy slacks and a beret, the guild costume of German intellectuals in the fifties, which costume he carried on into the sixties—typical of people who are behind the times but consider themselves avant-garde!).”

Two decades of waiting for Subicz’s pages have taken their toll: Schwab arrives in Paris to meet Subicz (like the agent Brodny, earlier in the book, but years later in terms of chronology, meets Subicz) and Schwab confesses as much, between room-temperature gin and tonics, cigarettes, and pills: He’s not on board with the Wirtschaftswunder, the Federal Republic’s Economic Miracle, but he needs its salary and perks; neither is he down with the burgeoning student movements, but he needs their excesses and purpose. Subicz should be worried, but men who’ve survived mass slaughters tend not to worry too much about substance abuse and certainly don’t stage interventions—at best, they get wasted themselves and pick up the tab, which is exactly what Subicz does. Schwab returns to Germany and binges to death. Subicz calls it a suicide, which is just the polite society term for another homicide he’s gotten away with.

Indeed, in Subicz’s narration, which takes up the two sections or folders labeled A and B, Schwab is presented as the Abel to Subicz’s Cain: Subicz “kills” Schwab by abandoning him for the movies, or by failing to write a book that brings Schwab back into esteem at his publishing house, which is under increasing pressure to make profits as its media-conglomerate parent becomes a global hegemon. As folder C is approached, however, it becomes increasingly feasible that the roles can be reversed, and that Schwab might be the Cain to Subicz’s Abel: Schwab “kills” Subicz by becoming too dissolute to edit him, or by having also championed Nagel, a famous but plodding German writer whose success has stymied Subicz (Nagel is a composite, but also the Nobel laureate and Waffen SS member Günter Wilhelm Grass). Another way to read the titular brothers is through nationality: Subicz’s Austria-Hungary is Abel, murdered by Germany’s Cain, which fostered Nazism and foisted it on Europe. Or else: Schwab’s Germany is Abel, murdered by Austria-Hungary’s Cain, Hitler’s native land.