It doesn’t ultimately matter which role any of them plays, however: At the end of the book, all of these characters, and all of these nations, are dead.

Schwab, as has been reported, dies of his habits, and Subicz dies in a car crash with a French starlet just outside Avignon, on the road from Paris to Cannes. Germany and Austria, meanwhile, have been reduced to mental habits, superstitions—because all of their cities have essentially become outposts of America, whose energy requires italics:

Already built into the trashy boxiness are the ruins of tomorrow, the tin-and-concrete wasteland of secondhand Americana, with mangebelts of rust and mortar, seething and teeming with ever-swelling, ever-swarming masses of more and more colorless more and more dissatisfied more and more demanding more and more hopeless more and more evil supermarket consumers in ever swifter, tinnier, more hastily glued-together, more and more perilous automobiles: highway rest stop eaters with empty gazes over munching chewing kneading swallowing mouths . . .

As the folders unfold and Subicz’s recounted conversations give way to dialogue from scenes from Subicz’s abandoned novels, then give way to dialogue from scenes from Subicz’s abandoned screenplays—all of which are interspersed with Schwab’s own editorial notes—the border between the “brothers” is all but effaced, like the border between Austria and Hungary, whose wall came down half a year before the wall in Berlin, as if the grand old Empire were making one last bid to restore itself and reassert its standards before Coca-Cola and Levi’s took over.

3

When Gregor von Rezzori died, in 1998, he still wasn’t finished with this material. In 1976, he’d published what he called the introductory pneuma (which is framed by the two Paris meetings, the interview with Brodny and the bender with Schwab), and folders A and B, in a book called Der Tod Meines Bruders Abel, which was translated in 1985 as The Death of My Brother Abel. Folder C was published post-humously in 2000 as Kain (Cain) and never translated. Here, both volumes are together in English for the first time, and the effect is to make the give-and-take between Subicz and Schwab into something closer to a forking or branching: They’re the two lives, or deaths, that might’ve been von Rezzori’s.

Gregor Arnulph Hilarius d’Arezzo, known as Grisha, was born not after the First World War, like his two “brothers,” but just at its start, in 1914—in Czernowitz, then the capital of the Duchy of Bukovina, later a major city in the Kingdom of Romania, and now a provincial city in Ukraine. His family were Sicilian aristocracy from Ragusa, who served as Habsburg officials. Grisha inherited their cosmopolitanism and became fluent in seven languages. His war was spent initially with the Romanian army, and then on false papers in Berlin, where he repeatedly tried to write about what he was witnessing. But every attempt at documenting his present led him to the past, and he eventually produced a distinguished oeuvre of cruel, beautiful autobiographical novels about his Empire childhood and teen years. Predictably, they were mostly ignored in Germany in favor of the lighter fare he wrote to pay the bills (his four-volume Idiot’s Guide to German Society, and, yes, his scripts for film and television). German letters didn’t know what to do with him: He wrote in German but wasn’t German; not even the Austrians would claim him (not that he wanted to be claimed by them). His foreignness—indeed, his official statelessness, for a period—along with the splendeurs of his style alienated him from the Trümmerliteratur movement (Rubble Literature, the direct and even rudimentary immediately postwar German literature that tried to objectively describe, not subjectively evaluate, the contemporary scene, as a way, perversely, of mitigating its readership’s war trauma), and he was too much of a nostalgist for the Vienna of Hermann Broch, Robert Musil, Joseph Roth, and Stefan Zweig to take part in the explicitly experimental Gruppe 47 (a group of novelists, poets, and playwrights that met between 1947 and ’67, and included Ingeborg Bachmann, Heinrich Böll, Peter Handke, and Uwe Johnson).