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Back Abel and Cain Save as PDF
Chapters (21)
  1. Cover
  2. Biographical Notes
  3. Other Books by Gregor von Rezzori
  4. Title Page
  5. INTRODUCTION
  6. THE DEATH OF MY BROTHER ABEL
  7. Dedication
  8. Chapter 1
  9. Chapter 2
  10. A
  11. Chapter 3
  12. Chapter 4
  13. B
  14. Chapter 5
  15. CAIN
  16. EDITOR’S FOREWORD
  17. INTENDED AS A PREFACE
  18. Folder C
  19. THE ICE AGE, 1947
  20. SCHWAB
  21. GISELA

“It was still deathly silent in the Nuremberg courtroom. No sound, no motion. Nothing stirred. The dammed-up human pond stood still. But all at once, the suspense was gone. It was gone in a bizarre way. It had not let up. It had not eased up little by little to tear off like a hanging thread. It had, so to speak, run out of this world. It had crossed some mysterious threshold and had run out into a different dimension. The pond was dead. It was no longer dammed up and it did not flow out. It stagnated, it began to decompose.

“And it remained so as LORD JUSTICE Lawrence, after clearing his throat with literary thoroughness, so to speak Dickensianly rapped his pencil on the tabletop and spoke in a paternally strict voice to tell the defendant Rudolf Hess that he should finally get to the point, he had already been speaking for twenty minutes, and he must bear in mind that twenty more defendants were waiting to make their concluding statements. And when the defendant Rudolf Hess responded by shrugging his shoulders and sullenly saying that if they didn’t want to hear what he had to say, he would simply stop; and he very ponderously rolled back into his wheelchair-invalid blanket and sat down to stare with empty periscope shafts into the void.

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“Nothing had happened, and what had happened was meaningless, both for the defendant Rudolf Hess and the Nuremberg Court of Law, and for us who were permitted to witness this historic moment. And it was meaningless for the world outside, beyond the guarded walls. And certainly for the new youth of Germany who were growing up out there in the rubble dumps. All of us had long since passed into a different state, into a dimension that had not been human for a long time.

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“Nothing more was happening to us. There were no murderers anymore and no victims, because there was no more human reason able to distinguish between good and evil. Madness was growing hybridly, welling and swelling and forming metastases like everything else around us. There was no more guilt and hence certainly no more atonement, hence no destiny and thus nothing more to narrate. We should have known this, my brother Schwab. We shouldn’t have pushed one another to write. Why? For whom? To what end? Peace could have been with us long ago, my brother Cain.”

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