Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

by Bruno Schulz

  Copyright © 1977,1978 by Ella Podstolski-Schulz

  Originally published in Poland in 1937

  with the title Sanatorium pod Klepsydra.

  All rights reserved

  Reprinted by arrangement with Walker and Company.

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  CIP data is available. ISBN 0-395-86023-7

  Printed in the United States of America

  QUM 10 987654 3 21

  TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

  He was small, unattractive and sickly, with a thin angular body and brown, deep-set eyes in a pale triangular face. He taught art at a secondary school for boys at Drohobycz in South Eastern Poland, where he spent most of his life. He had few friends outside his native city. In his leisure hours — of which there were probably many — he made drawings and wrote endlessly, nobody quite knew what. At the age of forty, having received an introduction through friends to Zofia Nalkowska, a distinguished novelist in Warsaw, he sent her some of his stories. They were published in 1934 under the title of Cinnamon Shops — and the name of Bruno Schulz was made. Three years later, a further collection of stories, with drawings by the author, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, was published; then The Comet, a novella, appeared in a leading literary weekly. In between, Schulz made a translation of Kafka's The Trial. It is said that he was working on a novel, entitled The Messiah, but nothing has remained of it. This is the sum total of his literary output.

  When Bruno Schulz's stories were re-issued in Poland in 1957, translated into French and German, and acclaimed everywhere by a new generation of readers to whom he was unknown, attempts were made to place his oeuvre in the mainstream of Polish literature, to find affinities, derivations, to explain him in terms of one literary theory or another. The task is well nigh impossible. He was a solitary man, living apart, filled with his dreams, with memories of his childhood, with an intense, formidable inner life, a painter's imagination, a sensuality and responsiveness to physical stimuli which most probably could find satisfaction only in artistic creation — a volcano, smouldering silently in the isolation of a sleepy provincial town.

  The world of Schulz is basically a private world. At its centre is his father 'that incorrigible improviser. .. the lonely hero who alone had waged war against the fathomless, elemental boredom that strangled the city.' Father, bearded, sometimes resembling a biblical prophet, is one of the great eccentrics of literature. In reality he was a Drohobycz merchant, who had inherited a textile business and ran it until illness forced him to abandon it to the care of his wife. He then retired to ten years of enforced idleness and his own world of dreams. Father who surrounds himself with ledgers and pores over them for days on end — while in reality all he is doing is putting coloured transfers on the ruled pages; Father who has zoological interest, who imports eggs of rare species of birds and has them hatched in his attic, who is dominated by the blue-eyed servant girl, Adela; who believes that tailors' dummies should be treated with as much respect as human beings; Father who loathes cockroaches to the point of fascination; who in a last apotheosis rises above the vulgar mob of buyers and sellers and, drowning in rivers of cloth, blows the horn of Atonement. . . . Then there is Mother, who did not love her husband properly and who condemned him therefore to an existence on the periphery of life, because he was not rooted in any woman's heart. There are uncles and aunts and cousins, each described with deadly accuracy, with epithets as from a clinical diagnosis.

  These were Schulz's people, the people of Drohobycz, at one time the Klondike of Galicia when oil was stuck near the city and prosperity entered it and destroyed the old patriarchal way of life, bringing false values, bogus Americanization, and new ways of making a quick fortune when the white spaces of an old map of the city were transformed into a new district, when the Street of Crocodiles became its centre, peopled with a race of rattle-headed men and women of easy morals. The old dignity of the Cinnamon Shops, with their aroma of spices and distant countries, changed into something brash, second rate, questionable, slightly suspect.

  One could continue to quote from the stories: somebody might attempt perhaps a psycho-analysis of Schulz on the basis of his writings. Polish and other critics have drawn attention to the influence that Thomas Mann, Freud and Kafka exercised on him. This may or may not be true: although it is also said that Schulz first read The Trial when the book was sent to him for reviewing after the publication of Cinnamon Shops. What is undoubtedly true is that the atmosphere of both Kafka's and Schulz's life in their respective provinces is not dissimilar. These distant outposts of the former Austro-Hungarian empire, with the memories of the 'good' Emperor Franz-Joseph still a living tradition, looked up to Vienna as the center of cultural and artistic life much more than to Prague or Warsaw.

  But whether or not these derivations existed in fact does not really matter, the stories still speak for themselves in the same voice as in the thirties and emerges from them in a sunken world, lost forever under the lava of history: an ordinary provincial city with ordinary people going about their daily tasks, a city scorched by the hot summers of every schoolchild's holidays, sometimes shaken by unexpected high winds from the mountains, but mostly sleepy and lethargic — here brought to life by the magic touch of a poetic genius, in a prose as memorable, powerful and unique as are the brush strokes of Marc Chagall.

  Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass is the second collection of prose fiction by Bruno Schulz. Published in Warsaw in 1937, it followed three years after The Street of Crocodiles. Like the previous book, Sanatorium is, in Schulz's own words. "An attempt at eliciting the history of a certain family, a certain house in a provincial city — not from documents, events, a study of character or of people's destinies — but by a search for the mythical sense, the essential core of that history .. . That dusky, allusive atmosphere, that aura that thickens around any family history, can only occasionally disclose to a poet its second, mythical face: an alternative, a depth in which the secret mystery of blood and race is hidden . . . These mythical elements are inherent in the region of early childish fantasies, intuitions, fears and anticipations characteristic of the dawn of life."

  Sanatorium is the poetic recreation of Schulz's autobiography: the memories of a child blessed with an extraordinary sensitivity projected with the eye of an artist; his pilgrimage into a lost and happier past. It is a time when Father was still alive but he is no more the central and dominant preoccupation of his son, as he was in the earlier book. Mother is here as a benevolent, bland presence. Other members of the family make brief appearances; the blue-eyed, temperamental, young servant girl, Adela, is still the household acolyte, the disturbing, sex-charged element. In the masterful central story that gives the book its title, Joseph, dutiful son and observant narrator, visits Father in limbo and reports on its confusion and hidden horrors. Yet Sanatorium belongs to Joseph: it chronicles his progress through stages of discovery. The revelation of nature in all its seasons, colours and phases raises him to a feverish frenzy and occasions his dramatic self-recognition of the child-as-artist. The infinite and bewildering variety of the wider world is revealed through the symbols and national emblems in a schoolboy's stamp album (in "Spring"). The evocation of first love in a long, dreamlike sequence in the same story is intert
wined with a fantasy about an enchanted house and Joseph's abortive rescue of a would-be princess. The final stories continue the process of self-discovery, disclosing the basic loneliness, sadness and near despair of Schulz's real existence.

  After the publication of his first book, Schulz's life as a teacher of drawing and handicrafts at the Drohobycz boys' college began gradually to expand and brighten. He gained friends in the literary world of Warsaw through the novelist Zofia Nalkowska, who was instrumental in the publication of Cinnamon Shops, and through Stainslaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, a great admirer of Schulz's prose and one who was also both artist and novelist, as well as a theatrical innovator of genius. Schulz could now supplement his income from teaching by contributing to literary weeklies in Warsaw and Lwow. He began devoting a great deal of time to correspondence (which has been meticulously traced and collected over the years since the end of the last war by Jerzy Ficowski). There were no more letters like those to Deborah Vogel (almost all lost) that spurred Schulz to literary pursuits before any of his work was published. The new letters concerned mostly his work and aspirations: endeavors to get wider recognition, to gain a public, and to have his books translated abroad. The recurrent theme in many of these letters is Schulz's obsession with time: the encroachment on it of the reality of his daily drudgery as a teacher contrasting with his dreams of a limitless quota of uninterrupted time that would provide a tabula rasa of pure, virgin hours.

  It was not to be. Through the accident of his brother's premature death in 1936, Schulz's financial responsibilities grew: he found himself sole supporter of his widowed sister, her son and an aged cousin. His engagement to a Catholic woman, a relationship already plagued by religious complications, was broken off. His letters reveal ever more frequent bouts of depression, each one lasting for ever longer periods. Although Cinnamon Shops brought him a prize from the Polish Academy of Letters (a fact that enhanced his standing in Drohobycz: his school gave him the title of "professor," but no rise in salary!), Sanatorium failed to win the annual prize awarded by the Warsaw weekly Wiadomosci Literackie. With the help of friends in Poland and France and after much persuasion, Schulz did manage to travel to Paris during the summer of 1938. For three weeks he visited art galleries and discussed art and literature. This was already a time of foreboding: Nazi expansionist policies presented a threat to peace in central Europe. The Polish-German pact of 1939 intensified the spread of Nazi ideas in some sections of Polish society. When war broke out in September, 1939, Drohobycz was, for a time, occupied by the Russians. Schulz could still teach and was able to write, but this type of writing was too personal, loo introspective to be palatable in the harsh climate of war. He therefore reverted to painting and was earning his modest keep as an artist in his native city when, during the German advance into Soviet territory, it was occupied by the Nazis in the summer of 1941.

  In the Jewish quarter of Drohobycz, on a certain "Black Thursday" in November, 1942, Schulz was bringing home a loaf of bread when he was shot in the street by a Gestapo officer who had a grudge against another Nazi, Schulz's temporary "protector" who liked his paintings. His body was buried by a Jewish friend in a cemetery which no longer exists.

  Schulz's fate, as he had written in "Loneliness," was "to be a parasite of metaphors ... carried away by the first simile that comes along." This particular metaphor does him less than justice: his oeuvre has triumphantly survived. The sixties saw the publication of his work in German, France, Italy and Norway. Now, forty years after its publication in Polish, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass is at last published in English in the United States. Schulz's dream of being read by a wider public has at last come true.

  Celina Wieniewska

  THE BOOK

  I

  I AM SIMPLY CALLING it The Book without any epithets or qualifications, and in this sobriety there is a shade of helplessness, a silent capitulation before the vastness of the transcendental, for no word, no allusion, can adequately suggest the shiver of fear, the presentiment of a thing without name that exceeds all our capacity for wonder. How could an accumulation of adjectives or a richness of epithets help when one is faced with that splendiferous thing? Besides, any true reader—and this story is only addressed to him—will understand me anyway when I look him straight in the eye and try to communicate my meaning. A short sharp look or a light clasp of his hand will stir him into awareness, and he will blink in rapture at the brilliance of The Book. For, under the imaginary table that separates me from my readers, don't we secretly clasp each other's hands?

  The Book . . . Somewhere in the dawn of childhood, at the first daybreak of life, the horizon had brightened with its gentle glow. The Book lay in all its glory on my father's desk, and he, quietly engrossed in it, patiently rubbed with a wet fingertip the top of decals, until the blank pages grew opaque and ghostly with a delightful foreboding and, suddenly flaking off in bits of tissue, disclosed a peacock-eyed fragment; blurred with emotion, one's eyes turned toward a virgin dawn of divine colors, toward a miraculous moistness of purest azure.

  Oh, that shedding of the film, oh, that invasion of brightness, that blissful spring, oh, Father . . .

  Sometimes my father would wander off and leave me alone with The Book; the wind would rustle through its pages and the pictures would rise. And as the windswept pages were turned, merging the colors and shapes, a shiver ran through the columns of text, freeing from among the letters flocks of swallows and larks. Page after page floated in the air and gently saturated the landscape with brightness. At other times, The Book lay still and the wind opened it softly like a huge cabbage rose; the petals, one by one, eyelid under eyelid, all blind, velvety, and dreamy, slowly disclosed a blue pupil, a colored peacock's heart, or a chattering nest of hummingbirds.

  This was a very long time ago. My mother had not appeared yet. I spent my days alone with my father in our room, which at that time was as large as the world.

  The crystals hanging from the lamp filled the room with diffused colors, a rainbow splashed into all the corners, and, when the lamp swayed on its chains, the whole room revolved in fragments of the rainbow, as if the spheres of all nine planets had shifted, one turning around the other. I liked to stand between my father's legs, clasping them from each side like columns. Sometimes he wrote letters. I sat on his desk and watched, entranced, the squiggles of his signature, crabbed and awhirl like the trills of a coloratura singer. Smiles were budding in the wallpaper, eyes hatched, somersaults turned. To amuse me, my father blew soap bubbles through a long straw; they burst in the irridescent space or hit the walls, their colors still hanging in the air.

  Then my mother materialized, and that early, bright idyll came to an end. Seduced by my mother's caresses, I forgot my father, and my life began to run along a new and different track with no holidays and no miracles. I might even have forgotten The Book forever, had it not been for a certain night and a certain dream.

  II

  On a dark wintry morning I woke up early [under the banks of darkness a grim dawn shone in the depths below] and while a multitude of misty figures and signs still crowded under my eyelids, I began to dream confusedly, tormented by various regrets about the old, forgotten Book.

  No one could understand me and, vexed by their obtuseness, I began to nag more urgently, molesting my parents with angry impatience.

  Barefoot, wearing only my nightshirt and trembling with excitement, I rifled the books on Father's bookshelves, and, angry and disappointed, I tried to describe to a stunned audience that indescribable thing, which no words, no pictures drawn with a trembling and elongated finger, could evoke. I exhausted myself in endless explanations, complicated and contradictory, and cried in helpless despair.

  My parents towered over me, perplexed, ashamed of their helplessness. They could not help feeling uneasy. My vehemence, the impatient and feverish urgency of my tone, made me appear to be in the right, to have a well-founded grievance. They came up to me with various books and pressed them
into my hands. I threw them away indignantly.

  One of them, a thick and heavy tome, was again and again pushed toward me by my father. I opened it. It was the Bible. I saw in its pages a great wandering of animals, filling the roads, branching off into processions heading for distant lands. I saw a sky filled with flocks of birds in flight, and an enormous, upturned pyramid on whose flat top rested the Ark.

  I raised my reproachful eyes to Father.

  "You must know, Father," I cried, "you must. Don't pretend, don't quibble! This book has given you away. Why do you give me that fake copy, that reproduction, a clumsy falsification? What have you done with The Book?"

  My father averted his eyes.

  III

  Weeks went by. My excitement abated, then passed, but the image of The Book continued to burn in my memory with a bright flame; a large, rustling Codex, a tempestuous Bible, the wind blowing through its pages, plundering it like an enormous, petal-shedding rose.

  My father, seeing that I had become calmer, approached me cautiously one day and said in a tone of gentle suggestion:

  "As a matter of fact, there are many books. The Book is a myth in which we believe when we are young, but which we cease to take seriously as we get older."

  At that time I already held quite a different opinion. I knew then that The Book is a postulate, that it is a goal. I carried upon my shoulders the burden of a great mission. I did not answer; I was scornful and filled with bitter, dogged pride.

  In fact, I was already in possession of some tattered remnants of The Book, a few pitiful shreds that by a freak of fate had fallen into my hands. I hid my treasure carefully from everybody, distressed by the utter downfall of that book and knowing that I could not expect anyone to appreciate those mutilated pages. It happened like this: