Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

by Bruno Schulz

  That whole lumber room of ancient beauty has been subjected to a painful distillation under the pressure of years of boredom.

  "Can you understand," my father used to ask, "the despair of that condemned beauty, of its days and nights? Over and over again it had to rouse itself to fictitious auctions, stage successful sales and noisy, crowded exhibitions, become inflamed with wild gambling passions, await a slump, scatter riches, squander them like a maniac, only to realize on sobering up that all this was in vain, that it could not get anywhere beyond a self-centered perfection, that it could not relieve the pain of excess. No wonder that the impatience and helplessness of beauty had at last to find its reflection in our sky, that it therefore glows over our horizon, degenerates into atmospheric displays, into these enormous arrangements of fantastic clouds I call our second or spurious fall. That second fall of our province is nothing but a sick mirage projected through an expanse of radiation into our sky by the dying, shut-in beauty in our museums. Fall is a great touring show, poetically deceptive, an enormous purple-skinned onion disclosing ever new panoramas under each of its skins. No center can ever be reached. Behind each wing that is moved and stored away new and radiant scenes open up, true and alive for a moment, until you realize that they are made of cardboard. All perspectives are painted, all the panoramas made of board, and only the smell is authentic, the smell of wilting scenery, of theatrical dressing rooms, redolent of grease paint and scent. And at dusk there is disorder and chaos in the wings, a pileup of discarded costumes, among which you can wade endlessly as if through yellowed fallen leaves. There is great confusion: everybody is pulling at the curtain ropes, and the sky, a great autumnal sky, hangs in tatters and is filled with the screeching of pulleys. And there is an atomsphere of feverish haste, of belated carnival, a ballroom about to empty in the small hours, a panic of masked people who cannot find their real clothes.

  "Fall, the Alexandrian time of the year, collecting in its enormous library the sterile wisdom of three hundred and sixty-five days of the sun's race. Oh those elderly mornings, yellow like parchment, sweet with wisdom like late evenings! Those forenoons smiling slyly like wise palimpsests, the many-layered texts of yellowed books! Ah, days of fall, that old crafty librarian, groping his way up ladders in a faded dressing gown and trying spoonfuls of sweet preserves from all the centuries and cultures! Each landscape is for him like the opening chapter of an old novel. What fun he has letting loose the heroes of old stories under that misty, honey-colored sky into an opaque and sad, late sweetness of light! What new adventures will Don Quixote find at Soplicowo?* How will Robinson Crusoe fare upon his return to his native Drohobycz?"

  On close, immobile evenings, golden after fiery sunsets, my father read us extracts from his manuscript. The flow of ideas allowed him sometimes to forget about Adela's ominous presence.

  Then came the warm winds from Romania, establishing an enormous yellow monotomy, a feel of the south. The fall would not end. Like soap bubbles, days rose ever more beautiful and ethereal, and each of them seemed so perfect that every moment of its duration was like a miracle extended beyond measure and almost painful.

  In the stillness of those deep and beautiful days, the consistency of leaves changed imperceptibly, until one day all the trees stood in the straw fire of completely dematerialized leaves, in a light redness like a coating of colored confetti, magnificent peacocks and phoenixes; the slightest move or flutter would cause them to shed the splendor of their plumage—the light, molted, superfluous leafy feathers.

  *Name of the estate in Lithuania where the action of Pan Thdeusz by Adam Mickiewicz takes place.

  DEAD SEASON

  I

  AT FIVE O'CLOCK in the morning, an hour glaring with early sunshine, our house was already enveloped in an ardent but quiet brightness. At that solemn hour, unobserved by anyone—while the rooms in the semidarkness of drawn blinds were still filled with the harmonious breathing of sleeping people—its facade bathed in the sun, in the silence of the early haze, as if its surface were decorated by blissfully sleeping eyelids. Thus, in the stillness of these early hours, it absorbed the first fires of the morning with a sleepy face melting in brilliance, its features slightly twitching from intense dreams. The shadow of the acacia in front of the house slid in waves down the hot surface, trying in vain to penetrate into the depth of golden sleep. The linen blinds absorbed the morning heat, portion after portion, and sunbathed fainting in the glare.

  At that early hour, my father, unable to sleep any longer, went downstairs loaded with books and ledgers, in order to open the shop, which was on the street level of the building. For a moment he stood still in the gateway, sustaining with half-closed eyes the powerful onslaught of the sun. The sun-drenched wall of the house pulled him tenderly into its blissfully leveled, smooth surface. For a moment Father became flat, grown into the facade, and felt his outstretched hands, quivering and warm, merging into its golden stucco. (How many other fathers have grown forever into the facades of houses at five o'clock in the morning, while on the last step of the staircase? How many fathers have thus become the concierges of their own gateways, flatly sculpted into the embrasure with a hand on the door handle and a face dissolved into parallel and blissful furrows, over which the fingers of their sons would wander, later, reminiscing about their parent, now incorporated forever into the universal smile of the house front?) But soon he wrenched himself away, regained a third dimension, and, made human once more, freed the metal-framed door of the shop from its bolts, bars, and padlocks.

  While he was opening that heavy, ironclad door, the grumbling dusk took a step back from the entrance, moved a few inches deeper, changed position, and lay down again inside. The morning freshness, rising like smoke from the cool tiles of the pavement, stood shyly on the threshold in a tiny, trembling stream of air. Inside the shop the darkness of many preceding days and nights lurked in the unopened bales of cloth, arranged itself in layers, then spent itself at the very heart of the shop—in the storeroom—where it dissolved, undifferentiated and self-saturated, into a dully looming archmatter of cloth.

  My father walked along that high wall of cheviots and cords, passing his hand caressingly along the upright bales. Under his touch the rows of blind torsos ever ready to fall over or break order, calmed down and entrenched themselves in their cloth hierarchy and precedence.

  For my father our shop was the place of eternal anguish and torment. This creature of his hands had for some time, in the years of its growth, been pushing against him ever more violently from day to day, and it had finally outgrown him. The shop became for him a task beyond his strength, at once immense and sublime. The immensity of its claims frightened him. Even his life could not satisfy their awful extent. He looked with despair at the frivolity of his shop assistants, their silly, carefree optimism, their jokes and thoughtless manipulations, occurring at the margins, as it were, of that great business enterprise. With bitter irony he watched that gallery of faces undisturbed by any worry, those foreheads innocent of any idea; he looked into the depths of those trusting eyes never troubled by even the slightest shadow of doubt. For all her loyalty and devotion, how could my mother help him? The realization of matters of a higher order was outside the scope of her simple and uncomplicated mind. She was not created for heroic tasks. For he did notice that behind his back she occasionally exchanged quick and understanding looks with the shop assistants, glad of any moment without supervision, when she could take part in their fatuous clowning.

  My father separated himself more and more from that world of lightheartedness and escaped into the hard discipline of total dedication. Horrified by the laxity spreading everywhere, he shut himself off in the lonely service of his high ideal. His hand never strayed from the reins, he never allowed himself a relaxation of rules or the comfort of facile solutions.

  That was good enough for Balanda & Co. and these other dilettanti of the trade, who knew not the hunger for perfection nor the asceticism of high pr
iesthood. My father suffered when he saw the downfall of the retail textile trade. Who of the present generation of textile merchants remembered the good traditions of their ancient art? Which of them knew, for instance, that pieces of cloth, laid in a stack on display shelves in accordance with the principles of textile art, could emit under the touch of a finger running downward, a sound like a descending scale? Which among his contemporaries was conversant with the finer points of style in the exchange of notes, memos, and letters? How many still remembered the charm of merchant diplomacy, the diplomacy of the good old school, the exciting stages of negotiation: beginning with irreconcilable stiffness and intransigent reserve at the visit of the representative of a foreign firm, through gradual thaw under the influence of the indefatigable persuasions and blandishments of that envoy, until the invitation to a working supper with wine—served at the desk, on top of papers, in an exalted mood, with some pinching of Adela's bottom while she served the meal, amid peppery jokes and a free flow of talk, as behooves gentlemen who know what is expected in the circumstances—was crowned with a mutually profitable business deal?

  In the quietness of the morning hours, while the heat was slowly rising, my father expected to find a happy and inspired phrase that would give the required weight to his letter to Messrs. Christian Seipel & Sons, Spinners and Mechanical Weavers. It was to be a cutting riposte to the unfounded demands of these gentlemen, the reply ad rem, concise at the decisive point, so that the letter could rise to a strong and witty final plea to produce the desired shock effect and could then be rounded off with one energetic, elegant, and final irrevocable sentence. He could almost feel the form of that phrase that had been eluding him for many days, he could almost touch it with his fingertips, but he could not lay his hands on it. He waited for a flash of carefree humor to take by storm the obstacle that stubbornly barred his way. He reached for yet another clean sheet of paper, in order to give fresh impetus to the conquest of the obstacle that had been defying all his efforts.

  Meanwhile the shop became gradually peopled with his assistants. They entered flushed from the early morning heat and avoided Father's desk, at which they cast frightened and guilt-ridden looks.

  Exhausted after the night and conscious of it, they felt the weight of his silent disapproval, which nothing they did could dispel. Nothing could placate the master, brooding over his worries; no show of eagerness could pacify him as he sat lurking like a scorpion behind his desk, his glasses flashing ominously as he foraged like a mouse among his papers. His excitement increased, his latent temper intensified in step with the heat. The square patch of sunlight on the floor glared. Shiny, metallic flies flashed like lightning in the entrance to the shop, settling for a moment on the sides of the door, glass bubbles blown from the hot pipe of the sun, from the glassworks of that radiant day: they sat with wings outspread, full of flight and swiftness, then changed places in furious zigzags. Through the bright quadrilateral of the doorway one could see the lime trees of the city park fainting in the sunlight, the distant bell tower of the church outlined clearly in the translucent and shimmering air, as if in the lenses of binoculars. The tinplated roofs were burning; the enormous, golden globe of heat was swelling all over the world.

  Father's irritation grew. He looked round helplessly, doubled up with pain, exhausted by diarrhea. He felt in his mouth, a taste more bitter than wormwood.

  The heat intensified, sharpening the fury of the flies, making the metal on their abdomens shine. The quadrilateral of light now reached Father's desk, and the papers burned like the Apocalypse. Father's eyes, blinded by the sunlight, could not stand their white uniformity. Through his thick glasses he saw everything he looked at in crimson, greenish, or purple frames and was filled with despair at this explosion of color, the anarchy raging over the world in an orgy of brightness. His hands shook. His palate was bitter and dry, heralding an attack of sickness. His eyes, embedded in the furrows of wrinkles, watched with attention the development of events in the depth of the shop.

  II

  When, at noon, my father, exhausted by the heat, trembling with futile excitement and almost on the verge of madness, retreated upstairs and the ceilings of the floor above cracked here and there under his skulking step, the shop experienced a momentary pause and relaxation: the hour of the afternoon siesta.

  The shop assistants turned somersaults on the bales of cloth, pitched tents of fabric on the shelves, made swings from draperies. They unwound the cloth, set free the smooth, tightly rolled ancient darkness. The shopworn, felted dusk, now liberated, filled the spaces under the ceiling with the smell of another time, with the odor of past days patiently arranged in innumerable layers during the cool falls of long ago. Blind moths scattered in the darkened air, fluffs of feathers and wool circled with them all over the shop, and the smell of finishing, deep and autumnal, filled this dark encampment of cloth and velvet. Picnicking in that camp the shop assistants devised practical jokes. They let their colleagues wrap them tightly up to their ears in dark, cool cloth and lay in a row blissfully immobile under the stack of bales—living bolts of cloth like mummies, rolling their eyes with an assumed fear at their own immobility. Or else they let themselves be swung up to the ceiling on enormous, outspread blankets of cloth. The dull thudding of these blankets and the current of air that arose made them mad with joy. It seemed as if the whole shop was taking off in flight, the fabrics rising in inspiration, the shop assistants, with their coattails flowing, swinging upward like prophets on short ascensions. My mother looked indulgently at these games, the relaxation due in the hours of siesta justified in her eyes even the worst transgressions.

  In the summer the back of the shop was dark because of the weeds growing in the courtyard. The storeroom window overlooking it became all green and iridescent like submarine depths from the movement of leaves and their undulating reflections. Flies buzzed there monotonously in their semiobscurity of long afternoons; they were monstrous specimens bred on Father's sweet wine, hairy hermits lamenting their accursed fate day in, day out in long, monotonous sagas. These flies, inclined to wild and unexpected mutations, abounded in unnatural specimens, bred from incestuous unions, degenerated into a super-race of top heavy giants, of veterans emitting a deep melancholy buzz. Toward the end of the summer some specimens were posthumously hatched out with wasted wings—mute and voiceless, the last of their race, resembling large, bluish beetles—and ended their sad lives running up and down the green windowpanes on busy, futile errands.

  The rarely opened door became covered with cobwebs. My mother slept behind the desk, in a cloth hammock swinging between the shelves. The shop assistants, bothered by flies, winced and grimaced, stirring in an uneasy sleep. Meanwhile, the weeds took over the courtyard. Under the ruthless heat of the sun, the rubbish heap sprouted enormous nettles and mallows.

  The heat of the sun falling on the subterranean water on this plot of soil produced a fermentation of venomous substances, some poisonous derivatives of chlorophyll. This morbid process brought forth malformed wrinkled leaves of astonishing lightness that spread until the space under the window was filled with a tissue-thin tangle of green pleonasms, of weedy rubbish degenerating into a papery, tawdry patchwork clinging to the walls of the storeroom. The shop assistants woke with flushed faces from a quick nap. Strangely excited, they got up with feverish energy, ready for even more heroic buffooneries; corroded by boredom, they climbed on tall shelves and drummed with their feet, looking fixedly at the empty expanse of the market square, longing for any kind of diversion.

  Once a peasant from the country, barefoot and smock-clad, stopped in the doorway of the shop and looked in shyly. For the bored shop assistants this was a heaven-sent opportunity. They quickly swept down the ladders, like spiders at the sight of a fly; the peasant, surrounded, pulled, and pushed, was asked a hundred questions, which he tried to parry with a bashful smile. He scratched his head, smiled, and looked with suspicion at the assiduous young men. So he wanted tobacco? B
ut what kind? The best Macedonian, golden as amber? Not that kind? Would ordinary pipe tobacco do? Shag perhaps? Would he care to step in? To come inside? There was nothing to fear. The shop assistants prodded him gently deeper into the shop, toward a side counter. Leon went behind the counter and pretended to pull out a nonexistent drawer. Oh, how he worked at it, how he bit his lip with effort! It was stuck and would not move. One had to thump the top of the counter with one's fists, with all one's might. The peasant, encouraged by the young men, did it with concentration, with proper attention. At last, when there was no result, he climbed, hunched and gray-haired, on top of the counter and stamped it with his bare feet. He had us all in fits of laughter.

  It was then that the regrettable incident occurred that filled us all with sadness and shame. Although we did not act in bad faith, we were all equally to blame. It was all due to our frivolity, our lack of seriousness and understanding for Father's worries. Given the unpredictable, insecure, and volatile nature of my father, our thoughtlessness produced consequences that were truly fatal.