Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

by Bruno Schulz

  Then Dodo would cast an angry and indignant look at his frightened father and mumble to himself with great displeasure: "He's off his head."

  Before Uncle Jerome accepted absolution from the complex and difficult affairs of life and got permission to retreat into his refuge in the alcove, he was a man of quite a different stamp. Those who knew him in his youth said that his reckless temperament knew no restraints, considerations, or scruples. With great satisfaction he spoke to mortally sick people about the death that awaited them. Visits of condolence provided him with an opportunity for sharply criticizing the life of the deceased, still being mourned by his family. About the unpleasant or intimate incidents in people's private lives that they wanted to conceal, he spoke to them loudly and with sarcasm. Then one night he returned from a business trip completely transformed and, shaking with fear, tried to hide under his bed. A few days later news was spread in the family that Uncle Jerome had given up all the complicated, dubious, and risky business affairs that had threatened to submerge him, had abdicated, and had begun a new life, regulated by strict, although to us somewhat obscure, principles.

  On Sunday afternoons when we were usually invited by Aunt Retitia to a small family tea party, Uncle Jerome did not recognize us. Sitting in the alcove, he looked through the glass door at the company with wild and frightened eyes. Sometimes, however, he unexpectedly left his hermitage, still in his long housecoat, his beard waving round his face, and, spreading his hands as if he wanted to separate us, he would say:

  "And now, I beg you, all you that are here, disperse, run along, but quietly, stealthily, on tiptoe . . ."

  Then, waving his finger mysteriously at us, he would add in a low voice:

  "Everybody is talking about it: Dee-da ..."

  My aunt would push him gently back to the alcove, but he would turn at the door and grimly, with raised finger, repeat: "Dee-da. "

  Dodo's understanding was a little slow, and he needed a few moments of silence and concentration before a situation became clear to him. When it did, his eyes wandered from one person to another, as if to make sure that something very funny had really happened. He then burst into noisy laughter, and, with great satisfaction, shaking his head in derision, he repeated amid the bursts of laughter: "He's off his head!"

  Night fell on Aunt Retitia's house. The servant girl went to bed in the kitchen; bubbles of night air floated from the garden and burst against the window. Aunt Retitia slept in the depths of her large bed; on the other, Uncle Jerome sat upright among the bedclothes, like a tawny owl, his eyes shining in the darkness, his beard flowing over his knees, which were drawn up to his chin.

  He slowly climbed down from his bed and walked on tiptoe to my aunt's bed. He stood over the sleeping woman, like a cat ready to leap, eyebrows and beard abristle. The lion on the wall tapestry gave a short yawn and turned his head away. My aunt, awakened, was alarmed by that head with its shining eyes and spitting mouth.

  "Go back to bed at once," she said, shooing him away as one would shoo a hen.

  Jerome retreated spitting and looking back with nervous movements of his head.

  In the next room Dodo lay on his bed. Dodo never slept. The center of sleep in his diseased brain did not function correctly, so he wriggled and tossed and turned from side to side all night long.

  The mattress groaned. Dodo sighed heavily, wheezed, sat up, lay down again.

  His unlived life worried him, tortured him, turning round and round inside him like an animal in a cage. In Dodo's body, the body of a half-wit, somebody was growing old, although he had not lived; somebody was maturing to a death that had no meaning at all.

  Then suddenly, he sobbed loudly in the darkness. Aunt Retitia leapt from her bed. "What is it, Dodo, are you in pain?" Dodo turned to her amazed. "Who?" he asked.

  "Why are you sobbing?" asked my aunt. "It is not I, it's he . . ." "Which he?" "The one inside ..." "Who is he?"

  Dodo waved his hand resignedly. "Eh . . ."he said and turned on his other side. Aunt Retitia returned to bed on tiptoe. As she passed Uncle Jerome's bed, he waved a threatening finger at her. "Everybody is talking about it: Dee-da ..."

  EDDIE

  I

  ON THE SAME FLOOR as our family, in a long and narrow wing of the house overlooking the courtyard, Eddie lives with his. Eddie has long ago stopped being a small boy. Eddie is a grown-up man with a full, manly voice who sometimes sings arias from operas.

  Eddie is inclined to obesity, not to its spongelike and flabby form, but rather to the athletic and muscular variety. His shoulders are strong and powerful like a bear's, but what of it? He has no use of his legs, which are completely degenerate and shapeless. Looking at his legs, it is difficult to determine the reason for his strange infirmity. It looks as if his legs had too many joints between the knee and the ankle; at least two more joints than normal legs. No wonder that they bend pitifully at those supernumerary joints, not only to the side but also forward and indeed in all possible directions.

  Thus, Eddie can move only with the help of two crutches, which are remarkably well made and polished to resemble mahogany. On these he walks downstairs every day to buy a newspaper: this is his only walk and his only diversion. It is painful to look at his progress down the stairs. His legs sway irregularly to one side, then back, bending in unexpected places; and his feet, like horses' hooves, small but thick, knock like sticks on the wooden planks. But having reached street level, Eddie unexpectedly changes. He straightens himself up, pushes out his chest grandly, and makes his body swing. Taking his weight on his crutches as if on parallel bars, he throws his legs far to the front. When they hit the ground with an uneven thud, Eddie moves the crutches forward and with a new impetus swings his body again. With these forward swings, he conquers space. Often, maneuvering his crutches in the courtyard, he can, with the excess of strength gathered during long hours of rest, demonstrate with truly magnificent gusto this heroic method of locomotion, to the amazement of servant girls from the first and the second floors. The back of his neck swells, two folds of flesh form under his chin, and on his face held aslant appears a grimace of pain when he clenches his teeth in effort. Eddie does no work, as if fate, having saddled him with the burden of infirmity, had in exchange freed him from that curse of Adam's breed. In the shadow of his disability Eddie exploits to the full his exceptional right to idleness and deep at heart is not displeased at that private transaction, individually negotiated with fate.

  Nonetheless, we have often wondered how such a young man in his twenties can fill his time. The reading of the newspaper provides a lot of work, for Eddie is a careful reader. No advertisement or announcement in small print escapes his notice. And when he finally gets to the last page of the journal, he is not condemned to boredom for the rest of the day—not at all. Only then does Eddie get down to the hobby to which he looks forward with pleasure. In the afternoon, when other people take a short siesta, Eddie gets out his large, fat scrapbooks, spreads them on the table under the window, prepares glue, sets out a brush and a pair of scissors, and begins the pleasant and rewarding job of cutting out the most interesting articles and pasting them in, according to a certain rigid system. The crutches are at his side, prepared for any eventuality, standing propped against the windowsill, but Eddie does not need them, for everything is within his reach. Thus busily occupied, he fills the few hours until teatime.

  Every third day Eddie shaves himself. He likes this activity and all the paraphernalia associated with it: hot water, shaving soap, and the smooth, gentle cutthroat razor. While mixing up soap with water and stropping the razor on a leather strap, Eddie sings. His voice is not trained, nor is it very tuneful, so he sings loudly without any pretensions, and Adela maintains that his voice is pleasant.

  However, Eddie's home life is not entirely harmonious. Unfortunately there seems to be a very serious conflict between him and his parents, the reason and background to which we do not know. We shan't repeat the gossip or hearsay; we shall limit o
urselves to facts empirically confirmed.

  It is usually toward the evening during the warm season, when Eddie's window is open, that we hear the echoes of these altercations. We hear, to be precise, only one half of the dialogue, Eddie's part, because the replies of his antagonists, hidden in the farther parts of the flat, cannot reach our ears.

  It is difficult, therefore, to guess what Eddie is accused of, but from the tone of his retorts one can only deduce that he is cut to the quick, almost at his wit's ends. His words are violent and injudicious, obviously dictated by great agitation, but his tone, although indignant, is rather whining and miserable.

  "Yes, indeed," he calls in a plaintive voice, "and so what? . . . What time yesterday? ... It is not true! . . . And what if it were? . . . Then Dad is lying!"

  And so it continues for whole stretches of time, diversified only by outbursts of Eddie's anger and by his attempts to tear out his reddish hair in helpless fury.

  But sometimes—and this is the climax of these scenes that gives them a specific appeal—there follows what we have been waiting for with bated breath. In the depth of the flat there is a loud crash, a door is opened with a bang, pieces of furniture are thrown to the floor, and lastly Eddie emits a heartrending scream.

  We listen to it shaken and embarrassed, but also morbidly excited at the thought of the savage and fantastic violence being wrought on an athletic full-blooded youth, however crippled in his legs.

  II

  At dusk, when the washing up after an early supper is finished, Adela usually sits on one of the balconies overlooking the courtyard, not far from Eddie's window. Two long balconies in the form of a squared horseshoe overlook the courtyard, one on the first floor and one on the second floor. In the cracks of their wooden planks bits of grass are growing, and from one crack even a small acacia tree waves high above the courtyard.

  Apart from Adela, one or two neighbors sit on these balconies in front of their doors sprawled on chairs or squatting on stools, wilting faintly in the dusk; they re6t after the toil of their day, mute as tied-up sacks, waiting for the night to untie them gently.

  Down below, the courtyard quickly fills with darkness, but the air above it does not yet relinquish its light and seems to become steadily lighter as everything below gradually turns pitch dark: it shimmers and trembles from the sudden, furtive flights of bats.

  Down below, the quick and silent work of night now begins in earnest. Greedy ants swarm everywhere, decomposing into atoms the substance of things, eating them down to their white bones, to their ribs and skeletons, which phosphoresce in the nightmare of this sad battlefield. White papers, in tatters on the rubbish heap, survive longest, like undigested rays of brightness in the worm-ridden darkness, and cannot completely dissolve. At times they seem engulfed by darkness, then they emerge again, but in the end it is impossible to say whether one sees anything or whether these are illusions that begin their nightly ravings; in the end people sit in their own aura under stars projected by their own pulsating brains, by the phantoms of hallucinations.

  And then thin veins of breezes rise from the bottom of the courtyard, hesitant and uncertain, streaks of freshness, which line like silk the folds of summer nights. And while the first shimmering stars appear in the sky, the summer night emerges with a sigh—deep, full of starry dust and the distant croaking of frogs.

  Without putting on the light, Adela goes to bed and sinks into the tired bedding of the previous night; hardly has she closed her eyes when the race on all floors and in all apartments of the house begins.

  Only for the uninitiated is the summer night a time of rest and forgetfulness. Once the activities of the day have finished and the tired brains long for sleep, the confused to-ing and fro-ing, the enormous tangled hubbub of a July night begins. All the apartments of the house, all rooms and alcoves, are full of noise, of wanderings, enterings and leavings. In all windows lamps with milky shades can be seen, even passages are brightly lighted and doors never stop being opened and shut. A great, disorderly, half-ironical conversation is conducted with constant misunderstandings in all the chambers of the human hive. On the second floor people misunderstand what those from the first floor have said and send emissaries with urgent instructions. Couriers run through all the apartments, upstairs and downstairs, forget their instructions on their way and are repeatedly called back. And there is always something to add, nothing is ever fully explained, and all that bustle among the laughter and the jokes leads to nothing.

  The back rooms, which do not participate in this great muddle of the night, have their separate time, measured by the ticking of clocks, by monologues of silence, by the deep breathing of the sleepers. Enormous wet-nurses swollen with milk sleep there, clinging greedily to the lap of night, their cheeks burning in ecstasy. Small babies wander with closed eyelids on the surface of their nurses' sleep, crawl delicately like ferreting animals over the blue map of veins on the white plains of their breasts, searching with blind faces the warm opening, the entry into the depths of sleep, and find at last with their tender lips the source of sleep: the trusted nipple filled with sweet forgetfulness.

  And those in their beds who have already caught sleep will not let go of it; they fight with it as with an angel that is trying to escape until they conquer it and press it to the pillow. Then they snore intermittently as if quarreling and reminding themselves of the angry history of their hatreds. And when the grumbles and recriminations have ceased and the struggle with sleep is over and every room in turn has sunk into stillness and nonexistence, Leon the shop assistant climbs blindly and slowly up the stairs, his boots in his hand, and in darkness tries to find the keyhole of the door. He returns thus nightly from the brothel, with bloodshot eyes, shaken by hiccups and with a thread of saliva trailing down his half-opened lips.

  In Mr. Jacob's room a lamp is alight on the table, over which he sits hunched, writing a long letter to Christian Seipel & Sons, Spinners and Mechanical Weavers. On the floor lies a whole stack of papers covered with his writing, but the end of the letter is not yet in sight. Every now and then he rises from the table and runs round the room, his hands in his windswept hair, and as he circles thus, he occasionally climbs a wall, flies along the wallpaper like a large gnat blindly hitting the arabesques of design, and descends again to the floor to continue his inspired circling.

  Adela is fast asleep, her mouth half open, her face relaxed and absent; but her closed lids are transparent, and on their thin parchment the night is writing its pact with the devil, half text, half picture, full of erasures, corrections, and scribbles.

  Eddie stands undressed in his room and exercises with dumbbells. He needs a lot of strength in his shoulders, twice as much as a normal man, for shoulders replace his useless legs, and, therefore, he exercises every night, zealously and in secret.

  Adela is flowing backward into oblivion and cannot shout or call, nor can she stop Eddie from trying to climb out of his window.

  Eddie crawls out onto the balcony without his crutches, and one wonders if his stumps would carry him. But Eddie is not attempting to walk. Like a large white dog, he approaches in four-legged squat jumps, in great shuffling leaps on the resounding planks of the balcony, until he has reached Adela's window. Every night, grimacing with pain, he presses his white, fat face to the windowpane shining in the moonlight, and plaintively and eagerly he tells her, crying, that his crutches have been locked in a cupboard for the night and that now he must run about like a dog, on all fours.

  But Adela is completely limp, completely surrendered to the deep rhythm of sleep. She has no strength even to pull up the blanket over her bare thighs and cannot prevent the columns of bedbugs from wandering over her body. These light and thin, leaflike insects run over her so delicately that she does not feel their touch. They are flat receptacles for blood, reddish blood bags without eyes or faces, now on the march in whole clans on a migration of the species subdivided into generations and tribes. They run up from her feet in scores, a ne
ver-ending procession; they are larger now, as large as moths, flat red vampires without heads, lightweight as if cut out of paper, on legs more delicate than the web of spiders.

  And when the last laggard bedbugs have come and gone, with an enormous one bringing up the rear, complete silence comes at last. Deep sleep fills the empty passages and apartments, while the rooms slowly begin to absorb the grayness of the hours before dawn.

  In all the beds people lie with their knees drawn up, with faces violently thrown to one side, in deep concentration, immersed in sleep and given to it wholly.

  And the process of sleeping is, in fact, one great story, divided into chapters and sections, into parts distributed among sleepers. When one of them stops and grows silent, another takes up his cue so that the story can proceed in broad, epic zigzags while they all lie in the separate rooms of that house, motionless and inert like poppy seed within the partitions of a large, dried-up poppy.

  THE OLD AGE PENSIONER

  I AM AN OLD-AGE PENSIONER in the true and full meaning of the word, very far advanced in that estate, an old pensioner of high proof.

  It may be that I have even exceeded the definite and allotted limits of my new status. I don't wish to hide it. There is nothing extraordinary about it. Why cast wondering looks and stare at me with hypocritical respect and solemn seriousness that conceal a lot of secret pleasure at one's neighbor's misfortune? How little elementary tact most people have! Facts of this kind should be accepted with a certain nonchalance. One must take these things as they come, just as I have accepted them lightly and without care. Perhaps this is why I am a little shaky on my feet and must put one before the other slowly and cautiously and watch where I go. It is so easy to stray under such circumstances. The reader will understand that I cannot be too explicit. My form of existence depends to a large degree on conjecture and requires a fair amount of goodwill. I will now have to appeal to this goodwill frequently by discreet winks, which don't come easily to me because of the stiffening of my facial muscles unused to mimic expressions. On the whole I don't force myself on anyone. I don't want to dissolve in gratitude for the sanctuary kindly provided for me by anyone's quick understanding. I acknowledge kindness without emotion, coolly and with complete indifference. I don't like to receive, along with the bonus of understanding, a heavy account for gratitude. The best thing is to treat me offhandedly, with a dose of healthy ruthlessness, with camaraderie and a sense of humor. In this respect, my good simpleminded colleagues from the office, all younger than myself, have found the proper tone.