Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

by Bruno Schulz

  I sometimes call at the office by force of habit, around the first of each month, and stand quietly at the counter waiting to be noticed. The following scene then takes place: At a given time, the head of the office, Mr. Filer, puts away his pen, winks at his subordinates, and says suddenly, looking past me into space, his hand cupping his ear:

  "If my hearing doesn't deceive me, it must be you, Councilor, somewhere among us!"

  His eyes, looking over my head into emptiness, begin to squint as he says this, and a humorous smile lights his face.

  "I heard a voice somewhere and I at once thought it must be you, dear Councilor!" he exclaims loudly, articulating distinctly as if he were speaking to a deaf person. "Please do make a sign, disturb the air at least in the place where you are floating!"

  "Don't pull my leg, Mr. Filer," I say softly, "I have come to collect my pension."

  "Your pension?" Mr. Filer exclaims, again squinting into the air, "Did you say your pension? You can't be serious, dear Councilor. Your name has been removed from the list of pensioners. Do you still expect to receive a pension, dear Councilor?"

  Thus they joke with me, in a warm, sympathetic, and humane way. That roughness, that direct jocularity, gives me a certain comfort. I leave the place more cheerful and hurry home quickly, in order to take with me indoors some of the pleasant warmth before it all evaporates.

  But as to other people ... An insistent questioning, never voiced aloud, which I can read in their eyes. It is difficult to avoid it. Supposing things are as they suspect—why immediately make these long faces, put on these solemn expressions, fall into uninvited silences, be both embarrassed and overcautious? Anything in order not to mention my condition . . . How well can I see through that game! It is no more than a kind of sybaritic self-indulgence and delight at their being different, a complete detachment from my condition, masked with hypocrisy. They exchange telltale looks but don't speak, and allow the thing to grow bigger in silence. Perhaps my condition is not quite as it should be. Perhaps it is even due to a small basic disability?

  Goodness gracious, so what? Is this a reason for that quick and frightened eagerness to please? Sometimes I want to burst out laughing when I see the recognition they show me, a kind of deference. Why do they insist so, why stress it, and why does doing it give them the profound satisfaction, which they try to conceal behind a mask of scared devotion?

  Let's assume that I am a passenger of light weight, even of excessively light weight; let's assume that I am embarrassed by certain questions such as how old I am, when is my birthday, and so on—is that a reason for incessantly touching upon these subjects as if they were very relevant? Not that I am in the least ashamed of my condition. Not at all. But I cannot bear the exaggeration with which they magnify the importance of a certain fact, a certain difference, no bigger really than a hair's breadth. I am amused by the false theatricality and the solemn pathos that surrounds this matter, by the tragic costumes and gloomy pomp that drape this fact. While in reality? . . . Nothing pathetic at all, nothing more natural and commonplace. Lightness, independence, irresponsibility . . . And an increased ear for music, a most extraordinary musicality of one's limbs, as it were. It is impossible to pass by a barrel organ and not dance to it. Not because you feel happy, but because you don't care, and the tune has its own will, its own stubborn rhythm. So you give in. "Maggie, Maggie, treasure of my soul ..." You are too light, too agile to protest; and besides, why protest against such an unpretentious and enticing proposal? Therefore I dance, or rather trot, in time with the tune, with the tiny steps of an old-age pensioner, and from time to time I give a little skip. Few people notice it, they are too busy rushing about their daily affairs.

  I am anxious to avoid one thing: that the reader should have exaggerated ideas about my situation. I must warn him against it both in the positive and negative sense. No sentimentality please. It is a condition like any other, and therefore capable of being understood and treated naturally. Any strangeness disappears once you have crossed to the other side. You sober up—this is what is characteristic of my situation: you are unburdened, feel light, empty, irresponsible, without respect for class, for personal ties, for conventions. Nothing holds me and nothing fetters me. I am boundlessly free. The strange indifference with which I move lightly through all the dimensions of being should be pleasurable in itself. But . . . that lack of anchorage, the would-be careless animation and lightheartedness—but I must not complain. . . . There is a saying: gather no moss. That is exactly it: I stopped gathering moss a long time ago.

  From the window of my room, which is high up, I have a bird's-eye view of the city, its walls, its roofs and chimneys in the gray light of a fall dawn—the whole, densely built-up panorama just unwrapped from the night, palely lighted at the yellow horizon, cut into light strips by the black scissors of cawing crows. I feel: this is life. Everyone is stuck within himself, within the day to which he wakes up, the hour which belongs to him, or the moment. Somewhere in the semidarkness of a kitchen coffee is brewing, the cook is not there, the dirty glare of a flame dances on the floor. Time deceived by silence flows backward for a while, retreats, and in these uncounted moments night returns and swells the undulating fur of a cat. Kathy from the first floor yawns and stretches languorously for long minutes before she opens the windows and starts sweeping and dusting. The night air, saturated with sleep and snoring, lazily wafts toward the window, gets out, and slowly enters the dun and smoky grayness of the day. Kathy dips her hands reluctantly into the dough of bedding, warm and sour from sleep. At last, with a shiver, with eyes full of night, she shakes from the window a large, heavy feather bed, and scatters over the city particles of feathers, stars of down, the lazy seed of night dreams.

  At such a time I would dream of being a baker who delivers bread, a fitter from the electric company, or an insurance man collecting the weekly installments. Or at least a chimney sweep. In the morning, at dawn, I would enter some half-opened gateway, still lighted by the watchman's lantern. I would put two fingers to my hat, crack a joke, and enter the labyrinth to leave late in the evening, at the other end of the city. I would spend all day going from apartment to apartment, conducting one never-ending conversation from one end of the city to the other, divided into parts among the householders; I would ask something in one apartment and receive a reply in another, make a joke in one place and collect the fruits of laughter in the third or fourth. Among the banging of doors I would squeeze through narrow passages, through bedrooms full of furniture, I would upset chamberpots, walk into squeaking perambulators in which babies cry, pick up rattles dropped by infants. I would stop for longer than necessary in kitchens and hallways, where servant girls were tidying up. The girls, busy, would stretch their young legs, tauten their high insteps, play with their cheap shining shoes, or clack around in loose slippers.

  Such are my dreams during the irresponsible, extramarginal hours. I don't deny them, although I see their lack of sense. Everybody should be aware of his condition and know how to accept it.

  For us, old-age pensioners, fall is on the whole a dangerous season.

  He who knows how difficult it is for us to achieve any stability at all, how difficult it is to avoid distraction or destruction by one's own hand, will understand that fall, its winds, disturbances, and atmospheric confusions do not favor our existence, which is precarious anyway.

  There are, however, some days during fall that are calm, contemplative, and kind to us. Days sometimes occur without sun, but warm, misty, and amber-colored on their edges. In the gap between the houses, a view suddenly opens on a stretch of sky moving low, ever lower, toward the last windswept yellowness of the distant horizon. The perspectives opening into the depth of day seem like the archives of the calendar, the cross-section of days, the endless files of time, floating in tiers into a bright eternity. The tiers order themselves in the fawn sky, while the present moment remains in the foreground and only a few people ever lift their eyes to the distant sh
elves of this illusory calendar. Eyes on the ground, everybody rushes somewhere, impatiently avoiding others; the street is cut by the invisible paths of these comings and goings, meetings and avoidings. But in the gap between the houses, where one can see the lower part of the city and its whole architectural panorama, lighted from the back by a streak of sun, there is a gap in the hubbub. On a small square, wood is being cut for the city school. Cords of healthy, crisp timber are piled high and melt slowly, one log after another, under the saws and axes of workmen. Ah, timber, trustworthy, honest, true matter of reality, bright and completely decent, the embodiment of the decency and prose of life! However deep you look into its core, you cannot find anything that is not apparent on its evenly smiling surface, shining with that warm, assured glow of its fibrous pulp woven in a likeness of the human body. In each fresh section of a cut log a new face appears, always smiling and golden. Oh the strange complexion of timber, warm without exaltation, completely sound, fragrant, and pleasant!

  The sawing of wood is a truly sacramental function, symbolic and dignified. I could stand for hours on a late afternoon watching the melodious play of saws, the rhythmical work of axes. Here is a tradition as old as the human race. In that bright gap of the day, in that hiatus of time opened onto a yellow and wilting eternity, beech logs have been sawed since Noah's day, with the same patriarchal and eternal movements, the same strokes and the same bent backs. The workmen stand up to their armpits in the golden shavings and slowly cut into the logs and cords of wood; covered with sawdust, with a tiny spark of light in their eyes, they cut ever deeper into the warm healthy pulp, into the solid mass; with each stroke a reflection sparks in their eyes, as if they were looking for something in the core of the timber: a golden salamander, a screaming fiery creature, that burrows deeper and deeper under their cutting. Perhaps they are simply dividing time into small splinters of wood. They husband time, they fill the cellars with an evenly sawed future for the winter months.

  Oh, to endure that critical period, those few weeks, until the morning frosts begin and winter starts in earnest. How I like the prelude to winter, still without snow but with the smell of frost and smoke in the air. I remember Sunday afternoons in the late fall. Let us assume that it has been raining for a whole week, that a long downpour has saturated the earth with water, and that now the surface begins to dry out, exuding a hearty, healthy cold. The week-old sky with a cover of tattered clouds has been raked up, like mud, to one side of the firmament, where it looms dark in a folded compressed heap, while from the west the hale, healthy colors of a fall evening begin to spread and slowly fill the cloudy landscape. And while the sky clears gradually from the west and becomes translucent, servant girls walk out in their Sunday best, in threes, in fours, holding hands. They walk in the empty, Sunday-clean and drying street between the suburban houses bright in the tartness of the air which now turns crimson before dusk; rosy and round-faced from the cold, they walk with elastic steps in their new, too tight shoes. A pleasant, touching memory, brought up from a dark corner of the mind!

  Recently, I have been calling almost daily at the office. It sometimes happens that someone is sick and they allow me to work in his place.

  Or somebody has something urgent to do in town and lets me deputize for him. Unfortunately, this is not regular work. It is pleasant to have, even for a few hours, a chair of one's own with a leather cushion, one's own rulers, pencils, and pens. It is pleasant to run into or even be rebuked by one's fellow workers. Someone addresses you, makes a joke, pulls your leg, and you blossom forth for a moment. You rub against somebody, attach your homelessness and nothingness to something alive and warm. The other person walks away and does not feel your burden, does not notice that he is carrying you on his shoulders, that like a parasite you cling momentarily to his life. . . .

  But since the appointment of a new head of department, even this has come to an end.

  Quite often now, if the weather is good, I sit out on a bench in a small square that faces the city school. From the street nearby comes the sound of wood being cut. Girls and young women return from the market. Some have serious and regular eyebrows and walk looking sternly from under them, slim and glum—angels with basketfuls of vegetables and meat. Sometimes they stop in front of shops and look at their reflections in the shop window. Then they walk away turning their heads, casting a proud and mustering eye on the backs of their shoes. At ten o'clock the beadle appears at the school gate and fills the street with the shrill ringing of his bell. Then the inside of the school seems to swell with a violent tumult that almost wrecks the building. Fugitives from the general commotion, small ragamuffins appear in the gateway, rush screaming down the stone steps and, finding themselves free, undertake some crazy leaps, and, between two mad looks of their rolling eyes, they throw themselves blindly into improvised games. Sometimes they venture up to my bench in their lunatic chases, throwing over their shoulders some obscure abuse at me. Their faces seem to come off their hinges in the violent grimaces that they make at me. Like a pack of busy monkeys, in a self-parody of clowning, this bunch of children run past me, gesticulating with a hellish noise. I can see their upturned, unformed, running noses, their mouths torn by shouting, their cheeks covered with spots, their small tight fists. Sometimes they stop near me. Strange to say, they treat me as if I were their age. True, I have been growing smaller for a long time. My face, wilted and flabby, has assumed the appearance of a child's face. I am slightly embarrassed when they address me as "thou." When one day one of them suddenly struck me across my chest, I rolled under the bench. I was not offended. They pulled me out, enchanted by this rather unexpected but refreshing behavior. The fact that I take no offense however violent and impetuous their conduct has gradually won me a measure of popularity. From then on, I have carried a supply of stones, buttons, empty cotton reels, and pieces of rubber in my pockets. This has enormously facilitated exchanges of ideas and made a natural bridge for starting friendships. Moreover, engrossed in factual interests, they pay less attention to me as a person. Under the cover of the arsenal produced from my pockets, I need not fear any more that their curiosity and inquisitiveness will be directed at me.

  One day I decided to translate into action a certain idea that had been worrying me more and more insistently.

  The day was mild, dreamy, and calm—one of those late fall days when the year, having exhausted all the colors and nuances of that season, seems to revert to the springtime pages of the calendar. The sunless sky had settled itself into colored streaks, gentle strips of cobalt, verdigris, and celadon, framed at the edges with whiteness as clear as water—the colors of April, inexpressible and long forgotten. I had put on my best suit and went out not without some misgivings. I walked quickly, effortlessly in the calm aura of the day, straying neither to the left nor right. Breathless, I ran up the stone steps. Alea iacta est, I said to myself, knocking at the door of the office. I stood in a modest posture in front of the headmaster's desk, as befitted my new role. I was slightly embarrassed.

  The headmaster produced from a glass-topped box a cockchafer on a pin and lifting it aslant to his eye, looked at it against the light. His fingers were stained with ink, the nails were short and cut straight. He looked at me from behind his glasses.

  "So you wish to enroll in the first form, Councilor?" he said. 'This is praiseworthy and admirable. I understand that you would like to refresh your education from the foundations, from the beginnings. I always repeat: grammar and the tables are the foundations of all learning. Of course, we cannot consider you, Councilor, as a schoolboy to whom compulsory education applies. Rather as a volunteer, a veteran of the alphabet, to coin a phrase, who after long years of wandering has called again at the haven of the school, who has brought his distressed ship to a safe port, as it were. Yes, yes, Councilor, very few people show us gratitude and recognition for our work, and few return to us after a lifetime of toil and settle down here permanently as a voluntary, life pupil. You shall enjoy speci
al privileges, Councilor, I have always thought—"

  "Excuse me," I interrupted, "but I should like to say that, as far as special privileges are concerned, I would like to renounce them completely. ... I don't want any. On the contrary, I should not like to be treated differently in any way; I wish to merge completely, to disappear in the gray mass of the class. My plan would fail if I were to be privileged. Even with regard to corporal punishment," here I lifted my finger, "and I completely recognize its beneficial and educational importance—I insist that no exception should be made for me."

  "Most praiseworthy, most thoughtful," said the headmaster with respect. "Come to think of it, your education might reveal certain gaps through the long years of nonusage. We all have in this respect some optimistic illusions, which can easily be dispelled. Do you remember, for instance, how much is five times seven?"

  "Five times seven," I repeated embarrassed, feeling confusion flowing in a warm and blissful wave to my head, creating a mist that obscured the clarity of my thoughts. Enchanted by my own ignorance, I began to stammer and repeat over and over again: "Five times seven, five times seven . . . ," enormously pleased that I was really reverting to childlike ignorance.