Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

by Bruno Schulz

  "There you are," said the headmaster, "it is high time for you to enroll in school once more."

  Then, taking me by the hand, he led me to the form where a class was being held.

  Again, as half a century ago, I found myself in the tumult of a room swarming and dark from a multitude of mobile heads. I stood, very small, in the center, holding the tail of the headmaster's coat, while fifty pairs of young eyes looked at me with the indifferent, cruel matter-of-factness of young animals confronted with a specimen of the same race. From all sides faces were made at me, grimaces of instant token enmity, tongues stuck out. I did not react to these provocations, remembering the good upbringing I had once received. Looking round the mobile, awkwardly grimacing faces, I recalled the same situation fifty years before. At that time I had stood next to my mother, while she talked to the lady teacher. Now, instead of my mother, it was the headmaster whispering something into the ear of the instructor, who was nodding his head and staring at me attentively.

  "He is an orphan," the instructor said at last to the class, "he has no father or mother, so don't be unkind to him."

  Tears came to my eyes after that short address, real tears of emotion, and the headmaster, himself moved, placed me on the bench nearest the rostrum.

  A new life thus began for me. The school at once absorbed me completely. Never in my earlier life had I been so engrossed in a thousand affairs, intrigues, and interests. I lived a life of incessant excitement. Over my head the lines of multiple and complicated messages were crossing. I was on the receiving end of signals, telegrams, signs of understanding. I was hissed at, winked at, and reminded in all manner of ways about a hundred promises which I had sworn to fulfill. I could hardly wait for the end of the lesson, during which out of inborn decency I sustained with stoicism all attacks and tried not to miss a single one of the instructor's words. But hardly had the bell been rung than the whole shouting gang fell upon me, surrounding me with an elemental impetus, and almost tearing me to pieces. They came from behind, or, stamping across the benches, they jumped over my head and turned somersaults over me. Each of them shouted his demands into my ears. I became the center of all interests, and the most important transactions, the most complicated and doubtful deals, could not take place without my participation. In the street, I walked surrounded by a noisy, violently gesticulating gang. Dogs passed us at a distance, with tails between their legs, cats jumped onto roofs when they saw us approaching, and lonely small boys, met in the street, with passive fatalism hunched their heads between their shoulders, preparing for the worst.

  Tuition at school had lost none of the charm of novelty, as, for instance, the art of spelling. The instructor appealed to our ignorance very skillfully and cunningly, he drew it forth until he reached that tabula rasa on which the seeds of all teaching must fall. Having thus eradicated all our prejudices and habits, he taught us from the very start. With difficulty and with concentration we melodiously spelled and divided words into syllables, sniffing in the intervals and pointing with our fingers at each new letter in our book. My primer had the same traces of my index finger, thicker at the more difficult letters, as the primers of my schoolmates.

  One day, I cannot remember why, the headmaster entered the room and in the sudden silence pointed his finger at three of us, one of whom was myself. We were to follow him to his study at once. We knew what was in store, and my two fellow culprits began to cry in advance. I looked with indifference at their premature contrition, at their faces deformed by sudden weeping as if with the onset of tears the human mask had fallen off and disclosed a formless pulp of weeping flesh. I myself was calm: with the stoicism of fair and moral natures I submitted myself to the course of events, ready to face the consequences of my actions. That strength of character, which resembled obstinacy, did not please the headmaster, as we three culprits stood facing him in his study, the instructor standing by with a cane in his hand. I undid my belt with indifference, but the headmaster, looking at me, exclaimed:

  "Shame on you! How is it possible, at your age?" and looked indignantly at the instructor.

  "A strange freak of nature," he added with a look of disgust. Then, having sent the two small boys away, he made a long and earnest speech, full of regrets and disapproval. But I did not understand him. Biting my nails, I looked stupidly ahead of me and then said lisping:

  "Please, Shir, it was Andy who shpat at the other Shir's roll."

  I had become a complete child.

  For gymnastics and art we went to another school building, which had a special room and equipment for these subjects. We marched in pairs, talking passionately, filling every street we passed with the sudden tumult of our mingled sopranos.

  The other school was in a large wooden building, reconstructed from an old theater hall, and with many outhouses. The art class resembled an enormous bathhouse; the ceiling rested on wooden pillars, and there was a gallery all around the room, to which we climbed at once, storming the stairs, which resounded thunderously under our feet. The numerous smaller rooms and recesses were wonderfully well-suited to the game of hide-and-seek. The art master never appeared, so we could play to our heart's content. From time to time the headmaster of that other school rushed into the hall, put the noisiest boys into corners, and pulled the cars of the wildest. Hardly had his back been turned than the noise began anew.

  We did not hear the bell announcing the end of the class. The afternoon came, short and colorful as usual in fall. Some boys were fetched by their mothers, who, scolding and smacking them, carried them off home. But for the others and those deprived of such solicitous care, the proper playtime only started at that moment. It was late evening before the old beadle who came to lock up the school finally chased us away.

  At that time of the year, there was dense darkness in the mornings when we walked to school, and the city was still asleep. We moved blindly with outstretched hands, dragging our feet in the rustling leaves that lay thick on the pavements. We groped along the walls of houses so as not to lose our way. Unexpectedly in a window recess we would feel under our hands the face of one of our mates, coming from the opposite direction. How we laughed, guessing whom it might be, how many surprises we had! Some boys would carry lighted bits of tallow candle, and the city was punctuated with these wandering lights, advancing low above ground in a trembling zigzag, meeting, then stopping to shed light on a tree, a clump of earth, a pile of yellow leaves among which very small boys looked for horse chestnuts. In some houses the first lamps were lighted, and the hazy glow from the upper floors, magnified by the squares of windows, fell in irregular patches on the pavements, on the town hall, on the blind facades of houses. And when somebody, lamp in hand, walked from one room to another, enormous rectangles of light outside would turn like the pages of a colossal book and the market square seemed to shift the houses and shadows and pick them up as if it were playing patience with an outsize pack of cards.

  At last we reached school. The candles were extinguished, darkness surrounded us as we groped for our places. Then the instructor entered, put an end of a tallow candle into a bottle, and the boring questions about declension of the irregular verbs would begin. As there was not yet sufficient light, the lesson remained oral and had to be memorized. While one of us was reciting monotonously, we looked, blinking, at the golden arrows shooting up from the candle, at lines that cut across one another like blades of straw on our half-closed eyelashes. The instructor poured ink into inkwells, yawned, looked out through the low window into the blackness. Under the seats it was completely dark. We dived there, giggling, walked on all fours, smelling one another like animals, and performing blindly and in whispers the usual transactions. I shall never forget those blissful early morning hours at school while a slow dawn matured beyond the windowpanes.

  At last came the season of autumnal winds. On its first day, early in the morning, the sky became yellow and modeled itself against that background in dirty gray lines of imaginary landscapes, of great m
isty wastes, receding in an eastward direction into a perspective of diminishing hills and folds, more numerous as they became smaller, until the sky tore itself off like the wavy edge of a rising curtain and disclosed a farther plan, a deeper sky, a gap of frightened whiteness, a pale and scared light of remote distance, discolored and watery, that like final amazement closed the horizon. As in Rembrandt's etchings one could see on such a day distant microscopic regions that, under the streak of brightness usually hard to locate, now rose from beyond the horizon under that clear crevice of sky.

  In that miniature landscape, one could see with sharp precision a railway train usually not visible at that distance, moving on a wavy track and crowned with a plume of silvery white smoke, which in turn dissolved into bright nothingness.

  And then, the wind rose. As if thrown from the clear gap in the sky, it circled and spread all over the city. It was woven of softness and gentleness, but it pretended to be brutal and fierce. It kneaded, turned over, and tortured the air until it felt like dying from bliss. Then it stiffened in space and reared, spread itself like canvas sails—enormous, taut, flapping like drying sheets—tangled itself in hard knots, trembling with tension, as if it wanted to move the whole atmosphere into a higher space; and then it pulled and untied the false knot and, a mile further away, threw again its hissing lasso, that lariat which could catch nothing.

  And the dance the wind led the chimney smoke! The smoke did not know how to avoid its scolding, how to turn, whether left or right, how to escape its blows. Thus the wind lorded it over the city as if on that memorable day it had wanted to give a telling example of its infinite willfulness.

  From early in the morning, I had a premonition of disaster. I made my way in the gale only with difficulty. On street corners, where the crosswinds met, my schoolmates held me by my coattails. So I sailed across the city and all was well. Later we went for gymnastics to the other school. On our way we bought some crescent rolls. Talking incessantly, our long crocodile wound through the gate and into the courtyard. One more minute and I should have been safe, in a secure spot, safe until the evening. If need be, I might have spent the night in the hall. My loyal friends would have stayed with me. But as fate had it, Vicky had that day been given a new top as a present, and he let it spin in front of the school. The top spun, a crowd formed at the entrance, I was pushed outside the gate and was immediately swept away.

  "Boys, help, help!" I shouted, already suspended in the air. I could still see their outstretched arms and their shouting, open mouths, but the next moment, I turned a somersault and ascended in a magnificent parabola. I was flying high above the roofs. Breathless I saw in my mind's eye how my schoolmates raised their arms, and called out to the instructor: "Please, sir, please, Simon has been swept away!"

  The instructor looked at them from under his spectacles. He went slowly over to the window and, screening his eyes with his hands, scanned the horizon. But he could not see me. In the dull glare of the pale sky, his face had the color of parchment.

  "We must cross his name off the register," he said with a bitter smile and returned to the rostrum. I was carried higher and higher into the unexplored yellow space.

  LONELINESS

  IT IS WITH GREAT RELIEF that I feel able to go out again. But for what a long time was I confined to my room! These have been bitter months and years.

  I cannot explain why I have been living in my old nursery—the back room of the apartment, with access from the balcony—which was rarely used in the past, forgotten, as if it did not belong to us. I cannot remember how I got there. I believe it was during a bright watery-white moonless night. I could see every detail in the dim light. The bed was unmade, as if someone had just left it, and I listened in the stillness for the breathing of people asleep. But who was likely to be breathing here? Since then, this has been my home. I have been here for years and am rather bored. Why didn't I think in advance about stocking up! Ah, you who still can do it, who still are given the time, make provisions, save up grain—good, nourishing, sweet grain—for a great winter of lean and hungry years lies ahead, and the earth will not bear fruit in the land of Egypt. Alas, I was not provident, like a hamster. I have always been a light-hearted field mouse, I have lived from day to day without a care for the morrow, trusting in my starveling's talent. Like a mouse, I thought, What do I care about hunger? If worst comes to worst, I can gnaw wood or nibble paper. The poorest of animals, a gray church mouse, at the tail end of the Book of Creation, I can exist on nothing. And so I live in this dead room. Many flies died in it a long time ago. I put my ear against wood, to hear the sound of a woodworm. Deadly silence. Only I, the immortal mouse, lonely and posthumous, rustle in this room, running endlessly on the table, on the shelf, on the chairs. I run around, resembling Aunt Thecla in a long gray frock reaching to the ground—agile, quick, and small, pulling behind me a mobile tail. I am now sitting in bright daylight on the table, immobile, as if stuffed, my eyes like two protruding shiny beads. Only the end of my muzzle pulsates imperceptibly, by force of habit, in minute chewing movements.

  This, of course, is to be understood as a metaphor. I am really an old-age pensioner, not a mouse. It is part of my existence to be the parasite of metaphors, so easily am I carried away by the first simile that comes along. Having been carried away, I have to find my difficult way back, and slowly return to my senses.

  What do I look like? Sometimes I see myself in the mirror. A strange, ridiculous, and painful thing! I am ashamed to admit it: I never look at myself full face. Somewhat deeper, somewhat farther away I stand inside the mirror a little off center, slightly in profile, thoughtful and glancing sideways. Our looks have stopped meeting. When I move, my reflection moves too, but half-turned back, as if it did not know about me, as if it had got behind a number of mirrors and could not come back. My heart bleeds when I see it so distant and indifferent. It is you, I want to exclaim; you have always been my faithful reflection, you have accompanied me for so many years and now you don't recognize me! Oh, my God! Unfamiliar and looking to one side, my reflection stands there and seems to be listening for something, awaiting a word from the mirrored depths, obedient to someone else, waiting for orders from another place.

  Mostly I sit at the table and turn the pages of my yellowed university notes—my only reading.

  I look at the sun-bleached curtain, stiff with dust, waving slightly in the cold breeze from the window. I could do exercises on the curtain rod, an excellent bar. How lightly one could turn somersaults on it in the sterile, tired air. Almost casually one could make an elegant salto mortale, coolly, without too much involvement—a speculative exercise, as it were. When one stands on tiptoe, balancing oneself on the bar, with one's head touching the ceiling, one has the impression that it is slightly warmer higher up—the illusion of being in a warmer zone.

  Ever since my childhood, I have liked to have a bird's-eye view of my room.

  So I sit and listen to the silence. The room is whitewashed. Sometimes on the white ceiling a wrinklelike crack appears, sometimes a flake of plaster breaks off with a click. Am I to reveal that the room is walled in? How can that be? Walled in? How could I leave it? That is just it: where there is a will, there is a way; a passionate determination can conquer all. I must only imagine a door, a good old door, like the one in the kitchen of my childhood, with an iron handle and a bolt. There is no walled-in room that could not be opened by such a trusted door, provided one were strong enough to suggest that such a door exists.

  FATHER'S LAST ESCAPE

  IT HAPPENED in the late and forlorn period of complete disruption, at the time of the liquidation of our business. The signboard had been removed from over our shop, the shutters were halfway down, and inside the shop my mother was conducting an unauthorized trade in remnants. Adela had gone to America, and it was said that the boat on which she had sailed had sunk and that all the passengers had lost their lives. We were unable to verify this rumor, but all trace of the girl was lost and we neve
r heard of her again.

  A new age began—empty, sober, and joyless, like a sheet of white paper. A new servant girl, Genya, anemic, pale, and boneless, mooned about the rooms. When one patted her on the back, she wriggled, stretched like a snake, or purred like a cat. She had a dull white complexion, and even the insides of her eyelids were white. She was so absent-minded that she sometimes made a white sauce from old letters and invoices: it was sickly and inedible.

  At that time, my father was definitely dead. He had been dying a number of times, always with some reservations that forced us to revise our attitude toward the fact of his death. This had its advantages. By dividing his death into installments, Father had familiarized us with his demise. We became gradually indifferent to his returns—each one shorter, each one more pitiful. His features were already dispersed throughout the room in which he had lived, and were sprouting in it, creating at some points strange knots of likeness that were most expressive. The wallpaper began in certain places to imitate his habitual nervous tic; the flower designs arranged themselves into the doleful elements of his smile, symmetrical as the fossilized imprint of a trilobite. For a time, we gave a wide berth to his fur coat lined with polecat skins. The fur coal breathed. The panic of small animals sewn together and biting into one another passed through it in helpless currents and lost itself in the folds of the fur. Putting one's ear against it, one could hear the melodious purring unison of the animals' sleep. In this well-tanned form, amid the faint smell of polecat, murder, and nighttime matings, my father might have lasted for many years. But he did not last.

  One day, Mother returned home from town with a preoccupied face.

  "Look, Joseph," she said, "what a lucky coincidence. I caught him on the stairs, jumping from step to step"—and she lifted a handkerchief that covered something on a plate. I recognized him at once. The resemblance was striking, although now he was a crab or a large scorpion. Mother and I exchanged looks: in spite of the metamorphosis, the resemblance was incredible.