by Bruno Schulz
THE STREET OF CROCODILES But in vain did he apostrophize the insect in this new language, born of sudden inspiration, as a cockroach's understanding is not equal to such a tirade: the insect continued on its journey to a corner of the room, with movements sanctified by an ageless ritual of the cockroach world. The feeling of loathing had as yet no permanence or strength in the dog's soul. The newly awakened joy of life transformed every sensation into a great joke, into gaiety. Nimrod kept on barking, but the tone of it had changed imperceptibly, had become a parody of what it had been – an attempt to express the incredible wonder of that capital enterprise, life, so full of unexpected encounters, pleasures, and thrills. Pan In a corner between the backs of sheds and outbuildings was a blind alley leading from the courtyard; the farthest, ultimate cul-de-sac, hemmed in between the privy and the wall of the chicken run – a dismal spot, beyond which one could see no farther. This was the land's end, the Gibraltar of the courtyard, desperately knocking its head against the blind fence of horizontal planks, enclosing that little world with finality. From under the fence ran a rivulet of black stinking water, a vein of rotting greasy mud which never dried out – the only road which led across the border of the fence into the wider world. The despair of the fetid alleyway had pushed for so long against the obstacle of the fence that it had loosened one of its planks. We boys did the rest and prised the plank free. In this way we made a breach, opening a window to the sun. Putting a foot on the plank which we had thrown as a bridge across the puddle, the prisoner of the courtyard could squeeze through the crack and let himself out into a new, wider world of fresh breezes. There, spread out before him, was a large, overgrown garden. Tall pear trees, broad apple trees, grew there in profusion, covered with silvery rustling leaves, with a foaming white glinting net. Thick tangled grass, never cut, covered the undulating ground with a fluffy carpet. Common meadow grasses with feathery heads grew there; wild parsley with its delicate filigrees; ground ivy with rough wrinkled leaves, and dead nettles smelling of mint. Shiny sinewy plantains spotted with rust shot up to display bunches of thick red seeds. The whole of this jungle was soaked in the gentle air and filled with blue breezes. When you lay in the grass you were under the azure map of clouds and sailing continents, you inhaled the whole geography of the sky. From that communion with the air, the leaves and blades became covered with delicate hair, with a soft layer of down, a rough bristle of hooks made, it seemed, to grasp and hold the waves of oxygen. That delicate and whitish layer related the 52 53
THE STREET OF CROCODILES PAN vegetation to the atmosphere, gave it the silvery greyish tint of the air, of shadowy silences between two glimpses of the sun. And one of the plants, yellow, inflated with air, its pale stems full of milky juice, brought forth from its empty shoots only pure air, pure down in the shape of fluffy dandelion balls scattered by the wind to dissolve noiselessly into the blue silence. The garden was vast with a number of extensions, and had various zones and climates. From one side it was open to the sky and air, and there it offered the softest, most delicate bed of fluffy green. But where the ground extended into a low-lying isthmus and dropped into the shadow of the back wall of a deserted soda factory, it became grimmer, overgrown and wild with neglect, untidy, fierce with thistles, bristling with nettles, covered with a rash of weeds, until, at the very end between the walls, in an open rectangular bay, it lost all moder- ation and became insane. There, it was an orchard no more, but a paroxysm of madness, an outbreak of fury, of cynical shamelessness and lust. There, bestially liberated, giving full rein to their passion, ruled the empty, overgrown, cabbage heads of burs – enormous witches, shedding their voluminous skirts in broad daylight, throwing them down, one by one, until their swollen, rustling, hole-riddled rags buried the whole quarrelsome bastard breed under their crazy expanse. And still the skirts swelled and pushed, piling up one on top of another, spreading and growing all the time – a mass of tinny leaves reaching up to the low eaves of a shed. It was there that I saw him first and for the only time in my life, at a noon hour crazy with heat. It was at a moment when time, demented and wild, breaks away from the treadmill of events and like an escaping vagabond, runs shouting across the fields. Then the summer grows out of control, spreads at all points all over space with a wild impetus, doubling and trebling itself into an unknown, lunatic dimension. At that hour, I submitted to the frenzy of chasing butterflies, to the passion of pursuing these shimmering spots, these errant white flakes, trembling in awkward zigzags in the burning air. And it so happened that one of these spots of light divided during flight into two, then into three – and the shining, blindingly white triangle of spots led me, like a will-o' -the-wisp, through the jungle of thistles, scorched by the sun. I stopped at the edge of the burs, not daring to advance into that hollow abyss. And then, suddenly, I saw him. Submerged up to his armpits in the thicket of burs, he crouched in front of me. I saw his broad back in a dirty shirt and the grubby side of his jacket. He sat there, as if ready to leap, his shoulders hunched as under a great burden. His body panted with tension, and perspiration streamed down his copper-brown face, glinting in the sun. Immobile, he seemed to be working very hard, struggling under some enormous weight. I stood, nailed to the spot by his look, held captive by it. It was the face of a tramp or a drunkard. A tuft of filthy hair bristled over his broad forehead, rounded like a stone washed by a stream. That forehead was now creased into deep furrows. I did not know whether it was the pain, the burning heat of the sun, or that super- human effort that had eaten into his face and stretched those features near to cracking. His dark eyes bored into me with the fixedness of supreme despair or of suffering. He both looked at me and did not, he saw me and did not see. His eyes were like bursting shells, strained in a transport of pain or the wild delights of inspiration. And suddenly on those taut features there slowly spread a terrible grimace. The grimace intensified, taking in the previous madness and tension, swelling, becoming broader and broader, until it broke into a roaring, hoarse shout of laughter. Deeply shaken, I saw how, still roaring with laughter, he slowly lifted himself up from his crouching position and, hunched like a gorilla, his hands in the torn pockets of his ragged trousers, began to run, cutting in great leaps and bounds through the rustling tinfoil of the burs – a Pan without a pipe, retreating in flight to his familiar haunts. 54 55
MR CHARLES Mr Charles Early on Saturday afternoon my Uncle Charles, a grass widower, set out for a holiday resort, an hour's walk from the city, to visit his wife and children, who were spending the summer there. Since his wife's departure, die house had not been cleaned, the bed not made. Charles returned home late at night, battered and bruised by the nightly revels to which he succumbed under the pressure of the hot empty days. The crushed, cool, disordered bedclothes seemed like a blissful haven, an island of safety on which he succeeded in landing with the last ounce of his strength like a castaway, tossed for many days and nights on a stormy sea. Groping blindly in the darkness, he sank between the white mounds of cool feathers and slept as he- fell, across the bed or with his head downward, pushing deep into the softness of the pillows, as if in sleep he wanted to drill through, to explore completely, that powerful massif of feather-bedding rising out of the night. He fought in his sleep against the bed like a bather swimming against the current, he kneaded it and moulded it with his body like an enormous bowl of dough, and woke up at dawn panting, covered with sweat, thrown up on the shores of that pile of bedding which he could not master in the nightly struggle. Half-landed from the depths of unconsciousness, he still hung on to the verge of night, gasping for breath, while the bedding grew around him, swelled and fermented – and again engulfed him in a mountain of heavy, whitish dough. He slept thus until late morning, while the pillows arranged them- selves into a large flat plain on which his now quieter sleep would wander. On these white roads, he slowly returned to his senses, to daylight, to reality – and at last he opened his eyes as does a sleeping passenger when the train stops at a station. Stale dusk fi
lled the room with the dregs of many days of solitude and quietness. The window buzzed with the morning swarms of flies and only the curtains shone brightly. Charles yawned out of his body, out of the depth of all its cavities the remains of yesterday. The yawning was convulsive as if his body wanted to turn itself inside out. In this way he got rid of the sand and ballast, the undigested remains of the previous day. Having thus eased himself, he wrote down his expenses in a note- book, calculated something, added it all up, and became pensive. Then he lay immobile for a long time, with glazed eyes which were the colour of water, protuberant and moist. In the diffused dusk of the room, brightened by the glare of the hot day behind the curtains, his eyes, like miniscule mirrors, reflected all the shining objects: the white light of the sun in the cracks of the window, the golden rectangle of the curtains, and enclosed, like a drop of water, all the room with the stillness of its carpets and its empty chairs. Meanwhile, the day behind the blinds resounded more and more violently with the buzzing of flies frenzied by the sun. The window could not contain this white fire and the curtains went faint from the bright undulations. At last Charles dragged himself from the bed and sat on it for some time, groaning. Past thirty, his body was beginning to thicken. His system, swelling with fat, harassed by sexual indulgence, but still flowing with seminal juices, seemed slowly to shape, in that silence, its future destiny. While Charles sat there in a thoughtless, vegetative stupor, completely surrendered to circulation, respiration, and the deep pulsation of his natural juices, there formed inside his perspiring body an unknown, unformulated future, like a terrible growth, pushing forth in an unknown direction. He was not afraid of it, because he already felt at one with that unknown and enormous thing which was to come, and he was growing together with it without protest, in a strange unison, numb with resigned awe, recognizing his future self in those colossal exuberances, those fantastic tumours which were maturing before his inward-turned sight. One of his eyes would then slightly squint to the outside, as if leaving for another dimension. Afterwards, he awoke from those hopeless musings, returning to the reality of the moment. He looked at his feet on the carpet, plump and delicate like a woman 's, and slowly removed his gold cuff links from the cuffs of his shirt. Then he went to the kitchen and in a shady corner found a bucket of water, a round, silent, watchful mirror waiting for him – the only living and knowing thing in that empty flat. 56 57
THE STREET OF CROCODILES He poured water into the basin and tasted with his skin its young, sweet, stale moisture. He dressed with care, but without haste, with long pauses between the separate manipulations. The rooms, empty and neglected, did not approve of him, the furniture and the walls watched him in silent criticism. He felt, entering that stillness, like an intruder in an underwater kingdom with a different, separate notion of time. Opening his own drawers, he felt like a thief and could not help moving on tiptoe, afraid to arouse noisy and excessive echoes that waited irritably for the chance to explode on the slightest provocation. And finally, when after sneaking from dresser to closet, he had found piece by piece all he needed and had finished his dressing among the furniture which bore with him in silence, and was ready at last, he stood, hat in hand, feeling rather embarrassed that even at the last moment he could not find a word which would dispel that hostile silence; he then walked towards the door slowly, resignedly, hanging his head, while someone else, someone forever turning his back, walked at the same pace in the opposite direction into the depths of the mirror, through the row of empty rooms which did not exist Cinnamon Shops At the time of the shortest, sleepy winter days, edged on both sides with the furry dusk of mornings and evenings, when the city reached out deeper and deeper into the labyrinth of winter nights, and was shaken reluctantly into consciousness by the short dawn, my father was already lost, sold and surrendered to the other sphere. His face and head became overgrown with a wild and recalcitrant shock of grey hair, bristling in irregular tufts and spikes, shooting out from warts, from his eyebrows, from the openings of his nostrils and giving him the appearance of an old ill-tempered fox. His sense of smell and his hearing sharpened extraordinarily and one could see from the expression of his tense silent face that through the intermediary of these two senses he remained in permanent contact with the unseen world of mouseholes, dark corners, chimney vents, and dusty spaces under the floor. He was a vigilant and attentive observer, a prying fellow conspirator, of the rustlings, the nightly creakings, the secret gnawing life of the floor. He was so engrossed in it that he became completely submerged in an inaccessible sphere and one which he did not even attempt to discuss with us. He often used to flip his fingers and laugh softly to himself when the manifestations of the unseen became too absurd; he then exchanged knowing looks with our cat, which, also initiated in these mysteries, would lift its cynical cold striped face, closing the slanting chinks of its eyes with an air of indifference and boredom. It sometimes happened that, during a meal, my father would suddenly put aside his knife and fork and, with his napkin still tied around his neck, would rise from the table with a feline movement, tiptoe to the door of the adjoining room and peer through the keyhole with the utmost caution. Then, with a bashful smile, he would return to the table slightly embarrassed, murmuring and whispering indis- 58 59
THE STREET OF CROCODILES CINNAMON SHOPS tinctly in tune with the interior monologue that wholly preoccupied him. To provide some distraction for him and to tear him away from these morbid speculations, my mother would force him to go out for a walk in the evenings. He went in silence, without protest but also without enthusiasm, distrait and absent in spirit. Once we even went all together to the theatre. We found ourselves again in that large, badly lit, dirty hall, full of somnolent human chatter and aimless confusion. But when we had made our way through the crowd, there emerged before us an enor- mous pale-blue curtain, like the sky of another firmament. Large, painted pink masks, with puffed-up cheeks floated in a huge expanse of canvas. The artificial sk y spread out in both directions, swellingwith the powerful breath of pathos and of great gestures, with the atmosphere of that fictitious floodlit world created on the echoing scaffolding of the stage. The tremor sailing across the large area of that sky, the breath of the vast canvas which made the masks revive and grow, revealed the illusory character of that firmament, caused that vibration of reality which, in metaphysical moments, we experi- ence as the glimmer of revelation:. The masks fluttered their red eyelids, their coloured lips whispered voicelessly, and I knew that the moment was imminent when the tension of mystery would reach its zenith and the swollen skies of the curtain would really burst open to reveal incredible and dazzling events. But I was not allowed to experience that moment, because in the meantime my father had begun to betray a certain anxiety. He was feeling in all his pockets and at last declared that he had left behind at home a wallet containing money and certain most important documents. After a short conference with my father, during which Adela's honesty was submitted to a hasty assessment, it was suggested that I should go home to look for the wallet. According to my mother, there was still plenty of time before the curtain rose and, fleet-footed as I was, I had every chance of returning in time. I stepped into a winter night bright from the illuminations of the sky. It was one of those clear nights when the starry firmament is so wide and spreads so far that it seems to be divided and broken up into a mass of separate skies, sufficient for a whole month of winter nights and providing silver and painted globes to cover all the nightly phenomena, adventures, occurrences, and carnivals. It is exceedingly thoughtless to send a young boy out on an urgent and important errand into a night like that, because in its semi- obscurity the streets multiply, becoming confused and interchanged. There open up, deep inside a city, reflected streets, streets which are doubles, makebelieve streets. One 's imagination, bewitched and misled, creates illusory maps of the apparently familiar districts, maps in which streets have their proper places and usual names but are provided with new and fictitious configurations by the inexhaustible i
nventiveness of the night. The temptations of such winter nights begin usually with the innocent desire to take a short cut, to use a quicker but less familiar way. Attractive possibilities arise of shortening a complicated walk by taking some never used side street. But on that occasion things began differently. Having taken a few steps, I realized that I was not wearing my overcoat. I wanted to turn back, but after a moment that seemed to me an unnecessary waste of time, especially as the night was not cold at all; on the contrary, I could feel waves of an unseasonal warmth, like breezes of a spring night. The snow shrank into a white fluff, into a harmless fleece smelling sweetly of violets. Similar white fluffs were sailing across the sky on which the moon was doubled and trebled, showing all its phases and positions at once. On that night the sky laid bare its internal construction in many sections which, like quasi-anatomical exhibits, showed the spirals and whorls of light, the pale green solids of darkness, the plasma of space, the tissue of dreams. On such a night, it was impossible to walk along Rampart Street, or any other of the dark streets which are the obverse, the lining as it were, of the four sides of Market Square, and not to remember that at that late hour the strange and most attractive shops were sometimes open, the shops which on ordinary days one tended to overlook. I used to call them cinnamon shops because of the dark panelling of their walls. These truly noble shops, open late at night, have always been the objects of my ardent interest. Dimly lit, their dark and solemn interiors were redolent of the smell of paint, varnish, and incense; of the aroma of distant countries and rare commodities. You could find in them Bengal lights, magic boxes, the stamps of long-forgotten countries, 60 61
