The Fictions of Bruno Schulz

by Bruno Schulz

  Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

  Contents Introduction by John Updike 117 Translator's Preface 123 The Book 127 The Age of Genius 140 Spring 150 A Night in July 208 My Father Joins the Fire Brigade 213 A Second Fall 219 Dead Season 223 Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass 237 Dodo 265 Eddie 273 The Old Age Pensioner 281 Loneliness 296 Father's Last Escape 299

  The Book 1 I am simply calling it The Book without any epithets or qualifications, and in this sobriety there is a shade of helplessness, a silent capitu- lation before the vastness of the transcendental, for no word, no allusion, can adequately suggest the shiver of fear, the presentiment of a thing without name that exceeds all our capacity for wonder. How could an accumulation of adjectives or a richness of epithets help when one is faced with that splendiferous thing? Besides, any true reader — and this story is only addressed to him — will understand me anyway when I look him straight in the eye and try to communicate my meaning. A short sharp look or a light clasp of his hand will stir him into awareness, and he will blink in rapture at the brilliance of The Book. For, under the imaginary table that separates me from my readers, don't we secretly clasp each other's hands? The Book ... Somewhere in the dawn of childhood, at the first daybreak of life, the horizon had brightened with its gentle glow. The Book lay in all its glory on my father's desk, and he, quietly engrossed in it, patiently rubbed with a wet fingertip the top of decals, until the blank pages grew opaque and ghostly with a delightful foreboding and, suddenly flaking off in bits of tissue, disclosed a peacock-eyed fragment; blurred with emotion, one's eyes turned toward a virgin dawn of divine colours, towards a miraculous moistness of purest azure. Oh, that shedding of the film, oh, that invasion of brightness, that blissful spring, oh, Father .. . Sometimes my father would wander off and leave me alone with The Book; the wind would rustle through its pages and the pictures would rise. And as the windswept pages were turned, merging the colours and shapes, a shiver ran through the columns of text, freeing from among the letters flocks of swallows and larks. Page after page 127

  SANATORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS THE BOOK floated in the air and gently saturated the landscape with brightness. At other times, The Book lay still and the wind opened it softly like a huge cabbage rose; the petals, one by one, eyelid under eyelid, all blind, velvety, and dreamy, slowly disclosed a blue pupil, a coloured peacock's heart, or a chattering nest of hummingbirds. This was a very long time ago. My mother had not appeared yet. I spent my days alone with my father in our room, which at that time was as large as the world. The crystals hanging from the lamp filled the room with diffused colours, a rainbow splashed into all the corners, and, when the lamp swayed on its chains, the whole room revolved in fragments of the rainbow, as if the spheres of all nine planets had shifted, one turning around the other. I liked to stand between my father's legs, clasping them from each side like columns. Sometimes he wrote letters. I sat on his desk and watched, entranced, the squiggles of his signature, crabbed and awhirl like the trills of a coloratura singer. Smiles were budding in the wallpaper, eyes hatched, somersaults turned. To amuse me, my father blew soap bubbles through a long straw; they burst in the irridescent space or hit the walls, their colours still hanging in the air. Then my mother materialized, and that early, bright idyll came to an end. Seduced by my mother's caresses, I forgot my father, and my life began to run along a new and different track with no holidays and no miracles. I might even have forgotten The Book forever, had it not been for a certain night and a certain dream. 2 On a dark wintry morning I woke up early (under the banks of darkness a grim dawn shone in the depths below) and while a multi- tude of misty figures and signs still crowded under my eyelids, I began to dream confusedly, tormented by various regrets about the old, forgotten Book. No one could understand me and, vexed by their obtuseness, I began to nag more urgently, molesting my parents with angry pointed, I tried to describe to a stunned audience that indescribable thing, which no words, no pictures drawn with a trembling and elong- ated finger, could evoke. I exhausted myself in endless explanations, complicated and contradictory, and cried in helpless despair. M1y parents towered over me, perplexed, ashamed of their helpless- ness. They could not help feeling uneasy. My vehemence, the impatient and feverish urgency of my tone, made me appear to be in the right, to have a well-founded grievance. They came up to me with various books and pressed them into my hands. I threw them away indignantly. One of them, a thick and heavy tome, was again and again pushed towards me by my father. I opened it. It was the Bible. I saw in its pages a great wandering of animals, filling the roads, branching off into processions heading for distant lands. I saw a sky filled with flocks of birds in flight, and an enormous, upturned pyramid on whose flat top rested the Ark. I raised my reproachful eyes to Father. `You must know, Father,' I cried, `you must. Don't pretend, don't quibble! This book has given you away. Why do you give me that fake copy, that reproduction, a clumsy falsification? What have you done with The Book?' My father averted his eyes. 3 Weeks went by. My excitement abated, then passed, but the image of The Book continued to burn in my memory with a bright flame; a large, rustling Codex, a tempestuous Bible, the wind blowing through its pages, plundering it like an enormous, petal-shedding rose. My father, seeing that I had become calmer, approached me cautiously one day and said in a tone of gentle suggestion: `As a matter of fact, there are many books. The Book is a myth in which we believe when we are young, but which we cease to take seriously as we get older.' At that time I already held quite a different opinion. I knew then that The Book is a postulate, that it is a goal. I carried upon my shoulders the burden of a great mission. I did not answer; I was scornful and filled with bitter, dogged pride. impatience. Barefoot, wearing only my nightshirt and trembling with excitement, I rifled the books on Father's bookshelves, and, angry and disap- 128 129

  SANATORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS THE BOOK In fact, I was already in possession of some tattered remnants of The Book, a few pitiful shreds that by a freak of fate had fallen into my hands. I hid my treasure carefully from everybody, distressed by the utter downfall of that book and knowing that I could not expect anyone to appreciate those mutilated pages. It happened like this: One day during that winter I surprised Adela tidying up a room. A long-handled brush in her hand, she was leaning against a reading desk, on which lay some papers. I looked over her shoulder, not so much from curiosity as to be close to her and enjoy the smell of her body whose youthful charms had just revealed themselves to my recently awakened senses. `Look,' she said, submitting without protest to my pressing against her. `Is it possible for anyone to have hair reaching down to the ground? I should like to have hair like that.' I looked at the picture. On a large folio page there was a photograph of a rather squat and short woman with a face expressing energy and experience. From her head flowed an enormous stole of hair, which fell heavily down her back trailing its thick ends on the ground. It was an unbelievable freak of nature, a full and ample cloak spun out of the tendrils of hair. It was hard to imagine that its burden was not painful to carry, that it did not paralyze the head from which it grew. But the owner of this magnificence seemed to bear it proudly, and the caption printed under the picture told the history of that miracle, beginning with the words: `I, Anna Csillag, horn at Karlovice in Moravia, had a poor growth of hair .. It was a long story, similar in construction to the story of Job. By divine will, Anna Csillag had been struck with a poor growth of hair. All her village pitied her for this disability, which they tolerated because of the exemplary life she led, although they suspected it could not have been entirely undeserved. But, lo and behold, her ardent prayers were heard, the curse was removed from her head, and Anna Csillag was graced with the blessing of enlightenment. She received signs and portents and concocted a mixture, a miraculous nostrum that restored fertility to her scalp. She began to grow hair, and what is more, her husband, brothers, even cousins were covered overnight with a tough, healthy black coating of hair growth. On the re
verse of the page, Anna Csillag was shown six weeks after the prescription was revealed to her, surrounded by her brothers, brothers-in-law, and nephews, bewhiskered men with beards down to their waists, exposed to the admiration of beholders in an eruption of unfalsified, bearlike masculinity. Anna Csillag became the benefactress of her village, on which the blessing of wavy heads of hair and of enormous fringes had descended, and whose male inhabitants, henceforth, could sweep the ground with their beards like broad besoms. Anna Csillag became the apostle of hairiness. Having brought happiness to her native village, she now wanted to make the whole world happy and asked, begged, and urged everyone to accept for their salvation the gift of the gods, the wonderful mixture of which she alone knew the secret. I read that story over Adela's arm and was struck by a sudden overwhelming thought. This was The Book, its last pages, the unof- ficial supplement, the tradesmen's entrance full of refuse and trash! Fragments of rainbow suddenly danced on the wallpaper. I snatched the sheaf of paper out of Adela's hands, and in a faltering voice I breathed: `Where did you find this book?' `You silly boy,' she answered shrugging her shoulders. `It has been lying here all the time; we tear a few pages from it every day and take them to the butcher's for packing meat or your father's lunch .. 4 I rushed to my room. Deeply perturbed, with burning cheeks I began to turn the pages of the old Book with trembling fingers. Alas, not many remained. Not a single page of the real text, nothing but adver- tisements and personal announcements. Immediately following the prophecies of the long-haired Sibyl was a page devoted to a miraculous nostrum for all illnesses and infirmities. Elsa — the Liquid with a Swan — was a balm that worked wonders. The page was full of authenticated, touching testimonials from people who had experienced its effects. The enthusiastic convalescents from Transylvania, Slavonia, and Bucovina hurried to bear witness and to relate their stories in warm and moving words. They came bandaged and bent, shaking their now superfluous crutches, tearing plasters from their eyes and bandages from their sores. Beyond these processions of cripples one imagined distant, mournful villages under skies white as paper, hardened by the prose 130 131

  of daily drudgery. They were villages forgotten in the depth of time, peopled by creatures chained forever to their tiny destinies. A cobbler was a total cobbler: he smelled of hide; he had a small and haggard face, pale myopic eyes, and a colourless, sniffing moustache; he felt a cobbler through and through. And when their abscesses did not worn them and their bones did not creak, when dropsy did not force them onto their pallets, these people plunged into a lifeless, grey happiness, smoking cheap, yellow imperial-and-royal tobacco or dully daydreaming in front of kiosks where tottery tickets were sold. Cats crossed their paths, both from the left and from the right; they dreamed of black dogs, and their palms frequently itched. Once in a while, they wrote a letter copied from a letter-writing manual, carefully stuck a stamp on the envelope, and entrusted it reluctantly to a letter box, which they then struck with their fists, as if to wake it up. And afterward they dreamed of white pigeons that carried letters in their beaks before disappearing in the clouds. The pages that followed rose over the sphere of daily affairs into the region of pure poetry. There were harmoniums, zithers, and harps, once played by consorts of angels; now, thanks to the progress of industry, they were accessible at popular prices to ordinary people – to all God-fearing people for their suitable entertainment and for the gladdening of their hearts. There were barrel organs, real miracles of technology, full of flutes, stops, and pipes, trilling sweetly like nests of sobbing nightingales: priceless treasures for crippled veterans, a source of lucrative income for the disabled, and generally indispensable in every musical family. One imagined these barrel organs, beautifully painted, carried on the backs of little grey old men, whose indistinct faces, corroded by life, seemed covered by cobwebs – faces with watery, immobile eyes slowly leaking away, emaciated faces as discoloured and innocent as the cracked and weathered bark of trees, and now like bark smelling only of rain and sky. These old men had long forgotten their names and identities, and, lost in themselves, their feet encased in enormous heavy boots, they shuffled on bent knees with small, even steps along a straight monot- onous line, disregarding the winding and tortuous paths of others who passed them by. On white, sunless mornings, mornings stale with cold and steeped in the daily business of life, they would disentangle themselves imper- ceptibly from the crowd and stand the barrel organ on a trestle at street corners, under the yellow smudge of a sky cut by lines of telegraph wires. As people hurried aimlessly by with their collars upturned, they would begin their tune – not from the start but from where it had stopped the day before – and play `Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do . . .' while from the chimneys above, white plumes of steam would billow. And – strange thing – that tune, hardly begun, fell at once into its place at that hour and in that landscape as if it had belonged by right to that dreamlike inward-looking day. The 132 133 SANATORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS THE BOOK

  SANATORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS THE BOOK thoughts and grey cares of the people hurrying past kept time with the tune. And when, after a time, the tune ended in a long expansive whizz ripped from the insides of the barrel organ, which now started on something quite else, the thoughts and cares stopped for a moment, like in a dance, to change step, and then at once turned in the opposite direction in time to a new tune now emerging from the pipes of the barrel organ: `Margaretta, treasure of my soul .. And in the dull indifference of that morning nobody noticed that the sense of the world had completely changed, that it now ran in ti me not with `Daisy, Daisy .. .' but with `Mar-ga-ret-ta .. I turned another page . . . What might this be? A spring downpour? No, it was the chirping of birds, which landed like grey shot on open umbrellas, for here I was offered real German canaries from the Harz mountains, cageloads of goldfinches and starlings, basketfuls of winged talkers and singers. Spindle-shaped and light, as if stuffed with cotton wool; jumping jerkily, agile as if running on smooth ball bearings; chattering like cuckoos in clocks — they were destined to sweeten the life of the lonely, to give bachelors a substitute for family life, to squeeze from the hardeit of hearts the semblance of maternal warmth brought forth by their touching helplessness. Even when the page was almost turned, their collective, alluring chirping still seemed to persist. But later on, the miserable remains of The Book became ever more depressing. The pages were now given over to a display of boring quackery. In a long coat, with a smile half hidden by his black beard, who was it who presented his services to the public? Signor Bosco of Milan, a master of black magic, was making a long and obscure appeal, demonstrating something on the tips of his fingers without clarifying anything. And, although in his own estimation he reached amazing conclusions, which he seemed to weigh for a moment before they dissolved into thin air, although he pointed to the dialectical subtleties of his oratory by raising his eyebrows and preparing one for something unexpected, he remained misunderstood, and, what is worse, one did not care to understand him and left him with his gestures, his soft voice, and the whole gamut of his dark smiles, to turn quickly the last, almost disintegrated pages. These pages quite obviously had slipped into a maniacal babble, into nonsense: A gentleman offered an infallible method of achieving decisiveness and determination and spoke at length of high principles and character. But to turn another page was enough for me to become completely disoriented as far as principles and firmness were concerned. A certain Mme Magda Wang, tethered by the train of her gown, declared above a modest decolletage that she frowned on manly deter- mination and principles and that she specialized in breaking the strongest characters. (Here, with a slight kick of her small foot, she rearranged the train of her gown.) There were methods, she continued through clenched teeth, infallible methods she could not divulge here, referring the readers to her memoirs, entitled The Purple Days (published by the Institute of Anthroposophy in Budapest); in them she listed the results of her experiences in the Colonies with the `dressage ' of men (this last
word underlined by an ironical flash of her eyes). And strangely enough, that slovenly and loose-tongued lady seemed to be sure of the approval of those about whom she spoke so cynically, and in the peculiar confusion of her words one felt that their meaning had mysteriously shifted and that we had moved to a totally different sphere, where the compass worked back to front. This was the last page of The Book, and it left me peculiarly dizzy, filled with a mixture of longing and excitement. 5 Leaning over that Book, my face glowing like a rainbow, I burned in quiet ecstasy. Engrossed in reading, I forgot my mealtimes. My intuition was right: this was the authentic Book, the holy original, however degraded and humiliated at present. And when late in the evening, smiling blissfully, I put the script away in the bottom of a drawer and hid it under a pile of other books, I felt as if I were putting to sleep the Dawn that emits a self-igniting purple flame. How dull all my other books now seemed! For ordinary books are like meteors. Each of them has only one moment, a moment when it soars screaming like the phoenix, all its pages aflame. For that single moment we love them ever after, although they soon turn to ashes. With bitter resignation we sometimes wander late at night through the extinct pages that tell their stone dead messages like wooden rosary beads. 134 135