The Fictions of Bruno Schulz

by Bruno Schulz

  SANA'T'ORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS THE BOOK The exegetes of The Book maintain that all books aim at being Authentic. That they live only a borrowed life, which at the moment of inspiration returns to its ancient source. This means that as the number of books decreases, the Authentic must increase. However, we don't wish to tire the reader with an exposition of doctrine. We should only like to draw his attention to one thing: the Authentic lives and grows. What does this mean? Well, perhaps next time, when we open our old script, we may not find Anna Csillag and her devotees in their old place. Perhaps we shall see her, the long-haired pilgrim, sweeping with her cloak the roads of Moravia, wandering in a distant land, through white villages steeped in prose and drabness, and distri- buting samples of Elsa's balm to God's simpletons who suffer from sores and itches. Ah, and what about the worthy village beavers, immobilized by their enormous beards? What will that loyal commune do, condemned to the care and administration of their excessive growths? Who knows, perhaps they will all purchase the genuine Black Forest barrel organs and follow their lady apostle into the world, looking for her everywhere while playing `Daisy, Daisy'? Oh Odyssey of beavers, roaming from town to town with barrel organs in pursuit of your spiritual mother! Is there a bard equal to this epic subject, who has been left in their village and is now wielding the spiritual power in Anna Csillag's birthplace? Couldn't they foresee that, deprived of their elite, of their splendid patriarchs, the village will fall into doubt and apostasy and will open its gates — to whom? Whom but the cynical and perverse Magda Wang (published by the Anthroposophical Institute of Budapest), who will open there a school of human dressage and breaking of character? But let us return to our pilgrims. We all know that old guard of wandering Cumbrians, those black- haired men with apparently powerful bodies, made of tissue without brawn or vigour. Their whole strength, their whole power, has gone into their hair. Anthropologists have been pondering for a long time over that peculiar tribe of men always clad in dark suits, with thick, silver chains dangling on their stomachs, with fingers adorned with brass signet rings. I like them, these Caspars or Balthazars; I like their deep serious- ness, their funereal decorativeness; I like those magnificent male speci- mens with beautiful glossy eyes like burnt coffee beans; I like the noble lack of vitality in their overblown and spongy bodies, the morbidezza of decadence, the wheezing breath that comes from their powerful lungs, and even the smell of valerian emanating from their beards. Like angels of the Presence, they sometimes appear suddenly in the door of our kitchen, enormous and short of breath, and, quickly tired, they wipe off perspiration from their damp brows while rolling the bluish whites of their eyes; for a moment they forget the object of their mission, and, astonished, looking for an excuse, a pretext for their arrival, they stretch out a hand and beg for alms. Let's return to the Authentic. We have never forsaken it. And here we must stress a strange characteristic of the script, which by now no doubt has become clear to the reader: it unfolds while being read, its boundaries open to all currents and fluctuations. Now, for instance, no one is offering goldfinches from the Harz Mountains, for from the barrel organs of those dark men the feathery little singers fly out at irregular intervals, and the market square is covered with them as with coloured twigs. Ah, what a multiplication of shimmering chattering birds! . . . On all the cornices and flagpoles, colourful bottlenecks are formed by birds fluttering and fighting for position. If you push out of the window the crook of a walking stick, 136 137

  SANATORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS THE BOOK it will be covered with a chirping, heavy bunch of birds before you can draw it back into your room. We are now quickly approaching the magnificent and catastrophic part of our story, which in our biography is known as the Age of Genius. Here we must for a moment go completely esoteric, like Signor Bosco of Milan, and lower our voices to a penetrating whisper. By meaningful smiles we must give point to our exposition and grind the delicate substance of imponderables between the tips of our fingers. It won't be our fault if sometimes we shall look like those merchants of invisible fabrics, who display their fake goods with elaborate gestures. Well then, did the Age of Genius ever occur? It is difficult to answer this question. Yes and no. There are things that cannot ever occur with any precision. They are too big and too magnificent to be contained in mere facts. They are merely trying to occur, they are checking whether the ground of reality can carry them. And they quickly withdraw, fearing to lose their integrity in the frailty of realization. And if they break into their capital, lose a thing or two in these attempts at incarnation, then soon, jealously, they retrieve their possessions, call them in, reintegrate: as a result, white spots appear in our biography — scented stigmata, the faded silvery imprints of the bare feet of angels, scattered footmarks on our nights and days — while the fullness of life waxes, incessantly supplements itself, and towers over us in wonder after wonder. And yet, in a certain sense, the fullness is contained wholly and integrally in each of its crippled and fragmentary incarnations. This is the phenomenon of imagination and vicarious being. An event may be small and insignificant in its origin, and yet, when drawn close to one 's eye, it may open in its centre an infinite and radiant perspective because a higher order of being is trying to express itself in it and irradiates it violently. Thus we shall collect these allusions, these earthly approximations, these stations and stages on the paths of our life, like the fragments of a broken mirror. We shall recreate piece by piece what is one and indivisible — the great era, the Age of Genius of our life. Perhaps in an attempt at diminution, overawed by the immensity of the transcendental, we have circumscribed, questioned, and doubted too much. Yet, despite all reservations: it did occur. It was a fact, and nothing can shake our certainty of it: we can still feel its taste on our tongue, its cold fire on our palate, the width of its breath fresh like a draught of pure ultramarine. Have we to some extent prepared the reader for the things that will follow? Can we risk a return journey into our Age of Genius? The reader may have caught some of our stage fright: we can feel his anxiety. In spite of appearances our heart is heavy, and we are full of fear. In God's name, then — let's embark and go! 138 139

  THE AGE OF GENIUS 2 The Age of Genius 1 Ordinary facts are arranged within time, strung along its length as on a thread. There they have their antecedents and their consequences, which crowd tightly together and press hard one upon the other without any pause. This has its importance for any narrative, of which continuity and successiveness are the soul. Yet what is to be done with events that have no place of their own in time; events that have occurred too late, after the whole of time has been distributed, divided, and allotted; events that have been left in the cold, unregistered, hanging in the air, homeless, and errant? Could it be that time is too narrow for all events? Could it happen that all the seats within time might have been sold? Worried, we run along the train of events, preparing ourselves for the journey. For heaven's sake, is there perhaps some kind of bidding for time? Conductor, where are you? Don't let's get excited. Don't let's panic; we can settle it all calmly within our own terms of reference. Have you ever heard of parallel streams of time within a two-track time? Yes, there are such branch lines of time, somewhat illegal and suspect, but when, like us, one is burdened with contraband of super- numerary events that cannot be registered, one cannot be too fussy. Let us try to find at some point of history such a branch line, a blind track onto which to shunt these illegal events. There is nothing to fear. It will all happen imperceptibly: the reader won't feel any shock. Who knows? Perhaps even now, while we mention it, the doubtful manoeuvre is already behind us and we are, in fact, proceeding into a cul-de-sac. My mother rushed in, frightened and enfolded my screams with her arms, wanting to stifle them like flames and choke them in the warmth of her love. She closed my mouth with hers and screamed together with me. But I pushed her away, and, pointing to the column of fire, a golden bar that shot through the air like a splinter and would not disappear — full of brightness and spiralling dus
t specks — I cried: `Tear it out, tear it out!' The large coloured picture painted on the front of the stove grew blood red; it puffed itself up like a turkey, and in the convulsions of its veins, sinews, and all its swollen anatomy, it seemed to be bursting open, trying to liberate itself with a piercing crowing scream. I stood rigid like a signpost, with outstretched, elongated fingers, pointing in anger, in fierce concentration, hand trembling in ecstasy. My hand guided me, alien and pale, and pulled me after it, a stiff, waxen hand, like the large votive hands in churches, like angels' palms raised for an oath. It was towards the end of winter. The world had dissolved in puddles, but sudden waves of heat seemed full of fire and pepper. The honeysweet pulp of day was cut into silvery furrows, into prisms filled with colours and spicy piquancies. Noonday collected within a short space the whole fire of these days and all the moments that glowed. At that hour, unable to contain the heat, the day shed its scales of silvery tinplate, of crunchy tinfoil, and, layer after layer, disclosed its core of solid brightness. And as if this were not enough, chimneys smoked and billowed with lustrous steam. The bright flanks of the sky exploded into white plumes, banks of clouds dispersed under the shell-fire of an invisible artillery. The window facing the sky swelled with those endless ascents, the curtains stood in flames, smoking in the fire, spilling golden shadows and shimmering spirals of air. Askew on the carpet lay a quadrilateral of brightness that could not detach itself from the floor. That bar of fire disturbed me deeply. I stood transfixed, legs astride, and barked short, hard curses at it in an alien voice. In the doorway and in the hall stood frightened, perplexed people: 140 141

  SANATORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS THE AGE OF GENIUS relatives, neighbours, overdressed aunts. They approached on tiptoe and turned away, their curiosity unsatisfied. And I screamed: `Don't you remember?' I shouted to my mother, to my brother. `I have been telling you that everything is held back, tamed, walled in by boredom, unliberated! And now look at that flood, at that flowering, at that bliss .. And I shed tears of happiness and helplessness. `Wake up,' I shouted, `come and help me! How can I face this flood alone, how can I deal with this inundation? How can I, all alone, answer the million dazzling questions that God is swamping me with?' And as they remained silent, I cried in anger: ` Hurry up, collect bucketfuls of these riches, store them up!' But nobody could assist me; bewildered, they looked over their shoulders, hiding behind the backs of neighbours. Then I realized what I had to do; I began to pull from the cupboards old Bibles and my father's half-filled and disintegrating ledgers, throwing them on the floor under that column of fire that glowed and brightened the air. I wanted more and more sheaves of paper. My mother and brother rushed in with ever new handfuls of old news- papers and magazines and threw then.' in stacks on the floor. And I sat among the piles of paper, blinded by the glare, my eyes full of explosions, rockets, and colours, and I drew wildly, feverishly, across the paper, over the printed or figure-covered pages. My coloured pencils rushed in inspiration across columns of illegible text in masterly squiggles, in breakneck zigzags that knotted themselves suddenly into anagrams of vision, into enigmas of bright revelation, and then dissolved into empty, shiny flashes of lightning, following imaginary tracks. Oh, those luminous drawings, made as if by a foreign hand. Oh, those transparent colours and shadows. How often, now, do I dream about them, then rediscover them after so many years at the bottom of old drawers, glimmering and fresh like dawn – still damp from the first dew of the day: figures, landscapes, faces! Oh, those blues that stop your breath with the pang of fear. Oh, those greens greener than wonder. Oh, those preludes of anticipated colours waiting to be given a name! Why did I squander them at the time with such wanton carelessness in the richness of surfeit? I allowed the neighbours to rummage about and plunder these stacks of drawings. They carried away whole sheaves of them. In what houses did they finally land, which rubbish heaps did they fill? Adela hung them up in the kitchen like wallpaper until the room became light and bright as if snow had fallen during the night. The drawings were full of cruelty, pitfalls and aggression. While I sat on the floor taut as a bow, immobile and lurking, the papers around me glowed brightly in the sun. It was enough if a drawing, pinned down by the tip of my pencil, made the slightest move towards escape, for my hand, trembling with new impulses and ideas, to attack it like a cat. Fierce and rapacious, I would, with lightning bites, savage the creation that tried to escape from under my crayon. And that crayon only left the paper when the now dead and immobile corpse displayed its colourful and fantastic anatomy on the page, like a plant in a herbal. It was a murderous pursuit, a fight to the death. Who could tell the attacker from the attacked in that tangle that spluttered with rage, with squeaks and fears? At times my hand would start to attack twice or three times in vain, only to reach its victim on the fourth or fifth attempt. Often it winced in pain and fear in the fangs and pincers of the monsters writhing under my scalpel. From hour to hour the visions became more crowded, bottlenecks arose, until one day all roads and byways swarmed with processions and the whole land was divided by meandering or marching columns – endless pilgrimages of beasts and animals. As in Noah's day, colourful processions would flow, rivers of hair and manes, of wavy backs and tails, of heads nodding monotonously in time with their steps. My room was the frontier and the tollgate. Here they stopped, tightly packed, bleating imploringly. They wriggled, shuffling their feet anxiously: humped and horned creatures, encased in the varied costumes and armours of zoology and frightened of each other, scared by their own disguises, looking with fearful and astonished eyes through the camouflage of their hairy hides and mooing mournfully, as if gagged under their attires. Did they expect me to name them and solve their riddle? Or did they ask to be christened so that they could enter into their names and fill them with their being? Strange monsters, question-mark apparitions, blue-print creatures appeared, and I had to scream and wave my hands to chase them away. 142 143

  SANA'T'ORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS THE AGE OF GENIUS They withdrew backwards lowering their heads, looking askance, lost within themselves; then they returned, dissolving into chaos, a rubbish dump of forms. How many straight or humped backs passed at that time under my hand, how many heads did my hand touch with a velvety caress! I understood then why animals have horns: perhaps to introduce an element of strangeness into their lives, a whimsical or irrational joke. An die fixe, transgressing the limits of their being, reaching high above their heads and emerging suddenly into light, frozen into matter palpable and hard. It then acquired a wild, incredible, and unpredict- able shape, an arabesque, invisible to their eyes yet frightening, an unknown cypher under the threat of which they are forced to live. I understood why these animals are given to irrational and wild panic, to the frenzy of a stampede: pushed into madness, they are unable to extricate themselves from the tangle of these horns, between which – when they lower their heads – they peer wildly or sadly, as if trying to find a passage between the branches. These homed animals have no hope of deliverance and carry on their heads the stigma of their sin with sadness and resignation. The cats were even further removed from light. Their perfection was frightening. Enclosed in the precision and efficiency of their bodies, they did not know either fault or deviation. They would descend for a moment into the depths of their being, then become immobile within their soft fur, solemnly and threateningly serious, while their eyes became round like moons, sucking the visible into their fiery craters. But a moment later, thrown back to the surface, they would yawn away their vacuity, disenchanted and without illusions. In their lives full of self-sufficient grace, there was no place for any alternative. Bored by this prison of perfection, seized with spleen, they spat with their wrinkled lips, while their broad, striped faces expressed an abstract cruelty. Lower down martens, polecats, and foxes sneaked stealthily by, thieves among animals, creatures with a bad conscience. They had reached their place in life by cunning, intrigue and trickery, against the intent of their Creator and, pursued by hatred,
always threatened, always on their guard, always in fear for that place, they passionately loved their furtive, stealthy existence and prepared to be torn to pieces in its defence. At last, all the processions had filed past, and silence fell on my room once more. I again began to draw, engrossed in my papers that breathed brightness. The v'indow was open, and on the windowsill doves and pigeons shivered in the spring breeze. Turning their heads to one side, they showed their round and glassy eyes in profile, as if afraid and full of flight. The days towards their end became soft, -,patine, and translucent, then again pearly and full of a misty sweetness. Faster came, and my parents went away for a week to visit my married sister. I was left alone in the flat, a pre y to my inspirations. Adela brought me breakfast and dinner on a tray. did not notice her nresence when she stopped in the doorway in her Sunday best, smelling of spring in her tulles and silks. I hrough the open window gentle breezes entered the room, filling it .with the reflections of distant landscapes. For a moment the colours jf distance stayed in the air, but not for long; they soon dispersed, dissolving into blue shadows, tender and gentle. The flood of paintings receded a little, the waters of imagination quieted and abated. I sat on the floor. Spread out around me were my crayons and buttons of paint: godly colours, azures breathing freshness, greens straying to the limits of the possible. And when I took a red crayon in my hand, happy fanfares of crimson marched out into the world, all balconies brightened with red waving flags, and whole houses arranged themselves along streets into a triumphant lane. Processions of city firemen in cherry red uniforms paraded in brightly lighted happy streets ; and gentlemen lifted their strawberry-coloured bowlers in greeting. Cherry red sweetness and cherry red chirping of finches filled the air scented with lay ender. And when I reached for blue paint, the reflection of a cobalt spring fell on all the windows along the street; the panes trembled, one after the other, full of azure and heavenly fire; curtains waved as if alerted; and a joyful draft rose in that lane between muslin curtains and oleanders on the empty balconies, as if somebody distant had appeared from the other side of a long and bright avenue and was now approaching, somebody luminous, preceded by good tidings, by premonitions, announced by the flight of swallows, by beacons of fire spreading mile after mile. 144 145