The Fictions of Bruno Schulz

by Bruno Schulz

  SANATORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS THE AGE OF GENIUS 3 At Easter time, usually at the end of March or the beginning of April, Shloma, the son of Tobias, was released from prison, where he had been locked up for the winter after the brawls and follies he had been involved in during the summer and autumn. One afternoon that spring I saw him from the window leasing the barber who in our town combined the functions of hairdresser and surgeon; I watched him carefully open the shining glass-paned door of the shop and descend the three wooden steps. He looked fresh and somehow younger, his hair carefully cut. He was wearing a jacket that was too short and too tight for him and a pair of checked trousers; slim and youthful in spite of his forty years. Trinity Square was at that time empty and tidy. After the spring thaw the slush had been rinsed away by torrential rains that had left the pavements washed clean. The thaw was followed by many days of quiet, discreet fine weather, with long spacious days stretching beyond measure into evenings when dusk seemed endless, empty, and fallow in its enormous expectations. When Shloma had shut the glass door of the barber's after himself, the sky filled it at once, just as it filled all the small windows of the one-storey house. Having come down the steps, he found himself completely alone on the edge of the large, empty square, which that afternoon seemed shaped like a gourd; like a new, unopened year. Shloma stood on its threshold, grey and extinguished, steeped in blueness and incapable of making a decision that would break the perfect roundness of an unused day. Only once a year, on his discharge from prison, did Shloma feel so clean, unburdened, and new. Then the day received him unto itself, washed from sin, renewed, reconciled with the world, and with a sigh it opened before him the spotless orbs of its horizons. Shloma did not hurry. He stood at the edge of the day and did not dare cross it, or advance with his small, youthful, slightly limping steps into the gently vaulted conch of the afternoon. A translucent shadow lay over the city. The silence of that third hour after midday extracted from the walls of houses the pure whiteness of chalk and spread it voicelessly, like a pack of cards. Having dealt one round, it began a second, drawing reserves of whiteness from the large baroque facade of the Church of the Holy Trinity, which, like an enormous divine shift fallen from heaven, folded itself into pilasters, projections, and embrasures and puffed itself up into the pathos of volutes and archvolutes before coming to rest on the ground. Shloma lifted his face and sniffed the air. The gentle breeze carried the scent of oleanders, of cinnamon, and of festive interiors. Then he sneezed noisily, and his famous powerful sneeze frightened the pigeons on the roof of the police station so that they panicked and flew away. Shloma smiled to himself: by the explosion of his nostrils God must have given him a sign that spring was here. This was a surer sign than the arrival of storks, and from then on days would be interrupted by these detonations, which, lost in the hubbub of the city, would punctuate its events from various directions like a witty commentary. `Shloma,' I called out from our low first-floor window. Shloma noticed me, smiled his pleasant smile, and saluted. 'We are alone in the whole square, you and I,' I said softly, because the inflated globe of the sky resounded like a barrel. `You and I,' he repeated with a sad smile. `How empty is the world today! ' We could have divided it between us and renamed it, so open, unprotected, and unattached was the world. On such a day the Messiah advances to the edge of the horizon and looks down on the earth. And when He sees it, white, silent, surrounded by azure and contemplation, He may lose sight of the boundary of clouds that arrange themselves into a passage, and, not knowing what He is doing, He may descend upon earth. And in its reverie the earth won't even notice Him, who has descended onto its roads, and people will wake up from their afternoon nap remembering nothing. The whole event will be rubbed out, and everything will be as it has been for centuries, as it was before history began. `Is Adela in?' Shloma asked with a smile. `There is no one at home, come up for a moment and I'll show you my drawings. ' 'If there is no one in, I shall do so with pleasure if you will open the door. ' And looking left and right in the gateway, with the gait of a sneak thief he entered the house. 146 147

  The Fictions of Bruno Schulz

  SANATORIUM UNDER THE SIGN 01 , THE HOURGLASS THE AGE OF GENIUS 4 `These are wonderful drawings,' Shloma said, stretching out his arm with the gesture of an art connoisseur. His face lit up with the reflection of colour and light. Then he folded his hand round his eve and looked through this improvised spyglass, screwing up his features in a grimace of earnest appreciation. `One might say,' he said, `that the world has passed through your hands in order to renew itself, in order to moult in them and shed its scales like a wonderful lizard. Ah, do you think I would be stealing and committing a thousand follies if the world weren't so outworn and decayed, with everything in it without its gilding, without the distant reflection of divine hands? What can one do in such a world? How can one not succumb and allow one's courage to fail when everything is shut tight, when all meaningful things are walled up, and when you constantly knock against bricks, as against the walls of a prison? Ah, Joseph, you should have been born earlier.' We stood in the semidarkness of my vast room, elongated in perspective toward the window opening on the square. Waves of air reached us in gentle pulsations, settling down on the silence. Each wave brought a new load of silence, seasoned with the colours of distance, as if the previous load had already been used up and exhausted. That dark room came to life only by the reflections of the houses far beyond the window, showing their colours in its depth as in a camera obscura. Through the window one could see, as through a telescope, the pigeons on the roof of the police station, puffed up and walking along the cornice of the attic. At times they rose up all at once and flew in a semicircle over the square. The room brightened for a moment with their fluttering wings, broadened with the echo of their flight, and then darkened when they settled down again. `To you, Shloma,' I said, `I can reveal the secret of these drawings. From the very start I had some doubts whether it was really I who made them. Sometimes they seem to me unintentional plagiarism, something, that has been suggested to me or remembered . . . As if something outside me had used my inspiration for an unknown purpose. For I must confess to you,' I added softly, looking into his eyes, `I have found the great Original .. `The Original?' he asked, and his face lit up. `Yes indeed, look for yourself,' I said kneeling in front of a chest of drawers. I first took out from it Adela's silk dress, then a box of her ribbons, and finally her new shoes with high heels. The smell of powder and scent filled the air. I took out some books: in the bottom of the drawer lay the long unseen, precious, beloved script. `Shloma,' I said trembling with emotion, `look, here it is .. But he was deep in thought, with one of Adela 's shoes in his hand, looking at it meditatively. ` God did not say anything of the kind,' he said, `and yet my convic- tion is total. I cannot find any arguments to the contrary. These lines are irresistible, amazingly accurate, and final, and like lightning illuminate the very centre of things. How can you plead innocence, how can you resist when you yourself have been bribed, outvoted, and betrayed by your most loyal allies. The six days of Creation were divine and bright. But on the seventh day God broke down. On the seventh day he felt an unknown texture under his fingers, and fright- ened, he withdrew his hands from the world, although his creative fervour might have lasted for many more days and nights. Oh, Joseph, beware the seventh day .. And lifting up with awe Adela's slim shoe, he spoke as if seduced by the lustrous eloquence of that empty shell of patent leather. `Do you understand the horrible cynicism of this symbol on a woman's foot, the provocation of her licentious walk on such elaborate heels? How can i leave you under the sway of that symbol? God forbid that I sho•ald do it .. Saving this, his skilful fingers stuffed Adela's shoes, dress, and beads into his pocket. 'What are you doing, Shloma?' But he was already moving quickly toward the door, limping slightly, his checked trousers flapping round his legs. In the doorway he turned his grey, already indistinct face towards me and lifted his hand in a reassuring gesture. And then he was gone. 148 149
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  SPRING Spring 1 This is the story of a certain spring that was more real, more dazzling and brighter than any other spring, a spring that took its text seriously: an inspired script, written in the festive red of sealing wax and of calendar print, the red of coloured pencils and of enthusiasm, the amaranth of happy telegrams from far away .. . Each spring begins like this, with stunning horoscopes reaching beyond the expectations of a single season. In each spring there is everything: processions and manifestations, revolutions and barri- cades. Each brings with it, at a given moment, the hot wind of frenzy, an infinity of sadnesses and delights that seek in vain their equivalents in reality. Later on, these exaggerations, culminations, and ecstasies are trans- formed into blossoming, into the trembling of cool leaves, and are absorbed by the tumultuous rustling of gardens. In this way springs betray their promise; each of them, engrossed in the breathless murmur of flowering parks, forgets its pledges and sheds, one by one, the leaves of its testament. But that particular spring had the courage to endure, to keep its promise and bond. After many unsuccessful efforts, it succeeded in acquiring a permanent shape and burst upon the world as the ultimate all-embracing spring. Oh that winds of events, that hurricane of happenings: the successful coups d'etat, those grandiose, triumphant, highfalutin days! How I wish that the pace of this story would catch their entrancing, inspired beat, the heroic tone of that epic, the marching rhythm of that springlike `Marseillaise ' ! How boundless is the horoscope of spring! One can read it in a thousand different ways, interpret it blindly, spell it out at will, happy to be able to decipher anything at all amid the misleading divinations of birds. The text can be read forwards or backwards, lose its sense and find it again in many versions, in a thousand alternatives. Because the text of spring is marked by hints, ellipses, lines dotted on an empty azure, and because the gaps between the syllables are filled by the frivolous guesses and surmises of birds, my story, like that test, will follow many different tracks and will be punctuated by springlike dashes, sighs, and dots. 2 During those wild spacious nights that preceded the spring, when the sky was vast, still raw and unscented, and aerial byways led into the starry infinite, my father sometimes took me out to supper in a small garden restaurant hidden between the back walls of the farthest houses of the market square. We walked in the damp light of streetlamps hissing in the wind, cutting across the large expanse of the square, forlorn, crushed by the immensity of the sky, lost and disoriented by its empty vastness. My father lifted his face bathed in the scanty light and looked anxiously at the starry grit scattered among the shallows of heavenly eddies. Their irregular and countless agglomerations were not yet ordered into constellations, and no figures emerged from the sterile pools. 150 151

  S.ANXI'ORII;Ni L'DF.R THE SIGN OF Tl lh }R .'RGI.ASS SPRIN The sadness of the starlit space lay heavily over the town, the lamps pierced the night below with beams of light, tying them haphazardly into knots. Under these lamps, passers-In stopped in groups of two or three in the circle of light, which for a short moment looked like the glow of a lamp over a dining table, although the night was indif- ferent and unfriendly, dividing the sky into wild airscapes, exposed to the blows of a homeless wind. Conversations faltered; under the deep shadow of their hats people smiled with their eves and listened dreamily to the distant hum of the stars. The paths in the restaurant garden were covered with gravel. Iwo standard lamps hissed gently. Gentlemen in black track coats sat in twos or threes at tables covered with white cloths, looking dully at the polished plates. Sitting thus, they calculated mentally the moves on the g' eat chess hoard of the sk_,' each seeing with his mind's eve t'. jumping knights and lost pawns of which new constellations immed atciy took the place. Musicians on the rostrum dipped their moustaches in mugs of hilt( r beer and sat around idly, deep in thought. Their violins and nobly shaped cellos lay neglected under the voiceless downpour of the stars. From time to time tine of them would reach for his instrument nc~ to tuning it plaintively to harmonize with his discreet coughin g . Then he would put it aside as if it were not vet ready, not vet measuring up to the night. which flowed along unheeding. And then, as the knives and forks began to clank soft.iv above the white table- cloths, the violins would rise alone, now suddenly mature although tentative and unsure just a short while before; slim and narrow- waisted, they eloquently proceeded with their task, took up again the lost human cause, and pleaded before the indifferent tribunal of stars, now set in a sky on which the shapes of the instruments floated like water signs or fragments of ketis, unfinished lyres or swans, an inut - ton, thoughtless starry commentary on the margin of music. The town photographer, who had for some time been casting mean ingiul glances at us from a neighbouring table, joined us at last and sat down, putting his mug of beer on the table. 1 le smiled equivocally, 152 153

  SANATORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS SPRING fought with his own thoughts, snapped his fingers, losing again and again some elusive point. We had felt for some time that our impro- vised restaurant encampment under the auspices of distant stars was doomed to collapse miserably, unequal to the ever increasing demands of the night. What could we set against these bottomless wastes? The night simply cancelled our human undertaking, even though it was supported by the sound of the violins, and moved into the gap, shifting its constellations to their rightful positions. We looked at the disintegrating camp of tables, the battlefield of half-folded tablecloths and crumpled napkins, across which the night trod in triumph, luminous and immense. We got up as well, and our thoughts, forestalling our bodies, followed the movements of starry carts on their great and shiny paths. And so we walked off under the stars, anticipating with half-closed eyes the ever more splendid illuminations. Ah, the cynicism of such a triumphant night! Having taken possession of the whole sky, it now played dominoes in space, lazily and without calculation, indifferently losing or winning millions. Then, bored, it traced on the battlefield of overturned tiles transparent squiggles, smiling faces, the same smile in a thousand copies, which a moment later rose toward the stars, already eternal, and dispersed into starry indifference. On our way home we stopped at a pastry shop to get cakes. No sooner had we entered the white, icing sugar room than the night suddenly tensed up and became watchful lest we should escape. It waited for us patiently, outside the door, showing the unmoving stars through the window panes of the shop while we were inside selecting our cakes with great deliberation. It was then that I saw Bianca for the first time. She stood sideways in front of the counter with her governess; she was slim and linear in a white dress as if she had just left the zodiac. She did not turn her head but stood with the perfect poise of a young girl, eating a cream bun. I could not see her clearly, for the zigzags of starry lines still lingered under my eyelids. It was the first time that our still confused horoscopes had crossed, met, and dissolved in indifference. We did not anticipate our fate from that early aspect of the stars, and we left the shop casually, making the glass-fronted door raffle. The photographer, my father and I walked home in a roundabout way, through distant suburbs. The few houses there were small, and eventually houses disappeared altogether. We entered a climate of gentle warm spring; the silvery reflection of a young, violet moon just risen crept on the muddy path. That pre-spring night antedated itself, feverishly anticipating its later phases. The air, a short while before seasoned with the usual tartness of the time of year, became sweetly insipid, filled with the smell of rain, of damp loam, and of the first snowdrops that bloomed spectrally in the white, magic light. And it was strange that under that benevolent moon frogs' spawn did not spread on the silvery mud, that the night did not resound with a thousand gossiping mouths on those gravelled river banks saturated with shiny drops of sweet water. And one had to imagine the croaking of frogs in the night, which was filled with the murmur of subterranean springs, so that – after a moment of stillness – the moon might continue on its way and climb higher in the sky, spreading wide its whiteness, ever more luminous, more magical and transcendental. We walked thus unde
r the waxing moon. My father and the photographer half-carried me between them, for I was stumbling with tiredness and hardly able to walk. Our steps crunched in the moist sand. It had been a long time since I had slept while walking, and under my eyelids I now saw the whole phosphorescence of the sky, full of luminous signs, of signals and starry phenomena. At last we reached an open field. My father laid me down on a coat spread on the ground. With closed eyes I saw the sun, the moon, and eleven stars aligned in the sky and parading before me. `Bravo, Joseph!' my father exclaimed and clapped his hands in praise. I committed an unconscious plagiarism of another Joseph and the circumstances were not the same, but no one held it against me. My father, Jacob, shook his head and smacked his lips, and the photographer stood his tripod on the sand, pulled out his camera like a concertina, and hid himself entirely in the folds of its black cloth: he was photographing the strange phenomenon, a shining horoscope in the sky, while I, my head swimming in brightness, lay blinded on the ground and limply held up my dream to exposure. 3 The days became long, light, and spacious – maybe too spacious for their content, which was still poor and tenuous. They were days with an allowance for growth, days pale with boredom and impatience and 154 155