Inside the Head of Bruno Schulz (4 page)

Bruno nodded. He carefully closed the cigar box and put it on the desk. Then he placed the pencil in his notebook, closed it and said, in the detached voice of someone talking in his sleep, “What does Mrs Jakubowicz want from me, Theo? Why must I go to the school so late this evening? I told them I was sick.”

“You’re to take your punishment, Professor,” said the white dove.

“Be quiet!” the gray dove interrupted.

“I thought that Mrs Jakubowicz wasn’t angry with me anymore. Were you lying to me just now, boys?”

Theo and Hermann did not reply, and the other doves who had gathered on the window sill and the floor
abruptly stopped tripping back and forth, and looked in their direction quietly and in suspense.

“Punishment?” said Bruno. “What kind of punishment? What for?”

“Go on, Theo,” said the white dove, “tell him. If you don’t I will, but then I’m bound to get everything all muddled up. And then Mrs Jakubowicz will be angry with me and so will Professor Schulz.”

Theo sailed down from the lamp to the table, perched on Bruno’s hand, ran up the sleeve of his shirt, which was drenched with sweat, and settled on his shoulder. “But you must put your ear very close to me, Professor,” he said, “because I’d rather tell you quietly.”

Bruno did as his student asked, and then he heard a wild hissing and whistling deep in his ear. “She says,” whispered Theo, gently touching Bruno’s ear with his bony little beak again and again, “she says that you’re infecting us all with your melancholy. She thinks you are more afraid than anyone she has ever met, and that means it is likely that you will refuse to let us have what would probably be the best books a human being could ever write. Your pessimism is really intolerable, she says, you are a bad, bad—”

At this moment someone drummed loudly on the
basement door. The doves—including Theo—flew up in alarm, and some of them hit their heads on the basement ceiling. They were all flapping their wings frantically, and the room was immediately full of a cloud of tiny gray, white and brown feathers, and an unbearable smell like a birdcage.

“Mama wants to know whether you’re coming up to supper or not, Uncle Bruno,” cried Chaimele and Jacek from outside, as if with a single voice. “Or do you have to go to Stryj Street today?” They laughed, and their laughter sounded like a wave rolling swiftly up and breaking several times—and then, without waiting for Bruno’s answer, they ran noisily upstairs again. Seconds later, Bruno heard chairs being moved about in the kitchen above him, and the sound of knives and forks against Mama’s old Russian porcelain plates.

“Keep quiet, children,” said Bruno quietly to the doves, “and please don’t disturb me. Sit down somewhere in peace and think of something nice, like what presents you would like for Chanukah or for your birthday. I have to finish writing a letter in a hurry, so that I can post it later on my way to the school. Yes, thank you, that’s nice of you.”

The birds immediately calmed down. Most of them settled beside the long, narrow window, which was black as night, and put their well-formed little heads under their wings, like good children. A few fluttered through the open skylight into the darkness, and Theo and Hermann, beak by beak, cheek to cheek, made themselves comfortable on Bruno’s cigar box.

“It is now certain that the false Thomas Mann must be an agent of the Secret State Police,” wrote Bruno, after he had opened his notebook again, laid it neatly on the table and bent over it like a cat with its back arched, “and I suspect he will not leave our town until we have all lost our wits. It is truly very unpleasant to think of the Nazis exploiting your good name, very highly esteemed Dr Mann, and because you, as the voice of the alternative Germany, must be careful of your reputation, I wanted to warn you—”. Here Bruno suddenly stopped. He crossed out the last two sentences and began again: “Is it not terrible that the Nazis are misusing your good name? Terrible for you, Dr Mann, but also for me. Perhaps you are surprised that I write to you in German—I also speak it, but with a strong Podolian accent which unfortunately shows where I come from only too soon—and of course my love of
the German language has to do with you, and also the poems and books of Rilke, Joseph Roth and Franz Kafka, whose fine and mysterious novel
The Trial
I and my former and long-forgotten fiancée translated into Polish. During the war—and hardly any of my literary Polish friends know this, not even Gombrowicz—I spent many months in Vienna, where I studied architecture without much interest, preferring to sit and read in the great libraries. The flexible rules of the
Mishnah
, the almost inspired melancholy of the Preacher, the gentle clarity of the
Shulchan Aruch
? No, those were never in my line. I long, rather, with Malte Laurids Brigge and Gustav von Aschenbach, for an end that awaits us all, but whose beauty and moment in time we should be able to determine ourselves—because God may have a plan for us, but he leaves making it until the last minute. And that is why I am so angry with your double, and his superiors in Berlin who have sent him to us. These people act as if they knew what will happen tomorrow. What shocking presumption!”

As he wrote this sentence, Bruno began sweating even more. He tore open his shirt, buttons flew across the table like shots, and Theo and Hermann, beating their wings, avoided them and then settled again on
the cigar box, which was now covered with their white droppings. Bruno carefully removed the pages he had written in the last few hours from his notebook; from the drawer of Papa’s desk he took a manuscript and an envelope, which already bore an address in Zürich and a stamp, and put the manuscript into it. He skimmed the letter, nodding with satisfaction several times, smiling and stroking his cheeks, and then he added a few last sentences. He wished Thomas Mann great success with the last volume of his story of
Joseph and his Brothers,
and asked him to read his, Bruno’s own story,
The Homecoming
, the first that he had written in German, and on this occasion he was permitting himself to send it to the great writer. “For many years, dear Dr Mann,” he concluded, “I have wished my books to appear in other countries as well, and perhaps you will like my story and see a way of helping me. Polish is a beautiful but very exclusive language, where you can choke as if on a single melon seed if you are not careful. I know what you are thinking now! No, I do not believe there is any point in waiting until even more Germans follow your double to these parts. I hope they will not come at all, and any who do come will certainly not be lovers of literature. Thank you, highly esteemed Dr Mann,
for taking the time to read my letter, although you certainly have more important things to do. You have no idea how much your attention means to me. With the greatest respect, your very sad and very devoted Bruno Schulz.”

Bruno put the letter in the envelope and sealed it. He got to his feet, went over to the little mirror with the white frame that hung beside the door, its paint peeling off, for a while he looked at his attractive, clever, triangular face, which suddenly seemed to him as gray as old newspaper, he tapped the tips of his big sail-like ears two or three times, and smiled at himself, and then—because the heat in his belly was intolerable by now—he slowly began removing his last items of clothing. When he was entirely naked, he shooed Theo and Hermann off the dirty cigar box again and put it, shaking his head, in the bottom drawer of the desk. Then he picked up the envelope and told the two of them, who had settled in front of the door, “Come along, children, Mrs Jakubowicz is waiting for us!” He took the thick envelope between his teeth, growled impatiently, put out the light and fell on his knees. After he had opened the door he crawled on all fours, as quietly as possible, to the ground floor and
then—passing the door of Hania’s apartment, behind which there was loud argument, and the sound of furniture and china being thrown around—out into Florianska Street, where only a single street lamp was on. The other lights were just going out again with a faint flickering.

Theo and Hermann and the other doves obediently followed Bruno, tripping and whirring in the air all the time, and some of the birds were already waiting for him, on the icy pavement and in the black trees in front of the building. As he slowly set off towards the school—to reach the large, dark building of the Jagiełło High School, he had to crawl to Piłsudski Street and turn off when he came to the town park—all the doves rose into the air, which was much too warm for winter, at the same time and circled around him, half human, half animal, in ellipses large and small in the silvery dark. The soft, gentle beating of their spread wings calmed Bruno, and he imagined himself following them into the many-branching starry firmament of the heavens.

But after several hundred meters, Bruno suddenly caught sight of a blaze of red firelight over the nocturnal city, he heard the sound of motor engines and loud orders, and when he looked to left or right he
always saw, at the end of every alley, a gigantic, black, prehistoric insect running past on feet that rattled like tank tracks.

What’s that? he thought.

No answer came.

What’s that?

That is the army of Abimelech, Fear finally replied; it has come to destroy all who first made him king and remembered, only later, that he had murdered seventy of their brothers.

Oh, I see, said Bruno, of course, and he was very glad that Fear was finally talking to him again. Then he crawled on, thinking: I want Helena to start by putting the black Columbine mask on me, and tying my arms together behind my back with the Easter whips, and the rest is up to her. Although he had been on the move for almost an hour, he had only just reached the portico of the town park, he was breathing heavily, his knees were sore and bloody and the doves in the sky above Drohobycz flew one after another into the red firelight, where they burned like tinder.

B
RUNO SCHULZ
was a Polish-Jewish writer and artist. Born in 1892 in Drohobycz, Poland (now part of Ukraine), he worked for many years as an art teacher in his hometown. He published two collections of short fiction,
The Street of Crocodiles
and
Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass
. In 1942 he was killed by a Gestapo officer and much of his work, including a novel titled
The Messiah
, was lost. The little that remains has influenced numerous important writers, including J. M. Coetzee, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Salman Rushdie, David Grossman and Jonathan Safran Foer.

‘Schulz was incomparably gifted as an explorer of his own inner life’

J. M. COETZEE

‘A man of enormous artistic gifts and imaginative riches’

PHILIP ROTH

‘Bruno Schulz was one of the great writers, one of the great transmogrifiers of the world into words’

JOHN UPDIKE

‘I read Schulz’s stories and felt the gush of life’

DAVID GROSSMAN

C
AME THE YELLOW DAYS
OF
winter, filled with boredom. The rust-colored earth was covered with a threadbare, meager tablecloth of snow full of holes. There was not enough of it for some of the roofs and so they stood there, black and brown, shingle and thatch, arks containing the sooty expanses of attics—coal black cathedrals, bristling with ribs of rafters, beams, and spars—the dark lungs of winter winds. Each dawn revealed new chimney stacks and chimney pots which had emerged during the hours of darkness, blown up by the night winds: the black pipes of a devil’s organ. The chimney sweeps could not get rid of the crows which in the evening covered the branches of the trees around the church with living black leaves, then took off, fluttering, and came back, each clinging to its own place on its own branch, only to fly away at dawn in large flocks, like gusts of soot, flakes of dirt, undulating and fantastic, blackening with their insistent cawing the musty yellow streaks of light. The days hardened with cold and boredom like last year’s loaves of bread. One
began to cut them with blunt knives without appetite, with a lazy indifference.

Father had stopped going out. He banked up the stoves, studied the ever-elusive essence of fire, experienced the salty, metallic taste and the smoky smell of wintry salamanders that licked the shiny soot in the throat of the chimney. He applied himself lovingly at that time to all manner of small repairs in the upper regions of the rooms. At all hours of the day one could see him crouched on top of a ladder, working at something under the ceiling, at the cornices over the tall windows, at the counterweights and chains of the hanging lamps. Following the custom of house painters, he used a pair of steps as enormous stilts and he felt perfectly happy in that bird’s-eye perspective close to the sky, leaves and birds painted on the ceiling. He grew more and more remote from practical affairs. When my mother, worried and unhappy about his condition, tried to draw him into a conversation about business, about the payments due at the end of the month, he listened to her absentmindedly, anxiety showing in his abstracted look. Sometimes he stopped her with a warning gesture of the hand in order to run to a corner of the room, put his ear to a crack in the floor and, by
lifting the index fingers of both hands, emphasize the gravity of the investigation, and begin to listen intently. At that time we did not yet understand the sad origin of these eccentricities, the deplorable complex which had been maturing in him.

Mother had no influence over him, but he gave a lot of respectful attention to Adela. The cleaning of his room was to him a great and important ceremony, of which he always arranged to be a witness, watching all Adela’s movements with a mixture of apprehension and pleasurable excitement. He ascribed to all her functions a deeper, symbolic meaning. When, with young firm gestures, the girl pushed a long-handled broom along the floor, Father could hardly bear it. Tears would stream from his eyes, silent laughter transformed his face, and his body was shaken by spasms of delight. He was ticklish to the point of madness. It was enough for Adela to waggle her fingers at him to imitate tickling, for him to rush through all the rooms in a wild panic, banging the doors after him, to fall at last on the bed in the farthest room and wriggle in convulsions of laughter, imagining the tickling which he found irresistible. Because of this, Adela’s power over Father was almost limitless.

At that time we noticed for the first time Father’s passionate interest in animals. To begin with, it was the passion of the huntsman and the artist rolled into one. It was also perhaps a deeper, biological sympathy of one creature for kindred, yet different, forms of life, a kind of experimenting in the unexplored regions of existence. Only at a later stage did matters take that uncanny, complicated, essentially sinful and unnatural turn, which it is better not to bring into the light of day.

But it all began with the hatching out of birds’ eggs.

With a great outlay of effort and money, Father imported from Hamburg, or Holland, or from zoological stations in Africa, birds’ eggs on which he set enormous brood hens from Belgium. It was a process which fascinated me as well—this hatching out of the chicks, which were real anomalies of shape and color. It was difficult to anticipate—in these monsters with enormous, fantastic beaks which they opened wide immediately after birth, hissing greedily to show the backs of their throats, in these lizards with frail, naked bodies of hunchbacks—the future peacocks, pheasants, grouse, or condors. Placed in cotton wool, in baskets, this dragon brood lifted blind, walleyed heads on thin necks, croaking voicelessly from their dumb throats. My
father would walk along the shelves, dressed in a green baize apron, like a gardener in a hothouse of cacti, and conjure up from nothingness these blind bubbles, pulsating with life, these impotent bellies receiving the outside world only in the form of food, these growths on the surface of life, climbing blindfolded toward the light. A few weeks later, when these blind buds of matter burst open, the rooms were filled with the bright chatter and scintillating chirruping of their new inhabitants. The birds perched on the curtain pelmets, on the tops of wardrobes; they nestled in the tangle of tin branches and the metal scrolls of the hanging lamps.

While Father pored over his large ornithological textbooks and studied their colored plates, these feathery phantasms seemed to rise from the pages and fill the rooms with colors, with splashes of crimson, strips of sapphire, verdigris, and silver. At feeding time they formed a motley, undulating bed on the floor, a living carpet which at the intrusion of a stranger would fall apart, scatter into fragments, flutter in the air, and finally settle high under the ceilings. I remember in particular a certain condor, an enormous bird with a featherless neck, its face wrinkled and knobbly. It was an emaciated ascetic, a Buddhist lama, full of imperturbable dignity
in its behavior, guided by the rigid ceremonial of its great species. When it sat facing my father, motionless in the monumental position of ageless Egyptian idols, its eyes covered with a whitish cataract which it pulled down sideways over its pupil to shut itself up completely in the contemplation of its dignified solitude—it seemed, with its stony profile, like an older brother of my father’s. Its body and muscles seemed to be made of the same material, it had the same hard, wrinkled skin, the same desiccated bony face, the same horny, deep eye sockets. Even the hands, strong in the joints, my father’s long, thick hands with their rounded nails, had their counterpart in the condor’s claws. I could not resist the impression, when looking at the sleeping condor, that I was in the presence of a mummy—a dried-out, shrunken mummy of my father. I believe that even my mother noticed this strange resemblance, although we never discussed the subject. It is significant that the condor used my father’s chamber pot.

Not content with the hatching out of more and more new specimens, my father arranged the marriages of birds in the attic, he sent out matchmakers, he tied up eager attractive birds in the holes and crannies under the roof, and soon the roof of our house, an enormous
double-rigged shingle roof, became a real birds’ hostel, a Noah’s ark to which all kinds of feathery creatures flew from far afield. Long after the liquidation of the birds’ paradise, this tradition persisted in the avian world and during the period of spring migration our roof was besieged by whole flocks of cranes, pelicans, peacocks, and sundry other birds. However, after a short period of splendor, the whole undertaking took a sorry turn.

It soon became necessary to move my father to two rooms at the top of the house which had served as storage rooms. We could hear from there, at dawn, the mixed clangor of birds’ voices. The wooden walls of the attic rooms, helped by the resonance of the empty space under the gables, sounded with the roar, the flutterings, the crowing, the gurgling, the mating cries. For a few weeks Father was lost to view. He only rarely came down to the apartment and, when he did, we noticed that he seemed to have shrunk, to have become smaller and thinner. Occasionally forgetting himself, he would rise from his chair at table, wave his arms as if they were wings, and emit a long-drawn-out bird’s call while his eyes misted over. Then, rather embarrassed, he would join us in laughing it off and try to turn the whole incident into a joke.

One day, during spring cleaning, Adela suddenly appeared in Father’s bird kingdom. Stopping in the doorway, she wrung her hands at the fetid smell that filled the room, the heaps of droppings covering the floor, the tables, and the chairs. Without hesitation, she flung open the window and, with the help of a long broom, she prodded the whole mass of birds into life. A fiendish cloud of feathers and wings arose screaming, and Adela, like a furious maenad protected by the whirlwind of her thyrsus, danced the dance of destruction. My father, waving his arms in panic, tried to lift himself into the air with his feathered flock. Slowly the winged cloud thinned until at last Adela remained on the battlefield, exhausted and out of breath, along with my father, who now, adopting a worried hangdog expression, was ready to accept complete defeat.

A moment later, my father came downstairs—a broken man, an exiled king who had lost his throne and his kingdom.