The Big Book of Classic Fantasy

by The Big Book of Classic Fantasy (retail) (epub)

  “So?”

  “Come on, Rose-Cold. The Great Bear is shivering impatiently, and out there in the stands the Three Marias are chatting to Sirius and Altair. Aldebaran has said he’ll be along a little later, when he can convince Boötes of something or other, and the Milky Way is asking for a discount to get in with all her children.”

  Rose-Cold wanted to leave. The stars made the snow shine. The pine trees slid around, looking for a good vantage point.

  Rose-Cold called to the cow.

  “Come on, dear little cow, you know I can’t skate; I’ve just put my foot in an ice-hole and I’ve twisted my ankle.”

  Everyone was very shocked at this. They sent the seals flopping across the ice: they are much more stable because they move more slowly.

  “Send for the doctors!”

  The walruses came, with their white spectacles, in a sledge with a green flag.

  “Ow, ow!”

  They looked at her foot. They looked at it all over. The Moon, very sad, called for the reindeer:

  “Send for the reindeer!”

  The reindeer came, wearing surgeons’ aprons and with rubber gloves on their hooves.

  They spoke to one another in Latin.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing. No, Miss Moon; I mean there’s nothing wrong with her.”

  “Ow, ow! I got a snowflake in my eye!” shouted Rose-Cold.

  “Send for the Aurora Borealis!”

  The Aurora Borealis had a remedy made from distilled water that he poured down an albatross’s beak.

  “It’s nothing.” He stroked her hair. “It’s nothing. You’ll be able to run the Four Seasons Cup before you know it.”

  “Come here, my little cow, you who love children so much. Call for the Wild Mistral Wind; I want to give him an errand.”

  “The stars are getting impatient and are calling for whisky to warm themselves up.”

  “Oh, let them drink whatever they want! Little cow, call for the Wild Mistral Wind.”

  The Moon was furious, and argued with Smoke from Factories, which turned red with anger. The Mistral came.

  “Oh, Wild Mistral Wind, call the pine trees over with your soft hands; wake them up; tell them that Rose-Cold will die on the Moon if they don’t help her.”

  The doctors gathered together again.

  “Nothing, Miss Moon. There’s nothing wrong with her.”

  The stars were spinning round now, just to have something to do. Their orbiting made them dizzy, and they got cross.

  The pine trees started to climb up from the earth. They got to the tops of mountains. Long chains of ice hung from their watch-pockets. The Mistral whispered:

  “They are here, Rose-Cold.”

  “Oh, Wild Wind, good Wild Wind, call the winter wolves. Put them on your shoulders, and quickly, because Rose-Cold needs them.”

  And the wolves came, with their long tails dragging behind, like soldiers with their sabers, and they stood behind the rows of seats.

  “You are fine now, Rose-Cold. Put on your skates.”

  “Little cow, before I do that, bring me my handkerchief, where my mirror is folded away.”

  Moon moved her horns quickly to get all the skaters together. They made a very surprising line. Each one had chosen his own color. Human Sighs, in their kitsch way, had decided to go in pink. A meteorite announced that the games had begun. The benches shook.

  “Run! Good! Faster! Run, Smoke from Factories!”

  Dogs Barking ran past quickly, and Glances at Balloons on Quiet Evenings passed by almost unseen.

  “Go for it! Go on, Rose-Cold!”

  They were going to beat her. The scarf, the skirt, the scarf…the scarf…the skirt…

  “Rose-Cold! Rose-Cold!”

  The scarf…the skirt slid down to the craters. Rose-Cold climbed up out of it. She was exhausted. She threw her mirror down onto the snow. The pines opened their arms to her. They caught Factory Smoke and Train Steam in their arms, and Horse Sweat, and Evaporation from Pools. The wolves leapt among the tree trunks and captured Dogs Barking and the Glances at Balloons. It was only the Sighs that carried on running, all in pink, sadly climbing a slope. They found the mirror at the top and stopped to look at themselves.

  Rose-Cold reached the finishing line, pushed along by a friendly wind. A beautiful constellation gave her the Four Seasons Cup. The Moon gave her a necklace made of lightning stones, and the stars gave her cinema tickets.

  “Little Cow, I’m tired; take me back to Earth.”

  The cow left her on her balcony. And it was already morning when the cow went back to the Moon, carried in a chicken’s beak.

  Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) was a writer and art teacher considered among the greatest Polish writers of his time. Known to be shy, rarely leaving his hometown, he wrote stories filled with vitality and curiosity about what he did know. Cinnamon Shops, also known as The Street of Crocodiles (1934), and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (1937) are two hard-to-classify collections written in a beautiful and luminous way. Not only did his writing and artwork have an influence on the culture, even his death inspired novels. Schulz was Jewish, and most believe that he was killed by an SS officer in a ghetto. This officer killed Schulz for no reason other than the fact that he did not like another officer who protected Schulz. In 1992, UNESCO announced the Year of Bruno Schulz, which commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of his death and the one hundredth anniversary of his birth.

  A Night of the High Season

  Bruno Schulz

  Translated by John Curran Davis

  EVERYBODY KNOWS that whimsical time, in the course of mundane and ordinary years, occasionally will bring forth from its womb other years, odd years, degenerate years, somewhere in which, like a little sixth finger upon a hand, a spurious thirteenth month sprouts up. Spurious, we say; for seldom will it grow to full size. Like late begotten children, it lags behind in its development, a hunchback month, a half-wilted offshoot, and more conjectured than real.

  The intemperance of summer’s age is to blame for it, its licentious, belated vitality. It often happens, though August has already gone by, that summer’s thick and hoary stem continues to burgeon, by force of habit, and from its touchwood it pushes out those wilding days, barren and idiotic weed days, and for good measure it throws in cabbage-stump days for free—empty and inedible, white, bewildered and unnecessary days.

  They sprout up, irregular and misshapen, formless and fused together, like the fingers of a monstrous hand, sprouting buds and coiled up into a fist.

  Others liken those days to apocrypha, slipped in furtively between the chapters of the great book of the year, to palimpsests inserted secretly among its pages, or to those white, unprinted sheets upon which one’s eyes, having read their fill and now replete with content, might be drained of visions and relinquish colors, ever paler on those empty pages, reposing on their nothingness before being drawn into the labyrinths of new adventures and chapters.

  Ah, that old, yellowed romance of the year! That great, crumbling book of the calendar! It lies forgotten, somewhere in the archives of time, where its contents continue to grow between the covers, endlessly swollen by months of garrulousness, a rapid autogeny of gibberish, all the storytelling and the reveries that multiply within it. Ah! And in writing down these stories of mine, arranging these tales of my father in the used up margin of its text, do I not yield to the secret hope that, someday, they will strike root imperceptibly between the faded leaves of that most magnificent, scattering book; that they will fall into the great rustle of its pages, which will enfold them?

  The matters of which we shall speak here took place then, in the thirteenth, supernumerary and somewhat spurious month of that year, on those dozen or so empty pages of the great chronicle of the calendar.

  The mornings w
ere strangely pungent and invigorating then. From a serene and cooler pace of time, an entirely new taste in the air, a change in the consistency of the light, it was plain to see that a different run of days had arrived, a new region of the Holy Year. One’s voice resonated beneath those skies with the sonorousness and freshness of a still new and unoccupied apartment, its aroma of lacquer and paint, incipient and speculative matters. That new echo was tested with a strange stirring of emotion, sliced into with curiosity, like a ring cake on some cool and sober morning, on the eve of a journey.

  My father was sitting once more in the rear office of the shop, a vaulted little chamber crisscrossed like a beehive into multi-cellular registries and endlessly shedding its layers of papers, letters, and invoices. The cross-ruled and empty existence of that room sprang from the rustling of those pages, the endless shuffling of those documents, and from the incessant sifting of those letters, with their innumerous company headings, an apotheosis was created in the air in the form of a factory town as birds in flight see it—bristling with smoking chimneys, surrounded by stacks of coins, its limits described by the flourishes and meanderings of grandiloquent &s and Sons.

  There sat Father on a high stool, as if in an aviary, while the dovecotes of the filing cabinets rustled their paper sheaves and all of their birds’ nests and tree-hollows chimed throughout with a twittering of numbers.

  The depths of the great shop were darkened and enriched every day with new supplies of cloth, serge, velvet, and cord. On those dark shelves, in those storehouses and repositories of cool, felty hues, the dark and mellow pageantry of things yielded its hundredfold interest, and autumn’s abundant capital was increased and consolidated. That capital grew larger and darker there, distributed ever more widely on the shelves as if in the galleries of some great theater, replenished and supplemented each morning with new consignments of merchandise, which arrived with the cool of the dawn in boxes and crates carried in on the great, bear-like shoulders of groaning, bearded porters, in mists of autumn freshness and vodka. The shop assistants unpacked those new supplies of lavish, deep-blue hues. They filled with them, neatly plugged with them, all of the chinks and gaps in the tall cupboards. It was a colossal register of all possible autumnal hues, ordered into layers and sorted into shades, running up and down as if on a ringing flight of stairs, a scale of all variegated octaves. It began at the bottom, where it plaintively and timidly ventured alto slides and semitones; it passed to the faded ashes of the distance, to Gobelin blues, and rising to the heights in ever broader harmonies, it arrived at deep royal azures, the indigo of distant forests, the plush of murmuring parks, and from there it entered the rustling shade of wilting gardens, through all of their ochres, rich reds, russets and sepias, finally to arrive at a dark aroma of mushrooms, a waft of touchwood in the depths of an autumn night, to the muted accompaniment of the deepest double basses.

  My father walked along those arsenals of the cloth autumn. He placated and silenced those hulks and their rising force, the calm power of the Season. He wanted to keep those reserves of stowed-away hues intact for as long as possible. He was reluctant to break up that endowment fund of the autumn and exchange it for ready cash. But he knew, he sensed, that the time was at hand and an autumn gale, ravaging and warm, would soon blow over those cupboards, and they would empty. There would be no restraining their outflow, those torrents of colourfulness about to burst over the whole town.

  For the time of the High Season was approaching, and the streets were growing busy. At six o’clock in the evening, the town blossomed with fervor. The houses blushed; the people wandered, animated by some inner fire, glaringly made up and painted, their eyes shining with some beautiful and evil, festival fever.

  In the side streets, in quiet alleyways leading nowhere now but into an evening district, the town was empty. Only the children were playing on the little squares, beneath their balconies. They played breathlessly, raucously, and nonsensically. They put tiny balloons to their lips, to inflate them, and suddenly, glaringly, to scowl themselves into great, gurgling, swashing excrescences, or to cock-a-doodle-doo themselves into stupid cockerel masks, autumn apparitions, red and crowing, colorful, fantastic and absurd. So puffed up and crowing, they seemed about to soar into the air in long, colored chains, to be strung over the town like autumn V formations of birds, fantastic flotillas of tissue-paper and autumnal weather, or they rode, screaming, on noisy little carts, which resounded with a colored rattling of wheels, spokes and poles. Loaded up with their screams, those carts rolled to the bottom of the street, all the way down to a yellow evening brook that surged in a crevice, where they fell to pieces in a wreckage of splinters, wheels and sticks.

  And as the children’s games grew noisier and more confused, the town’s blushes deepened and were flushed with crimson. The whole world suddenly began to wilt and blacken, and an hallucinatory twilight rapidly seeped out and infected everything. That pestilence of the twilight spread everywhere; it passed insidiously and venomously from place to place, and whatever it touched quickly moldered, blackened, and crumbled into dust. The people fled the twilight in silent panic, but that leprosy caught up with them at once, breaking out in a dark rash on their foreheads, and their faces were lost, falling away in great, shapeless smears as they ran, without features now, without eyes, casting off mask after mask until the twilight teemed with those discarded masks and dominoes, tumbling in the wake of their flight. Then everything began to develop a patina of putrefying black bark, infected scabs of darkness peeling away in great flakes. But as everything down below fell into confusion and ruin in that silent turmoil, in the panic of its hasty schedule, the silent alarum of sunset remained up above, rising ever higher and higher, trembling with the tinkling of a million silent bluebells, surging with the ascent of a million silent skylarks, all flying together into one great, silver infinity. And suddenly it was nighttime, holy night, still growing, the gusts of wind that swelled it still gathering their strength. In its multifarious labyrinth, bright nests were carved out—shops, great colored lanterns, heaped up with merchandise and filled with a bustle of customers. Through the bright panes of those lanterns, the ritual of autumn shopping could be discerned, noisy and full of bizarre ceremony.

  That great, voluminous autumn night, dilated by the wind, its shadows lengthening, concealed bright pockets in its dark folds, pouches of colored trinkets and gaudy merchandise, a grocer’s shop miscellany of chocolates and biscuits. Botched from confectionery boxes, brightly wallpapered with advertisements for chocolate bars, filled with tablets of soap, cheerful rubbish, golden trifles, tinfoil, trumpets, wafers, and colored mints, those kiosks and stalls were stations of frivolity, rattle-boxes of blitheness strewn along the creepers of an enormous, labyrinthine night flapping in the winds.

  Huge, dark crowds flowed in noisy confusion in the darkness, the shuffling of a thousand feet and the uproar of a thousand mouths, a teeming, tangled migration dragging along the arteries of the autumnal town. And that river flowed on, full of turmoil and dark looks, broken into conversations and shreds of gossip, a great pulp of rumors, laughter and tumult, as if dried autumnal poppy heads were moving in a crowd and scattering their seeds—rattlebox-heads, doorknocker-people.

  Restless, tinged with blushes, his eyes shining, my father wandered about the brightly lit shop, listening intently. Through the display window and portal, the noise of the town, the muffled hubbub of the flowing throng, arrived from afar. Above the silence of the shop, pendent from its great vault, a paraffin lamp shone brightly, and silently chased the last trace of shadow from every nook and cranny. The vast, empty floor crackled softly in its light, calculating, down and across, all of its gleaming squares, its chessboard of great tiles, which spoke to one another in a silence of crackles and replied, now here, now there, with a loud crack. But the layers of cloth lay quiet, voiceless in their felty downiness, passing looks back and forth behind Father’s back, all along the walls,
exchanging silent, knowing signs from cupboard to cupboard.

  Father listened. His ears seemed to grow elongated in that nocturnal silence, to branch out beyond the window like a fantastic coral, an undulating red polyp in the sediment of the night. He listened and he heard. He heard with growing unease the distant tide of the approaching crowd. He looked around the empty shop in dismay, searching for the shop assistants, but those dark, red-haired angels had flown away somewhere. He was left alone, in fear of the crowd that soon would swamp the silence of the shop in a raucous, plundering multitude and divide it among themselves, auction off all of that rich autumn accumulated throughout the years in its great, secluded storehouse. Where were the shop assistants? Where were those handsome cherubs who ought to defend the dark cloth ramparts? Father had the awful suspicion that, somewhere deep inside the house, they were sinning with the daughters of men. Standing motionless, filled with foreboding, his eyes shining in the bright silence of the shop, he heard with his inner ear what was going on deep inside the house, in the rear chambers of that great, colored lantern. Room after room, chamber after chamber, the house opened up before him like a house of cards. He saw the shop assistants’ pursuit of Adela through all of those empty and brightly lit rooms, upstairs, downstairs, until at last she gave them the slip and fell into the bright kitchen, which she barricaded with the credenza. She stood breathless, shiny and amused, smiling and fluttering her great eyelashes.

  The shop assistants giggled, crouching at the door. The kitchen window was open onto a great, black night filled with reveries and confusion, its black, half-open panes ablaze with a reflex of distant illumination. Here and there, shining pots and demijohns stood in perfect stillness, their greasy glaze gleaming in the silence. Adela, her eyelids fluttering, cautiously leaned her tinged, rouged face out of the window. She was looking in the dark courtyard for the shop assistants, certain of their ambush. And she saw them. They were making their way in cautious single file along a narrow ledge at first-floor level, along a wall red in a glow of distant illumination, and stealing up to the window. Father shrieked with fury and despair. But just then, the uproar of voices grew very loud, and suddenly the bright shop window was populated with faces—up close and contorted with laughter, garrulous faces flattening their noses onto the glistening panes. Father turned scarlet with distress. He jumped onto the counter, and as the crowd laid siege to that fortress, as that raucous throng stormed the shop, he leaped in a single bound onto a shelf piled high with bales of cloth, and suspended high above the crowd, blew with all his might into a huge shofar and trumpeted the alert. But it was no sound of angels hurrying to his aid that came to fill that vault. In reply to each wail of his trumpet there came only the great, laughing chorus of the crowd.