Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

by Bruno Schulz

  It is not quite as dark here as we thought. On the contrary, the interior is pulsating with light. It is, of course, the internal light of roots, a wandering phosphorescence, tiny veins of light marbling the darkness, an evanescent shimmer of nightmarish substances. Likewise, when we sleep, severed from the world, straying into deep introversion, on a return journey into ourselves, we can see clearly through our closed eyelids, because thoughts are kindled in us by internal tapers and smolder erratically. This is how total regressions occur, retreats into self, journeys to the roots. This is how we branch out into anamnesis and are shaken by underground subcutaneous shivers. For it is only above ground, in the light of day, that we are a trembling, articulate bundle of tunes; in the depth we disintegrate again into black murmurs, confused purring, a multitude of unfinished stories.

  It is only now that we realize what the soil is on which spring thrives and why spring is so unspeakably sad and heavy with knowledge. Oh, we would not have believed it had we not seen it with our own eyes! Here are labyrinths of depth, warehouses and silos of things, graves that are still warm, the litter, and the rot. Age-old tales. Seven layers (like in ancient Troy), corridors, chambers, treasure chests. Numerous golden masks—one next to another—flattened smiles, faces eaten out, mummies, empty cocoons . . . Here are columbaria, the drawers for the dead, in which they lie dessicated, blackened like roots, awaiting their moment. Here are great apothecary storerooms where they are displayed in lachrymatories, crucibles, and jars. They have been standing on the shelves for years in a long, solemn row, although no one has been there to buy them. Perhaps they have come alive in their pigeonholes, completely healed, clean as incense, and scented— chirruping specifics, awakened impatient drugs, balms, and morning unguents—balancing their early taste on the tip of the tongue. These walled-in pigeon perches are full of chicks hatching out and making their first attempts at chirping. How dew-fresh and time-anticipating are these long, empty lanes where the dead wake up in rows, deeply rested—to a completely new dawn!

  But we have not finished yet; we can go deeper. There is nothing to fear. Give me your hand, take another step: we are at the roots now, and at once everything becomes dark, spicy, and tangled like in the depth of a forest. There is a smell of turf and tree rot; roots wander about, entwined, full with juices that rise as if sucked up by pumps. We are on the nether side, at the lining of things, in gloom stitched with phosphorescence. There is a lot of movement and traffic, pulp and rot, tribes and generations, a brood of bibles and iliads multiplied a thousand times! Wanderings and tumult, the tangle and hubbub of history! That road leads no farther. We are here at the very bottom, in the dark foundations, among the Mothers. Here are the bottomless infernos, the hopeless Ossianic spaces, all those lamentable Nibe-lungs. Here are the great breeding grounds of history, factories of plots, hazy smoking rooms of fables and tales. Not at last one can understand the great and sad machinery of spring. Ah, how it thrives on stories, on events, on chronicles, on destinies! Everything we have ever read, all the stories we have heard and those we have never heard before but have been dreaming since childhood—here and nowhere else is their home and their motherland. Where would writers find their ideas, how would they muster the courage for invention, had they not been aware of these reserves, this frozen capital, these funds salted away in the underworld? What a buzz of whispers, what persistent purr of the earth! Continuous persuasions are throbbing in your ears. You walk with half-closed eyes in a warmth of whispers, smiles, and suggestions, importuned endlessly, pin-pricked a thousand times by questions as though by delicate insect proboscides. They would like you to take something from them, anything, a pinch at least of these disembodied, timeless stories, absorb it into your young life, into your bloodstream; save it, and try to live with it. For what is spring if not a resurrection of history? It alone among these disembodied things is alive, real, cool, and unknowing. Oh, how attracted are these specters and phantoms, larvae and lemurs, to its young green blood, to its vegetative ignorance! And spring, helpless and naive, takes them into its slumber, sleeps with them, wakes half-conscious at dawn, and remembers nothing. This is why it is heavy with the sum of all that is forgotten and sorrowful, for it alone must live vicariously on these rejected lives, and must be beautiful to embody all that has been lost. . . . And to make up for all this, it has only the heady smell of cherry blossom to offer, streaming in one eternal, infinite flood in which everything is contained. . . . What does forgetting mean? New greenery has grown overnight on old stories, a soft green tuft, a bright, dense mass of buds has sprouted from all the pores in a uniform growth like the hair on a boy's head on the day after a haircut. How green with oblivion spring becomes: old trees regain their sweet nescience and wake up with twigs, unburdened by memories although their roots are steeped in old chronicles. That greenness will once more make them new and fresh as in the beginning, and stories will become rejuvenated and start their plot once again, as if they had never been.

  There are so many unborn tales. Oh, those sad lamenting choruses among the roots, those stories outbidding one another, those inexhaustible monologues among suddenly exploding improvisations! Have we the patience to listen to them? Before the oldest known legend there were others no one has ever heard; there were nameless forerunners; novels without a title; enormous, pale, and monotonous epics; shapeless bardic tales; formless plots; giants without a face; dark texts written for the drama of evening clouds. And behind these lays, sagas, unwritten books, books—eternal pretenders, and lost books inpartibus infidelium.

  Among all the stories that crowd the roots of spring, there is one that long ago passed into the ownership of the night and settled down forever at the bottom of the firmament as an eternal accompaniment and background to the starry spaces. During every spring night, whatever might happen in it, that story unfolds itself above the croaking of frogs and the endless working of mills. A man walks under the milky stars strewn by the handmills of night; he walks hugging a child in the folds of his cloak; he walks across the sky, constantly on his way, a perpetual wanderer through the endless spaces. Oh, the sadness of loneliness, the pathos of orphanhood in the vastness of night. Oh, glare of distant stars! In that story time can never change anything. The story appears on the starry horizons and will do so forever, always afresh, for once derailed from the tracks of time, it has become unfathomable, never to be exhausted by repetition. There goes that man who hugs the child in his arms—we are repeating on purpose that refrain, that pitiful motto of the night, in order to express the intermittent continuity of walking, sometimes obstructed by the tangle of stars, sometimes completely invisible during long, silent intervals in which one can feel the breeze of eternity. The distant worlds come within reach, glaring frighteningly, they send violent signals through eternity in an unspoken, mute language—while he walks on and on and soothes the little girl endlessly, monotonously, and without hope, helpless against the whispers and sweet persuasions of the night, against the only word formed on the lips of silence, when no one is listening to it. . . .

  The story is about a princess kidnapped and changed for another child.

  XVIII

  When late at night they return to the spacious villa among gardens, to a low white room where a black shining piano stands with all its strings silent, when through the wide glass wall, as if through the panes of a greenhouse, the spring night looks in, pale and blinking with stars, and the scent of cherry blossom floats from bottles and containers over the cool white bedding—the anxious listening fills the sleepless night and the heart speaks in sleep, sobs, races, and stumbles through the long, dewy, moth-swarming night, luminous and scented with bird cherry. . . . Ah, it is the bird cherry that gives depth to the limitless night; hearts aching from flights, tired from happy pursuits, would like to rest awhile on some airy narrow ridge, but from that endless pale night a new night is born, even paler and more disembodied, cut into luminous lines and zigzags, into spirals of stars and pale flights, pierce
d a thousand times by the suckers of invisible gnats bloated with the blood of maidens; the tireless heart must again stumble through sleep, mad, engaged in starry and complex affairs, in breathless hurry, in moonlit panics, ascending and enlarged, entangled in pale fascinations, in comatose lunar dreams and lethargic shivers.

  Ah, all these rapes and pursuits of that night, the treacheries and whispers, Negroes and helmsmen, balcony railings and night-blinds, muslin frocks and veils trailing behind hurried escapes! . . . Until at last, after a sudden blackout, a dull black pause, a moment comes when all the puppets are back in their boxes, all the curtains are drawn, and all the bated breaths are quietly exhaled, while on the vast calm sky drawn is building noiselessly its distant pink and white cities, its delicate, lofty pagodas and minarets.

  XIX

  Only now will the nature of that spring become clear and legible to an attentive reader of the Book. All these morning preparations, all the day's early ablutions, all its hesitations, doubts, and difficulties of choice will disclose their meaning to one who is familiar with stamps. Stamps introduce one to the complex game of morning diplomacy, to the prolonged negotiations and atmospheric deceits that precede the final version of any day. From the reddish mists of the ninth hour, the motley and spotted Mexico with a serpent wriggling in a condor's beak is trying to emerge, hot and parched by a bright rash, while in a gap of azure amid the greenery oftall trees, a parrot is stubbornly repeating "Guatemala, Guatemala" at even intervals, with the same intonation, and that green word infects things that suddenly become fresh and leafy. Slowly, among difficulties and conflicts, a voting takes place, the order of ceremonies is established, the list of parades, the diplomatic protocol of the day.

  In May the days were pink like Egyptian stamps. In the market square brightness shone and undulated. On the sky billows of summery clouds—volcanic, sharply outlined—folded under chinks of light [Barbados, Labrador, Trinidad], and everything was running with redness, as if seen through ruby glasses or the color of blood rushing to the head. There sailed across the sky the great corvette of Guiana, exploding with all its sails. Its bulging canvas towered amid taut ropes and the noise of tugboats, amid storms of gulls and the red glare of the sea. Then there rose to the sky and spread wide an enormous, tangled rigging of ropes, ladders, and masts and, with a full spread of canvas, a manifold, many-storied aerial spectacle of sails, yards, and braces, of holds from which small agile Negro boys shot out for a moment and were lost again in the labyrinths of canvas, among the signs and figures of the fantastic tropical sky.

  Then the scenery changed in the sky: in massed clouds three simultaneous pink eclipses occurred, shiny lava began to smolder, outlining luminously the fierce contours of clouds [Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica] and the center of the world receded, its glaring colors became deeper. Roaring tropical oceans, with their azure archipelagos, happy currents and tides and equatorial and salty monsoons made their appearance. With the stamp album in my hand, I was studying the spring. Was it not a great commentary on the times, the grammar of its days and nights?

  The main thing was not to forget, like Alexander the Great, that no Mexico is final, that it is a point of passage which the world will cross, that beyond each Mexico there opens another, even brighter one, a Mexico of super-colors and hyper-aromas. . . .

  XX

  Bianca is all gray. Her dark complexion has a tinge of burned-out ashes. The touch of her hand must be unimaginable.

  The careful breeding of whole generations flows in her disciplined blood. Her resigned submission to the rules of tact, proof of conquered contrariness, broken rebellion, secret sobbing, and violence done to her pride, is quite touching. Every one of her gestures expresses submission, with good will and sad grace, to the prescribed forms. She does nothing that is unnecessary, each step is avariciously measured, just complying with the conventions, entering into their spirit without enthusiasm and only from a passive sense of duty. From these daily victories Bianca draws her premature experience and wisdom. Bianca knows what there is to know, and she does seem to enjoy her knowledge, which is serious and full of sadness. Her mouth is closed in lines of infinite beauty, her eyebrows traced with severe accuracy. No, her wisdom does not lead to relaxation of rules, to softness or self-indulgence. On the contrary. The truth, at which she gazes with her sad eyes, can only be borne by a tense attention to forms and their strictest observance. And that unfailing tact and loyalty to convention obscures a whole sea of sadness and suffering gallantly overcome.

  And yet, although broken by form, she has emerged from it victorious. But with what sacrifice has that triumph been achieved!

  When she walks—slim and straight—it is not clear what kind of pride she carries so simply in the unsophisticated rhythm of her walk, whether her own pride overcome, or the triumph of principles to which she has submitted.

  But when she lifts her eyes and looks straight at you, nothing can be hidden from her. Her youth has not protected her from being able to guess the most secret things. Her quiet serenity has been achieved after long days of weeping and sobbing. This is why her eyes are deeply circled and have in them the moist, hot glow and that spare purpose-fulness that never misses anything.

  XXI

  Bianca, enchanting Bianca, is a mystery to me. I study her with obstinacy, passion, and despair—with the stamp album as my textbook. Why am I doing this? Can a stamp album serve as a textbook of psychology? What a naïve question! A stamp album is a universal book, a compendium of knowledge about everything human. Naturally, only by allusion, implication, and hint. bu need some perspicacity, some courage of the heart, some imagination in order to find the fiery thread that runs through the pages of the book.

  One thing must be avoided at all costs: narrow-mindedness, pedantry, dull pettiness. Most things are interconnected, most threads lead to the same reel. Have you ever noticed swallows rising in flocks from between the lines of certain books, whole stanzas of quivering pointed swallows? One should read the flight of these birds. . . .

  But to return to Bianca. How movingly beautiful are her movements! Each is made with deliberation, determined centuries ago, begun with resignation, as if she knew in advance the course and the inevitable sequence of her destiny. It happens that I want to ask her something with my eyes, to beg for something in my thoughts, while I sit facing her in the park. And before I have formulated my plea, she has already answered. She has answered sadly by one short, penetrating look.

  Why does she hold her head lowered? What is she gazing at with attention, with such thoughtfulness? Is her life so hopelessly sad? And yet, in spite of everything, doesn't she carry that resignation with dignity, with pride, as if things had to remain as they were, as if that knowledge, which deprives her of joy, had given her some untouchabil-ity instead, some higher freedom found only in voluntary submission? Her obedience has the grace of triumph and of victory.

  With her governess she sits on a bench facing me, and both are reading. Her white dress—I have never seen her wear any other color— lies like an open flower on the seat. Her slim dark legs are crossed in front of her with indescribable grace. To touch her body must, I imagine, be painful from the sheer holiness of such a contact.

  Then having closed their books, they both rise. With one quick look Bianca acknowledges and returns my ardent greeting and walks away, disengaged, weaving her feet, meandering, melodiously keeping pace with the rhythm of the long, elastic steps of her governess.

  XXII

  I have investigated the whole area around the estate. I have walked several times around the high fence that surrounds that vast terrain. I have seen the white walls of the villa with its terraces and broad verandas from all angles. Behind the villa spreads a park and, adjoining it, a large plot of land without any trees. Strange structures, partly factories, partly farm buildings, stand there. I put my eye against a chink in the fence, and what I saw must have been an illusion. In the spring air, thinned by the heat, you can sometimes see distant things m
irrored through miles of quivering air. All the same my head is splitting from contradictory thoughts. I must consult the stamp album again.

  XXIII

  Is it possible? Could Bianca's villa be an extraterritorial area under the safeguard of international treaties? To what astonishing assumptions does the study of the stamp album lead me! Am I alone in possession of this amazing truth? And yet one cannot treat lightly the evidence and arguments provided on this point by the stamp album.

  Today I investigated the whole villa from nearby. For weeks I have been hanging around the crested wrought iron gate. My opportunity came when two large empty carriages drove out of the garden. The gates were left wide open and there was nobody in sight. I entered nonchalantly, produced my drawing book from my pocket and, leaning against a pillar of the gate, pretended to draw some architectural detail. I stood on a graveled path trod so many times by Bianca's light feet. My heart would stop still from blissful anticipation at the thought that I might see her emerging in a flimsy white dress from one of the French windows. But all the windows and doors had green sunshades drawn over them. Not even the slightest sound betrayed the life hidden in that house. The sky on the horizon was overcast; there was lightning in the distance. No breeze moved the warm rarefied air. In the quietness of that gray day only the chalk white walls of the villa spoke with the voiceless but expressive eloquence of their ornate architecture. Its elegance was repeated in pleonasms, in a hundred variations on the same motif. Along a blindingly white frieze, bas-relief garlands ran in rhythmic cadenzas to the left and right and stopped undecided at the corners. From the height of the central terrace a marble staircase descended, ceremonious and solemn, between smoothly running balusters and architectural vases, and, flowing broadly to the ground, seemed to arrange its train with a deep curtsy.