Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

by Bruno Schulz

  "In my megalomania I went so far as to dare to pry into the dynastic affairs of the highest powers, and I have mobilized you, gentlemen, against the Demiurge. I have abused your receptiveness to ideas, your noble credulity, in order to implant in you a false and iconoclastic doctrine, to harness your fiery idealism for a wanton, inconsiderate action. I don't want to determine whether I have been suited to the highest duties to which my ambition has driven me. I was probably called only to initiate them, to be abandoned later. I have exceeded my competence, but even that has been foreseen. In reality, I have known my fate from the outset. As the fate of that luckless Maximilian, my fate was that of Abel. There was a moment when my sacrifice seemed sweet and pleasing to God, when your chances seemed nil, Rudolph. But Cain always wins. The dice were loaded against me."

  At that moment a distant detonation shook the air, and a column of fire rose above the forests. All those present turned their heads.

  "Stay calm," I said, "it is the Wax Figures Exhibition on fire. I left there, before our departure, a barrel of powder with a lighted fuse. You have lost your home, noble gentlemen, and now you are homeless. I hope that this does not affect you too much?"

  But these once powerful individuals, these leaders of mankind, stood silent, helplessly rolling their eyes, crazily keeping a battle formation in the distant glare of the fire. They looked at one another, blinking, without a thought.

  "You, Sire," I addressed myself to the archduke, "were wrong. Perhaps you too were guilty of megalomania. I had no right to try to reform the world on your behalf. Perhaps this has never been your intention either. Red is, after all, only a color like all the others, and only all colors put together contribute to the wholeness of light. Forgive me for having misused your name for purposes that were alien to you. Long live Franz Joseph the First!"

  The Archduke shook at the sound of that name, reached for his saber, then hesitated and thought better of it; but a more vivid flush colored his painted cheeks, the corners of his mouth lifted, his eyes began to turn in their orbits, and in a measured step, with great distinction, he began to hold court, moving from one person to the other with a radiant smile. They moved away from him, scandalized. The revival of imperial manners at this unsuitable moment created the worst possible impression.

  "Stop this, Sire," I said, "I don't doubt that you know by heart the ceremonial of your court, but this is not the time for it. I want to read to you, noble gentlemen, and to you, Infanta, the act of my abdication. I am abdicating completely. I am dissolving the triumvirate. I am giving up the regency in favor of Rudolph. You, noble gentlemen," here I turned to my staff, "are free to go now. Your intentions were excellent, and I thank you most sincerely in the name of our dethroned idea"—tears sprung to my eyes—"which, in spite of everything . . ."

  Just then a shot was fired somewhere nearby. We all turned our heads in that direction. M. de V. stood with a smoking pistol in his hand, strangely stiff and leaning to one side. He grimaced, then staggered and fell on his face.

  "Father, Father!" screamed Bianca and threw herself upon the prostrate man. Confusion followed. Garibaldi, an old hand who knew everything about wounds, leaned over him. The bullet had pierced his heart. The King of Piedmont and Mazzini lifted him carefully by the arms and laid him on a stretcher. Bianca was sobbing, supported by Rudolph. The Negroes who just then appeared under the trees crowded round their master. "Massa, Massa, our kind massa," they chanted in chorus.

  "This night is truly fatal!" I cried. "This tragedy won't be the last. But I must confess that this is something I had not foreseen. I have wronged him. In reality, a noble heart beat in his breast. I hereby revoke my judgment of him, which has obviously been shortsighted and prejudiced. He must have been a good father, a good master to his slaves. My reasoning has failed even in this instance, but I admit it without regret. It is your duty, Rudolph, to comfort Bianca, to redouble your love, to replace her father. You will probably want to take his body on board; we shall therefore form a procession and march to the harbor. I can hear the siren of the steamship."

  Bianca got back into the carriage; we mounted our horses. The Negroes took the stretcher on their shoulders and we all turned toward the harbor. The cavalcade of riders brought up the rear of that sorry procession. The storm had abated during my speech, the light of flares opened deep long cracks among the trees, and fleeting black shadows formed a semicircle behind our backs. At last we left the forest. We could see in the distance the steamship with its large paddles.

  Not much remains to be added, the story is nearing its end. Accompanied by the sobbing of Bianca and the Negroes, the body of the dead man was taken aboard. For the last time we re-formed our ranks.

  "One more thing, Rudolph," I said, taking hold of a button of his jacket. "You are leaving now as heir to an enormous fortune. I don't wish to make any suggestions, and it should be my task to provide for the old age of these homeless heroes, but, unfortunately, I am a pauper."

  Rudolph at once reached for his checkbook. We conferred shortly and privately and quickly came to an agreement.

  "Gentlemen," I exclaimed, addressing myself to my guard, "my generous friend here has decided to compensate you for my action, which has deprived you of your livelihood and a roof over your heads. After what has happened, no wax-figure cabinet will ever admit you, especially since the competition is very great. You will have to give up some of your ambitions. Instead, you will become free men, which, I know, will appeal to you. As you have not been trained, unfortunately, for any practical work, having been destined for purely representative duties, my friend here has made a donation sufficient for the purchase of twelve barrel organs from the Black Forest. You will disperse all over the world, playing for people's pleasure. The choice of music is left to you. Why mince words, anyway, since you are not completely real Dreyfuses, Edisons, and Napoleons? You have assumed these names vicariously, for lack of anything better. Now you will swell the numbers of many of your precedessors, those anonymous Garibaldis, Bismarcks, and MacMahons who wander in their thousands, unacknowledged, all over the world. In the depths of your hearts you will remain forever what you are. And now, dear friends and noble gentlemen, let's wish together all happiness to the bridal pair: Long live Rudolph and Bianca!"

  "Long live Rudolph and Bianca!" they cried in chorus.

  The Negroes were singing a Negro spiritual. When they had finished, I regrouped them again with a wave of my hand, and then, producing my pistol, I cried:

  "And now farewell, gentlemen, and take warning from what you are about to see now and never attempt to guess at divine intentions. No one has ever penetrated the designs of the spring. Ignorabimus, gentlemen, ignorabimus!"

  I lifted the pistol to my temple and was about to pull the trigger, when someone knocked it from my hand. An officer of the Feldjägers stood by me and, holding some papers in his hand, asked:

  "Are you Joseph N.?"

  "Yes," I answered.

  "Haven't you some time ago," asked the officer, "dreamed the standard dream of the biblical Joseph?"

  "Perhaps. ..."

  "So you admit it," said the officer consulting his papers. "Do you know that the dream has been noticed in the highest places and has been severely criticized?"

  "I cannot answer for my dreams," I said.

  "Yes, you can. I am arresting you in the name of His Majesty the Emperor-and-King!"

  I smiled.

  "How slow are the mills of justice. The bureaucracy of His Majesty the Emperor-and-King grinds rather slowly. I have outpaced that early dream by actions that are much more dangerous and that I wanted to expiate by taking my own life, yet it is this obsolete dream that has saved my life. ... I am at your disposal."

  I saw an approaching column of troops. I stretched out my arms so that I could be handcuffed and turned my head once more. I saw Bianca for the last time. Standing on board the steamship, she was waving her handkerchief. The guard of veterans was saluting me in silence.

&nbs
p; A NIGHT IN JULY

  DURING THE LONG HOLIDAY of my last year in school I became acquainted for the first time with summer nights. Our house, exposed all day long to the breezes and glares of the hot summer days that entered through the open windows, now contained a new lodger, my sister's small son, a tiny, pouting, whimpering creature. He made our home revert to primitive conditions, he reduced us to the nomadic and harem-like existence of a matriarchal encampment where bedding, diapers, and sheets were forever being washed and dried, where a marked neglect of feminine appearance was accompanied by a predilection for frequent Strippings of a would-be innocent character, an acid aura of infancy and of breasts swelling with milk.

  After a very difficult confinement, my sister left to convalesce at a spa, my brother-in-law began to appear only at mealtimes, and my parents stayed in their shop until late at night. The household was ruled by the baby's wet-nurse, whose expansive femininity was further enhanced by her role as mother-provider. That majestic dignity, coupled with her large and weighty presence, impressed a seal of gynecocracy on the whole house. It was a gynecocracy based on the natural advantages of a replete and fully grown carnality shared cleverly between herself and two servant girls, whose activities allowed them to display a whole gamut of feminine self-absorption. The blossoming and ripening of the garden full of rustling leaves, silvery flashes of light, and shadowy meditations was balanced inside the house by an aroma of femininity and maternity that floated over the white linen and the budding flesh. At the hotly glaring hour of noon all the curtains in the wide-open windows rose in fright and all the diapers drying on lines fluttered in a row: through this white avenue of linens and muslins feathery seeds, pollens, and lost petals flowed in; the garden tides of light and shadow, the intermittent rustle and calm slowly entered the rooms as if this hour of Pan had lifted all walls and partitions and allowed an all-embracing unity to rule the whole world.

  I spent the evenings of that summer in the town's only cinema, staying there until the end of the last performance.

  From the darkness of the cinema hall, with its fleeting lights and shadows, one entered a quiet, bright lobby like the haven of an inn on a stormy night.

  After the fantastic adventures of the film, one's beating heart could calm down in the bright waiting room, shut off from the impact of the great pathetic night; in that safe shelter, where time stood still, the light bulbs emitted waves of sterile light in a rhythm set by the dull rumbling of the projector, and kept by the shake of the cashier's box.

  That lobby, plunged into the boredom of late hours like a railway waiting room after the departure of the last train, seemed at times to be the background for the final minutes of existence, something that would remain after all else had passed, after the tumult of life was exhausted. On a large colored poster, Asta Nielsen staggered forever with the black stigma of death on her forehead, her mouth open in a last scream, her eyes supremely beautiful and wide with superhuman effort.

  The cashier had long since left for home. By now she was probably bustling by an unmade bed that was waiting in her small room like a boat to carry her off to the black lagoons of sleep, into the complicated world of dreams. The person sitting in the box office was only a wraith, an illusory phantom looking with tired, heavily made-up eyes at the emptiness of light, fluttering her lashes thoughtlessly to disperse the golden dust of drowsiness scattered by the electric bulbs. Occasionally she smiled palely to the sergeant of the fire brigade, who, himself empty of reality, stood leaning against the wall, forever immobile in his shining helmet, in the shallow splendor of his epaulettes, silver braids, and medals. The glass panes of the door leading into the late July night shook in time with the rhythm of the projector, but the reflection of the electric lamp in the glass refuted the night, contributing to the illusion of a shelter safe from the immense spreading darkness. Then at last the enchantment of the lobby was broken: the glass door opened and the red curtain swelled from the breath of night which overruled everything.

  Imagine the sense of adventure felt by a slim and sickly high school boy when he opens the glass door of a safe haven and walks out all alone into the immensity of a July night. Will he forever wade through the black morasses and quagmires of the endless night, or will he come one morning to a safe harbor? How many years will his lonely wanderings last?

  No one has ever charted the topography of a July night. It remains unrecorded in the geography of one's inner cosmos.

  A night in July! What can be likened to it? How can one describe it? Shall I compare it to the core of an enormous black rose, covering us with the dreams of hundreds of velvety petals? The night winds blow open its fluffy center, and in its scented depth we can see the stars looking down on us.

  Shall I compare it to the black firmament under our half-closed eyelids, full of scattered speckles, white poppy seeds, stars, rockets, and meteors? Or perhaps to a night train, long as the world, driving through an endless black tunnel; walking through a July night is like passing precariously from one coach to another, between sleeping passengers, along narrow drafty corridors, past stuffy compartments.

  A night in July! The secret fluid of dusk, the living, watchful, and mobile matter of darkness, ceaselessly shaping something out of chaos and immediately rejecting every shape. Black timber out of which caves, vaults, nooks, and niches along the path of a sleepy wanderer are constructed. Like an insistent talker, the night accompanies a lonely pilgrim, shutting him within the circle of its apparitions, indefatigable in invention and in fantasies, evoking for him starry distances, white milky ways, the labyrinths of successive Coliseums and Forums. The night air, that black Proteus playfully forming velvety densities streaked with the scent of jasmine, cascades of ozone, sudden airless wastes rising like black globes into the infinite, monstrous grapes of darkness flowing with dark juice! I elbow my way along these tight passages, I lower my head to pass under arches and low vaults, and suddenly the ceiling breaks open with a starry sigh, a wide cupola slides away for a moment, and I am led again between narrow walls and passages. In these airless bays, in these nooks of darkness, scraps of conversation left by nightly wanderers hang in the air, fragments of inscriptions stick to posters, lost bars of laughter are heard, and skeins of whispers undispersed by the breeze of night unfold. Sometimes the night closes in around me like a small room without a door. I am overcome by drowsiness and cannot make out whether my legs are still carrying me forward or whether I am already at rest in that small chamber of the night. But then I feel again a velvety hot kiss left floating in space by some scented lips, some shutters open, I take a long step across a windowsill and continue to wander under the parabolas of falling stars.

  From the labyrinth of night two wanderers emerge. They are weaving something together and pull from the darkness a long, hopeless plait of conversation. The umbrella of one of them knocks monotonously against the pavement (such umbrellas are carried as protection from the rain of stars and meteors), and large heads in globelike bowlers start rolling about. At other times I am stopped for a moment by the conspiratorial look of a black squinting eye, and a large bony hand with protruding joints limps through the night clutching the crutch of a stick, tightly grasping a handle made from a stag's horn (in such sticks long thin swords are sometimes hidden).

  At last, at the city boundary the night gives up its games, removes its veil, discloses its serious and eternal face. It stops constructing around us illusory labyrinths of hallucination and nightmare and opens wide its starry eternity. The firmament grows into infinity, constellations glow in their splendor in time-hallowed positions, drawing magic figures in the sky as if they wanted to announce something, to proclaim something ultimate by their frightening silence. The shimmering of these distant worlds is a silvery starry chatter like the croaking of frogs. The July sky scatters an unbelievable dust of meteors, quietly soaked up by the cosmos.

  At some hour of the night—the constellations still dreaming their eternal dreams—I found myself again i
n my own street. A star shone over the end of it, emitting an alient scent. When I opened the gate of the house, a draft could be felt like that in a dark tunnel. In the dining room the light was still on, four candles burned in a brass candlestick. My brother-in-law was not yet in. Since my sister's departure, he had frequently been late for supper, sometimes not returning until late at night. Waking up from sleep, I often saw him undressing with a dull and meditative expression. Then he would blow out the candle, take all his clothes off, and, naked, lie for a long while sleepless on the cool bed. Sleep would only gradually overpower his large body. He would restlessly murmur something, breathe heavily, sigh, struggle with an imaginary burden on his breast. At times he would sob softly and dryly. Frightened, I asked in the darkness: "Are you all right, Charles?" but in the meantime he was off on the steep path of his dreams, scrambling laboriously up some hill of snoring.

  Through the open window the night was now breathing slowly. Into its large formless mass a cool, odorous fluid was being poured, the dark joints became looser, allowing thin rivulets of scent to seep through. The dead matter of darkness sought liberation in inspired flights of jasmine scent, but the unformed depths of the night remained still dead and unliberated.

  The chink of light under the door to the next room shone like a golden string, sonorous and sensitive, like the sleep of the infant whining in his cradle. The chatter of caressing talk could be heard from there, an idyll between the wet-nurse and the baby, the idyll of first love, in the midst of a circle of nightly demons that assembled in the darkness behind the window, lured by the warm spark of life glimmering inside.