The Fictions of Bruno Schulz

by Bruno Schulz

  THE STREET OF CROCODILES COCKROACHES I was disconcerted. I did remember the invasion of cockroaches, that black swarm which had nightly filled the darkness with a spidery running. All cracks in the floors were full of moving whispers, each crevice suddenly produced a cockroach, from every chink would shoot a crazy black zigzag of lightning. Ah, that wild lunacy of panic, traced in a shiny black line on the floor! Ah, those screams of horror which my father emitted, leaping from one chair up to another with a javelin in his hand! Refusing all food and drink, with fever patches on his cheeks, with a grimace of revulsion permanently fixed around his mouth, my father had grown completely wild. It was clear that no human body could bear for long such a pitch of hatred. A terrible loathing had transformed his face into a petrified tragic mask, in which the pupils, hidden behind the lower lids, lay in wait, tense as bows, in a frenzy of permanent suspicion. With a wild scream he would suddenly jump up from his seat, run blindly to a corner of the room and stab downwards with the javelin, then lift it, having impaled an enormous cockroach that desperately wriggled its tangle of legs. Adela would then come to the rescue and take the lance with its trophy from father, now pale and faint with horror, and shake it aff into a bucket. But even at the time, I could not tell whether these pictures were implanted in my mind by Adela's tales or whether I had witnessed them myself. NIy father at the time no longer possessed that power of resistance which protects healthy people from the fascination of loathing. Instead of fighting against the terrible attraction of that fascination, my father, a prey to madness, became completely subjected to it. The fatal consequences were quick to follow. Soon, the first suspicious symptoms appeared, filling us with fear and sadness. Father's behaviour changed. His madness, the euphoria of his excitement wore off. In his gestures and expressions signs of a bad conscience began to show. He took to avoiding us. He hid, for days on end, in corners, in wardrobes, under the eiderdowns. I saw him sometimes looking pensively at his own hands, examining the consistency of skin and nails, on which black spots began to appear like the scales of a cockroach. In daytime he was still able to resist with such strength as remained in him, and fought his obsession, but during the night it took hold of him completely. I once saw him late at night, in the light of a candle set on the floor. He lay on the floor naked, stained with black totem spots, the lines of his ribs heavily outlined, the fantastic structure of his anatomy visible through the skin; he lay on his face, in the grip of obsession of loathing which dragged him into the abyss of its complex paths. Ile moved with the many-limbed, complicated move- ments of a strange ritual in which I recognized with horror an imitation of the ceremonial crawl of a cockroach. From that day on we gave Father up for lost. His resemblance to a cockroach became daily more pronounced – he was being trans- formed into one. We got used to it. We saw him ever more rarely, as he would disappear for weeks on end on his cockroachy paths. We ceased to recognize him; he merged completely with that black, uncanny tribe. Who could say whether he continued to live in some crack in the floor, whether he ran through the rooms at night absorbed in cock- roachy affairs, or whether perhaps he was one of those dead insects which Adela found every morning lying on their backs with their legs in the air and which she swept up into a dustpan to burn later with disgust? `And yet,' I said, disconcerted, `I am sure that this condor is he.' My mother looked at me from under her eyelashes. `Don't torture me, darling; I have told you already that Father is away, travelling all over the country: he now has a job as a commercial traveller. You know that he sometimes comes home at night and goes away again before dawn.' 80 81

  THE GALE and began to descend in powerful spirals. The darkness exploded in a great stormy gale and raged for three days and three nights .. . The Gale During that long and empty winter, darkness in our city reaped an enormous, hundredfold harvest. The attics and storage rooms had been left cluttered up for too long, with old pots and pans stacked one on top of another, and batteries of discarded empty bottles. There, in those charred, many-raftered forests of attics, darkness began to degenerate and ferment wildly. There began the black parlia- ments of saucepans, those verbose and inconclusive meetings, those gurglings of bottles, those stammerings of flagons. Until one night the regiments of saucepans and bottles rose under the empty roofs and marched in a great bulging mass against the city. The attics, now freed from their clutter, opened up their expanses; through their echoing black aislea.ran cavalcades of beams, formations of wooden trestles, kneeling on their knees of pine, now at last freed to fill the night with a clatter of rafters and the crash of purlins and crossbeams. Then the black rivers of tubs and watercans overflowed and swept through the night. Their black, shining, noisy concourse beseiged the city. In the darkness that mob of receptacles swarmed and pressed forward like an army of talkative fishes, a boundless invasion of garru- lous pails and voluble buckets. Drumming on their sides, the barrels, buckets, and watercans rose in stacks, the earthenware jars gadded about, the old bowlers and opera hats climbed one on top of another, growing towards the sky in pillars only to collapse at last. And all the while their wooden tongues rattled clumsily, while they ground out curses from their wooden mouths, and spread blasphemies of mud over the whole area of the night, until at last these blasphemies achieved their object. Summoned by the creaking of utensils, by their fulsome chatter, there arrived the powerful caravans of wind and dominated the night. An enormous, black, moving amphitheatre formed high above the city `You won't go to school today,' said my mother in the morning, `there's a gale blowing.' A delicate veil of resin-scented smoke filled the room. The stove roared and whistled, as if a whole pack of hounds or demons were held captive in it. The large face painted on its protruding belly made colourful grimaces and its cheeks swelled dramatically. I ran barefoot to the window. The sky was swept lengthwise by the gusts of the wind. Vast and silvery-white, it was cut into lines of energy tensed to breaking point, into awesome furrows like strata of tin and lead. Divided into magnetic fields and trembling with discharges, it was full of concealed electricity. The diagrams of the gale were traced on it which, itself unseen and elusive, loaded the landscape with its power. One could not see the gale. One could recognize its effect on the houses, on the roofs under which its fury penetrated. One after the other, the attics seemed to loom larger and to explode in madness when touched by its finger. It swept the squares clean, leaving behind it a white emptiness in the streets; it denuded the whole area of the marketplace_ Only here and there a lonely man, bent under the force of the wind, could be seen clinging to the corner of a house. The whole Market Square seemed to shine like a bald head under the powerful gusts of wind. The gale blew cold and dead colours on to the sky - streaks of green, yellow, and violet — the distant vaults and arcades of its spirals. The roofs loomed black and crooked, apprehensive and expectant. Those under which the wind had already penetrated, rose in insiration, outgrew the neighbouring roofs and prophesied doom under the unkempt sky. Then they fell and expired, unable to hold any longer the powerful breath which then moved farther along and filled the whole space with noise and terror. And yet more houses rose with a scream, in a paroxysm of prediction, and howled disaster. The enormous beech trees around the church stood with their arms upraised, like witnesses of terrifying visions, and screamed and screamed. Farther along, beyond the roofs of Market Square, I saw the gable ends and the naked walls of suburban houses. They climbed one over 82 83

  THE STREET OF CROCODILES THE GALE the other and grew, paralysed with fear. The distant cold red glare painted them in autumnal colours. We did not have our midday meal that day because the fire in the range belched circles of smoke into the kitchen. All the rooms were cold and smelled of wind. About two o'clock in the afternoon a fire broke out in the suburbs and spread rapidly. My mother and Adela began to pack our bedding, fur coats, and valuables. Night came. The wind intensified in force and violence, grew immeasurably and filled the whole area. It had now stopped visiting the houses and roofs, and had started to build a many-store
yed, multilevel spiral over the city, a black maze, growing relentlessly upwards. From that maze it shot out along galleries of rooms, raced amid claps of thunder through long corridors and then allowed all those imaginary structures to collapse, spreading out and rising into the formless stratosphere. Our rooms trembled gently, the pictures rattled on the walls, the windowpanes shone with the greasy reflection of the lamp. The curtains swelled with the breath of that stormy night. We suddenly remembered that we had not seen Father since the morning. He must have gone out very early to the Shop, where the gale had probably surprised him and cut him off from home. ` He will not have had anything to eat all day,' Mother wailed. The senior shop assistant, Theodore, volunteered to venture into the windswept night, to take some food to Father. My brother decided to go with him. Wrapped in large bearskin coats, they filled their pockets with flatirons and brass pestles, metal ballast to prevent them from being blown away by the gale. The door leading into the night was opened cautiously. No sooner had Theodore and my brother taken one step into the darkness, than they were swallowed up by the night on the very theshold of the house. The wind immediately washed away all traces of their departure. From the window one could not see the light of the lantern which they had taken. Having swallowed them, the wind quietened down for a while. Adela and Mother again tried to light a fire in the kitchen range. All the matches went out and through the opened access door ashes and soot were blown all over the room. We stood behind the front door of the house and listened. In the lament of the gale one could hear all kinds of voices, questions, calls and cries. We imagined that we could hear Father, lost in the gale, calling for help, or else that it was my brother and Theodore chatting unconcernedly outside the door. The sounds were so deceptive that Adela opened the door at one point and in fact saw Theodore and my brother just emerging, with great effort, from the gale in which they had sunk up to their armpits. They came in panting and closed the door with difficulty behind them. For a moment they had to lean against it, so strong was the storming of the wind at the entrance. At last they got the door bolted and the wind continued its chase elsewhere. They spoke almost incoherently of the terrible darkness, of the gale. Their fur coats, soaked with wind, now smelled of the open air. They blinked in the light; their eyes, still full of night, spilled darkness at each flutter of the eyelids. They could not reach the shop, they said; they had lost their way and hardly knew how to get back; the city was unrecognizable and all the streets looked as if they had been displaced. My mother suspected that they were not telling the truth. In fact we all had the impression that they had perhaps stood under our windows for a few minutes without attempting to go anywhere. Or perhaps the city and the marketplace had ceased to exist, and the gale and the night had surrounded our house with dark stage props and some machinery to imitate the howling, whistling and groaning? Perhaps these enormous and mournful spaces suggested by the wind did not exist, perhaps there were no vast labyrinths, nor spirals, no windowed corridors to form a long black flute on which the wind played its tunes? We were increasingly inclined to think that the gale was only an invention of the night, a poor representation on a confined stage of the tragic immensity, the cosmic homelessness and loneliness of the wind. Our front door now opened time after time to admit visitors wrapped tightly in capes and shawls. A breathless neighbour or friend would slowly shed his outer wrappings and throw out confused and unconnected words which fantastically exaggerated the dangers of the night. We all sat together in the brightly lit kitchen. Behind the kitchen range and the black broad eaves of the chimney, a few steps led to the attic door. On these steps Theodore now sat, listening to the attic shaking in the wind. He heard how, during the pauses between gusts, the bellows of the rafters folded themselves into pleats and the roof hung limply like an enormous lung from which air had escaped; then 84 85

  The Fictions of Bruno Schulz

  THE STREET OF CROCODILES again how, it inhaled, stretched out the rafters, grew like a Gothic vault and resounded like the box of an enormous double bass. And then we forgot the gale. Adela started pounding cinnamon in a mortar. Aunt Perasia had come to call. Small, vivacious and very active, with the lace of her black shawl on her head, she began to bustle about the kitchen, helping Adela, who by then had plucked a cockerel. Aunt Perasia put a handful of paper in the grate and lit it. Adela grasped the cockerel by its neck, and held it over the flames to scorch off the remaining feathers. The bird suddenly spread its wings in the fire, crowed once and was burned. At that Aunt Perasia began to shout and curse. Trembling with anger, she shook her fists at Adela and at Mother. I could not understand what it was all about, but she persisted in her anger and became one small bundle of gestures and imprecations. It seemed that in her paroxysm of fury she might disintegrate into separate gestures, that she would divide into a hundred spiders, would spread out over the floor in a black, shim- mering net of crazy running cockroaches. Instead, she began suddenly to shrink and dwindle, still shaking and spitting curses. And then she trotted off, hunched and small, into a corner of the kitchen where we stacked the firewood and, cursing and coughing, began feverishly to rummage among the sonorous wood until she found two thin, yellow splinters_ She grabbed them with trembling hands, measured them against her legs, then raised herself on them as if they were stilts and began to walk about, clattering on the floor, jumping here and there across the slanting lines of the floorboards, quicker and quicker, until she finished up on a pine bench, whence she climbed on the shelf with the crockery, a tinkling wooden shelf running the whole length of the kitchen wall. She ran along it on her stilts and shrank away into a corner. She became smaller and smaller, black and folded like a wilted, charred sheet of paper, oxidized into a petal of ash, disintegrating into dust and nothingness. We all stood helpless in the face of this display of self-destructive fury. 'With regret we observed the sad course of the paroxysm and with some relief returned to our occupations when the lamentable process had spent itself. Adela clanked the mortar again, pounding cinnamon; Mother returned to her interrupted conversation; and Theodore, listening to the prophecies in the attic, made comical faces, lifting his eyebrows and softly chuckling to himself. 86 The Night of the Great Season Everyone knows that in a run of normal uneventful years that great eccentric, Time, begets sometimes other years, different, prodigal years which – like a sixth, smallest toe – grow a thirteenth freak month. We use the word freak deliberately, because the thirteenth month only rarely reaches maturity, and like a child conceived late in it 's mother's life, it lags behind in growth; it is a hunchback month, a half-witted shoot, more tentative than real. What is at fault is the senile intemperance of the summer, its lustful and belated spurt of vitality. It sometimes happens that August has passed, and yet the old thick trunk of summer continues by force of habit to produce and from its mouldered wood grows those crab-like, weed-days, sterile and stupid, added as an afterthought; stunted, empty, useless days – white days, permanently astonished and quite unnecessary. They sprout, irregular and uneven, formless and joined like the fingers of a monster's hand, stumps folded into a fist. There are people who liken these days to an apocrypha, put secretly between the chapters of the great book of the year; to palimpsests, covertly included between its pages; to whose white, unprinted sheets on which eyes, replete with reading and the remembered shapes of words, can imagine colours and pictures, which gradually become paler and paler from the blankness of the pages, or can rest on their neutrality before continuing the quest for new adventures in new chapters. Ah, that old, yellowed romance of the year, that large, crumbling book of the calendar! It lies forgotten somewhere in the archives of Time, and its content continues to increase between the boards, swelling incessantly from the garrulity of months, from the quick self- perpetuation of lies, of drivel, and of dreams which multiply in it. Ah, when writing down these tales, revising the stories about my father on the used margins of its text, don ' t I, too, surrender to the secret 87