The Fictions of Bruno Schulz

by Bruno Schulz

  SANATORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS SPRING pulled his hair in agitation. He was completely out of control, ready for anything. Very frightened, I began to plead with him. I admitted that my story seemed improbable on first hearing, even unbelievable. I myself, I agreed, was quite amazed. No wonder that it was difficult for him, unprepared as he was, to accept it at once. I appealed to his heart and honour. Would his conscience allow him to refuse me his help just when matters were about to reach a decisive stage? Would he now spoil everything by withdrawing his participation? At last I under- took to prove, on the basis of the stamp album, that everything was, word for word, the truth. Somewhat mollified, Rudolph opened the album. Never before had I spoken with such force and enthusiasm. I outdid myself. Supporting my reasoning with the evidence of stamps, not only did I refute all his accusations and dispel his doubts, but what is more, I reached such revealing conclusions that I myself was amazed by the perspective that opened up. Rudolph remained silent and defeated, and no more was said about dissolving the partnership. 31 Can one consider it a coincidence that at about the same time a great theatre of illusion, a magnificent wax figure exhibition, came to town and pitched its tent in Holy Trinity Square? I had been anticipating it for a long time and told Rudolph the news with great excitement. The evening was windy; rain hung in the air. On the yellow and dull horizon the day was getting ready to depart, hastily putting weatherproof grey covers over the train of its carts, about to proceed in rows towards the cool beyond. Under a half-drawn, darker curtain the last streaks of sunset appeared for a moment, then sank into a flat, endless plain, a lakeland of watery reflections. A frightened, yellow, foredoomed glare shone from these streaks across half the sky; the curtain was falling quickly. The pale roofs of houses shone with a moist reflection; it was getting dark and the gutter pipes were beginning to sing in monotone. The wax figure exhibition was already open. Crowds of people sheltering under umbrellas were outlined in the dim light of the sinking day in the forecourt of the tent, where they ceremoniously gave money for their tickets to a decolletaged lady, glittering with jewels and gold teeth: a live, laced-up, and painted torso, her lower extremities lost in the shadow of velvet curtains. Through a half-open flap we entered a brightly lit space. It was full of people. Groups of them in wet overcoats with upturned collars ambled in silence from place to place, stopping in attentive semicircles. Without difficulty I recognized among them those who belonged to this world only in appearance, who in reality led a separate, dignified, and embalmed life on pedestals, a life on show, festively empty. They stood in grim silence, clad in sombre made-to-measure frock coats and morning suits of good-quality cloth, very pale, and on their cheeks the feverish flush of the illnesses from which they had died. They had not had a single thought in their heads for quite a time, only the habit of showing themselves from every angle, of exhibiting the emptiness of their existence. They should have been in their beds a long time before, tucked under their cold sheets, their dose of medi- cine administered. It was a presumption to keep them up so late on their narrow pedestals and in chairs on which they sat so stiffly, in tight patent-leather footwear, miles from their previous existence, with glazed eyes entirely deprived of memory. All of them had hanging from their lips, dead like the tongue of a strangled man, a last cry, uttered when they left the lunatic asylum where, taken for maniacs, they had spent some time in purgatory before entering this ultimate abode. No, they were not authentic Dreyfuses, Edisons, or Lucchenis; they were only pretenders. They may have been real madmen, caught red-handed at the precise moment a brilliant idee fixe had entered their heads; the moment of truth was skilfully distilled and became the crux of their new existence, pure as an element and unalterable. Ever since then, that one idea remained in their heads like an exclamation mark, and they clung to it, standing on one foot, suspended in midair, or stopped at half a gesture. Passing anxiously from group to group, I looked in the crowd for Maximilian. At last I found him, not in the splendid uniform of admiral of the Levant Squadron, in which he sailed from Toulon on the way to Mexico in the flagship Le Cid, nor in the green tail coat of cavalry general he wore in his last days. He was in an ordinary suit of clothes, a frock coat with long, folding skirts and light-coloured trousers, his chin resting on a high collar with a cravat. Rudolph and 184 185

  SANATORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS SPRING I stopped reverently in the group of people forming a semicircle in front of him. Suddenly, I froze. A few steps from us, in the first row of the onlookers, stood Bianca in a white dress, accompained by her governess. She stood there and looked. Her small face had become paler in the last few days, and her eyes, darkly circled and full of shadow, wore an expression of profound sadness. She was standing immobile, with folded hands hidden in the pleats of her dress, looking from under her serious eyebrows with mournful eyes. My heart bled at the sight of her. Unconsciously I followed the direction of her gaze, and this is what I saw: Nlaximilian's features moved, as if awakened, the corner of his mouth curled up in a smile, his eyes shone and began to roll in their orbits, his breast covered with decorations heaved with a sigh. It was not a miracle, but a simple mechanical trick. Suitably wound up, the Archduke held court in accordance with the principles of his mechanism, graciously and ceremoniously as he had done when alive. He was now scanning the spectators, his eyes looking attentively at everybody in turn. His eyes rested on Bianca's for a moment. He winced, hesitated, swallowed hard, as if he had wanted to say something; but a moment later, obedient to his mechanism, he continued to run his eyes over other faces with the same inviting and radiant smile. Had he become aware of Bianca's presence, had it reached his heart? Who could tell? He was not even fully himself, merely a distant double of his former being, much reduced and in a state of deep prostration. On the basis of mere fact, one must admit that in a way he was his own closest relative, perhaps he was even as much himself as possible under the circumstances, so many years after his death. In that waxen resurrec- don it must have been very difficult to become one 's real self. Some- thing quite new and frightening must have sneaked into his being; something foreign must have detached itself from the madness of the ingenious maniac who conceived him in his megalomania — and this now seemed to be filling Bianca with awe and horror. Even a very sick person changes and becomes detached from his own self, let alone someone so clumsily resuscitated. For how did he behave now toward his own flesh and blood? With an assumed gaiety and bravdo he continued to play his clowning imperial comedy, magnificent and smiling. Had he much to conceal, or was he perhaps afraid of the attendants who were watching him while he was on exhibition in that hospital of wax figures where he and the others stayed under hospital regulations? Distilled laboriously from somebody's madness; clean, cured, and saved at last — didn't he have to tremble at the possibility of being returned to chaos and turmoil? When I turned to Bianca again, I saw that she had covered her face with a handkerchief. The governess put an arm around her, gazing inanely at her with her enamel blue eyes. I could not look any longer at Bianca's suffering and felt like sobbing. I pulled Rudolph 's sleeve and we walked towards the exit. Behind our backs, that made-up ancestor, that grandfather in the prime of life, continued to bestow on all and sundry his radiant imperial salutes: in an excess of zeal he even lifted his hand and was almost blowing kisses to us in the immobile silence, amid the hissing of acetylene lamps and the quiet dripping of rain on the canvas of the tent; he rose on tiptoe with the last remnants of his strength, mortally ill like the rest of them and longing for the death shroud. In the vestibule the made-up torso of the lady cashier said some- thing to us while her diamonds and gold teeth glittered against the black background of magic draperies. We went out into a dewy night, 186 187

  SANATORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS SPRING warm from rain. The roofs shone with water, the gutter pipes gurgled monotonously. We ran through the downpour, lighted by street lamps, jingling under the rain. 32 Oh abysmal human perversity, truly infernal intrigue! In whose m
ind could have arisen that venomous and devilish idea, bolder than the most elaborate flights of fancy? The deeper I penetrate its malevol- ence, the greater my wonder at the perfidy, the flash of evil genius, in that monstrous idea. So my intuition has not led me astray. Here, at hand, in the midst of an apparent legality, in time of peace guaranteed by treaties, a crime was being committed that made one's hair stand on end. A sombre drama was being enacted in complete silence, a drama so shrouded in secrecy that nobody could guess at it and detect it during the innocent aspects of that spring. Who could suspect that between that gagged, mute wax figure rolling its eyes and the delicate, carefully raised, and beautifully mannered-Bianca a family tragedy was being enacted? Who really was Bianca? Are we to reveal the secret at last? What if she was not descended either from the legitimate empress of Mexico or even from the morganatic wife, Izabella d'Orgaz, who, from the stage of a touring opera, conquered Archduke Maximilian by her beauty? What if her mother was the little Creole girl whom he called Conchita and who under that name has entered history through the back door as it were. Information about her that I have been able to collect with the help of the stamp album can be summarized in a few words. After the Emperor's fall, Conchita left with her small daughter for Paris, where she lived on a widow's pension, keeping unbroken faith with the memory of her imperial lover. There, history lost track of that touching figure, giving way to hearsay and reconstruction. Nothing is known about the daughter's marriage and her subsequent fate. Instead, in 1900, a certain Mme de V, a lady of extraordinary and exotic beauty, left France with her small daughter and her husband on false passports and proceeded to Austria. At Salzburg, on the Austro-Bavarian frontier, when changing trains for Vienna, the family was stopped by the Austrian gendarmerie and arrested. It was remark- able that, after his false papers had been examined, M. de V was freed but did not try to get his wife and daughter released. He returned the same day to France, and all trace of him has since been lost. Thereafter the story becomes very entangled. I was therefore very thrilled when the stamp album helped me to find the fugitives' trace. The discovery was entirely mine. I succeeded in identifying the said M. de V. as a highly suspect individual who appeared in a different country under a completely different name. But hush! ... Nothing more can be said about it yet. Suffice it to say that Bianca's genealogy has been established beyond any doubt. 33 So much for canonical history. But the official history remains incom- plete. There are in it intentional gaps, long pauses that spring fills swiftly with its fantasies. One needs a lot of patience to find a grain of truth in the tangle of springtime vagaries. This might be achieved by a careful grammatical analysis of the phrases and sentences of spring. Who? Whose? What? One must eliminate the seductive cross talk of birds — their pointed adverbs and prepositions, their skittish pronouns — and work oneself slowly to a healthy grain of sense. The stamp album serves as a compass in my search. Stupid, indiscrimi- nating spring! It covers everything with growth, mingles sense with nonsense, cracking jokes, light-hearted to a degree. Could it be that it, too, is in league with Franz Jospeh, that it is tied to him by a bond of common conspiracy? Every ounce of sense breaking through is at once covered up by a hundred lies, by an avalanche of nonsense. The birds obliterate all evidence, obscure all traces by their family punctuation. Truth is cornered by the luxuriance that immediately fills each empty plot, each crevice, with its spreading foliage. Where is truth to shelter, where is it to find asylum if not in a place where nobody is looking for it: in fairground calendars and almanacs, in the canticles of beggars and tramps, which in direct line are derived from stamp albums? 188 189

  SANATORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS SPRING 34 After many sunny weeks came a period of hot and overcast days. The sky darkened as on old frescoes, and in the oppressive silence banks of clouds loomed like tragic battlefields in paintings of the Neapolitan school. Against the background of these leaden, ashen cumuli, the chalky whiteness of houses shone brightly, accentuated by the sharp shadows of cornices and pilasters. People walked with heads bowed, their mood dark and tense as before a storm charged with static electricity. Bianca had not been seen again in the park. She was obviously closely supervised and not allowed out. They must have smelled danger. I saw in town a group of gentlemen in black morning coats and top hats walking through the market square with the measured steps of diplomats. Their white shirt fronts glared in the leaden air. They looked in silence at the houses, as if valuing them, and walked with slow, rhythmic steps. They had coal black moustaches on carefully shaven faces with shining expressive eyes, which turned in their orbits smoothly, as if oiled. From time to time they doffed their hats and wiped their brows. They were all slim, tall, and middle-aged, and they had the sultry faces of gangsters. 35 The days became dark, cloudy, and grey. A distant, potential storm lay in wait day and night over the horizon, not discharging itself in a downpour. In the great silence, a breath of ozone would pass at times through the steely air, with the smell of rain and a moist, fresh breeze. Afterwards the gardens filled the air with enormous sighs and grew their leaves hastily, doing overtime by day and by night. All flags hung down heavy and darkened, helplessly pouring out the last streaks of colour into the dense aura. Sometimes at the opening of a street someone turned to the sky half a face, like a dark cut-out with one frightened and shining-eye, and listened to the rumble of space, to the electric silence of passing clouds while the air was cut by the flight of trembling, pointed, arrow-sharp, black and white swallows. Ecuador and Columbia are mobilizing. In the ominous silence lines of infantry in white trousers, white straps crossed on their breasts, are crowding the quays. The Chilean unicorn is rearing. One can see it in the evening outlined against the sky, a pathetic animal, immobile with terror, its hooves in the air. 36 The days are sinking ever deeper into shadow and melancholy. The sky has blocked itself and hangs low, swelled with a dark, threatening storm. The earth, parched and motley, is holding its breath; only the gardens, crazy and drunken, continue to grow, to sprout leaves and fill all their free spaces with a cool greenery. (The fat buds were sticky like an itchy rash, painful and festering; now they are healing with cool foliage, forming leafy scars, gaining green health, multiplied beyond measure and without count. They have already stifled under their greeness the forlorn call of the cuckoo, and its distant voice now rises faintly from deep thickets, dulled by the happy flood of leaves.) Why are the houses shining so bright in that dusky landscape? As the rustling parks become darker, the whitewash on houses sharpens and glows in the sunless air with the hot reflection of burnt earth, as if it were to be spattered in a moment by the feverish spots of infectious disease. Dogs run dizzily, their noses in the air. Crazed and excited, they sniff among the fluffy greenness. Something revealing and enormous prepares to spring forth from the closeness of these overcast days. I am trying to guess what event could match the negative sum of expectations contained in this enormous load of electricity; what could equal this catastrophic barometrical low. The thing that is growing is preparing nature for a trough that the gardens cannot fill although they are equipped with the most enchanting smell of lilac. 37 Negroes, crowds of Negroes, were in the city! People had seen them here and there, in many places at once. They were running in the 190 191