Inside the Head of Bruno Schulz

by Maxim Biller

  “The day before yesterday, dear Dr Mann,” Bruno went on writing quickly by the light of his German lamp, while he pressed the thumb and forefinger of his left hand to his temples, which were suddenly aching, “Dr Franck came to see me at the school. As you already know, he is the former specialist in internal medicine who no longer wants to submit to the laws of everyday life. Instead he sits at the railway station talking to himself, or he recites prayers and blessings out loud, all jumbled up—he of all people, the atheist and one of the first Zionists in our town. After knocking so quietly that you could hardly hear him, Dr Franck came into the art room and asked me to go out with him. At first the boys did not want to let me go—they never want to be left alone, you see, because then they always attack one another like enemies. When they began begging, tugging at my jacket with their beaks, Dr Franck—I had not seen him so clear and determined since he closed the practice—held his outstretched forefinger in front of his mouth and said a long, slow, ‘Ssh!’ At once they fell silent, and flew back to their places. Some of them went on drawing, some hid their heads under their wings and fell asleep.”

  Bruno stopped massaging his temples and, with his notepad close to his face, went over and brushed aside a few tiny gray and white feathers that had sunk slowly from above onto the paper. Instead of sinking to the floor they flew up into the vortex that had risen and performed a little dance in front of his flat, paper-kite nose. Bruno watched them, smiling, and kept blowing them up in the air again, then he lowered his head and wrote: “No sooner had Dr Franck and I closed the classroom door behind us than he began talking to me excitedly. It was about your double, Dr Mann. Of course he had not left Drohobycz after his nocturnal performance in the hotel manager Hasenmass’s bathroom. He has never yet done what he said he would do. He explained that his wife had fallen sick in Zürich, and besides, he must wait for the rest of his library, which was stuck in Customs in a Reichsbahn railway car at the border near Basle, so he meant to make use of this extra time to stay in our town, working in peace before his great journey to America. Two days later he gave a reading in the pharmacy on the market place—he stood at the sales desk and, despite protests from the apothecary Hulciner, we had made ourselves comfortable in all the little drawers and compartments. Apparently he was reading the first pages of the continuation of his novel about the confidence trickster Felix Krull, but anyone can say that. It is true that what he read didn’t sound bad—Krull decides to go to the circus, gets to know a rich and beautiful Englishwoman whom he does not love, and so on—but the sentences were trite and pompous. This evening it was finally clear to me that he cannot be the real Thomas Mann, for one thing because he appeared in a blood-red Persian robe, loosely tied with a curtain cord that had been pulled down, with his bare chest showing and a small, wildly twitching snake between his legs. And now Dr Franck was standing in the hall of the Jagiełło High School in front of me, telling me firmly, but with quivering lips, what he had seen and heard a few hours earlier. That morning the alleged Thomas Mann—his hair, which was usually combed smoothly back, tousled, rouge on his cheeks, his thin mustache shaved off and then painted on again with shoe cream—had been sitting next to him in a niche in the station cafeteria, talking in German to someone whom Dr Franck did not know. This other man had a high, squeaky, pleasing voice”—here Bruno stopped writing, closed his eyes and thought of a German movie actor whose dishonest, superior manner, reminiscent of Wilhelm Busch’s naughty boys Max and Moritz, always drew comments in the form of loud whistles from the spectators in the Drohobycz Palace Cinema—“and had the amiable and familiar face of a neighbor to whom you would entrust the key to your own apartment before going away on a journey. They were conversing in such low voices that at first Dr Franck could not hear what it was all about. He caught the word ‘movement’ once or twice, and the name of the Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov was also mentioned. Then the alleged Thomas Mann, speaking in a rather louder and more agitated voice than his companion (who wore a long, black, gleaming leather coat that rustled as he moved, and that he had not removed in the cafeteria), began enumerating the surnames of the Jewish inhabitants of Drohobycz. They kept laughing—particularly at those names that also had a literal meaning in German, such as Gottesdiener (servant of God), Katzenellenbogen (cat’s elbow), Wahrhaftig (truthful), Hasenmass (hare’s measure)—and finally the other man said it was all so witty, he really couldn’t take any more of it, and he asked the false Thomas Mann to give him a written list of all the Jews in town instead, with their addresses and a brief assessment of their physical strength and financial circumstances. At some point”—and again little gray and white feathers fell from the air and settled on Bruno’s notepad, he felt a not unpleasant breath of wind pass over him, now hot and now cold, and heard the soft tripping of small birds’ feet coming closer from all sides—“at some point Dr Franck, who was finding the conversation of the two men increasingly sinister, closed his eyes, and he began reciting the Shacharit morning prayer for the eighth or tenth time that morning. But then his curiosity got the better of him, and he looked past the wooden partition between the tables in the cafeteria at the two Germans sitting there. Of course his eyes immediately met those of the man in the leather coat, who nodded to Dr Franck, without showing any surprise, pointed his forefinger at him like a commissioner on a Red Army poster and said, ‘I like your people’s prayers, and the Shema Israel is particularly fine. It would be a loss if there were no one left to recite it.’ Do you understand now, Dr Mann, why I am writing to you?”

  Bruno got to his feet in agitation, walked twice, then a third time around the desk, and when he sat down again there were two little doves perching on the lamp, one white and one gray, looking at him in silence. On the window sill above there were more doves, and some beside his chair as well, but he took no notice of this sudden plague of birds in his basement study. “Dr Franck and I,” he went on writing, pausing again and again, “are in no doubt, Dr Mann, of what is going on here: we are being spied on! Exactly what the Germans plan to do we do not know. We know only how the Jews are faring in their old home, and we hope that the new Nazi realm will not go on and on growing, to reach our town one day with its kraken arms. Dr Franck, who as President of the Poalei Zion movement in the old days would have liked to move the whole of Drohobycz to the banks of the Jordan or the mountains of Galilee, now says that if the enemies of the Jews begin to rage, there will be nothing left for us anyway but prayer. And he thinks we ought to continue remaining on good terms with your double, as it may help us later. So Dr Franck has also offered him his own apartment in Drohobycz for the rest of his stay here, because it is much lighter and more comfortable than the hotel manager’s bathroom. After we had been standing together in silence for a little longer—while the noise made by the students went on in the art room—Dr Franck suddenly took my arm and asked me whether he could stay with us until the worst was over. What was I to reply? That Hania hates having guests? That the atmosphere on his bleak station bench is better than in our cold, sad house? That we are all lost anyway, and God has another end in view for every one of us?”

  No sooner had Bruno written the last sentence than the warm gray lump in his belly became so hot that he had to take off his heavy tweed jacket and unbutton the collar of his shirt. He hung the jacket over the back of Papa’s chair, and spent some time looking in silence at the two doves on his desk. Without moving, they looked back, also in silence. Then he carefully opened the lower compartment of his desk and took a large old cigar box out of it. He kept the things that were really important to him in this box: the tiny, well-worn brass hearing trumpet that Papa, in his last months of life, was always holding against the floor of the family’s old house on the market place, so as to get a better idea of what the mice, spiders and martens living under it had to say. Adele’s feather duster, of which he had both good and bad memories. And distributed everywhere in the cigar box was the sawdust, with its unpleasant odor, that he had secretly
collected from the smelly, tangled hair of Helena Jakubowicz over the past years. Like someone digging for gold, he would run his fingers through that damp yellow pile of sawdust, thinking of the delightful and dangerous things that Helena Jakubowicz bought for the two of them in one of the badly lit shops that were always changing their location beyond the market place—and soon he felt reassured again and stopped sweating.

  “Professor Schulz,” the gray dove said to him, in the firm but still slightly pubertal voice of young Theo Rosenstock, staring at him out of small black eyes as if he were blind, “Mrs Jakubowicz has sent us again. She says you must hurry. She doesn’t have much time, because afterwards she has a date to meet the gentleman from Germany in the Savoy Bar, and she also has to correct our philosophy essays by tomorrow.”

  “I’m sure to get top marks,” said the white dove, giggling. Bruno recognized the girlish voice of Hermann, the baker Lisowski’s middle son, who was as stupid as he was sweet, and he wished very much that the boy was right in what he said.

  “Oh no, you won’t,” said the gray dove. “Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. What do you know about that?”

  “Nothing,” said the white dove. “But in the long break period I helped Mrs Jakubowicz to get all those flies and beetles out of her hair, and oh, how good they tasted!”

  “Hermann, you’re such a sweet little idiot,” said the gray dove, nodding its head jerkily back and forth a few times, and plucking at its tousled breast feathers with its immaculate beak. The white dove imitated it, then they both laughed, the gray dove spread its wings, rose quickly in the air, turned two or three somersaults above the desk, and settled beside the other bird again on the black, shiny shade of Bruno’s lamp. “And I’ll get top marks at sport,” said the dove. “Isn’t that so, Professor? But I’ll get a much lower mark for art, won’t I?”

  Bruno nodded. He carefully closed the cigar box and put it on the desk. Then he placed the pencil in his notebook, closed it and said, in the detached voice of someone talking in his sleep, “What does Mrs Jakubowicz want from me, Theo? Why must I go to the school so late this evening? I told them I was sick.”

  “You’re to take your punishment, Professor,” said the white dove.

  “Be quiet!” the gray dove interrupted.

  “I thought that Mrs Jakubowicz wasn’t angry with me anymore. Were you lying to me just now, boys?”

  Theo and Hermann did not reply, and the other doves who had gathered on the window sill and the floor abruptly stopped tripping back and forth, and looked in their direction quietly and in suspense.

  “Punishment?” said Bruno. “What kind of punishment? What for?”

  “Go on, Theo,” said the white dove, “tell him. If you don’t I will, but then I’m bound to get everything all muddled up. And then Mrs Jakubowicz will be angry with me and so will Professor Schulz.”

  Theo sailed down from the lamp to the table, perched on Bruno’s hand, ran up the sleeve of his shirt, which was drenched with sweat, and settled on his shoulder. “But you must put your ear very close to me, Professor,” he said, “because I’d rather tell you quietly.”

  Bruno did as his student asked, and then he heard a wild hissing and whistling deep in his ear. “She says,” whispered Theo, gently touching Bruno’s ear with his bony little beak again and again, “she says that you’re infecting us all with your melancholy. She thinks you are more afraid than anyone she has ever met, and that means it is likely that you will refuse to let us have what would probably be the best books a human being could ever write. Your pessimism is really intolerable, she says, you are a bad, bad—”

  At this moment someone drummed loudly on the basement door. The doves—including Theo—flew up in alarm, and some of them hit their heads on the basement ceiling. They were all flapping their wings frantically, and the room was immediately full of a cloud of tiny gray, white and brown feathers, and an unbearable smell like a birdcage.

  “Mama wants to know whether you’re coming up to supper or not, Uncle Bruno,” cried Chaimele and Jacek from outside, as if with a single voice. “Or do you have to go to Stryj Street today?” They laughed, and their laughter sounded like a wave rolling swiftly up and breaking several times—and then, without waiting for Bruno’s answer, they ran noisily upstairs again. Seconds later, Bruno heard chairs being moved about in the kitchen above him, and the sound of knives and forks against Mama’s old Russian porcelain plates.

  “Keep quiet, children,” said Bruno quietly to the doves, “and please don’t disturb me. Sit down somewhere in peace and think of something nice, like what presents you would like for Chanukah or for your birthday. I have to finish writing a letter in a hurry, so that I can post it later on my way to the school. Yes, thank you, that’s nice of you.”

  The birds immediately calmed down. Most of them settled beside the long, narrow window, which was black as night, and put their well-formed little heads under their wings, like good children. A few fluttered through the open skylight into the darkness, and Theo and Hermann, beak by beak, cheek to cheek, made themselves comfortable on Bruno’s cigar box.

  “It is now certain that the false Thomas Mann must be an agent of the Secret State Police,” wrote Bruno, after he had opened his notebook again, laid it neatly on the table and bent over it like a cat with its back arched, “and I suspect he will not leave our town until we have all lost our wits. It is truly very unpleasant to think of the Nazis exploiting your good name, very highly esteemed Dr Mann, and because you, as the voice of the alternative Germany, must be careful of your reputation, I wanted to warn you—”. Here Bruno suddenly stopped. He crossed out the last two sentences and began again: “Is it not terrible that the Nazis are misusing your good name? Terrible for you, Dr Mann, but also for me. Perhaps you are surprised that I write to you in German—I also speak it, but with a strong Podolian accent which unfortunately shows where I come from only too soon—and of course my love of the German language has to do with you, and also the poems and books of Rilke, Joseph Roth and Franz Kafka, whose fine and mysterious novel The Trial I and my former and long-forgotten fiancée translated into Polish. During the war—and hardly any of my literary Polish friends know this, not even Gombrowicz—I spent many months in Vienna, where I studied architecture without much interest, preferring to sit and read in the great libraries. The flexible rules of the Mishnah, the almost inspired melancholy of the Preacher, the gentle clarity of the Shulchan Aruch? No, those were never in my line. I long, rather, with Malte Laurids Brigge and Gustav von Aschenbach, for an end that awaits us all, but whose beauty and moment in time we should be able to determine ourselves—because God may have a plan for us, but he leaves making it until the last minute. And that is why I am so angry with your double, and his superiors in Berlin who have sent him to us. These people act as if they knew what will happen tomorrow. What shocking presumption!”

  As he wrote this sentence, Bruno began sweating even more. He tore open his shirt, buttons flew across the table like shots, and Theo and Hermann, beating their wings, avoided them and then settled again on the cigar box, which was now covered with their white droppings. Bruno carefully removed the pages he had written in the last few hours from his notebook; from the drawer of Papa’s desk he took a manuscript and an envelope, which already bore an address in Zürich and a stamp, and put the manuscript into it. He skimmed the letter, nodding with satisfaction several times, smiling and stroking his cheeks, and then he added a few last sentences. He wished Thomas Mann great success with the last volume of his story of Joseph and his Brothers, and asked him to read his, Bruno’s own story, The Homecoming, the first that he had written in German, and on this occasion he was permitting himself to send it to the great writer. “For many years, dear Dr Mann,” he concluded, “I have wished my books to appear in other countries as well, and perhaps you will like my story and see a way of helping me. Polish is a beautiful but very exclusive language, where you can choke as if on a single melon seed if you are not careful.
I know what you are thinking now! No, I do not believe there is any point in waiting until even more Germans follow your double to these parts. I hope they will not come at all, and any who do come will certainly not be lovers of literature. Thank you, highly esteemed Dr Mann, for taking the time to read my letter, although you certainly have more important things to do. You have no idea how much your attention means to me. With the greatest respect, your very sad and very devoted Bruno Schulz.”

  Bruno put the letter in the envelope and sealed it. He got to his feet, went over to the little mirror with the white frame that hung beside the door, its paint peeling off, for a while he looked at his attractive, clever, triangular face, which suddenly seemed to him as gray as old newspaper, he tapped the tips of his big sail-like ears two or three times, and smiled at himself, and then—because the heat in his belly was intolerable by now—he slowly began removing his last items of clothing. When he was entirely naked, he shooed Theo and Hermann off the dirty cigar box again and put it, shaking his head, in the bottom drawer of the desk. Then he picked up the envelope and told the two of them, who had settled in front of the door, “Come along, children, Mrs Jakubowicz is waiting for us!” He took the thick envelope between his teeth, growled impatiently, put out the light and fell on his knees. After he had opened the door he crawled on all fours, as quietly as possible, to the ground floor and then—passing the door of Hania’s apartment, behind which there was loud argument, and the sound of furniture and china being thrown around—out into Florianska Street, where only a single street lamp was on. The other lights were just going out again with a faint flickering.