“What did the woman want, Hania?” said Bruno slowly and crossly, for he wanted to go on writing quickly, and he thought: good, at least talking works again.
“She said you weren’t in school today, and in your absence your students had destroyed the stuffed animals in the art room and thrown them into the light-well of the yard,” Hania called through the door in her high, faded, widow’s voice. “And she said that was why you were to look in today and take your punishment. If you didn’t, she said, it would be worse tomorrow. Will you eat with us first, Brunio? Jankel is in Lemberg until Tuesday, and I have more than enough meat and kreplach.” She sighed. “You know, even if he’s only away for a day or two on business I miss him as if he were never coming back. We eat at nine!”
As you see, my greatly respected Herr Thomas Mann, thought Bruno, your double is not the only person in Drohobycz who has lost his wits. It began early with my sister Hania, and my father was in even more of a hurry to leave the world. Long before his death, he resorted to that in-between realm where, he thought, human beings, animals and plants could communicate without words. Shaking his head, Bruno put the black notebook aside, laid the pencil on the ice-cold floor, where it quickly rolled away like a frightened mouse, stopped when it reached one of the legs of the desk and stayed there. As my beloved and now dead mother nursed him, thought Bruno, without noticing that he was no longer writing, she, too, discovered the joys of unreality. To her way of thinking my father — even when he was as small as a baby again, lying in our little dog Nimrod’s basket, weeping and whispering as he nestled against the baffled animal — was a guilty man exploiting his mortal sickness to avoid responsibility for his house and his family, and so she would sometimes throw things at him: the key to the front door, or her siddur prayer book when she was in the middle of praying. Ever since then, my dear Herr Mann, I have asked myself three times a day: did Mama learn that from our implacable jailer Adele? Did she know how often Adele — a tiny woman, but often endowed by her fury with superhuman strength — had raised her hand to me in the old days, in one of the forgotten, empty, dusty attic rooms in our old house on the market place? I think there can be no two answers to that question. Once the roughly made wooden door of one of the rooms, where I was in the middle of my little conversation with Adele’s feather duster as it whistled through the air, was left open, and when I turned my head aside in pain I saw Mama’s helpless, harlequin face in the gap where the door stood ajar. Do you see what kind of a madhouse this town of Drohobycz is now, Dr Mann? People here never think and act as they should! I could tell you so many tales: my students, instead of drawing and doing their arithmetic exercises, generally perch on the rooftops of the houses, cooing and pecking, or fly in circles around the tower of the town hall. Hasenmass the hotel manager — I saw this through the window late at night last Saturday — has himself harnessed to a hackney cab by your double, and, naked and whinnying softly, he takes the master from bar to bar. Perelmann, the under-age, melancholy editor-in-chief of the Drohobycz News, writes every day in his paper that the Jews ought to renounce their faith, as they once did overnight in Spain in the past, and then they would soon be leading Torquemada’s divisions instead of being crushed by them. And Dr Franck, the specialist in internal medicine, closed his practice last month and sits on a bench at the railway station all day, reciting the Kaddish all the time.
And what about the lovely, gloomy Helena Jakubowicz? She, poor woman, believing too much in the enlightening power of literature and ideas, suffers from particularly severe depression, the result, as one tells oneself, of extreme literary ambition accompanied by only average talent. I do not know what it is that she likes about my stories. She takes them, she has told me a couple of times, as you might take an aspirin or, no, an antidote to the poison of hopelessness within herself. And having to wait so long for my new book often makes her even sadder — hence her eternal, abnormal, wild and illogical anger with me, the compliant scapegoat, the anger that comforts me whenever I am not holding Helena in check, and gives me the reassuring knowledge that childhood, snow-white or blood-red, will never pass away and become happiness. It really is a shame, Herr Mann, that you will never meet Helena. What a delicate, dear woman is hidden in reality behind the ill-smelling, downy, monkey hair on her face! And what if she were to wash and comb her hair properly for once, if she were to remove the sticky sawdust from her hair and her clothes, if she were to have a pedicure and put on a pretty, close-fitting French skirt suit? Then, ah then, I fear that perhaps I would never tremble with such pleasant desire in her presence. Now you can see how crazy a man gets to be if he lives here too long.
“I am not hungry, Hania,” said Bruno slowly and indistinctly, as if awakening from a deep sleep. Once again that growl came out of his throat, but this time it did not alarm him. “I am going to do a little more work, and later look in at the High School to see what they want me for there. Don’t wait for me.” He tried to stand up as quietly as possible, so as not to make any noise that would start Hania talking again, but she had already gone upstairs, for he heard her now in the kitchen above him playing a wild military march on pans, plates and the oven. At first his attempt to stand up went well. Bruno raised his torso and kept his balance without having to support himself with his hands on the cold stone floor — but when he tried getting to his feet he tottered, and had to kneel down again at once. He stayed like that for minutes on end, surprised to find that today, of all days, he had lost the ability to stand upright and walk. For many years he had expected that to happen, but not now, not until much later — in a future endlessly far away, populated by gigantic wall lizards, snakes and primeval birds who ate their own tails, by armies of human beings in gray uniforms in long, straggling processions that reached to the horizon, by millions of naked men, women and children who could move only on all fours. And everywhere in that country, fires large and small were burning, and anyone who could see through the smoke and the flames shooting up around him prayed that he might not be forced, like those people, to his hands and knees, and be driven like them into that fire.