“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.”