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.
Theo and Hermann and the other doves obediently followed Bruno, tripping and whirring in the air all the time, and some of the birds were already waiting for him, on the icy pavement and in the black trees in front of the building. As he slowly set off towards the school — to reach the large, dark building of the Jagiełło High School, he had to crawl to Piłsudski Street and turn off when he came to the town park — all the doves rose into the air, which was much too warm for winter, at the same time and circled around him, half human, half animal, in ellipses large and small in the silvery dark. The soft, gentle beating of their spread wings calmed Bruno, and he imagined himself following them into the many-branching starry firmament of the heavens.
But after several hundred meters, Bruno suddenly caught sight of a blaze of red firelight over the nocturnal city, he heard the sound of motor engines and loud orders, and when he looked to left or right he always saw, at the end of every alley, a gigantic, black, prehistoric insect running past on feet that rattled like tank tracks.
What’s that? he thought.
No answer came.
What’s that?
That is the army of Abimelech, Fear finally replied; it has come to destroy all who first made him king and remembered, only later, that he had murdered seventy of their brothers.
Oh, I see, said Bruno, of course, and he was very glad that Fear was finally talking to him again. Then he crawled on, thinking: I want Helena to start by putting the black Columbine mask on me, and tying my arms together behind my back with the Easter whips, and the rest is up to her. Although he had been on the move for almost an hour, he had only just reached the portico of the town park, he was breathing heavily, his knees were sore and bloody and the doves in the sky above Drohobycz flew one after another into the red firelight, where they burned like tinder.
TWO STORIES BY BRUNO SCHULZ
BRUNO SCHULZ was a Polish-Jewish writer and artist. Born in 1892 in Drohobycz, Poland (now part of Ukraine), he worked for many years as an art teacher in his hometown. He published two collections of short fiction, The Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. In 1942 he was killed by a Gestapo officer and much of his work, including a novel titled The Messiah, was lost. The little that remains has influenced numerous important writers, including J. M. Coetzee, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Salman Rushdie, David Grossman and Jonathan Safran Foer.
‘Schulz was incomparably gifted as an explorer of his own inner life’
‘A man of enormous artistic gifts and imaginative riches’
‘Bruno Schulz was one of the great writers, one of the great transmogrifiers of the world into words’
‘I read Schulz’s stories and felt the gush of life’
BIRDS
CAME THE YELLOW DAYS OF winter, filled with boredom. The rust-colored earth was covered with a threadbare, meager tablecloth of snow full of holes. There was not enough of it for some of the roofs and so they stood there, black and brown, shingle and thatch, arks containing the sooty expanses of attics — coal black cathedrals, bristling with ribs of rafters, beams, and spars — the dark lungs of winter winds. Each dawn revealed new chimney stacks and chimney pots which had emerged during the hours of darkness, blown up by the night winds: the black pipes of a devil’s organ. The chimney sweeps could not get rid of the crows which in the evening covered the branches of the trees around the church with living black leaves, then took off, fluttering, and came back, each clinging to its own place on its own branch, only to fly away at dawn in large flocks, like gusts of soot, flakes of dirt, undulating and fantastic, blackening with their insistent cawing the musty yellow streaks of light. The days hardened with cold and boredom like last year’s loaves of bread. One
began to cut them with blunt knives without appetite, with a lazy indifference.
Father had stopped going out. He banked up the stoves, studied the ever-elusive essence of fire, experienced the salty, metallic taste and the smoky smell of wintry salamanders that licked the shiny soot in the throat of the chimney. He applied himself lovingly at that time to all manner of small repairs in the upper regions of the rooms. At all hours of the day one could see him crouched on top of a ladder, working at something under the ceiling, at the cornices over the tall windows, at the counterweights and chains of the hanging lamps. Following the custom of house painters, he used a pair of steps as enormous stilts and he felt perfectly happy in that bird’s-eye perspective close to the sky, leaves and birds painted on the ceiling. He grew more and more remote from practical affairs. When my mother, worried and unhappy about his condition, tried to draw him into a conversation about business, about the payments due at the end of the month, he listened to her absentmindedly, anxiety showing in his abstracted look. Sometimes he stopped her with a warning gesture of the hand in order to run to a corner of the room, put his ear to a crack in the floor and, by lifting the index fingers of both hands, emphasize the gravity of the investigation, and begin to listen intently. At that time we did not yet understand the sad origin of these eccentricities, the deplorable complex which had been maturing in him.
Mother had no influence over him, but he gave a lot of respectful attention to Adela. The cleaning of his room was to him a great and important ceremony, of which he always arranged to be a witness, watching all Adela’s movements with a mixture of apprehension and pleasurable excitement. He ascribed to all her functions a deeper, symbolic meaning. When, with young firm gestures, the girl pushed a long-handled broom along the floor, Father could hardly bear it. Tears would stream from his eyes, silent laughter transformed his face, and his body was shaken by spasms of delight. He was ticklish to the point of madness. It was enough for Adela to waggle her fingers at him to imitate tickling, for him to rush through all the rooms in a wild panic, banging the doors after him, to fall at last on the bed in the farthest room and wriggle in convulsions of laughter, imagining the tickling which he found irresistible. Because of this, Adela’s power over Father was almost limitless.