Sanatorium under the sign of the hourglass - Bruno Schulz [10]
The window facing the sky swelled with those endless ascents, the curtains stood in flames, smoking in the fire, spilling golden shadows and shimmering spirals of air. Askew on the carpet lay a quadrilateral of brightness that could not detach itself from the floor. That bar of fire disturbed me deeply. I stood transfixed, legs astride, and barked short, hard curses at it in an alien voice.
In the doorway and in the hall stood frightened, perplexed people: relatives, neighbors, overdressed aunts. They approached on tiptoe and turned away, their curiosity unsatisfied. And I screamed:
"Don't you remember?" I shouted to my mother, to my brother. "I have been telling you that everything is held back, tamed, walled in by boredom, unliberated! And now look at that flood, at that flowering, at that bliss. . . ."
And I shed tears of happiness and helplessness.
"Wake up," I shouted, "come and help me! How can I face this flood alone, how can I deal with this inundation? How can I, all alone, answer the million dazzling questions that God is swamping me with?"
And as they remained silent, I cried in anger: "Hurry up, collect bucketfuls of these riches, store them up!"
But nobody could assist me; bewildered, they looked over their shoulders, hiding behind the backs of neighbors.
Then I realized what I had to do; I began to pull from the cupboards old Bibles and my father's half-filled and disintegrating ledgers, throwing them on the floor under that column of fire that glowed and brightened the air. I wanted more and more sheaves of paper. My mother and brother rushed in with ever new handfuls of old newspapers and magazines and threw them in stacks on the floor. And I sat among the piles of paper, blinded by the glare, my eyes full of explosions, rockets, and colors, and I drew wildly, feverishly, across the paper, over the printed or figure-covered pages. My colored pencils rushed in inspiration across columns of illegible text in masterly squiggles, in breakneck zigzags that knotted themselves suddenly into anagrams of vision, into enigmas of bright revelation, and then dissolved into empty, shiny flashes of lightning, following imaginary tracks.
Oh, those luminous drawings, made as if by a foreign hand. Oh, those transparent colors and shadows. How often, now, do I dream about them, then rediscover them after so many years at the bottom of old drawers, glimmering and fresh like dawn—still damp from the first dew of the day: figures, landscapes, faces!
Oh, those blues that stop your breath with the pang of fear. Oh, those greens greener than wonder. Oh, those preludes of anticipated colors waiting to be given a name!
Why did I squander them at the time with such wanton carelessness in the richness of surfeit? I allowed the neighbors to rummage about and plunder these stacks of drawings. They carried away whole sheaves of them. In what houses did they finally land, which rubbish heaps did they fill? Adela hung them up in the kitchen like wallpaper until the room became light and bright as if snow had fallen during the night.
The drawings were full of cruelty, pitfalls, and aggression. While I sat on the floor taut as a bow, immobile and lurking, the papers around me glowed brightly in the sun. It was enough if a drawing, pinned down by the tip of my pencil, made the slightest move toward escape, for my hand, trembling with new impulses and ideas, to attack it like a cat. Fierce and rapacious, I would, with lightning bites, savage the creation that tried to escape from under my crayon. And that crayon only left the paper when the now dead and immobile corpse displayed its colorful and fantastic anatomy on the page, like a plant in a herbal.
It was a murderous pursuit, a fight to the death. Who could tell the attacker from the attacked in that tangle that spluttered with rage, with squeaks and fears? At times my hand would start to attack twice or three times in vain, only to reach its victim on the fourth or fifth attempt. Often