Sanatorium under the sign of the hourglass - Bruno Schulz [12]
Easter came, and my parents went away for a week to visit my married sister. I was left alone in the flat, a prey to my inspirations. Adela brought me breakfast and dinner on a tray. I did not notice her presence when she stopped in the doorway in her Sunday best, smelling of spring in her tulles and silks.
Through the open window gentle breezes entered the room, filling it with the reflections of distant landscapes. For a moment the colors of distance stayed in the air, but not for long; they soon dispersed, dissolving into blue shadows, tender and gentle. The flood of paintings receded a little, the waters of imagination quieted and abated.
I sat on the floor. Spread out around me were my crayons and buttons of paint: godly colors, azures breathing freshness, greens straying to the limits of the possible. And when I took a red crayon in my hand, happy fanfares of crimson marched out into the world, all balconies brightened with red waving flags, and whole houses arranged themselves along streets into a triumphant lane. Processions of city firemen in cherry red uniforms paraded in brightly lighted happy streets, and gentlemen lifted their strawberry-colored bowlers in greeting. Cherry red sweetness and cherry red chirping of finches filled the air scented with lavender.
And when I reached for blue paint, the reflection of a cobalt spring fell on all the windows along the street; the panes trembled, one after the other, full of azure and heavenly fire; curtains waved as if alerted; and a joyful draft rose in that lane between muslin curtains and oleanders on the empty balconies, as if somebody distant had appeared from the other side of a long and bright avenue and was now approaching, somebody luminous, preceded by good tidings, by premonitions, announced by the flight of swallows, by beacons of fire spreading mile after mile.
III
At Easter time, usually at the end of March or the beginning of April, Shloma, the son of Tobias, was released from prison, where he had been locked up for the winter after the brawls and follies he had been involved in during the summer and autumn. One afternoon that spring I saw him from the window leaving the barber who in our town combined the functions of hairdresser and surgeon; I watched him carefully open the shining glass-paned door of the shop and descend the three wooden steps. He looked fresh and somehow younger, his hair carefully cut. He was wearing a jacket that was too short and too tight for him and a pair of checked trousers; slim and youthful in spite of his forty years.
Trinity Square was at that time empty and tidy. After the spring thaw the slush had been rinsed away by torrential rains that had left the pavements washed clean. The thaw was followed by many days of quiet, discreet fine weather, with long spacious days stretching beyond measure into evenings when dusk seemed endless, empty, and fallow in its enormous expectations. When Shloma had shut the glass door of the barber's after himself, the sky filled it at once, just as it filled all the small windows of the one-story house.
Having come down the steps, he found himself completely alone on the edge of the large, empty square, which that afternoon seemed shaped like a gourd, like a new, unopened year. Shloma stood on its threshold, gray and extinguished, steeped in blueness and incapable of making a decision that would break the perfect roundness of an unused day.
Only once a year, on his discharge from prison, did Shloma feel so clean, unburdened, and new. Then the day received him unto itself, washed from sin, renewed, reconciled with the world, and with a sigh it opened before him the spotless orbs of its horizons.
Shloma did not hurry. He stood at the edge of the day and did not dare cross it, or advance with his small, youthful, slightly limping steps into the gently vaulted conch of the afternoon.
A translucent shadow lay over the city. The silence of that third hour after midday extracted from the walls of houses the pure whiteness of chalk and spread it voicelessly,