Sanatorium under the sign of the hourglass - Bruno Schulz [46]
At last, at the city boundary the night gives up its games, removes its veil, discloses its serious and eternal face. It stops constructing around us illusory labyrinths of hallucination and nightmare and opens wide its starry eternity. The firmament grows into infinity, constellations glow in their splendor in time-hallowed positions, drawing magic figures in the sky as if they wanted to announce something, to proclaim something ultimate by their frightening silence. The shimmering of these distant worlds is a silvery starry chatter like the croaking of frogs. The July sky scatters an unbelievable dust of meteors, quietly soaked up by the cosmos.
At some hour of the night—the constellations still dreaming their eternal dreams—I found myself again in my own street. A star shone over the end of it, emitting an alient scent. When I opened the gate of the house, a draft could be felt like that in a dark tunnel. In the dining room the light was still on, four candles burned in a brass candlestick. My brother-in-law was not yet in. Since my sister's departure, he had frequently been late for supper, sometimes not returning until late at night. Waking up from sleep, I often saw him undressing with a dull and meditative expression. Then he would blow out the candle, take all his clothes off, and, naked, lie for a long while sleepless on the cool bed. Sleep would only gradually overpower his large body. He would restlessly murmur something, breathe heavily, sigh, struggle with an imaginary burden on his breast. At times he would sob softly and dryly. Frightened, I asked in the darkness: "Are you all right, Charles?" but in the meantime he was off on the steep path of his dreams, scrambling laboriously up some hill of snoring.
Through the open window the night was now breathing slowly. Into its large formless mass a cool, odorous fluid was being poured, the dark joints became looser, allowing thin rivulets of scent to seep through. The dead matter of darkness sought liberation in inspired flights of jasmine scent, but the unformed depths of the night remained still dead and unliberated.
The chink of light under the door to the next room shone like a golden string, sonorous and sensitive, like the sleep of the infant whining in his cradle. The chatter of caressing talk could be heard from there, an idyll between the wet-nurse and the baby, the idyll of first love, in the midst of a circle of nightly demons that assembled in the darkness behind the window, lured by the warm spark of life glimmering inside.
On the other side was an empty room, and beyond it the bedroom of my parents. Straining my ear, I could hear how my father, on the threshold of sleep, glided in ecstasy over its aerial roads, wholly dedicated to this flight. His melodious and penetrating snoring told the story of his wandering along unknown impasses of sleep.
Thus did the souls slowly enter the aphelion, the sunless side of life, which no living creature has ever seen. They lay like people in the throes of death, rattling terribly and sobbing, while the black eclipse held their spirits in bond. And when at last they passed the black nadir, the deepest Orcus of the soul, when in mortal sweat they had fought their way through its strange promontories, the bellows of their lungs began to swell with a different tune, their inspired snores persisting until dawn.
A dense darkness still oppressed the earth when a different smell, a different color announced the slow approach of dawn. This was the moment when the most sober, sleepless