Sanatorium under the sign of the hourglass - Bruno Schulz [47]
MY FATHER JOINS THE FIRE BRIGADE
AT THE BEGINNING of October my mother and I usually returned home from our holiday in the country. The place where we stayed was in a neighboring county, in a wooded valley of the River Slotvinka, which resounded with the murmur of innumerable underground springs. With our ears still filled with the rustle of beech trees and the chirping of birds, we rode in a large old landau, crowned with an enormous hood. We sat underneath it among numerous bundles in a kind of velvet-lined cavernous alcove, looking through the window at the changing landscape, colorful like pictures slowly dealt out from a pack.
At dusk we reached a plateau—the vast, startled crossroads of the country. The sky over it was deep, breathless, and windswept. Here was the farthest tollgate of the country, the last turning, beyond which the landscape of early autumn opened lower down. The frontier too was here, marked by an old, rotting frontier post with a faded inscription on a board that swayed in the wind.
The great wheels of the landau creaked as they sank in the sand, and the chattering spokes fell silent; only the large hood droned dully and flapped darkly in the crosswinds, like an ark that had landed in a desert.
Mother paid the toll, the bar of the turnpike squeaked when lifted, and the landau rolled heavily into the autumn.
We entered the wilted boredom of an enormous plain, an area of faded pale breezes that enveloped dully and lazily the yellow distance. A feeling of forlornness rose from the windswept space.
Like the yellowed pages of an old fable, the landscape became paler and more brittle as if it would disintegrate in an enormous emptiness. In that windy nowhere, in that yellow nirvana, we might have ridden to the limits of time and reality, or remained in it forever, amid the warm, sterile draftiness—an immobile coach on large wheels, stuck in the clouds of a parchment sky; an old illustration; a forgotten woodcut in an old-fashioned, moldy novel—when the coachman suddenly jerked the reins and from the lethargy of the crossroads pulled the landau into a forest.
We entered the thickets of dry fluff, a tobacco-colored wilting. Everything around us was sheltered and tawny like the inside of a box of trabucos. In that cedar semidarkness we passed tree trunks that were dry and odorous like cigars. We drove on and the forest became darker, smelling more aromatically of tobacco, until at last it enclosed us like a dry cello box, resounding faintly to its last tune. The coachman had no matches, so he could not light the lanterns. The horses, breathing heavily, found their way by instinct. The rattling of the spokes became less loud, the wheels began to turn softly in the sweet-smelling needles. My mother fell asleep. Time passed uncounted, making unfamiliar knots and abbreviations in its passage. The darkness was impenetrable; the dry rustle of the forest still resounded over the hood as the ground under the horses' hooves became solid and the carriage turned round and stopped, almost brushing a wall. Holding the door of the landau, my mother blindly felt for the gate to our house. The coachman was already unloading our bundles.
We entered a large vaulted hallway. It was dark, warm, and quiet like an old empty bakery at dawn, when the oven is cool, or like a Turkish bath late at night, when the forsaken tubs and basins grow cold in the darkness, in a silence measured by the dripping of taps. A cricket was patiently pulling from the darkness the tacking stitches