Sanatorium under the sign of the hourglass - Bruno Schulz [54]
In the quietness of the morning hours, while the heat was slowly rising, my father expected to find a happy and inspired phrase that would give the required weight to his letter to Messrs. Christian Seipel & Sons, Spinners and Mechanical Weavers. It was to be a cutting riposte to the unfounded demands of these gentlemen, the reply ad rem, concise at the decisive point, so that the letter could rise to a strong and witty final plea to produce the desired shock effect and could then be rounded off with one energetic, elegant, and final irrevocable sentence. He could almost feel the form of that phrase that had been eluding him for many days, he could almost touch it with his fingertips, but he could not lay his hands on it. He waited for a flash of carefree humor to take by storm the obstacle that stubbornly barred his way. He reached for yet another clean sheet of paper, in order to give fresh impetus to the conquest of the obstacle that had been defying all his efforts.
Meanwhile the shop became gradually peopled with his assistants. They entered flushed from the early morning heat and avoided Father's desk, at which they cast frightened and guilt-ridden looks.
Exhausted after the night and conscious of it, they felt the weight of his silent disapproval, which nothing they did could dispel. Nothing could placate the master, brooding over his worries; no show of eagerness could pacify him as he sat lurking like a scorpion behind his desk, his glasses flashing ominously as he foraged like a mouse among his papers. His excitement increased, his latent temper intensified in step with the heat. The square patch of sunlight on the floor glared. Shiny, metallic flies flashed like lightning in the entrance to the shop, settling for a moment on the sides of the door, glass bubbles blown from the hot pipe of the sun, from the glassworks of that radiant day: they sat with wings outspread, full of flight and swiftness, then changed places in furious zigzags. Through the bright quadrilateral of the doorway one could see the lime trees of the city park fainting in the sunlight, the distant bell tower of the church outlined clearly in the translucent and shimmering air, as if in the lenses of binoculars. The tinplated roofs were burning; the enormous, golden globe of heat was swelling all over the world.
Father's irritation grew. He looked round helplessly, doubled up with pain, exhausted by diarrhea. He felt in his mouth, a taste more bitter than wormwood.
The heat intensified, sharpening the fury of the flies, making the metal on their abdomens shine. The quadrilateral of light now reached Father's desk, and the papers burned like the Apocalypse. Father's eyes, blinded by the sunlight, could not stand their white uniformity. Through his thick glasses he saw everything he looked at in crimson, greenish, or purple frames and was filled with despair at this explosion of color, the anarchy raging over the world in an orgy of brightness. His hands shook. His palate was bitter and dry, heralding an attack of sickness. His eyes, embedded in the furrows of wrinkles, watched with attention the development of events in the depth of the shop.
II
When, at noon, my father, exhausted by the heat, trembling with futile excitement and almost on the verge of madness, retreated upstairs and the ceilings of the floor above cracked here and there under his skulking step, the shop experienced a momentary pause and relaxation: the hour of the afternoon siesta.
The shop assistants turned somersaults on the bales of cloth, pitched tents of fabric on the shelves,