Sanatorium under the sign of the hourglass - Bruno Schulz [56]
It was then that the regrettable incident occurred that filled us all with sadness and shame. Although we did not act in bad faith, we were all equally to blame. It was all due to our frivolity, our lack of seriousness and understanding for Father's worries. Given the unpredictable, insecure, and volatile nature of my father, our thoughtlessness produced consequences that were truly fatal.
While we were all standing in a semicircle, enjoying our little joke, my father quietly entered the shop.
We did not see him come in. We noticed him only when the sudden understanding of our little game distorted his face in a grimace of wild horror. My mother came running, very frightened:
"What is the matter, Jacob?" she asked breathlessly.
She began to slap him on the back as one would a person who is choking. It was too late. My father was bristling all over, his face was decomposing quickly, falling apart, changing under our eyes, struck by the burden of an inexplicable calamity. Before we could understand what was happening, he shook himself violently, buzzed, and rose in flight before our eyes, transformed into a monstrous, hairy, steel blue horsefly, furiously circling and knocking blindly against the walls of the shop. Transfixed, we listened to the hopeless lament, the expressively modulated dull plaint, running up and down the registers of boundless pain—an unrelieved suffering under the dark ceiling of the shop.
We stood unmoving, deeply shamed, unable to look at one another. In the depth of our hearts we felt a certain relief that at a critical moment my father had found a way out of an impossible situation. We admired the courage with which he threw himself recklessly into a blind alley of desperation from which, as it seemed, there was no return.
Yel, looking at it dispassionately, one had to take my father's transformation cum grano salis. It was much more the symbol of an inner protest, a violent and desperate demonstration from which, however, reality was not absolutely absent. One has to keep in mind that most of the events described here suffer from summer aberrations, the canicular semireality, the marginal time running irresponsibly along the borderline of the dead season.
We listened in silence. My father's revenge was particularly cunning: it was a kind of reprisal. From then on we were condemned to hearing forever that baleful low buzzing—a persistent, doleful complaint, which rose to a pitch and then suddenly stopped. For a moment, we savored the silence with relief, a beneficent respite during which a glimmer of hope arose in us. But after a while the buzzing began again, ever more insistent and plaintive, and we realized that there was no end to that suffering, to that curse, to the homeless beating against all the walls. That monologue of complaint and silence, each time rising even louder and angrier, as if it wanted to cancel the previous moment of short appeasement, jarred on our nerves. Suffering that is limitless, suffering that is stubbornly enclosed within the circle of its own mania, suffering to the point of distraction, of self-mutilation, becomes in the end unbearable for the helpless witnesses of misfortune. That incessant, angry appeal for our sympathy contained too obvious a reproach, too glaring an accusation against our own well-being, not to make us rebellious. We all inwardly writhed, full of protest and fury instead of contrition. Was there really no other way out for him but to throw himself