Sanatorium under the sign of the hourglass - Bruno Schulz [74]
It was difficult to reconstruct the history of that escapade, as Dodo kept completely silent about it. Most probably, having extended the course of his daily walk, he had wandered off to an unfamiliar area of the city, perhaps helped in it by the young peripatetics, who were not adverse to exposing Dodo to new and unfamiliar conditions of life.
Maybe it was one of the occasions when Dodo's poor, overburdened memory had a day off, and he forgot his address and even his name, details he somehow usually managed to remember, but we never did learn the details of his adventure.
When Dodo's elder brother went abroad, the family shrunk to four members. Apart from Uncle Jerome and Aunt Retitia, there was only Caroline, who played the part of lady housekeeper in that patrician establishment.
Uncle Jerome had been confined to his room for many years. From the moment when Providence gently eased from his hand the steering of the battered ship of his life, he had led the existence of a pensioner in the narrow space allotted to him between the hallway and the dark alcove of his apartment.
In a long housecoat reaching down to his ankles, he used to sit in the darkest corner of the alcove, his facial hair growing daily longer. A beard the color of pepper, with long strands of hair almost completely white at the ends, surrounded his face and spread halfway up his cheeks, leaving free only a hawk's nose and eyes, rolling their whites under the shadow of shaggy eyebrows.
In this windowless room—a narrow prison in which, like a large cat, he was condemned to walk up and down in front of the glass door leading to the drawing room—stood two enormous oak beds, Uncle's and Aunt's nightly abode. The whole back wall of the room was covered with a large tapestry, the indistinct woven figures of which loomed through the darkness. When one's eyes became accustomed to the dark, one could see on it, among bamboos and palms, an enormous lion, powerful and forbidding as a prophet, majestic as a patriarch.
Sitting back to back, the lion and Uncle Jerome felt each other's presence and loathed it. Without looking, they growled at each other, bared their evil teeth, and muttered threats. Sometimes the lion in an excess of irritation would rise on his forelegs, his mane bristling, and fill the overcast tapestry sky with his roaring. Sometimes Uncle Jerome would tower over the lion and deliver a prophetic tirade, frowning under the weight of the great words, his beard waving in inspiration. Then the lion would narrow his eyes in pain and, slowly turning his head, cringe under the lash of divine words.
The lion and Jerome transformed the dark alcove in my uncle's apartment into a perpetual battlefield.
Uncle Jerome and Dodo lived in the small apartment independently from each other, in two different dimensions that never coincided. Their eyes, whenever they met, wandered on without focusing, like the eyes of animals of two unrelated and distant species that are incapable of retaining the picture of anything unfamiliar.
They never spoke to each other.
At table, Aunt Retitia, sitting between her husband and her son, formed a buffer between two worlds, an isthmus between two oceans of madness.
Uncle Jerome ate jerkily, his long beard dipping into his plate. When the kitchen door creaked, he half rose from his chair and grabbed his plate of soup, ready to flee with it to the alcove should a stranger enter the room. Aunt Retitia would reassure him, saying:
"Don't be afraid, no one is there; it is only the maid."
Then Dodo would cast an angry and indignant look at his frightened father and mumble to himself with great displeasure: "He's off his head."
Before Uncle Jerome accepted absolution from the complex and difficult affairs of life and got permission to retreat into his refuge in the alcove, he was a man of quite a different stamp. Those who knew him in his youth said that his reckless temperament knew no restraints, considerations,