Sanatorium under the sign of the hourglass - Bruno Schulz [86]
At last we reached school. The candles were extinguished, darkness surrounded us as we groped for our places. Then the instructor entered, put an end of a tallow candle into a bottle, and the boring questions about declension of the irregular verbs would begin. As there was not yet sufficient light, the lesson remained oral and had to be memorized. While one of us was reciting monotonously, we looked, blinking, at the golden arrows shooting up from the candle, at lines that cut across one another like blades of straw on our half-closed eyelashes. The instructor poured ink into inkwells, yawned, looked out through the low window into the blackness. Under the seats it was completely dark. We dived there, giggling, walked on all fours, smelling one another like animals, and performing blindly and in whispers the usual transactions. I shall never forget those blissful early morning hours at school while a slow dawn matured beyond the windowpanes.
At last came the season of autumnal winds. On its first day, early in the morning, the sky became yellow and modeled itself against that background in dirty gray lines of imaginary landscapes, of great misty wastes, receding in an eastward direction into a perspective of diminishing hills and folds, more numerous as they became smaller, until the sky tore itself off like the wavy edge of a rising curtain and disclosed a farther plan, a deeper sky, a gap of frightened whiteness, a pale and scared light of remote distance, discolored and watery, that like final amazement closed the horizon. As in Rembrandt's etchings one could see on such a day distant microscopic regions that, under the streak of brightness usually hard to locate, now rose from beyond the horizon under that clear crevice of sky.
In that miniature landscape, one could see with sharp precision a railway train usually not visible at that distance, moving on a wavy track and crowned with a plume of silvery white smoke, which in turn dissolved into bright nothingness.
And then, the wind rose. As if thrown from the clear gap in the sky, it circled and spread all over the city. It was woven of softness and gentleness, but it pretended to be brutal and fierce. It kneaded, turned over, and tortured the air until it felt like dying from bliss. Then it stiffened in space and reared, spread itself like canvas sails—enormous, taut, flapping like drying sheets—tangled itself in hard knots, trembling with tension, as if it wanted to move the whole atmosphere into a higher space; and then it pulled and untied the false knot and, a mile further away, threw again its hissing lasso, that lariat which could catch nothing.
And the dance the wind led the chimney smoke! The smoke did not know how to avoid its scolding, how to turn, whether left or right, how to escape its blows. Thus the wind lorded it over the city as if on that memorable day it had wanted to give a telling example of its infinite willfulness.
From early in the morning, I had a premonition of disaster. I made my way in the gale only with difficulty. On street corners, where the crosswinds met, my schoolmates held me by my coattails. So I sailed across the city and all was well. Later we went for gymnastics to the other school. On our way we bought some crescent rolls. Talking incessantly, our long crocodile wound through the gate and into the courtyard. One more minute and I should have been