Sanatorium under the sign of the hourglass - Bruno Schulz [88]
Mostly I sit at the table and turn the pages of my yellowed university notes—my only reading.
I look at the sun-bleached curtain, stiff with dust, waving slightly in the cold breeze from the window. I could do exercises on the curtain rod, an excellent bar. How lightly one could turn somersaults on it in the sterile, tired air. Almost casually one could make an elegant salto mortale, coolly, without too much involvement—a speculative exercise, as it were. When one stands on tiptoe, balancing oneself on the bar, with one's head touching the ceiling, one has the impression that it is slightly warmer higher up—the illusion of being in a warmer zone.
Ever since my childhood, I have liked to have a bird's-eye view of my room.
So I sit and listen to the silence. The room is whitewashed. Sometimes on the white ceiling a wrinklelike crack appears, sometimes a flake of plaster breaks off with a click. Am I to reveal that the room is walled in? How can that be? Walled in? How could I leave it? That is just it: where there is a will, there is a way; a passionate determination can conquer all. I must only imagine a door, a good old door, like the one in the kitchen of my childhood, with an iron handle and a bolt. There is no walled-in room that could not be opened by such a trusted door, provided one were strong enough to suggest that such a door exists.
FATHER'S LAST ESCAPE
IT HAPPENED in the late and forlorn period of complete disruption, at the time of the liquidation of our business. The signboard had been removed from over our shop, the shutters were halfway down, and inside the shop my mother was conducting an unauthorized trade in remnants. Adela had gone to America, and it was said that the boat on which she had sailed had sunk and that all the passengers had lost their lives. We were unable to verify this rumor, but all trace of the girl was lost and we never heard of her again.
A new age began—empty, sober, and joyless, like a sheet of white paper. A new servant girl, Genya, anemic, pale, and boneless, mooned about the rooms. When one patted her on the back, she wriggled, stretched like a snake, or purred like a cat. She had a dull white complexion, and even the insides of her eyelids were white. She was so absent-minded that she sometimes made a white sauce from old letters and invoices: it was sickly and inedible.
At that time, my father was definitely dead. He had been dying a number of times, always with some reservations that forced us to revise our attitude toward the fact of his death. This had its advantages. By dividing his death into installments, Father had familiarized us with his demise. We became gradually indifferent to his returns—each one shorter, each one more pitiful. His features were already dispersed throughout the room in which he had lived, and were sprouting in it, creating at some points strange knots of likeness that were most expressive. The wallpaper began in certain places to imitate his habitual nervous tic; the flower designs arranged themselves into the doleful elements of his smile, symmetrical as the fossilized imprint of a trilobite. For a time, we gave a wide berth to his fur coat lined with polecat skins. The fur coal breathed. The panic of small animals sewn together and biting into one another passed through it in helpless currents and lost itself in the folds of the fur. Putting one's ear against it, one could hear the melodious purring unison of the animals' sleep. In this well-tanned form, amid the faint smell of polecat, murder, and nighttime matings, my father might have lasted for many years. But he did not last.
One day, Mother returned home from