The Street of Crocodiles - Bruno Schulz [16]
One day, during spring cleaning, Adela suddenly appeared in Father's bird kingdom. Stopping in the doorway, she wrung her hands at the fetid smell that filled the room, the heaps of droppings covering the floor, the tables, and the chairs. Without hesitation, she flung open a window and, with the help of a long broom, she prodded the whole mass of birds into life. A fiendish cloud of feathers and wings arose screaming, and Adela, like a furious maenad protected by the whirlwind of her thyrsus, danced the dance of destruction. My father, waving his arms in panic, tried to lift himself into the air with his feathered flock. Slowly the winged cloud thinned until at last Adela remained on the battlefield, exhausted and out of breath, along with my father, who now, adopting a worried hangdog expression, was ready to accept complete defeat.
A moment later, my father came downstairs—a broken man, an exiled king who had lost his throne and his kingdom.
Tailors' Dummies
The affair of the birds was the last colorful and splendid counteroffensive of fantasy which my father, that incorrigible improviser, that fencing master of imagination, had led against the trenches and defenseworks of a sterile and empty winter. Only now do I understand the lonely hero who alone had waged war against the fathomless, elemental boredom that strangled the city. Without any support, without recognition on our part, that strangest of men was defending the lost cause of poetry. He was like a magic mill, into the hoppers of which the bran of empty hours was poured, to re-emerge flowering in all the colors and scents of Oriental spices. But, used to the splendid showmanship of that metaphysical conjurer, we were inclined to underrate the value of his sovereign magic, which saved us from the lethargy of empty days and nights.
Adela was not rebuked for her thoughtless and brutal vandalism. On the contrary, we felt a vile satisfaction, a disgraceful pleasure that Father's exuberance had been curbed, for although we had enjoyed it to the full, we later ignominiously denied all responsibility for it. Perhaps in our treachery there was secret approval of the victorious Adela to whom we dimly ascribed some commission and assignment from forces of a higher order. Betrayed by us all, Father retreated without a fight from the scenes of his recent glory. Without crossing swords, he surrendered to the enemy the kingdom of his former splendor. A voluntary exile, he took himself off to an empty room at the end of the passage and there immured himself in solitude.
We forgot him.
We were beset again from all sides by the mournful grayness of the city which crept through the windows with the dark rash of dawn, with the mushroom growth of dusk, developing into the shaggy fur of long winter nights. The wallpaper of the rooms, blissfully unconstrained in those former days and accessible to the multicolored flights of the birds, closed in on itself and hardened, becoming engrossed in the monotony of bitter monologues.
The chandeliers blackened and wilted like old thistles; now they hung dejected and ill-tempered, their glass pendants ringing softly whenever anybody groped their way through the dimly lit room. In vain did Adela put colored candles in all the holders; they were a poor substitute for, a pale reflection of, those splendid illuminations which had so recently enlivened these hanging gardens. Oh, what a twittering had been there, what swift and fantastic flights cutting the air into packs of magic cards, sprinkling thick flakes of azure, of peacock and parrot green, of metallic sparkle, drawing lines and flourishes in the air, displaying colored fans which remained suspended, long after flight, in the shimmering atmosphere. Even now, in the depth of the grayness, echoes and memories of brightness were hidden but nobody caught them, no clarinet drilled the troubled air.
Those weeks passed under the sign of a strange drowsiness.
Beds unmade for days on end, piled high