The Street of Crocodiles - Bruno Schulz [45]
The events I am now going to relate happened in that thirteenth, supernumerary, freak month of that year, on those blank pages of the great chronicles of the calendar.
The mornings were strangely refreshing and tart. From the quietened and cooler flow of time, from the completely new smell in the air, from the different consistency of the light, one could recognize that one had entered a new series of days, a new era of the Lord's Year.
Voices trembled under these new skies resonantly and lightly, as in a new and still-empty house which smells of varnish and paint, of things begun and not yet used. With a strange emotion one tried out new echoes, one bit into them with curiosity as, on a cool and sober morning on the eve of a journey, one bites into a fresh, still warm currant loaf.
My father was again sitting at the back of his shop, in a small, low room divided like a beehive into many cells of file boxes from which endless layers of paper, letters and invoices overflowed. From the rustle of sheets, from the ceaseless turning over of pages, arose the squared empty existence of that room; the constant moving of files of innumerable letters with business headings created in the stuffy air an apotheosis, a bird's eye mirage of an industrial city, bristling with smoky chimneys, surrounded by a row of medals, and with a clasp formed from the curves and flourishes of a proud "& Co."
There my father would sit, as if in an aviary, on a high stool; and the lofts of filing cabinets rustled with piles of paper and all the pigeonholes filled with the twitter of figures.
The depth of the large shop became, from day to day, darker and richer, with stocks of cloth, serge, velvet, and cord. On the somber shelves, those granaries and silos, the cool, felted fabrics matured and yielded interest. The powerful capital of autumn multiplied and mellowed. It grew and ripened and spread, ever wider, until the shelves resembled the rows of some great amphitheater. It was augmented daily by new loads of goods brought in crates and bales in the cool of the morning on the broad, bearlike shoulders of groaning, bearded porters who exuded an aura of autumn freshness mixed with vodka. The shop assistants unpacked these new supplies and filled with their rich, drapery colors, as with putty, all the holes and cracks of the tall cupboards. They ran the gamut of all the autumn shades and went up and down through the octaves of color. Beginning at the bottom, they tried shyly and plaintively the contralto semitones, passed on to the washed-out grays of distance, to tapestry blues and, going upward in ever broader chords, reached deep, royal blues, the indigo of distant forests and the plush of rustling parks, in order to enter, through the ochers, reds, tans, and sepiàs, the whispering shadows of wilting gardens, and to reach finally the dark smell of fungi, the waft of mold in the depth of autumn nights and the dull accompaniment of the darkest basses.
My father walked along these arsenals of autumn goods and calmed and soothed the rising force of these masses of cloth, the power of the Season. He wanted to keep intact for as long as possible those reserves of stored color. He was afraid to break into that iron fund of autumn, to change it into cash. Yet, at the same time, he knew and felt that soon an autumn wind would come, a devastating wind which would blow through the cupboards; that they would give way; that nothing would check the flood, and that the streams of color would engulf the whole city.
The time of the Great Season was approaching. The streets were getting busy. At six in the evening the city became feverish, the houses stood flushed, and people walked about made up in bright colors, illuminated by some interior fire, their eyes shining with a festive fever, beautiful yet evil.
In the side streets, in quiet backwaters fleeing