The Street of Crocodiles - Bruno Schulz [47]
Father was listening. In the silence of the night his ear seemed to grow larger and to reach out beyond the window: a fantastic coral, a red polypus watching the chaos of the night.
He listened and heard with growing anxiety the distant tide of the approaching crowds. Fearfully he looked around the empty shop, searching for his assistants. Unfortunately those dark and red-haired administering angels had flown away somewhere. Father was alone, terrified of the crowd which was soon to flood the calm of the shop in a plundering, noisy mob; to divide among themselves and put up to auction the whole rich autumn which he had collected over the years and stored in his large secluded silo.
Where were the shop assistants? Where were those handsome cherubs who had been entrusted with the defense of the dark bastions of cloth? My father thought with painful suspicion that perhaps they were somewhere in the depths of the building with other men's daughters. Standing immobile and anxious, his eyes shining in the lamplit silence of the shop, he heard with his inner ear what was happening inside the house, in the back chambers of that large colored lantern. The house opened before him, room after room, chamber after chamber, like a house of cards, and he saw the shop assistants chasing Adela through all the empty brightly lit rooms, upstairs and downstairs, until she escaped them and reached the kitchen to barricade herself there behind the kitchen dresser.
There Adela stood, panting, amused, smiling to herself, her long lashes fluttering. The shop assistants were giggling, crouched behind the door. The kitchen window was open onto the black night, saturated with dreams and complications. The dark, half-opened panes shone with the reflections of a distant illumination. The gleaming saucepans and jars stood immobile on all sides and glinted with their thick glaze. Adela leaned cautiously from the window her bright, made-up face with the fluttering eyes. She looked for the shop assistants in the dark courtyard, sensing an ambush. And then she saw them, advancing slowly and carefully toward her in single file, along the narrow ledge under the window which ran the length of the wall, now red from the glare of distant lights. My father shouted in anger and desperation, but at that very moment the hubbub of voices drew much nearer and the shopwindow became peopled with faces crooked with laughter, with chattering mouths, with noses flattened on the shining panes. My father grew purple with anger and jumped on the counter. And, while the crowd stormed his fortress and entered his shop in a noisy mass, Father, in one leap, reached the shelves of fabrics and, hanging high above the crowd, began to blow with all his strength a large shofar, sounding the alert. But the ceiling did not resound with the rustle of angels' wings speeding to his rescue: instead, each plaint of the shofar was answered by the loud, sneering choir of the crowd.
"Jacob, start trading! Jacob, start selling!" they called and the chant, repeated over and over again, became rhythmical, transforming itself into the melody of a chorus, sung by them all. My father saw that resistance would be useless, jumped down from his ledge and moved with a shout toward the barricades of cloth. Grown tall with fury, his head swollen into a purple fist, he rushed like a fighting prophet on the ramparts of cloth and began to storm against them. He leaned with his whole strength against the enormous bales, heaving them from their places. He put his shoulders under the great lengths of cloth and made them fall on the counter with axiull thud. The bales overturned, unfolding in the air like enormous flags, the shelves exploded with bursts of draperies, with waterfalls of fabrics as if touched by the wand of Moses.
The reserves from the cupboards poured out and flowed in a broad relentless stream. The colorful contents of the shelves spread and multiplied, covering all the counters and