Inside the Head of Bruno Schulz

INSIDE THE HEAD OF BRUNO SCHULZ

Praise be to him who creates strange beings.

S. Y. AGNON
,
And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight

“
M
Y HIGHLY ESTEEMED
, greatly respected, dear Herr Thomas Mann,” wrote a small, thin, serious man slowly and carefully in his notebook, on a surprisingly warm autumn day in November 1938—and immediately crossed the sentence out again. He rose from the low, softly squealing swivel chair, where he had been sitting since early that afternoon at the desk, also too low, from his father’s old office, he swung his arms upward and sideways a couple of times as if doing morning exercises, and looked for two or three minutes at the narrow, dirty, skylight panes of the top of the window, through which shoes and legs kept appearing, along with the umbrella tips and skirt hems of passers-by up above in Florianska Street. Then he sat down once more and began again.

“My dear sir,” he wrote. “I know that you receive many letters every day, and probably spend more time answering them than writing your wonderful, world-famous novels. I can imagine what that means! I myself have to spend thirty-six hours a week teaching drawing
to my beloved but totally untalented boys, and when, at the end of the day, I leave the Jagiełło High School where I am employed, tired and—”. Here he broke off, stood up again, and as he did so knocked the desk with his left knee. However, instead of rubbing the injured knee, or hopping about the small basement room, cursing quietly, he held his head firmly with both hands—it was a very large, almost triangular, handsome head, reminiscent from a distance of those paper kites that his school students had been flying in the Koszmarsko stone quarry since the first windy days of September—and soon afterwards he let go of his head again with a single vigorous movement, as if that could help him to get his thoughts out. It worked, as it almost always did, and then he sat down at the desk again, took a fresh sheet of paper and wrote, quickly and without previous thought: “My dear Dr Thomas Mann! Although we are not personally acquainted, I must tell you that three weeks ago a German came to our town, claiming to be you. As I, like all of us in Drohobycz, know you only from newspaper photographs, I cannot say with complete certainty that he is not you, but the stories he tells alone—not to mention his shabby clothing and his strong body odor—arouse my suspicions.”

Right, very good, that will do for the opening, thought the small, serious man in the basement of the Florianska Street building, satisfied, and he put his pencil—it was a Koh-i-Noor HB, and you could also draw with it if necessary—into the inside pocket of the thick Belgian jacket that he wore all year round. Then he closed the black notebook with the blank label at its first page, and stroked his face as if it did not belong to him. For the first time that day—no, for the first time in many months, maybe even years—he no longer felt that large black lizards and squinting snakes, as green as kerosene and with evil grins, were about to slither out of the walls around him; he did not hear the beating and rushing of gigantic
Archaeopteryx
wings behind him, as he usually did every few minutes; he was not afraid that soon, very soon indeed, something unimaginably dreadful was going to happen. When he realized that, he was immediately panic-stricken, for it must be a trap set for him by Fate.

Ever since he could remember Bruno—for that was the name of the man with the face like a paper kite—had awoken every morning with Fear in his heart. Fear and he had breakfast together in Lisowski’s tearoom, Fear accompanied him to the High School and looked
over his shoulder as the boys put their unsuccessful sketches of animals down in front of him, as well as plaster models, covered with black fingerprints, of their sweet little heads. Fear was there when he talked to other teachers during the break periods—their conversation was generally about the boys’ unimportant bragging and misdeeds, or a new production at the Kaminski Theater in Warsaw, they hardly ever mentioned all the fuss the Germans were kicking up these days—and Fear did not leave him even when Helena Jakubowicz, the young sports and philosophy teacher, asked him how his new novel was getting on. Everyone in Poland who understood the first thing about literature, she said, was waiting for it with increasing impatience and interest. Only when Helena Jakubowicz—small, athletic and with a hairy face like a clever female bonobo chimpanzee—put her hand on his arm and pressed it did Fear go away. But as soon as Helena let go, Fear was back, and so he had to take it away with him to the large, darkened apartment in Stryj Street, where fortunately Fear did not follow him all the way into one of the girls’ rooms. But as soon as he was outside again, Fear settled firmly down in his belly—which indeed was its favorite place—sat there like a large, hot, gray lump
turning and rustling all the time, and he took it home with him. And then, even if after a brief supper, and after leafing through the
Tygodnik Ilustrowany
and the
Neue Freie Presse
, he was finally sitting at his father’s old desk in the basement, Fear was there as well. Fear was with him as he wrote, as he drew, as he thought—and he always thought while he worked—of Papa’s shrinking, dying body, or of the baffled way the Russian soldiers shook their heads when, in the second year of the war, they had accidentally set the Schulz family’s house in the market place on fire. And when Fear felt tired and was going to slink away, he quickly imagined that it was he, not his mortally sick brother-in-law Jankel, who had felt impelled to cut his throat with a razor blade one cool summer morning—whereupon the gray lump began boring an even deeper hole in his belly. Only in his sleep was Bruno really alone. Then he dreamt of Zürich, Paris and New York, where there were hundreds and indeed thousands of ruined, thin-skinned people like him, smiling and waving at one another in cafés, parks and libraries, encouraging each other by means of slight, silent nods.

“Professor Schulz.” Bruno suddenly heard a deep, but still uncertain boy’s voice calling to him—a voice
on the verge of breaking. “You weren’t in school today! You’ll get bad marks!” The boy laughed, and some of the other boys joined in. Then the boy knocked on the skylight with a stick, but it was more like the sound of a bird’s beak, and the knocking, at first a soft, scraping sound, quickly grew louder. Bruno slipped off his chair onto the floor behind the desk, he took his head in his hands again, elbows propped wide apart, covered those big ears of his with his small hands, and as he briefly looked up at the skylight over the edge of the desk, he saw several small beaks scratching and pecking at the dirty glass. He immediately slid to the floor again, covered his ears even more firmly, and lost himself in the sound of the sea as the breaking waves ran in and out, a sound that spread from the middle of his head all over the world.

Bruno had really been hoping that no one in school would notice his absence, particularly not pretty Helena, whose thick, blonde and often badly combed hair unfortunately gave off the pungent smell of an animal cage, a mixture of urine and damp hay that had been left lying around. Yesterday she had shut him up, for almost a whole hour’s lesson and without any light on, in the little room containing broken gymnastics equipment
next to the sports hall. He didn’t know why, but probably because he had trembled even more than usual during their last conversation in a break period, and couldn’t be soothed even by the pressure of her short, but sharp and unfiled fingernails. So what? She shouldn’t have asked him to let her see at least a few pages of his novel, and he had been cold as well, in spite of the summery days that came like a gift in mid-November, and in spite of the fact that he was wearing his heavy jacket. When she finally let him out he was feeling very much better, or so he told her at least, for fear of making her even angrier, and she promised to shut him up again sometime soon. Maybe, she added, she’d come into the little room with him herself for a while if he liked. She could go to one of the chaotic shops beyond the market place that opened only late in the evening for a few hours, sometimes not even that, and buy some things that she’d been wanting to try out with him for a long time. He could guess what she meant! No, he had replied, he’d rather she didn’t, although he immediately felt very safe and well at the thought of those things—black leather Venetian Columbine masks stuffed with sawdust; penis-sized Pierrots made of willow rods, and Easter whips interwoven with thin
steel chains; silver nipple clamps, and Japanese shunga candles (their dripping wax left no blisters behind on the skin). He wondered, even as he hurried up to the second floor and his class of shouting boys in the art room, whether to say he was sick next day. Then, when he was on his way home, it occurred to him that he had been meaning for a long time to write to Thomas Mann in Zürich, and that decided the matter: he would be off school sick tomorrow!

“The way the alleged Thomas Mann eats and speaks is also suspicious,” Bruno wrote in his notebook now, still sitting on the floor, while the tapping on the window pane died down. “It is true that he cuts up the meat and potatoes on his plate in a bored manner, just like a surgeon studying his patient’s tissue, first spreading the napkin on his lap even more lovingly than stern Adele used to place freshly shaken-out quilts and pillows on our beds. But then the stranger will suddenly fling his knife and fork wildly across the restaurant in the Swaying Pyramid Hotel, where he has occupied the manager Hasenmass’s bathroom for weeks, he seizes the food on his plate with his hands, stuffs it into his mouth, and blood spurts all over his shirt and into his eyes. Fortunately, he has not yet hit anyone with the
flying cutlery! All the important people in our town, who have been hovering around him since his arrival like a colony of bees around their queen, duck for a moment and then come up again—the corners of their mouths stretched in a subservient smile, their eyes glazed and reddened with alarm—and ask him please to go on telling them his exciting stories.”

Bruno paused for a moment. The unpleasant tapping and scraping of the birds’ beaks had stopped, but now evening, almost night had fallen, as abruptly and menacingly as it did every day of his life. In the basement, however, stale twilight still reigned, with the remnants of many terrible and futile hours of work, and that immediately reminded him yet again of the fact that, so far, only the title existed of the great book that he had been promising his friends, his colleagues, and the women he knew in Lemberg, Warsaw and here at home for years—not a page, not a drawing. He didn’t even know what the book was going to be about. At least he had finally written his first story in German, and if, with the aid of Thomas Mann, it were to appear in the
Neuer Rundschau
or in the
Sammlung
, not even his fear could keep him from leaving Drohobycz and Poland for ever. A friendly letter from the famous writer in
reply to his, a recommendation from him to the publishing houses of Querido in Amsterdam or Bermann Fischer in Stockholm, and he would throw a couple of manuscripts, his drawing pads, some underwear and his shaving things into Papa’s old leather suitcase and set off for freedom.

“The longer the stranger stays here,” Bruno continued his letter, while a high-spirited smile brightened his stern, almost sad face, “the more often he is asked what has brought him, the famous winner of the Nobel Prize, to a little backwater like Drohobycz. Have his works not been translated into thirty-seven languages? Doesn’t he count Albert Einstein, Arthur Rubinstein and Franklin D. Roosevelt among his friends? Isn’t he more prosperous than all the Polish and Yiddish writers of West Galicia put together, and couldn’t he therefore, if he were coming to our part of the world, afford to stay in a suite at the Russischer Hof hotel? He always gives a different answer—either with exaggerated friendliness, or angrily stamping his muddy walking shoes, which are full of holes. Sometimes he says that he is no longer safe in Zürich, because the Germans have begun throwing their enemies out of the windows of houses in secret, but they would certainly never come
to Poland. Sometimes he mentions a terribly deformed yet very sociable Lithuanian-American businessman who has lived in Drohobycz for years, and who could get him, his wife and his six children a visa to go to the States. I have never heard of this Mr Katanauskas before, and even the members of our friendly Thomas Mann Committee don’t know him, but of course they dare not question the master more closely.”

Bruno paused again, and not knowing how to go on he raised his eyes in the search for inspiration. In the twilight of the basement he did not recognize his own drawings, which covered all the walls and, because of the constant damp down there, were as wrinkled as old women’s skin. In the faint light of evening, the bodies and faces of the men, women, birds, horses and dogs that Bruno could never stop drawing looked even more distorted, translucent and vulnerable; they seemed to be simultaneously living and dead, and that gave him a new idea.

“One evening,” he went on, after skimming what he had already written and correcting two or three passages, “the alleged Thomas Mann also told us, in the bar of the Swaying Pyramid, that he wanted to collect material for his next novella here in the town of the
Jagienka-Łomska pogrom. The novella, he said with an almost sadistic chuckle, would be about the abduction and murder of a little Christian girl, just as it was in the real pogrom. Suspicion—and he couldn’t stop laughing, dear Dr Mann, while striking the manager Hasenmass several times on his bald patch—suspicion would fall first on her own uncle, then on the Jews of the town, and because it soon became clear that the uncle was indeed the guilty party, the Christians were in such a rage that they killed the Jews and set fire to their houses. Then, when the fire spread to their own quarter of Drohobycz, they accused one another of destroying the town, fell upon each other and fought with knives and pitchforks, raped their best friends, both men and women, and their children and mothers. ‘Well, my friends,’ said the false stranger to us when he had finished, and was wiping tears of laughter from his eyes, ‘how do you like this story? How would you reply to the question of guilt that I am about to ask? I would say: if the Hebrews had never come to Drohobycz, that pointless and utterly destructive pogrom would never have taken place, would it?’ Then he beat a short but vigorous drum roll on the manager’s head with the palms of both his hands.”