Inside the Head of Bruno Schulz Read Online Free Page A

treacherous face, as it kept emerging in the hazy cigar smoke, he seemed to be coming to enjoy all this whipping, pushing and cursing. ‘Is it my fault that a decent man like me can’t be sure of his life in Europe today?’ he exclaimed, striking the weeping editor-in-chief Perelmann a blow on the nose with the handle of the whip. ‘I’d rather be at home in Munich watching little boys in Briennerstrasse than wading in the swamps of Galicia!’ he cried, belaboring the buttocks of the sighing Adele. Then he turned to the totally confused baker Lisowski, who had probably last read more than three consecutive sentences at his bar-mitzvah ceremony, and while he covered the baker’s fat belly and upper arms with red welts from the whip he cried, ‘You and those bandits in Berlin are to blame for everything that’s going wrong: Germany, Europe, the world. You were the first to say that humanity is alone, and so now every other idiot takes himself for God on earth!’ Yes, my highly esteemed Dr Mann, even Mr Katanauskas”—and the same rigidsmile with which his students sometimes adorned the kites flying over the Koszmarsko stone quarry appeared on Bruno’s face—“even he was not spared. Only now he was crying in his fine Vilna Yiddish that he wanted to go to New York with you, one pogrom in his life was enough, and as honorary American consul he had the same rights as those he was helping—when he got a push in his bare belly from your double, and as he fell his metal mask was kicked. The mask came off, landed clinking and dancing on the floor, and now, in so far as it was possible to see it in the smoke wafting back and forth, a half-burnt face with a dark, empty eye socket came into view. Then it was poor Helena’s turn, and after her came my students, who at some point, instead of fluttering about Hasenmass’s bathroom screeching, formed a protective circle around their gasping and exhausted teacher Helena with wings spread wide. But gradually the blows inflicted by the German grew weaker, and so did his voice, in the silvery clouds of smoke the wavering contours of the sad, childish face of Lieutenant Alfred Dreyfus formed for a moment, then the French officer became the weeping, bleeding Jagienka Łomska, then I saw myself coming out of the smoke, and finally the cloud turned, coalesced andclimbed to the ceiling, where it disappeared with a loud hiss into the jets of the showers—thus revealing a great heap of naked bodies lying lifeless around the false Thomas Mann as he knelt there, exhausted. ‘Me too,’ I cried in all the confusion. ‘I want to come too!’ But as he mopped the sweat off his throat and forehead with a handkerchief that was stiff and sticky with dirt, he replied in a friendly tone, ‘Not you, you’ll still be needed. You must write your novel. What is it to be called? The Messiah , am I right? To work, get down to work, and when you have finished those bandits will come from Berlin to your little town and burn you along with your wonderful manuscript. Too bad—it’s your own fault!’ He laughed. ‘Terrific, what a subject! But who will write a novel about it when you are dead, Jew Schulz?’”
    Maybe the ending goes a little too far, thought Bruno, as he read the last pages of his letter to his famous and influential colleague in Zürich. Will he believe it of me? Will he give me his support? Won’t he think I mean him? And suddenly his companion Fear was back, Fear who had left him for the last couple of hours, and the hot gray lump was turning in his belly again. At the same time Hania’s loud footsteps shook the blackand now almost invisible basement ceiling from above, and he was afraid that she might at any moment break through the floor of the kitchen with her high stiletto heels and pierce his head. Hania—poor, intolerable Hania—had recently taken to wearing her expensive French shoes even at home, as well as her chiffon dress from Lunarski & Klein in Warsaw, for she