Inside the Head of Bruno Schulz Read Online Free Page B

was expecting the late Jankel back anytime soon, and wanted to be beautiful for him. And as she almost never took off the dress, not even when she was cooking, and certainly not now, it was covered with splashes of red borscht and dried yellow bits of dough, and its lovely white puff sleeves had dozens of holes burnt in them. Hania was not the only bundle of nerves in the house. Her two sons were also getting more and more restless from week to week, and were in a bad way. Their trousers and shirts were torn, they had dark red, almost black scabs on their bare knees, they cut each other’s unwashed hair with the kitchen scissors, so that it looked untidy and all tousled as if they were vagrants, and Bruno hadn’t seen them in school for months. When their mother asked them something, they either didn’t reply at all, or threatened to throw her out of the house, so she generally kept quiet in their presence. However, Jacekand Chaimele left their uncle in peace. Only sometimes, when he was lying on Papa’s old, greasy, Biedermeier sofa with its huge vultures’ feet and claws and, quietly moving his lips, read a book or drew a sketch, did they talk about him in whispers. “Who’s going to look after us when the Russians or the Germans come?” Jacek said to Chaimele a few days ago. And Chaimele replied, giggling, “Uncle Bruno, of course. Along with the tarts from Stryj Street and his writer friends in Warsaw, he’s sure to know what to do.” Whereupon Bruno uttered a quiet whistle of alarm, gave the sofa a little pat, and it immediately pattered out of the living room with him and into the library, where he could be undisturbed again.
    By now it was so dark in Bruno’s basement study that he could hardly read his own handwriting. The faint, orange, fantastic light of the street lamps that had just come on outside in Florianska Street was lost halfway between the open skylight and his easel, where he had hung up his hat and coat for years, and sometimes he imagined hanging himself up on it. He quickly stood up, forced himself back behind the low desk and switched on the handsome, cold, German lamp, with its black metal shade that even after years shone like polishedcavalry boots. Only when he was sitting on Papa’s creaking old office chair did it occur to him that he was no longer crouching on the floor, like one of the creatures from his daydreams that had no will of their own, scribbling violet lines, squiggles and little hooks, like an insect, in his notebook, marks that might even make some kind of sense in the end. But Fear was still there, and Fear whispered: you must come to the point. Do you know how many letters he gets every day? Yes, I do, replied Bruno, but do you really think I can write to him now and tell him what I really want him to do? Yes, why not, replied Fear, although I’m not perfectly sure, because I am Fear. Haven’t I overdone it? said Bruno. I mean saying that someone else is pretending to be him, could be him, but that he is so brutish and arrogant to the very people who respect him and sing his praises. I mean, it does sound rather unlikely, doesn’t it? Do you know the story of the people of Sichem, asked Fear, do you know what happened to them after they had chosen Abimelech as ruler of the Philistines? Not exactly, said Bruno, will you tell me? Later, maybe, said Fear, you’re not ready for it yet.
    “The day before yesterday, dear Dr Mann,” Bruno went on writing quickly by the light of his Germanlamp, while he pressed the thumb and forefinger of his left hand to his temples, which were suddenly aching, “Dr Franck came to see me at the school. As you already know, he is the former specialist in internal medicine who no longer wants to submit to the laws of everyday life. Instead he sits at the railway station talking to himself, or he recites prayers and blessings out loud, all jumbled up—he of all people, the atheist and one of the first Zionists in our town. After knocking