Inside the Head of Bruno Schulz Read Online Free

Hasenmass; Lisowski the baker, with his wife and three sons; Adele; almost all my students; Mr Perelmann and Helena Jakubowicz; Jankel, my sister’s late husband; Reynisz the notary; and my friend and colleague Czarski, editor-in-chief of the Tygodnik Ilustrowany , who was staying in Drohobycz in order to persuade me (of course in vain) to publish a fragment of my novel in his journal. Later we were joined by a man whom I did not know, an American with half his face covered by a sparkling metal mask. This was the mysterious Mr Katanauskas. They had all”—here Bruno looked up and, before writing on, studied the large drawing on the wall to the right of the door, which depicted half a dozen small, thin, naked men kneeling in front of a young lady in high-heeled shoes and a torn ball gown, with their avid eyes, full of despair and desire, open wide as if they were slowly suffocating under the influence of an invisible opiate—“they had all, like me and Hasenmass the hotel manager, stripped naked. They had hung their clothes on the hooks, and they sat in silence, or engagedin excessively low-voiced conversation with each other, on the two benches, waiting. When the master entered, with the hotel manager and me, they rose at almost the same time, covered their bare chests and their genitals with their hands, and even the last and quietest conversations died down. The false Thomas Mann at first acted as if the over-intimate and pushy behavior of his guests, if one may so call it, was unwelcome to him. As they suddenly began moving towards him, like a brood of turtles slowly awakening and making their way from the beach into the water, he raised his hands in a gesture of rejection. He briskly twirled the ends of his mustache, then took a half-smoked cigar from the inside pocket of his shabby tweed jacket, which was buttoned up the wrong way, and tried to light it. He succeeded only at the third or fourth attempt. ‘How are you, my friends?’ he said uncertainly, and the cigar smoke that he puffed out mingled with his breath, which smelt of something rotten. ‘I’m glad to see you again. I’m afraid I must return to Zürich tomorrow to fetch my wife and children. After that we shall board a train for Marseilles, and we go on from there by sea to New York. We have the prospect of a very pretty villa in Princeton; I think I shall be able to pay for it cash downwith the advances for the last part of the Joseph tetralogy. I’m very sorry that I must leave you here alone; I know the times will get no better, and the guarantees of the Allies are, as we can see from the example of the poor Czechs and Slovaks, worth nothing. But good Mr Katanauskas has kept his promise, and we can set off for America at last. We would be stupid not to go, don’t you agree?’ They all—as one man—took a stride towards him, and then another stride and yet another, they murmured softly, ‘Oh dear’ and ‘Please don’t go’, and the first arms were already winding around his throat and his arms. ‘It’s not my fault, believe me,’ he said, ‘please stop this, it’s uncomfortable for me. Stop it!’ By now the manager Hasenmass’s bathroom was full of metallic blue smoke, and you could hardly see whose hand was tugging at the alleged Thomas Mann’s hair, which was slicked back with gel, while he tried to unbutton his shirt. ‘Stop that at once!’ he cried again. Then he produced, as if from nowhere, the horsewhip that he had never once had to use during our harmonious ride through the sleeping town of Drohobycz, and he began fending off the naked men who were pestering him with short, sharp cracks of that whip. I myself—I was standing beside that twitching, sighing,ever-growing human pyramid as it collapsed on itself—I myself, unfortunately, was struck by none of them. He whipped the men, then the women, then even the children, and if there had still been traces of reluctance to be seen at first in his long, masterful and