gigi
Kindergarten kid
Posts: 1,470
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Post by gigi on Feb 22, 2009 5:21:14 GMT 1
 Israelis attend the exhibition of Jewish author and artist Bruno Schulz at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, Friday, Feb. 20, 2009. Schulz, known as the "Polish Kafka," was forced by a Gestapo officer in 1941 to paint the walls of a nursery with characters from famous fables. A year later a Nazi sergeant shot Schulz in the back of the head and, for the next six decades, his colorful murals were forgotten. On Friday, Israel's Holocaust museum presented Schulz's fairy-tale wall paintings eight years after their discovery sparked a diplomatic row between Israel and Ukraine, which objected to the artwork being removed from the country. (AP Photo/Dan Balilty) Holocaust art on displayBy ARON HELLER • Associated Press • February 21, 2009 A Gestapo officer forced Jewish author and artist Bruno Schulz to paint fairy tale characters on the walls of a nursery in an occupied Polish village in 1941. A Nazi sergeant shot and killed Schulz a year later, and his colorful murals were forgotten for decades.
Israel's Holocaust museum presented Schulz's paintings on Friday, eight years after their discovery sparked a diplomatic row over their ownership.
The exhibit "Bruno Schulz: Wall Painting Under Coercion" includes fragments of three murals depicting dwarfs, princesses, horses and carriages along with images evoking Schulz's struggles during the Holocaust.
Schulz was born in Drohobych, a village that was then part of Poland and is now in Ukraine. After the village was occupied by Nazi troops in World War II, Gestapo officer Felix Landau took in Schulz as a forced laborer.
Landau admired Schulz's work. He offered him protection and ordered him to illustrate the walls of his young son's nursery with images of Cinderella, Snow White and Hansel and Gretel.
On Nov. 19, 1942, Schulz was carrying a loaf of bread on the street when a Nazi rival of Landau's shot him down, allegedly in retaliation for Landau's killing of that man's so-called "personal Jew." Schulz was among 230 Jews killed in Drohobych that day and one of the nearly 15,000 slain in the town during the Nazi occupation. Some 400 Jews survived, and only a few remain in Drohobych.www.courierpostonline.com/article/20090221/NEWS01/902210329/1006/RSS01More information about Bruno Schulz: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Schulzwww.brunoschulzart.org/ |
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Post by Bonobo on Feb 25, 2009 22:23:14 GMT 1
Thanks Gigi. I thought about him a few times but I appreciate neither his art nor his literature, so I was a bit reluctant. See for yourself. Bruno Schulz  and his art.           Famous frescos  Harvard Death Fugue:
On The Exploitation of Bruno Schulz
James R. Russell
Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies,
Harvard University.
In November 2003, a controversial documentary about the rediscovered frescoes by Bruno Schulz was shown at Harvard. Schulz was a Jewish writer and graphic artist whose dreamlike work echoes Franz Kafka and foreshadows Gabrial Garcia Marquez. Schulz wrote in Polish, and the characters and scenes in his stories are drawn from the life of his Jewish family and the community of the Galician town of Drohobycz. He was murdered by the Nazis in 1942 and the frescoes he had painted were lost until a German researcher found them; the researcher's son then made a film about their search and rediscovery. There had been many anti-Semitic attacks in the western Ukraine, and a team from Yad Vashem removed most of what is left of the frescoes to Jerusalem for restoration and display in conditions of reverence, of historical context, and of comparative safety. Yet the film presents Yad Vashem's act as one of vandalism, pillage, and betrayal of the legacy of Schulz himself. The discussion that followed the Harvard screening generally approved this view, which became a platform for attacks on Israel generally.
www.zeek.net/art_0401.shtml Israel and Ukraine Sign Agreement Today on Bruno Schulz Works Located at Yad Vashem
(February 28, 2008 - Jerusalem) Today, Israel and Ukraine signed an agreement relating to the Bruno Schulz works located at Yad Vashem. The agreement was signed by Pinchas Avivi, Deputy Director-General and head of the Division for Central Europe and Eurasia in the Israeli Foreign Ministry, and Ukraine’s Ambassador to Israel Ihor Tymofieiev, in the presence of Ukraine’s Vice Prime Minister Ivan Vasyunik.
According to the agreement, the Schulz works, currently located at Yad Vashem, will be recognized as the property and cultural wealth of Ukraine, and will be on temporary loan at Yad Vashem for 20 years, after which the loan will be automatically renewed every five years.
Bruno Schulz was born in Drohobycz (then Poland, today Ukraine). A Jewish author and artist, he was forced to embellish with fairy-tale protagonists the walls of the children’s room in a house occupied by Nazi officer Felix Landau. He was later shot to death by an SS officer on a day of pogroms in the city of Drohobycz, only because he was a Jew. Some 60 years after they were made, the works were discovered in a state of neglect and disrepair. Yad Vashem acquired the works, with the agreement of the family, in whose home they were found, and the approval and blessing of the Mayor of Drohobycz, and a team of experts brought the works to Yad Vashem in 2001. Since that time, they have undergone professional conservation to keep them in the condition in which they were found and to ensure that no further deterioration of the materials and colors occurs in the future.
The conditions under which the murals were created, by the sole wish of the Nazi perpetrator and under his direct command - that is, forced labor - make them Holocaust artifacts. Schulz’s fate was the same as that as most of the Jews of Drohobycz - cold-blooded murder at the hand of the Nazis.
www1.yadvashem.org/about_yad/press_room/press_releases/28.02.08.html |
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Post by Bonobo on Feb 25, 2009 23:40:01 GMT 1
www.schulzian.net/www.schulzian.net/translation/shops.htm The Cinnamon Shops August
1
IN JULY, my father went to take the waters, and he left me with my mother and older brother, at the mercy of the summer days, glowing white and stunning. We browsed, stupefied by the light, through that great book of the holiday, in which every page was ablaze with splendour and had, deep inside, a sweetly dripping pulp of golden pears.
Adela returned on luminous mornings, like Pomona from the fire of the enkindled day, tipping out of her basket the colourful beauty of the sun — glistening wild cherries, full of water under their transparent skins; mysterious black cherries with an aroma surpassing what would be realised in their taste; apricots, the core of the long afternoons lying in their golden pulp. And alongside that pure poetry of fruits she unloaded slices of meat and a keyboard of calf ribs, swollen with energy and goodness, and algae of vegetables that called to mind slaughtered octopus and jellyfish — the raw material of dinner, its flavour still unformed and sterile — dinner’s vegetative and telluric ingredients with a wild and field aroma.
Through a dark apartment on the first floor of a tenement on the market square, every day of that whole great summer, there passed: the silence of shimmering veins of air, squares of radiance dreaming their fervid dream on the floor, a barrel organ melody struck from the deepest golden vein of the day, and two or three measures of a refrain played over and over again on a grand piano somewhere, swooning in the sunshine on the white pavements, lost in the fire of the deep day. Her housework done, Adela threw a shadow over the rooms by drawing down the linen blinds. Then the colours deepened by an octave; the sitting room filled up with darkness as if plunged into the luminosity of the deep sea, still dimly reflected in mirrors of green, while all the torrid heat of the day breathed on the blinds, swaying gently to the reveries of the midday hour.
On Saturday afternoons I would go with Mother for a stroll. From the duskiness of the hallway we stepped straight out into the sunbath of the day. Passers-by, wading in gold, squinted in the glare as if their eyes were glued with honey; their drawn back upper lips bared their teeth and gums. And everyone wading through that golden day wore that same sweltered grimace, as if the sun had bestowed the same mask upon all of its disciples — the golden mask of a solar cult. And everyone walking along the streets that day, who met or passed each other by, young or old, every man, woman and child, hailed one another with that mask as they went, gold paint daubed thickly on their faces — they grinned back and forth that bacchanalian grimace — a barbarian mask of pagan worship.
The market square was empty and yellowed by the heat, swept clean by hot winds, like a biblical desert. Thorny acacias springing up from the emptiness of the yellow square frothed above it with their shining foliage, their bouquets of graciously gesturing green filigrees, like trees on old tapestries. Those trees seemed to be affecting a gale, theatrically twirling their crowns in order to show off by their pompous gesticulations the courtliness of the leafy fans of their silvered abdomens, like noblemen’s fox pelts. The old houses, burnished by the winds of many days, were tinged with reflections of the vast atmosphere, echoes and reminiscences of hues diffused deep within the coloured weather. It seemed that whole generations of summer days (like patient stucco workers scrubbing mouldy plaster from old façades) had worn away a fallacious varnish, eliciting more distinctly day by day the true aspects of the houses, a physiognomy of the fortunes and the life that had formed them from within. The windows fell asleep, blinded by the radiance of the empty square; the balconies confessed their emptiness to the sky; the open hallways were fragrant with coolness and wine.
A few ragamuffins, sheltering in a corner of the market square from the fiery broom of the heat, were beleaguering a stretch of a wall, testing it over and over again with throws of buttons and coins as if the true mystery of the wall, inscribed with hieroglyphs of scratches and cracks, might be divined in the horoscopes of those metal discs. Otherwise, the market square was empty. The good Samaritan’s donkey might arrive at any moment, led on by the bridle in the shade of the swaying acacias, at that vaulted entrance hall with wine barrels before it, and two attendants would carefully lift the stricken man down from its burning saddle, to carry him gently inside and up the cool stairway, to the storey exuding the aromas of a Sabbath meal.
We strolled on, Mother and I, along the two sunlit edges of the market square, casting our crooked shadows over all the houses as if along a keyboard. The paving stones fell steadily past under our weightless, flat footsteps — some of them pale pink like human skin, others golden or greenish-blue, all of them level, warm and velvety in the sunshine, like sundials trodden underfoot beyond all recognition, to blessed nothingness.
Finally, at the corner of ulica Stryjska, we stepped into the shadow of the chemist’s shop. An enormous jar of raspberry juice in the chemist’s spacious window symbolised the coolness of the balsams there, by which all afflictions could be assuaged. And after a few houses more the street could no longer uphold municipal decorum, like a peasant returning to his native village who casts off his stylish town attire on the road, slowly turning once more into a rustic vagabond, the nearer he gets to home.The Cinnamon Shops
DURING the period of the shortest, sleepy winter days, enclosed within furry edgings of dusk on both sides — morning and evening — as the town branched out deeper and deeper into the labyrinths of the winter nights, only shaken to its senses by a fleeting dawn — my father was already lost, sold, pledged to the other sphere.
His face and head luxuriantly and wildly developed a covering of grey hair in those days, protruding irregularly in bunches, bristles and long brushes that shot from his warts, eyebrows and nostrils, which lent to his features the appearance of a bristled up old fox.
His senses of smell and hearing were inordinately sharpened, and it showed in the play of his taciturn and tense face that he was, through the mediation of those senses, in continual contact with an invisible world of dark nooks and mouse-holes, musty empty spaces beneath the floor, and chimney ducts.
All the scratches and nocturnal cracks, the secret, creaking life of the floor, found in him an unfailing and vigilant observer, a spy and co-conspirator. It absorbed him to the point of utter engrossment in that sphere, inaccessible to us, which he made no attempt to explain to us.
Many times, when those antics of the invisible sphere grew too absurd, he could only flick his fingers and laugh quietly to himself, and then, with a glance, he would commune with our cat, also initiated into that world, which raised its face — cold, cynical and etched with stripes — and narrowed in boredom and indifference its slanting chinks of eyes.
During dinner he might put aside his knife and fork in the middle of the meal and rise with a feline motion, his napkin tied under his chin — he crept on toe-pads to an adjacent door, an empty room, and peeked with the greatest circumspection through the keyhole. Then, with a shameful air, he returned to the table, smiling sheepishly between purrs and indistinct mutters, pertaining to the internal monologue in which he had become engrossed.
In order to distract him somehow, and to tear him away from his morbid investigations, Mother would take him on evening walks, which he acceded to silently and without resistance, albeit half-heartedly, distracted and miles away. Once, we even went to the theatre.
We found ourselves once more in that great, dimly lit and dirty hall, all sleepy human hubbub and incoherent confusion. But once we had struggled through the human throng a gigantic pale sky-blue curtain loomed before us, like the sky of some other firmament. Great pink painted masks with puffed out cheeks undulated on the enormous canvas expanse. That artificial sky spread and flowed down and athwart, swelling with an enormous gulp of pathos and great gestures — the atmosphere of that world, artificial and full of radiance, which had been erected there on the clattering scaffolding of the stage. A shudder flowing through the great countenance of that sky, a breath of the enormous canvas, in which the masks grew and came to life, betrayed the illusoriness of that firmament, gave rise to that tremor of reality that we, in our metaphysical moments, sense as a glimmer of the mysterious.
The masks fluttered their red eyelids, their coloured lips voicelessly whispered something, and I knew that the moment was approaching when the secret tensions would reach their zenith, when the swelling sky of the curtain would actually be raised, revealing stupendous and enchanting things.
But I was not allowed to savour that moment, for Father had meanwhile begun to display certain signs of anxiety — he grasped his pockets and at last announced that he had forgotten his wallet, along with his money and important documents.
After a brief consultation with Mother, during which Adela’s honesty was given hasty, comprehensive appraisal, it was proposed that I return home in search of the wallet. Mother judged that there was still plenty of time before the commencement of the performance, and that, given my nimbleness, I could easily be back in time.
I went out into a winter night coloured by the illumination of the sky. It was one of those bright nights in which the astral firmament is as immense and branching as if it had fallen to pieces, broken up and divided into a labyrinth of separate heavens, enough to be shared by whole months of winter nights, to overlay with its silvered and painted globes all of their nocturnal phenomena, adventures, scandals and carnivals.
It is unpardonable impudence to send a young boy out with an important and urgent mission on such a night, since in its half light the streets will become multifarious, entwined, and exchanged one for another. Deep inside the town there open up, so to speak, double streets, doppelganger streets, mendacious and delusive streets. One’s imagination, enchanted and misled, produces false maps of the ostensibly long known and familiar town, where those streets have their places and names, while the night, in its inexhaustible fecundity, has nothing better to do than to produce continually new and fictitious configurations. Those temptations of winter nights usually begin innocently, with the intention of taking a shortcut, of chancing an unaccustomed or swifter alley. The enticing arrangements of an intersection arise, of convoluted progress along some untried cross street. But this time it began differently.
Having gone a few steps I realised I had left my overcoat behind. I was about to turn back, but on reflection this seemed a needless waste of time, for the night was not at all cold — on the contrary, it was veined with streams of strange warmth, the wafts of some false spring. The snow dwindled into white strands, into an innocent and sweet fleece scented with violets. The sky thawed into those strands, where the moon showed itself twice, three times over, demonstrating by this multifariousness all of its phases and positions.
The sky that day laid bare the interior of its construction, as if in many anatomical specimens, displaying spirals and veins of light, sections of the pale green solids of the night, the plasma of its expanses and the tissue of its nocturnal reveries.
On such a night it was unlikely to walk along Podwale or any of the other dark streets that are the reverse side, the lining, as it were, of the four sides of the market square, and not to recall that, occasionally in that late season, one or two of those curious and so alluring shops would still be open, which were forgotten about on ordinary days. I called them the Cinnamon Shops, after the dark wainscoting, of that hue, that they were panelled with.www.schulzian.net/translation/sanatorium.htmThe Sanatorium at the Sign of the Hourglass For Józefina Szelińska 
THE JOURNEY went on and on. Barely one or two passengers were travelling on that forgotten branch line, where the train ran only once a week. Never had I seen carriages of such archaic style, spacious as rooms, dark and full of nooks, withdrawn from the other lines long ago. Those corridors deviating at different angles and those empty, labyrinthine and cold compartments had something oddly forlorn about them, something almost ghastly. I made my way from carriage to carriage in search of some snug corner. It was windy everywhere — cold draughts cut a path through those interiors, penetrating the whole train from end to end. People sat here and there on the floor with their bundles, not daring to occupy the vacant and excessively high seats. Those bulging cedar seats were as cold as ice anyway, and sticky with age. No passengers boarded at the empty stations. Without a whistle, without a puff, the train went slowly and, as it seemed, pensively on its way.
A man in a torn railwayman’s uniform accompanied me for a time, silent and engrossed in his thoughts. He pressed a handkerchief to his swollen, aching face. Then even he was lost somewhere — he got off unnoticed at some halt. He left behind him his imprint in the straw strewing the floor, and an outworn black valise which he forgot.
Wading in straw and litter I went from carriage to carriage with tottering steps. The doors of the compartments, open at both ends, swung in the draught. Nowhere was there even a solitary passenger. At last I met a conductor wearing the black uniform of the railway service of that line. He was winding a thick scarf around his neck and packing away his bits and pieces — a torch and an official book. ‘We are pulling in, sir,’ he said, casting a look at me with totally white eyes. The train drew slowly to a halt, without a puff, without a rattle, as if its life had slowly escaped it along with its last exhalation of steam. We stopped dead. Silence and emptiness — no station building. As I stepped down he pointed out to me the direction in which the Sanatorium lay. With my valise in my hand I walked along a narrow white highway which led by and by into the dark thicket of a park. I regarded the landscape with curiosity. The path along which I was walking rose up and led out onto the crest of a gentle knoll, from where a huge horizon was encompassed. It was an utterly grey day, dreary and bereft of highlights. And perhaps under the influence of that heavy and colourless atmosphere the entire great bowl of the horizon darkened, upon which an immense wooded landscape was arranged like stage scenery, in strands and layers of forestation, ever more distant and grey, flowing with streaks and gentle slopes, here from the left side, there from the right. That entire dark and solemn landscape seemed to flow imperceptibly into itself, to move impulsively like a cloudy and gathering sky full of potential movement. The fluid belts and trails of the forests seemed to rustle, and to be carried along by that sound like a tide rising imperceptibly toward the land. The receeding white road meandered through the dark dynamic of the wooded terrain like a melody along a crest of wide chords, struck with the force of the huge musical massifs that finally engulfed it. I snapped off a twig from a wayside tree. The green of its leaves was utterly dark, practically black. It was a strangely saturated blackness, deep and generous, as full of force and nourishment as sleep. And all the greys of the landscape were derivatives of that one colour. Our own landscape occasionally assumes such a colour, on cloudy summer twilights saturated by long rainstorms, that same deep and peaceful abnegation, that same resigned and final numbness with no further need of the consolation of colours.
It was as dark as night in the forest. I went gropingly on silent conifer needles. The trees grew sparser, and under my feet the beams of a bridge began to clatter. On its far side, amid the blackness of trees, the grey and many windowed walls of a hotel loomed, with a sign which read: SANATORIUM. The bridge, enclosed on both sides by a shaky handrail of birch branches, came to an end at the very entrance, where glazed double doors stood open. Gloom and solemn silence pervaded the corridor. I went on tiptoe from door to door, reading their numbers with my fingertips in the darkness. At a corner I finally came across a chambermaid. She was hurrying out of one of the rooms, breathless and flustered as if tearing herself away from someone’s importunate hands. She could barely understand what I said to her. I had to repeat myself. She fidgeted helplessly.
Had my telegram been received? She spread her arms. Her glance only wandered to the side. She was waiting for a chance to skip back to the half-open door, at which she was squinting.
‘I’ve come a long way,’ I said with some impatience. ‘I booked a room here by telegram. To whom should I report?’
She did not know. ‘Perhaps you’d like to try the restaurant,’ she stammered. ‘Everyone is asleep at the moment. I’ll announce you when the doctor gets up.’
‘Asleep? But it’s daytime, and a long time before nightfall...’
‘Haven’t you been informed?’ she raised her inquisitive eyes to me. ‘They are always asleep. And besides,’ she added coquettishly, ‘night-time never comes here.’ She composed herself, no longer trying to escape. Her fidgeting hands plucked at the lace of her pinafore.
I left her. I went into the semi-dark restaurant. Here stood tables, and a huge buffet extended the length of one wall. It was a long time since I had last eaten, and so I had a keen appetite. I was gladdened by the sight of plates abundantly crammed with pastries and layer cakes.
I put my valise on one of the tables. They were all unoccupied. I clapped my hands. No response. My eyes were drawn to a neighbouring, larger and brighter room. Through an expansive window or veranda this room opened onto a landscape I had already come to know, and which, in its sadness and resignation, stood in the frame of the embrasure like a mournful memento. In evidence on the tablecloths were the remains of recent meals, opened bottles and half-empty glasses. Even tips lay here and there, uncollected by the staff. I returned again to the buffet, appraising the cakes and pies. They looked most appetising. Should I serve myself, I wondered. I felt a surge of most singular ravenousness. One short-cake with apple jam particularly made my mouth water. I was just about to lever one of those cakes with a silver spatula when I sensed the presence of someone behind me. The chambermaid had entered in quiet slippers and gently touched my back. ‘The doctor would like to see you now,’ she said, contemplating her fingernails.
She walked ahead of me, never turning completely around, sure of the magnetism exerted by the motion of her hips. She played with the intensity of that magnetism, adjusting the distance between our bodies as we passed by dozens of doors, each with a number attached. The corridor grew increasingly dark. In total darknesses now, she leant against me for a moment. ‘This is the doctor’s door,’ she whispered. ‘Please go in.’
Doctor Gotard received me, standing in the middle of the room. He was a short man, broad in the shoulders, and he had a black beard.
‘We received your telegram only yesterday,’ he said. ‘We did send a carriage to the station, but you had already arrived on another train. It’s not the best of connections I’m afraid. So, how are you feeling?’
‘Is Father alive?’ I asked, looking anxiously at him as he went on smiling.
‘Naturally he is alive,’ he said, steadily holding my eager look. ‘Within, of course, the limits determined by the situation,’ he added, narrowing his eyes. ‘You know as well as I do that from the perspective of your family home, from the perspective of your own country, your father has died. This cannot be completely undone. That demise casts a certain shadow over his existence here.’
‘But Father himself does not know, does not suspect?’ I asked in a whisper. He shook his head with deep earnestness. ‘You may rest assured,’ he said, lowering his voice, ‘that our patients do not suspect — they cannot suspect…’
‘The whole technique depends,’ he continued, demonstrating its mechanism on his fingers, poised in readiness for this, ‘on our having set back time. We fall behind time here, by a certain interval the extent of which no one really knows. It all boils down to simple relativism. Here, your father’s death, that death that has caught up with him in your homeland, has simply not yet run its course.’
‘In that case,’ I said, ‘Father is dying, or close to death...’
‘You misunderstand me,’ he replied in a tone of tolerant impatience. ‘Here, we reactivate past time, with all of its possibilities — and even, therefore, the possibility of a recovery.’
He looked at me, smiling and stroking his beard.
‘But no doubt you will want to see your father now. We have reserved the other bed in your father’s room for you, in accordance with your instructions. I’ll show you the way.’
As we stepped out into the dark corridor Doctor Gotard began to speak in a whisper. I noticed that he was wearing felt slippers, just like the chambermaid’s.
‘We allow our patients to lie long hours in their beds — we are conserving their vital energy. Besides, they have nothing better to do here.’
He stopped in front of a particular door and put a finger to his lips.
‘Go in quietly, your father is asleep. You should go to bed too. It’s all you can do for the time being. Goodbye for now.’
‘Goodbye,’ I whispered, feeling my beating heart rise rise to my throat. I pressed the door handle and the door yielded of its own accord, opened half way like lips parting without resistance in sleep. I went inside. The room was grey and bare, practically empty. On a plain wooden bed under a tiny skylight my father lay in a heap of bedclothes and slept. His deep breathing unloaded entire strata of snoring from the depths of his slumber. The whole room was already lined from floor to ceiling with that snoring, and still new entries came. I gazed with affection on Father’s emaciated, wasted face, now totally absorbed in that labour of snoring, a face which, in a distant trance — having discarded its earthly covering — was making its confession somewhere on a far removed bank of its existence, in a solemn enumeration of its minutes.
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Post by Bonobo on Jul 12, 2009 21:37:42 GMT 1
Bruno Schulz
The Birds
THE YELLOW and utterly boring days of winter had come. A shredded and tattered, too-short mantle of snow covered the russet hued ground. It was too meagre for the many roofs and so they stood out black or rust coloured, arks of shingle or thatch concealing the smoke-blackened expanses of the attics inside them — black, charred cathedrals bristling with their ribs of rafters, purlins and joists — the dark lungs of the winter gales. Each dawn uncovered new vent pipes and chimney stacks, sprung up in the night, blown out by the nocturnal gale — the black pipes of the Devil’s organs. Chimney sweeps could not drive away the crows that perched in the evenings like living black leaves on the branches of the trees by the church; they rose up again, flapping, finally to cling once more, each to its own place on its own branch; but at daybreak they took to the air in great flocks — clouds of soot, flakes of undulating and fantastic lampblack, smearing the dull-yellow streaks of the dawn with their twinkling cawing. The days hardened in the cold and boredom, like last year’s bread loaves. We cut them with blunt knives, without appetite, in idle sleepiness.
Father no longer left the house. He lit the stoves, studied never to be fathomed essence of fire, and savoured the salty, metallic taste and smoky aroma of the winter flames, a cool caress of salamanders licking the shiny soot in the chimney’s throat. In those days he undertook with enthusiasm all the repairs in the upper reaches of the room. He could be seen at any time of day, squatting at the top of a stepladder as he tinkered with something near the ceiling, near the cornices of the tall windows end p.21 or around the counterweights and chains of the hanging lamps. As house painters do, he used his stepladder like enormous stilts, and he felt good in that bird’s-eye perspective, close to the ceiling’s painted sky, its arabesques and birds. He took himself further and further away from the affairs of practical life. Should Mother, filled with anxiety about his condition, attempt to draw him into a conversation about the business, about the bills due at the end of the month, he would listen to her distractedly, thoroughly vexed and with twitches in his absent face. Sometimes he would interrupt her suddenly, with an imploring gesture of the hand, and scurry to a corner of the room; he pressed his ear to a chink between the floorboards and, with the index fingers of both hands upraised, indicating the highest importance of the investigation, he would listen. We had not yet come to understand the lamentable background to these eccentricities, the gloomy complex ripening in the depths.
Mother had no influence over him; he bestowed great reverence and attention upon Adela, however. When she swept his room it was a great and important ceremony to him, one which he never neglected to observe, following Adela’s every movement with a mixture of fear and a shudder of delight. He ascribed some deeper, symbolic meaning to her every movement. When the girl pushed a long-handled brush across the floor with youthful and bold thrusts it was almost beyond his endurance. Tears flowed from his eyes then; his face was choked with silent laughter and a joyful spasm of orgasm shook his body. His sensitivity to tickling approached madness. Adela merely had to point a finger at him with a motion suggesting tickling and immediately he would flee in a wild panic through all the rooms, fastening their doors behind him, finally to collapse in the last, on his stomach on the bed, twisting in convulsions of laughter provoked by that singular inner vision he could least endure. Thanks to this, Adela had almost unlimited authority over Father. end p.22
It was then that we first noticed Father’s passionate interest in animals. At first it was the passion of a hunter and an artist combined, or perhaps it was one creature’s deeper, zoological liking for related and yet so different forms of life — experimentation in the unexplored registers of being. Only in a later phase did the affair take that peculiar, embroiled and deeply sinful turn against nature which it would be better not to bring to the light of day.
It began with the incubation of birds’ eggs.
With a great outlay of effort and expense, Father obtained fertilised birds’ eggs from Hamburg, Holland and African zoological stations, and set enormous Belgian hens to incubating them. It was a procedure no less interesting to me, that hatching out of nestlings, real anomalies of shape and colouration. In those monsters with their enormous, fantastic beaks — which yawned wide open the moment they were born, hissing voraciously in the abysses of their throats — in those salamanders with the frail, naked bodies of hunchbacks, it was improbable to envision the peacocks, pheasants, wood grouse and condors they were to become. Consigned to baskets, in cotton wool, that dragon brood lifted up their blind and walleyed heads on thin necks, squawking voicelessly from their mute throats. My father walked along the shelves in a green apron, like a gardener along his cactus frames, and he coaxed from nothingness those blind blisters pulsating with life, those listless abdomens taking in the external world only in the form of food, those excrescences of life scrabbling gropingly toward the light. Some weeks later, when those blind buds of life had burst into the light, the rooms were filled with the colourful chirruping, the twinkling twittering of their new inhabitants. They perched on the wooden pelmets and the mouldings on the wardrobes; they nested in the thicket of tin branches and arabesques of the many-armed hanging lamps.
When Father studied his great ornithological compendiums, browsing through their colourful plates, those fledged phantasms appeared to fly out of them, end p.23 filling the room with colourful fluttering, slivers of crimson, shreds of sapphire, verdigris and silver. At feeding time they comprised a colourful, surging patch on the floor, a living carpet which fell to pieces upon anyone’s incautious entry, rent asunder into animated flowers, fluttering into the air to perch at last in the upper reaches of the room. A certain condor remains especially in my memory, an enormous bird with a bare neck and a face wrinkled and rank with excrescences. It was a lean ascetic, a Buddhist lama with impassive dignity in its whole demeanour, comporting itself with the iron ceremony of its great tribe. As it sat opposite Father, static in its monumental posture of the immemorial Egyptian pagan gods, its eye clouding over with a white film which spread from the edge to the pupil, which enclosed it entirely in its contemplation of its own venerable solitude, it seemed, with its stone-hard profile, to be some older brother of my Father. The very same substance of the body, its tendons and the wrinkled, hard skin — the same dried and bony face with its very same deep, horny sockets. Even Father’s long and thin hands, hardened into nodules, and his curling nails had their analogon in the condor’s talons. Seeing it asleep, I could not resist the impression that I was looking at a mummy — the mummy, shrunken by desiccation, of my father. Neither do I believe that this astonishing resemblance had escaped Mother’s notice, although we never pursued the topic. It was characteristic that the condor and my Father used the same chamber pot.
Not confining himself to the incubation of ever younger specimens, my father arranged ornithological weddings; he dispatched matchmakers and tethered the enticing, ardent fiancées in the gaps and hollows of the attic; and he managed, in fact, to turn the roof of our house — end p.24 an enormous, shingled span-roof — into a veritable bird’s inn, a Noah’s ark to which all kinds of feathered creature flocked from faraway places. Even long after the liquidation of the avian farm, our house retained a place in the traditions of the realm of birds, and many a time during the springtime migration whole hosts of cranes, pelicans, peacocks, and birds of all kinds would alight on our roof.
By and by, however, in the wake of its brief magnificence, this venture took a sad turn. A final translocation of Father was soon imposed, to two rooms in the attic which had served as lumber rooms. The mingled early dawn clamour of the birds’ voices now reached us from there. Augmented by the resonance of the expanse of the roof, those wooden boxes of attic rooms rang throughout with uproar, fluttering, crowing, hoots and gurgles. Thus was Father lost to our sight throughout several weeks. He came down to the apartment only occasionally, and only then could we perceive that he was rather diminished, had lost weight, and shrunk. On occasion, in his forgetfulness, he would start up from his chair at table and let out protracted hoots, beating his arms like wings while a cloud of leucoma came to his eyes. Afterwards, embarrassed, he laughed together with us and tried to make light of such incidents.
One day, during her general housework, Adela appeared without warning in Father’s ornithological kingdom. Standing in the doorway she wrung her hands at the stench rising in the air, at the heaps of excrement covering the floor, the tables and the furniture. With quick decisiveness she threw open the window, and with the aid of her long brushes she set the whole avian mass whirling. An infernal storm-cloud of feathers, wings and screeches rose up, in the midst of which Adela danced a dance of destruction, looking like a furious maenad enveloped in the whirling of her thyrsus*. Beating his arms in dismay, my father tried to raise himself into the air along with his flock of birds. The winged storm-cloud slowly thinned until Adela was at last standing alone on the battlefield, exhausted and breathing hard, along with my father, with an air of perturbation and shame, ready to accede to any capitulation.
A moment later, my father descended the stairway of his dominion — a broken man, an exile king who had lost his throne and his reign.
> -Mannequins- >
Notes
* ... a furious maenad enveloped in the whirling of her thyrsus: the maenads were female followers of Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, also called Bacchus; they roamed the wilderness in ecstatic devotion, wearing fawn skins. The thyrsus was an ivy-wreathed staff that they carried. [RETURN]
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