Maxim Biller: Inside The Head of Bruno Schulz

“Professor! Professor! Don’t be afraid, we’ll see you safely through town to the High School! Mrs Jakubowicz isn’t as angry with you as you think, we’ve been talking to her about you. And she forgave us at once.”

Had he dreamt it, or had his students just called that out to him in chorus — cheeping, chirping, clear as a bell — from outside the skylight which was suddenly half open, flapping quietly in the wind? Bruno, still crouching on the floor with his head leaning on the greasy brown seat of the chair, acted as if he hadn’t heard anything. For some time, lying in wait like a cat with his eyes narrowed, he watched the pencil that had rolled away, and then suddenly snatched it up.

“It seems to me,” he wrote in his notebook again, pressing it open against the desk drawer, which stood ajar, “as if the people of Drohobycz had been waiting for someone like the false winner of the Nobel Prize to come to their town and turn their heads even more, my dear and highly esteemed Dr Mann. They have been living for too long with no contact with the outside world, a provincial existence makes them anxious, crazy, curious. They plan a day’s excursion to Stryj months in advance, and before anyone here travels to the capital, he visits Reynisz the notary to put his affairs in order. You should see the people of Drohobycz for yourself! They almost all have attractive, pale, friendly faces, behind which they conceal either nothing at all — or the longing for eternal bright nights and a pain that is otherwise described only in history books. I know”—he hesitated, but then quickly went on writing—“I know what I am talking about, for I am no exception. I have studied in Vienna and Lemberg, and all the same I came back again. I had a fiancée whose name I often forget; she left me because for years I promised to move to live with her in Warsaw, without ever really meaning it. And when I was awarded the Golden Laurel of the Academy of Literature last month, I lay in bed for days weeping, instead of being glad. So I too, my most esteemed Dr Mann, have recently let your double deceive me like everyone else. Last Saturday, when he was going down Florianska Street drawn along by Hasenmass the hotel manager, I did not just cast a quick glance out of the window and then quickly return to my work. Oh no! I leapt up from my desk, I tore off my clothes as I ran, and when I had caught up with the cab in which your ill-omened double sat, stiff and haughty as a German professor, I let myself be harnessed to it too as I went on full speed ahead, and so we trotted away to the Swaying Pyramid Hotel on the market place. Once we had arrived we were permitted (without the carriage, of course, but in full harness) to accompany the master into the manager’s bathroom, where he has been staying since his arrival in Drohobycz. This bathroom — it is almost as large as the hall of the Jagiełło High School, and I hope you have comparable rooms in your new house in Zürich — contained no washbasins, no lavatory, no bathtub, only several showers fitted into the bare concrete ceiling, two benches and a long rail with clothes-hooks hanging from it. Obviously the false Nobel Prize winner had had everything removed as soon as he moved in, to leave more space for his many visitors. Those present that night were: Mrs 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 engaged in 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 down with 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 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 rigid smile 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 and climbed 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?’”