Maxim Biller: Inside The Head of Bruno Schulz

Bruno got to his feet in agitation, walked twice, then a third time around the desk, and when he sat down again there were two little doves perching on the lamp, one white and one gray, looking at him in silence. On the window sill above there were more doves, and some beside his chair as well, but he took no notice of this sudden plague of birds in his basement study. “Dr Franck and I,” he went on writing, pausing again and again, “are in no doubt, Dr Mann, of what is going on here: we are being spied on! Exactly what the Germans plan to do we do not know. We know only how the Jews are faring in their old home, and we hope that the new Nazi realm will not go on and on growing, to reach our town one day with its kraken arms. Dr Franck, who as President of the Poalei Zion movement in the old days would have liked to move the whole of Drohobycz to the banks of the Jordan or the mountains of Galilee, now says that if the enemies of the Jews begin to rage, there will be nothing left for us anyway but prayer. And he thinks we ought to continue remaining on good terms with your double, as it may help us later. So Dr Franck has also offered him his own apartment in Drohobycz for the rest of his stay here, because it is much lighter and more comfortable than the hotel manager’s bathroom. After we had been standing together in silence for a little longer — while the noise made by the students went on in the art room — Dr Franck suddenly took my arm and asked me whether he could stay with us until the worst was over. What was I to reply? That Hania hates having guests? That the atmosphere on his bleak station bench is better than in our cold, sad house? That we are all lost anyway, and God has another end in view for every one of us?”

No sooner had Bruno written the last sentence than the warm gray lump in his belly became so hot that he had to take off his heavy tweed jacket and unbutton the collar of his shirt. He hung the jacket over the back of Papa’s chair, and spent some time looking in silence at the two doves on his desk. Without moving, they looked back, also in silence. Then he carefully opened the lower compartment of his desk and took a large old cigar box out of it. He kept the things that were really important to him in this box: the tiny, well-worn brass hearing trumpet that Papa, in his last months of life, was always holding against the floor of the family’s old house on the market place, so as to get a better idea of what the mice, spiders and martens living under it had to say. Adele’s feather duster, of which he had both good and bad memories. And distributed everywhere in the cigar box was the sawdust, with its unpleasant odor, that he had secretly collected from the smelly, tangled hair of Helena Jakubowicz over the past years. Like someone digging for gold, he would run his fingers through that damp yellow pile of sawdust, thinking of the delightful and dangerous things that Helena Jakubowicz bought for the two of them in one of the badly lit shops that were always changing their location beyond the market place — and soon he felt reassured again and stopped sweating.

“Professor Schulz,” the gray dove said to him, in the firm but still slightly pubertal voice of young Theo Rosenstock, staring at him out of small black eyes as if he were blind, “Mrs Jakubowicz has sent us again. She says you must hurry. She doesn’t have much time, because afterwards she has a date to meet the gentleman from Germany in the Savoy Bar, and she also has to correct our philosophy essays by tomorrow.”

“I’m sure to get top marks,” said the white dove, giggling. Bruno recognized the girlish voice of Hermann, the baker Lisowski’s middle son, who was as stupid as he was sweet, and he wished very much that the boy was right in what he said.

“Oh no, you won’t,” said the gray dove. “Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit . What do you know about that?”

“Nothing,” said the white dove. “But in the long break period I helped Mrs Jakubowicz to get all those flies and beetles out of her hair, and oh, how good they tasted!”

“Hermann, you’re such a sweet little idiot,” said the gray dove, nodding its head jerkily back and forth a few times, and plucking at its tousled breast feathers with its immaculate beak. The white dove imitated it, then they both laughed, the gray dove spread its wings, rose quickly in the air, turned two or three somersaults above the desk, and settled beside the other bird again on the black, shiny shade of Bruno’s lamp. “And I’ll get top marks at sport,” said the dove. “Isn’t that so, Professor? But I’ll get a much lower mark for art, won’t I?”

Bruno nodded. He carefully closed the cigar box and put it on the desk. Then he placed the pencil in his notebook, closed it and said, in the detached voice of someone talking in his sleep, “What does Mrs Jakubowicz want from me, Theo? Why must I go to the school so late this evening? I told them I was sick.”

“You’re to take your punishment, Professor,” said the white dove.

“Be quiet!” the gray dove interrupted.

“I thought that Mrs Jakubowicz wasn’t angry with me anymore. Were you lying to me just now, boys?”

Theo and Hermann did not reply, and the other doves who had gathered on the window sill and the floor abruptly stopped tripping back and forth, and looked in their direction quietly and in suspense.

“Punishment?” said Bruno. “What kind of punishment? What for?”

“Go on, Theo,” said the white dove, “tell him. If you don’t I will, but then I’m bound to get everything all muddled up. And then Mrs Jakubowicz will be angry with me and so will Professor Schulz.”

Theo sailed down from the lamp to the table, perched on Bruno’s hand, ran up the sleeve of his shirt, which was drenched with sweat, and settled on his shoulder. “But you must put your ear very close to me, Professor,” he said, “because I’d rather tell you quietly.”

Bruno did as his student asked, and then he heard a wild hissing and whistling deep in his ear. “She says,” whispered Theo, gently touching Bruno’s ear with his bony little beak again and again, “she says that you’re infecting us all with your melancholy. She thinks you are more afraid than anyone she has ever met, and that means it is likely that you will refuse to let us have what would probably be the best books a human being could ever write. Your pessimism is really intolerable, she says, you are a bad, bad—”

At this moment someone drummed loudly on the basement door. The doves — including Theo — flew up in alarm, and some of them hit their heads on the basement ceiling. They were all flapping their wings frantically, and the room was immediately full of a cloud of tiny gray, white and brown feathers, and an unbearable smell like a birdcage.

“Mama wants to know whether you’re coming up to supper or not, Uncle Bruno,” cried Chaimele and Jacek from outside, as if with a single voice. “Or do you have to go to Stryj Street today?” They laughed, and their laughter sounded like a wave rolling swiftly up and breaking several times — and then, without waiting for Bruno’s answer, they ran noisily upstairs again. Seconds later, Bruno heard chairs being moved about in the kitchen above him, and the sound of knives and forks against Mama’s old Russian porcelain plates.

“Keep quiet, children,” said Bruno quietly to the doves, “and please don’t disturb me. Sit down somewhere in peace and think of something nice, like what presents you would like for Chanukah or for your birthday. I have to finish writing a letter in a hurry, so that I can post it later on my way to the school. Yes, thank you, that’s nice of you.”

The birds immediately calmed down. Most of them settled beside the long, narrow window, which was black as night, and put their well-formed little heads under their wings, like good children. A few fluttered through the open skylight into the darkness, and Theo and Hermann, beak by beak, cheek to cheek, made themselves comfortable on Bruno’s cigar box.