Maxim Biller: Inside The Head of Bruno Schulz

“MY HIGHLY ESTEEMED, greatly respected, dear Herr Thomas Mann,” wrote a small, thin, serious man slowly and carefully in his notebook, on a surprisingly warm autumn day in November 1938—and immediately crossed the sentence out again. He rose from the low, softly squealing swivel chair, where he had been sitting since early that afternoon at the desk, also too low, from his father’s old office, he swung his arms upward and sideways a couple of times as if doing morning exercises, and looked for two or three minutes at the narrow, dirty, skylight panes of the top of the window, through which shoes and legs kept appearing, along with the umbrella tips and skirt hems of passers-by up above in Florianska Street. Then he sat down once more and began again.

“My dear sir,” he wrote. “I know that you receive many letters every day, and probably spend more time answering them than writing your wonderful, world-famous novels. I can imagine what that means! I myself have to spend thirty-six hours a week teaching drawing to my beloved but totally untalented boys, and when, at the end of the day, I leave the Jagiełło High School where I am employed, tired and—”. Here he broke off, stood up again, and as he did so knocked the desk with his left knee. However, instead of rubbing the injured knee, or hopping about the small basement room, cursing quietly, he held his head firmly with both hands — it was a very large, almost triangular, handsome head, reminiscent from a distance of those paper kites that his school students had been flying in the Koszmarsko stone quarry since the first windy days of September — and soon afterwards he let go of his head again with a single vigorous movement, as if that could help him to get his thoughts out. It worked, as it almost always did, and then he sat down at the desk again, took a fresh sheet of paper and wrote, quickly and without previous thought: “My dear Dr Thomas Mann! Although we are not personally acquainted, I must tell you that three weeks ago a German came to our town, claiming to be you. As I, like all of us in Drohobycz, know you only from newspaper photographs, I cannot say with complete certainty that he is not you, but the stories he tells alone — not to mention his shabby clothing and his strong body odor — arouse my suspicions.”

Right, very good, that will do for the opening, thought the small, serious man in the basement of the Florianska Street building, satisfied, and he put his pencil — it was a Koh-i-Noor HB, and you could also draw with it if necessary — into the inside pocket of the thick Belgian jacket that he wore all year round. Then he closed the black notebook with the blank label at its first page, and stroked his face as if it did not belong to him. For the first time that day — no, for the first time in many months, maybe even years — he no longer felt that large black lizards and squinting snakes, as green as kerosene and with evil grins, were about to slither out of the walls around him; he did not hear the beating and rushing of gigantic Archaeopteryx wings behind him, as he usually did every few minutes; he was not afraid that soon, very soon indeed, something unimaginably dreadful was going to happen. When he realized that, he was immediately panic-stricken, for it must be a trap set for him by Fate.

Ever since he could remember Bruno — for that was the name of the man with the face like a paper kite — had awoken every morning with Fear in his heart. Fear and he had breakfast together in Lisowski’s tearoom, Fear accompanied him to the High School and looked over his shoulder as the boys put their unsuccessful sketches of animals down in front of him, as well as plaster models, covered with black fingerprints, of their sweet little heads. Fear was there when he talked to other teachers during the break periods — their conversation was generally about the boys’ unimportant bragging and misdeeds, or a new production at the Kaminski Theater in Warsaw, they hardly ever mentioned all the fuss the Germans were kicking up these days — and Fear did not leave him even when Helena Jakubowicz, the young sports and philosophy teacher, asked him how his new novel was getting on. Everyone in Poland who understood the first thing about literature, she said, was waiting for it with increasing impatience and interest. Only when Helena Jakubowicz — small, athletic and with a hairy face like a clever female bonobo chimpanzee — put her hand on his arm and pressed it did Fear go away. But as soon as Helena let go, Fear was back, and so he had to take it away with him to the large, darkened apartment in Stryj Street, where fortunately Fear did not follow him all the way into one of the girls’ rooms. But as soon as he was outside again, Fear settled firmly down in his belly — which indeed was its favorite place — sat there like a large, hot, gray lump turning and rustling all the time, and he took it home with him. And then, even if after a brief supper, and after leafing through the Tygodnik Ilustrowany and the Neue Freie Presse , he was finally sitting at his father’s old desk in the basement, Fear was there as well. Fear was with him as he wrote, as he drew, as he thought — and he always thought while he worked — of Papa’s shrinking, dying body, or of the baffled way the Russian soldiers shook their heads when, in the second year of the war, they had accidentally set the Schulz family’s house in the market place on fire. And when Fear felt tired and was going to slink away, he quickly imagined that it was he, not his mortally sick brother-in-law Jankel, who had felt impelled to cut his throat with a razor blade one cool summer morning — whereupon the gray lump began boring an even deeper hole in his belly. Only in his sleep was Bruno really alone. Then he dreamt of Zürich, Paris and New York, where there were hundreds and indeed thousands of ruined, thin-skinned people like him, smiling and waving at one another in cafés, parks and libraries, encouraging each other by means of slight, silent nods.

“Professor Schulz.” Bruno suddenly heard a deep, but still uncertain boy’s voice calling to him — a voice on the verge of breaking. “You weren’t in school today! You’ll get bad marks!” The boy laughed, and some of the other boys joined in. Then the boy knocked on the skylight with a stick, but it was more like the sound of a bird’s beak, and the knocking, at first a soft, scraping sound, quickly grew louder. Bruno slipped off his chair onto the floor behind the desk, he took his head in his hands again, elbows propped wide apart, covered those big ears of his with his small hands, and as he briefly looked up at the skylight over the edge of the desk, he saw several small beaks scratching and pecking at the dirty glass. He immediately slid to the floor again, covered his ears even more firmly, and lost himself in the sound of the sea as the breaking waves ran in and out, a sound that spread from the middle of his head all over the world.

Bruno had really been hoping that no one in school would notice his absence, particularly not pretty Helena, whose thick, blonde and often badly combed hair unfortunately gave off the pungent smell of an animal cage, a mixture of urine and damp hay that had been left lying around. Yesterday she had shut him up, for almost a whole hour’s lesson and without any light on, in the little room containing broken gymnastics equipment next to the sports hall. He didn’t know why, but probably because he had trembled even more than usual during their last conversation in a break period, and couldn’t be soothed even by the pressure of her short, but sharp and unfiled fingernails.