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 1938and 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 fathers 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 Jagieo 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 Lisowskis 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 fathers 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 Papas 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 familys 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 Zrich, 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 cafs, parks and libraries, encouraging each other by means of slight, silent nods.

Professor Schulz. Bruno suddenly heard a deep, but still uncertain boys voice calling to him a voice on the verge of breaking. You werent in school today! Youll 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 birds 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 hours lesson and without any light on, in the little room containing broken gymnastics equipment next to the sports hall. He didnt know why, but probably because he had trembled even more than usual during their last conversation in a break period, and couldnt be soothed even by the pressure of her short, but sharp and unfiled fingernails. So what? She shouldnt have asked him to let her see at least a few pages of his novel, and he had been cold as well, in spite of the summery days that came like a gift in mid-November, and in spite of the fact that he was wearing his heavy jacket. When she finally let him out he was feeling very much better, or so he told her at least, for fear of making her even angrier, and she promised to shut him up again sometime soon. Maybe, she added, shed come into the little room with him herself for a while if he liked. She could go to one of the chaotic shops beyond the market place that opened only late in the evening for a few hours, sometimes not even that, and buy some things that shed been wanting to try out with him for a long time. He could guess what she meant! No, he had replied, hed rather she didnt, although he immediately felt very safe and well at the thought of those things black leather Venetian Columbine masks stuffed with sawdust; penis-sized Pierrots made of willow rods, and Easter whips interwoven with thin steel chains; silver nipple clamps, and Japanese shunga candles (their dripping wax left no blisters behind on the skin). He wondered, even as he hurried up to the second floor and his class of shouting boys in the art room, whether to say he was sick next day. Then, when he was on his way home, it occurred to him that he had been meaning for a long time to write to Thomas Mann in Zrich, and that decided the matter: he would be off school sick tomorrow!