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.

 

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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]