Bruno Schultz:

门兴格拉德巴赫

August

Translated by John Curran Davis


IN JULY my father would set off to take the waters, and he left me with my mother and elder brother, prey to summer days white from the heat and stunning. We browsed, stupefied by the light, through that great book of the holiday in which every page was radiant with splendour and had, at bottom, a pulp dripping with sweetness, of golden pears.

Adela would return in the luminous mornings, like Pomona from the fire of the enkindled day, spilling the coloured beauty of the sun from her basket - glistening wild cherries full of water under their clear sparkling skin, mysterious black cherries whose aroma outdid what would be fulfilled in their taste, and apricots in whose golden pulp the core of the long afternoons lay; and beside that pure poetry of fruits she unloaded slices of veal and a keyboard of calf ribs, swollen with strength and nutritiousness, and an alga of vegetables portraying slaughtered octopus and jellyfish - dinner\'s raw material with a flavour as yet undefined and sterile; dinner\'s vegetative and telluric ingredients with a wild and field aroma.

Through a dark apartment on the first floor of a market square tenement, every day throughout the whole high summer, there would pass: the silence of the air\'s trembling grain, squares of brightness eagerly dreaming their dream on the floor, a barrel-organ melody struck out of the deepest golden vein of the day, and two or three measures of a refrain played on a grand piano somewhere, over and over again and swooning in the sunshine on the white pavements, lost in the fire of the deep day. When she had finished cleaning, Adela cast darkness over the rooms, drawing shut the linen blinds. Then the colours fell deeper by an octave; the room was filled with darkness as though plunged into the luminosity of the deep sea, still cloudily visible in green mirrors, while all the daytime heat breathed on the blinds, gently swaying to the midday hour\'s reveries.

On Saturday afternoons I went out with Mother for a walk. From the duskiness of the hallway one stepped out at once into the sun-bath of the day. Passers-by, wading in gold, had squinting eyes from the glare as though glued with honey, while a drawn back upper lip displayed their teeth and gums. And everyone wading through that golden day wore that same sweltered grimace, as though the sun had bestowed one and the same mask upon its disciples - the golden mask of a brotherhood of the sun; and everyone walking on the streets today, meeting or passing each other by - old or young, every man, woman and child - hailed each other in passing with that mask, with gold paint thickly daubed on their faces; they grinned to one another that bacchanalian grimace - a barbarian mask of pagan worship.

The market square was empty and yellowed by the heat, swept clean of dust by hot winds like a biblical desert. Thorny acacias burgeoning out of the yellow emptiness frothed overhead with their shining foliage, their bouquets of nobly-limbed green filigrees like trees on old tapestries. Those trees, it seemed, were affecting a gale, theatrically flourishing their crowns as though, in their pompous gesticulations, to disclose the courtliness of their leafy silver-lined fans, like the fox furs of nobles. The old houses, burnished by the winds of abundant days, were tinged with great atmospheric reflections, echoes and reminiscences of hues diffused in the depth of the colourful weather. It seemed that whole generations of summer days (like patient stucco workers scrubbing away at the mouldy plaster of the old façades) had worn away their mendacious glazing, uncovering the houses\' distinctly true aspects day in and day out, the physiognomy of the fate and life that formed them from within. The windows, blinded in the radiance of the empty square, now fell asleep; the balconies confessed their emptiness to the sky; the open hallways exuded coolness and wine.

A group of vagabonds, secluded in a corner of the market square from the flaming broom of the heat, were besieging a section of a wall, assaying it over and over again with throws of buttons and coins as though the true secret of the wall, scribbled over with hieroglyphs of scratches and cracks, might be divined in the horoscope of those metal discs. Well, the market square was empty. One might expect that, at that shop doorway with the wine barrels in front, the good Samaritan\'s donkey would soon arrive, led on by the bridle in the shade of the swaying acacias, and two attendants would delicately bring an ailing man down from the burning saddle, to carry him carefully in, up the cool stairway, to the storey that was exuding the delectable Sabbath-meal aroma.

We strolled on, Mother and I, along the two sunlit sides of the market square, casting our broken shadows over all the houses as though upon keyboards. The paving stones fell steadily by under our weightless flat footsteps - some like human skin, others golden or greenish-blue, all level, warm and velvety in the sun like various kinds of sundial, trodden into imperceptibility by our feet, into blessed nothingness.

Until at last, at the corner of ulica Stryjska, we stepped into the shadow of the chemist\'s shop. The enormous jar of raspberry juice in the spacious chemist\'s window symbolised the coolness of the balsams there, by which any suffering might be assuaged. And after a few houses more the street could no longer uphold municipal decorum, like a peasant returning to his native village who divests himself of his elegant town attire on the road, slowly transforming himself, the nearer he approaches home, into a country vagabond.

The little suburban houses were sinking, windows and all, submerged in the lush and intricate blossoming of their tiny gardens. Overlooked by the magnificent day all manner of herb, flower and weed was luxuriantly and quietly multiplying, delighted by that pause in which they could dream beyond the margin of time, on the verges of the infinite day. An enormous sunflower, hoisted up on a powerful stem and afflicted with elephantiasis, awaited in yellow mourning the sad, final day of its life, stooping under the hypertrophy of its own monstrous corpulence. But the naive suburban campanulas and the unsophisticated, fastidious, chintz-print flowerlets stood idly by in their starched little pink and white camisoles, utterly indifferent to the sunflower\'s great tragedy.

A TANGLED THICKET of grasses, tassels, weeds and thistles blazes in the afternoon fire. A garden\'s afternoon doze resounds with a horde of flies. A golden stubble field shouts in the sunshine like a russet swarm of locusts; crickets shriek in the lavish fiery rain; seed pods softly detonate, like grasshoppers.

While over by a fence a sheepskin of grass rises up in a humpy hummock-mound, as though the garden has turned over onto its other side in its sleep and its broad peasant shoulders are breathing upon the silence of the earth. Upon those broad shoulders of the garden the slovenly, womanly luxuriance of August assumed enourmous proportions in the silent cavities of the enormous burdocks; it held sway with its sheets of bright hairy metal and overgrown wagging tongues of fleshy green. There those bulging rag-doll burdocks gaped like hags sitting expansively, half devoured by their own crazy skirts. There the garden sold off for free its cheapest pellets of wild lilac, its stinking soap, its thick plantain porridge, the aqua-vitae of its mint, and all the worst of August\'s shoddy wares. While on the other side of the fence, behind those backwoods of the summer where a stupidity of idiotic weeds grew, there was a rubbish heap wildly overgrown with musk-thistle. No one knew that, this year, August was holding its great pagan orgy right there. On that rubbish heap, leaning against a fence and shaggy with wild lilac, stood the bed of Tłuja, the idiot girl. That is what we all called her. On the heap of debris and waste, old pots, shoes, rubble and dirt, stood the green painted bed supported by two old bricks in place of a missing leg.

The air hanging over that rubble, turned savage by the heat and shot through with the lightning flashes of glistening horseflies maddened by the sun, crackled as though with the shaking of invisible rattle boxes, intensifying to the point of madness.

Tłuja sits squatting amidst her yellow blankets and rags. Her huge head bristles with a shock of black hair. Her face is contractile like the bellows of an accordion. Occasionally a grimace of anguish folds this accordion up into a thousand transverse pleats, and then astonishment stretches them out, smoothes out the folds and reveals the narrow little slits of her tiny eyes and the moist gums and yellowed teeth behind her snout-like fleshy lips. Hours pass, full of glaring heat and boredom, during which Tłuja babbles in an undertone, dozes, grumbles quietly, and coughs. In a dense cluster, flies cover the unmoving. But all at once that whole heap of dirty rags, tatters and shreds begins to move, as though a litter of lively scratching rats has been spawned within it. The flies awaken, startled, and rise up in a great resounding swarm, full of furious buzzing, glints and flickers. And as the rags fall to the ground and scatter like frightened rats over the rubbish heap the nucleus extricates itself from them and gradually unwinds; the core of the rubbish heap unpeels itself: the half-naked and sombre idiot slowly rises up and stands looking like a pagan goddess on stunted puerile legs, and with the distending influx of her angry neck, from her face, reddened, darkened with fury, upon which arabesques of distended veins effloresce like a barbarian painting, she tears out an animal scream, a hoarse scream, the triumph of every bronchus and pipe in that half-beast, half-goddess breast. The thistles cry out, burning in the sunshine, and the burdocks prance, shamelessly parading their bare flesh, the weeds drool their gleaming poison, and the idiot, grown hoarse with yelling, in a wild convulsion, a furious impatience, strikes with her fleshy bosom the trunk of an elder tree, which quietly creaks at the insistence of this debauched lust, enchanted by the whole beggar-woman chorus into degenerate, pagan fecundity.

Tłuja\'s mother hires herself out to housewives, to scrub their floors. She is a small woman, yellow as saffron, and with saffron she seasons the floors, pine tables, benches and banisters she cleans in poor people\'s quarters. Once, Adela took me to the house of that old Maryśka. It was early in the morning; we went into a blue-washed little room with trodden down clay pugging between the floorboards, upon which the early sun fell glaring-yellow in the silence of a morning measured out by the strident clanging of a rustic clock on the wall. In a straw-filled crate lay stupid Maryśka, pale as a wafer and still, like a glove from which the hand has been removed. And, as though taking advantage of her repose, the silence chattered; the yellow, glaring and malevolent silence monologised, quarrelled and proclaimed its maniacal monologue in a loud and vulgar manner. Maryśka\'s time was the time locked up in her soul; it flowed out of her, terrifyingly real, and darted about the room unhindered, noisy, knocking and infernal, distributed like bad flour from the loud grinding mill clock in the glaring silence of the morning, deteriorated flour, the stupid flour of the insane.

IN ONE of those cottages, surrounded by rusty railings and drowning in the lush greenery of its garden, lived Aunt Agata. Going in to visit her we passed by colourful glass spheres on the tops of poles in her garden, pink, green and violet, in which complete, radiant and shining worlds were conjured like those ideal and happy pictures enclosed in the matchless perfection of soap bubbles.

In the dusky hallway with its old chromolithographs, devoured by mould and gone blind in their old age, we rediscovered a scent well known to us. In that faithful old scent the life of those rustics was stored up in a strangely simple synthesis, an alembic of their race, the category of their blood and the secret of their fate, all soaked up unnoticed in the everyday passing of their own separate time. The wise old door whose dark sighs let those rustics in and out, the taciturn witness to the comings and goings of the mother, the daughters and sons, opened noiselessly as though into a wardrobe, and we entered their life. They sat as though in the shadow of their fate, and put up no defence - they surrendered their secret to us in their first clumsy gestures. Were we not, by blood and fate, related to them?

The room was dark and velvety, upholstered in gold-patterned royal-blue, although an echo of the fiery day shimmered even here, on the brass of the picture frames, the door handles and the golden skirting boards, albeit let in through the density of the garden\'s greenery. Aunt Agata, huge and luxuriant, her plump white flesh mottled with a ginger rust of freckles, got up from her seat by the wall. We sat down with them as though on the brink of their fate, a little abashed by that defencelessness with which they had so unreservedly disclosed themselves to us, and we drank water with rose syrup, an astonishing drink in which I all but found the deepest essence of that sweltering Saturday.

My aunt was complaining. This was the customary tone of her utterances, the sound of that white and prolific flesh soaring as though already beyond the confines of her person - barely, uncertainly held in convergence in the fetters of her individual form - and even in that convergence it was already multifarious, ready to split open, to branch out and spill over into her family. It was an almost autogenic fecundity, an unbridled and morbidly wanton femininity.

It seemed that the mere scent of manhood, a whiff of tobacco smoke or a bachelor\'s joke might impel that perturbed femininity to a riotous parthenogenesis. And, in truth, all her complaints, whether to her husband or her servants, or her worries over her children, were only capricious, discontented and sulking fecundity, a continuation of that irritable, angry and tearful coquetry with which she unavailingly assayed her husband. Uncle Marek, small, hunched, and with a face purged of sex, sat in his grey bankruptcy, resigned to his fate in the shadow of that boundless contempt, in which he appeared to relax. The far away radiance of the garden, spreading out at the window, smouldered in his grey eyes. At times he tried, by some ineffectual motion, to express reservations of some sort, to make a stand, but a wave of self-sufficient femininity pushed that meaningless gesture aside, passed by triumphantly, disregarding him, and washed away with its wide surge the feeble spasms of his masculinity.

There was something tragic in that slovenly and immoderate fecundity; there was the destitution of a creature fighting on the border of nothingness and death; there was some kind of heroism of femininity, triumphing by fertility even over nature\'s decrepitude, over the insufficiency of man. But her offspring disclosed the reason for that maternal panic, that madness of childbearing which had exhausted itself in abortive embryos, in an ephemeral generation of phantoms without blood or face.

Łucja entered, the middle child, with a head too blooming and ripe for her childlike and plump body of white and delicate flesh. She held out to me her doll-like little hand, seemingly just budding, and her whole face blossomed at once like a peony full to overflowing with pink. Distressed by her blushes which shamelessly spoke of the secrets of menstruation, she closed her eyes, and she burned even more deeply at the touch of the most nonchalant question, because they each contained a secret allusion to her oversensitive virginity.

Emil, the eldest of the cousins, with a flaxen moustache and a face from which life seemed to have washed away every feature, paced back and forth across the room with his hands in the pockets of his voluminous trousers.

His elegant and costly clothes bore the stamp of the exotic countries he had returned from. His withered and clouded face seemed to forget about itself from one day to the next, to become a bare white wall with a pale net of veins, in which, like the lines on a faded map, the waning reminiscences of that stormy and wasted life had become entangled. He was a master of card tricks; he smoked long, noble pipes, and he smelt oddly of the scent of far-away countries. His gaze wandering over old reminiscences, he related strange anecdotes which broke off suddenly at a certain point, became confused and blew away into nothingness. I cast a wistful gaze at him, wishing he would turn his attention to me and deliver me from the torment of my boredom. And it seemed, in effect, that he had winked at me, going out to another room. I hurried after him. He was sitting deep in a little couch, his crossed knees almost at the level of his head, as bald as a billiard ball. It seemed as though it was only his voluminous clothes that lay there, crumpled and thrown over the arm-chair. His face was like a breath of a face - a streak which an unknown passer-by had left in the air. In his blue-enamelled hands he held a wallet, in which he was looking at something.

From the mist of his face the convex film of a pallid wall-eye struggled to emerge, luring me with a playful flicker. I felt an irresistible fondness for him. He took me between his knees, and shuffling photographs with his skilful hands he opened up peep-holes before my eyes onto naked women and boys in strange positions. I was standing there, leaning against him and looking with unseeing distant eyes at those delicate human bodies, when a fluid of unclear perturbation which suddenly clouded the air reached me and ran me through with a shudder of unease, a wave of sudden understanding. But just then that haze of a smile that had been sketched under his soft and beautiful moustache, the germ of desire that had tensed on his temples in a pulsating vein, the intensity holding his features in concentration only for an instant - withdrew into nothingness; his face fell away into absence, forgot about itself, and blew away.

王敖

这篇我一直很喜欢，是他的全集的第一篇。