Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass Read online

  Yet what is to be done with events that have no place of their own in time; events that have occurred too late, after the whole of time has been distributed, divided, and allotted; events that have been left in the cold, unregistered, hanging in the air, homeless, and errant?

  Could it be that time is too narrow for all events? Could it happen that all the seats within time might have been sold? Worried, we run along the train of events, preparing ourselves for the journey.

  For heaven's sake, is there perhaps some kind of bidding for time? Conductor, where are you?

  Don't let's get excited. Don't let's panic; we can settle it all calmly within our own terms of reference.

  Have you ever heard of parallel streams of time within a two-track time? Yes, there are such branch lines of time, somewhat illegal and suspect, but when, like us, one is burdened with contraband of supernumerary events that cannot be registered, one cannot be too fussy. Let us try to find at some point of history such a branch line, a blind track onto which to shunt these illegal events. There is nothing to fear. It will all happen imperceptibly: the reader won't feel any shock. Who knows? Perhaps even now, while we mention it, the doubtful maneuver is already behind us and we are, in fact, proceeding into a cul-de-sac.

  II

  My mother rushed in, frightened and enfolded my screams with her arms, wanting to stifle them like flames and choke them in the warmth of her love. She closed my mouth with hers and screamed together with me.

  But I pushed her away, and, pointing to the column of fire, a golden bar that shot through the air like a splinter and would not disappear— full of brightness and spiralling dust specks—I cried: "Tear it out, tear it out!"

  The large colored picture painted on the front of the stove grew blood red; it puffed itself up like a turkey, and in the convulsions of its veins, sinews, and all its swollen anatomy, it seemed to be bursting open, trying to liberate itself with a piercing crowing scream.

  I stood rigid like a signpost, with outstretched, elongated fingers, pointing in anger, in fierce concentration, hand trembling in ecstasy.

  My hand guided me, alien and pale, and pulled me after it, a stiff, waxen hand, like the large votive hands in churches, like angels' palms raised for an oath.

  It was toward the end of winter. The world had dissolved in puddles, but sudden waves of heat seemed full of fire and pepper. The honey-sweet pulp of day was cut into silvery furrows, into prisms filled with colors and spicy piquancies. Noonday collected within a short space the whole fire of these days and all the moments that glowed.

  At that hour, unable to contain the heat, the day shed its scales of silvery tinplate, of crunchy tinfoil, and, layer after layer, disclosed its core of solid brightness. And as if this were not enough, chimneys smoked and billowed with lustrous steam. The bright flanks of the sky exploded into white plumes, banks of clouds dispersed under the shellfire of an invisible artillery.

  The window facing the sky swelled with those endless ascents, the curtains stood in flames, smoking in the fire, spilling golden shadows and shimmering spirals of air. Askew on the carpet lay a quadrilateral of brightness that could not detach itself from the floor. That bar of fire disturbed me deeply. I stood transfixed, legs astride, and barked short, hard curses at it in an alien voice.

  In the doorway and in the hall stood frightened, perplexed people: relatives, neighbors, overdressed aunts. They approached on tiptoe and turned away, their curiosity unsatisfied. And I screamed:

  "Don't you remember?" I shouted to my mother, to my brother. "I have been telling you that everything is held back, tamed, walled in by boredom, unliberated! And now look at that flood, at that flowering, at that bliss. . . ."

  And I shed tears of happiness and helplessness.

  "Wake up," I shouted, "come and help me! How can I face this flood alone, how can I deal with this inundation? How can I, all alone, answer the million dazzling questions that God is swamping me with?"

  And as they remained silent, I cried in anger: "Hurry up, collect bucketfuls of these riches, store them up!"

  But nobody could assist me; bewildered, they looked over their shoulders, hiding behind the backs of neighbors.

  Then I realized what I had to do; I began to pull from the cupboards old Bibles and my father's half-filled and disintegrating ledgers, throwing them on the floor under that column of fire that glowed and brightened the air. I wanted more and more sheaves of paper. My mother and brother rushed in with ever new handfuls of old newspapers and magazines and threw them in stacks on the floor. And I sat among the piles of paper, blinded by the glare, my eyes full of explosions, rockets, and colors, and I drew wildly, feverishly, across the paper, over the printed or figure-covered pages. My colored pencils rushed in inspiration across columns of illegible text in masterly squiggles, in breakneck zigzags that knotted themselves suddenly into anagrams of vision, into enigmas of bright revelation, and then dissolved into empty, shiny flashes of lightning, following imaginary tracks.

  Oh, those luminous drawings, made as if by a foreign hand. Oh, those transparent colors and shadows. How often, now, do I dream about them, then rediscover them after so many years at the bottom of old drawers, glimmering and fresh like dawn—still damp from the first dew of the day: figures, landscapes, faces!

  Oh, those blues that stop your breath with the pang of fear. Oh, those greens greener than wonder. Oh, those preludes of anticipated colors waiting to be given a name!

  Why did I squander them at the time with such wanton carelessness in the richness of surfeit? I allowed the neighbors to rummage about and plunder these stacks of drawings. They carried away whole sheaves of them. In what houses did they finally land, which rubbish heaps did they fill? Adela hung them up in the kitchen like wallpaper until the room became light and bright as if snow had fallen during the night.

  The drawings were full of cruelty, pitfalls, and aggression. While I sat on the floor taut as a bow, immobile and lurking, the papers around me glowed brightly in the sun. It was enough if a drawing, pinned down by the tip of my pencil, made the slightest move toward escape, for my hand, trembling with new impulses and ideas, to attack it like a cat. Fierce and rapacious, I would, with lightning bites, savage the creation that tried to escape from under my crayon. And that crayon only left the paper when the now dead and immobile corpse displayed its colorful and fantastic anatomy on the page, like a plant in a herbal.

  It was a murderous pursuit, a fight to the death. Who could tell the attacker from the attacked in that tangle that spluttered with rage, with squeaks and fears? At times my hand would start to attack twice or three times in vain, only to reach its victim on the fourth or fifth attempt. Often it winced in pain and fear in the fangs and pincers of the monsters writhing under my scalpel.

  From hour to hour the visions became more crowded, bottlenecks arose, until one day all roads and byways swarmed with processions and the whole land was divided by meandering or marching columns— endless pilgrimages of beasts and animals.

  As in Noah's day, colorful processions would flow, rivers of hair and manes, of wavy backs and tails, of heads nodding monotonously in time with their steps.

  My room was the frontier and the tollgate. Here they stopped, tightly packed, bleating imploringly. They wriggled, shuffling their feet anxiously: humped and horned creatures, encased in the varied costumes and armors of zoology and frightened of each other, scared by their own disguises, looking with fearful and astonished eyes through the camouflage of their hairy hides and mooing mournfully, as if gagged under their attires.

  Did they expect me to name them and solve their riddle? Or did they ask to be christened so that they could enter into their names and fill them with their being? Strange monsters, question-mark apparitions, blue-print creatures appeared, and I had to scream and wave my hands to chase them away.

  They withdrew backward, lowering their heads, looking askance, lost within themselves; then they returned, dissolving into chaos, a rubbish dump of for
ms. How many straight or humped backs passed at that time under my hand, how many heads did my hand touch with a velvety caress!

  I understood then why animals have horns: perhaps to introduce an element of strangeness into their lives, a whimsical or irrational joke. An idée fixe, transgressing the limits of their being, reaching high above their heads and emerging suddenly into light, frozen into matter palpable and hard. It then acquired a wild, incredible, and unpredictable shape, an arabesque, invisible to their eyes yet frightening, an unknown cypher under the threat of which they are forced to live. I understood why these animals are given to irrational and wild panic, to the frenzy of a stampede: pushed into madness, they are unable to extricate themselves from the tangle of these horns, between which— when they lower their heads—they peer wildly or sadly, as if trying to find a passage between the branches. These horned animals have no hope of deliverance and carry on their heads the stigma of their sin with sadness and resignation.

  The cats were even further removed from light. Their perfection was frightening. Enclosed in the precision and efficiency of their bodies, they did not know either fault or deviation. They would descend for a moment into the depths of their being, then become immobile within their soft fur, solemnly and threateningly serious, while their eyes became round like moons, sucking the visible into their fiery craters. But a moment later, thrown back to the surface, they would yawn away their vacuity, disenchanted and without illusions. In their lives full of self-sufficient grace, there was no place for any alternative. Bored by this prison of perfection, seized with spleen, they spat with their wrinkled lips, while their broad, striped faces expressed an abstract cruelty.

  Lower down martens, polecats, and foxes sneaked stealthily by, thieves among animals, creatures with a bad conscience. They had reached their place in life by cunning, intrigue, and trickery, against the intent of their Creator, and, pursued by hatred, always threatened, always on their guard, always in fear for that place, they passionately loved their furtive, stealthy existence and prepared to be torn to pieces in its defense.

  At last, all the processions had filed past, and silence fell on my room once more. I again began to draw, engrossed in my papers that breathed brightness. The window was open, and on the windowsill doves and pigeons shivered in the spring breeze. Turning their heads to one side, they showed their round and glassy eyes in profile, as if afraid and full of flight. The days toward their end became soft, opaline, and translucent, then again pearly and full of a misty sweetness.

  Easter came, and my parents went away for a week to visit my married sister. I was left alone in the flat, a prey to my inspirations. Adela brought me breakfast and dinner on a tray. I did not notice her presence when she stopped in the doorway in her Sunday best, smelling of spring in her tulles and silks.

  Through the open window gentle breezes entered the room, filling it with the reflections of distant landscapes. For a moment the colors of distance stayed in the air, but not for long; they soon dispersed, dissolving into blue shadows, tender and gentle. The flood of paintings receded a little, the waters of imagination quieted and abated.

  I sat on the floor. Spread out around me were my crayons and buttons of paint: godly colors, azures breathing freshness, greens straying to the limits of the possible. And when I took a red crayon in my hand, happy fanfares of crimson marched out into the world, all balconies brightened with red waving flags, and whole houses arranged themselves along streets into a triumphant lane. Processions of city firemen in cherry red uniforms paraded in brightly lighted happy streets, and gentlemen lifted their strawberry-colored bowlers in greeting. Cherry red sweetness and cherry red chirping of finches filled the air scented with lavender.

  And when I reached for blue paint, the reflection of a cobalt spring fell on all the windows along the street; the panes trembled, one after the other, full of azure and heavenly fire; curtains waved as if alerted; and a joyful draft rose in that lane between muslin curtains and oleanders on the empty balconies, as if somebody distant had appeared from the other side of a long and bright avenue and was now approaching, somebody luminous, preceded by good tidings, by premonitions, announced by the flight of swallows, by beacons of fire spreading mile after mile.

  III

  At Easter time, usually at the end of March or the beginning of April, Shloma, the son of Tobias, was released from prison, where he had been locked up for the winter after the brawls and follies he had been involved in during the summer and autumn. One afternoon that spring I saw him from the window leaving the barber who in our town combined the functions of hairdresser and surgeon; I watched him carefully open the shining glass-paned door of the shop and descend the three wooden steps. He looked fresh and somehow younger, his hair carefully cut. He was wearing a jacket that was too short and too tight for him and a pair of checked trousers; slim and youthful in spite of his forty years.

  Trinity Square was at that time empty and tidy. After the spring thaw the slush had been rinsed away by torrential rains that had left the pavements washed clean. The thaw was followed by many days of quiet, discreet fine weather, with long spacious days stretching beyond measure into evenings when dusk seemed endless, empty, and fallow in its enormous expectations. When Shloma had shut the glass door of the barber's after himself, the sky filled it at once, just as it filled all the small windows of the one-story house.

  Having come down the steps, he found himself completely alone on the edge of the large, empty square, which that afternoon seemed shaped like a gourd, like a new, unopened year. Shloma stood on its threshold, gray and extinguished, steeped in blueness and incapable of making a decision that would break the perfect roundness of an unused day.

  Only once a year, on his discharge from prison, did Shloma feel so clean, unburdened, and new. Then the day received him unto itself, washed from sin, renewed, reconciled with the world, and with a sigh it opened before him the spotless orbs of its horizons.

  Shloma did not hurry. He stood at the edge of the day and did not dare cross it, or advance with his small, youthful, slightly limping steps into the gently vaulted conch of the afternoon.

  A translucent shadow lay over the city. The silence of that third hour after midday extracted from the walls of houses the pure whiteness of chalk and spread it voicelessly, like a pack of cards. Having dealt one round, it began a second, drawing reserves of whiteness from the large baroque facade of the Church of the Holy Trinity, which, like an enormous divine shift fallen from heaven, folded itself into pilasters, projections, and embrasures and puffed itself up into the pathos of volutes and archvolutes before coming to rest on the ground.

  Shloma lifted his face and sniffed the air. The gentle breeze carried the scent of oleanders, of cinnamon, and of festive interiors. Then he sneezed noisily, and his famous powerful sneeze frightened the pigeons on the roof of the police station so that they panicked and flew away. Shloma smiled to himself: by the explosion of his nostrils God must have given him a sign that spring was here. This was a surer sign than the arrival of storks, and from then on days would be interrupted by these detonations, which, lost in the hubbub of the city, would punctuate its events from various directions like a witty commentary.

  "Shloma," I called out from our low first-floor window.

  Shloma noticed me, smiled his pleasant smile, and saluted.

  "We are alone in the whole square, you and I," I said softly, because the inflated globe of the sky resounded like a barrel.

  "You and I," he repeated with a sad smile. "How empty is the world today!"

  We could have divided it between us and renamed it, so open, unprotected, and unattached was the world. On such a day the Messiah advances to the edge of the horizon and looks down on the earth. And when He sees it, white, silent, surrounded by azure and contemplation, He may lose sight of the boundary of clouds that arrange themselves into a passage, and, not knowing what He is doing, He may descend upon earth. And in its reverie the earth won't even notice Him, who has
descended onto its roads, and people will wake up from their afternoon nap remembering nothing. The whole event will be rubbed out, and everything will be as it has been for centuries, as it was before history began.

  "Is Adela in?" Shloma asked with a smile.

  "There is no one at home, come up for a moment and I'll show you my drawings."

  "If there is no one in, I shall do so with pleasure if you will open the door."

  And looking left and right in the gateway, with the gait of a sneak thief he entered the house.

  IV

  "These are wonderful drawings," Shloma said, stretching out his arm with the gesture of an art connoisseur. His face lit up with the reflection of color and light. Then he folded his hand round his eye and looked through this improvised spyglass, screwing up his features in a grimace of earnest appreciation.

  "One might say," he said, "that the world has passed through your hands in order to renew itself, in order to molt in them and shed its scales like a wonderful lizard. Ah, do you think I would be stealing and committing a thousand follies if the world weren't so outworn and decayed, with everything in it without its gliding, without the distant reflection of divine hands? What can one do in such a world? How can one not succumb and allow one's courage to fail when everything is shut tight, when all meaningful things are walled up, and when you constantly knock against bricks, as against the walls of a prison? Ah, Joseph, you should have been born earlier."

  We stood in the semidarkness of my vast room, elongated in perspective toward the window opening on the square. Waves of air reached us in gentle pulsations, settling down on the silence. Each wave brought a new load of silence, seasoned with the colors of distance, as if the previous load had already been used up and exhausted. That dark room came to life only by the reflections of the houses far beyond the window, showing their colors in its depth as in a camera obscura. Through the window one could see, as through a telescope, the pigeons on the roof of the police station, puffed up and walking along the cornice of the attic. At times they rose up all at once and flew in a semicircle over the square. The room brightened for a moment with their fluttering wings, broadened with the echo of their flight, and then darkened when they settled down again.