See Under, page 12
BRUNO
[ 1 ]
AT THE DEEP-WATER PORT OF DANZIG he jumped into the sea. It was a drizzly evening, and the handful of people on the dock were too busy to notice him. Stevedores had built a fire under a tin lean-to, and he could smell the coffee brewing: real coffee! He walked briskly through the rain. He had been forced to leave his hat behind in the gallery cloakroom, as well as his black briefcase with the manuscript of The Messiah inside. Four years of thinking and writing. It was a mistake that spread malignantly before he realized the Messiah would never come in writing, would never be invoked in a language suffering from elephantiasis. A new grammar and a new calligraphy had first to be invented. He glanced anxiously at the Port Authority buildings. Two soldiers stood talking in the alleyway nearby. Bruno clenched his fists unconsciously, as he had been training himself to do ever since it became illegal for a Jew to put his hands in his pockets in the presence of a uniformed German. He walked quickly, making himself small: the gait of an unattractive man. Rain dripped down his tight-skinned, sallow face—
How well I know that face: I often find it peering at me from his grotesque drawings, surrounded by other dwarfed and miserable men under the patent-leather heel of Adela, the beautiful servant girl, or some other disdainful female. (But notice the sea, Bruno: the gray sea shaking out its bedding for the night, popping dumps of kelp that bob up to the light for an instant and sink back into the foam again.)
They displayed Munch’s painting in the farthermost corner of the gallery (so disturbing was it to them), in the midst of his milder, more colorful works. It was cordoned off, with a sign in Polish and German saying: DO NOT TOUCH.
Idiots. They should have protected the public from the painting, not the other way around. That figure on the wooden bridge, mouth open in a scream, had deeply touched him. Kissing it there in the gallery, Bruno felt infected. Or perhaps the kiss had brought a latent infection to life. Now Bruno walks past the heavy boats, rolling his eyes and twisting his lips as the scream from the painting makes its way from heart to mouth, like a fetus whose time has come. He shivers: Bruno is the weak link in the chain. Take care of him. The great Zofia Nal-kowska once beseeched her friends, “Look after Bruno, for his sake and for ours.”
Now he fell down. He tripped over a coil of algae-covered rope and almost dropped into the water. For a moment he lay on the dock, doubled over with pain. The rips under his arms and elbows were exposed. He scrambled to his feet. Get up. Mustn’t be a sitting duck. They’re after him. The SS and Polish police are after him for leaving the ghetto in Drohobycz and taking the train, strictly forbidden to Jews, and then daring to attend the Munch exhibit in Danzig, where he did what he did before they threw him out. But Bruno fears neither the SS nor the Polish police, his latest persecutors. He fears only the great searchlights that converge inside and chastise him to be-like-everybody-else, to live the gray life he can never redeem with a touch of his pen.
The moment Bruno saw The Scream at the Artus Hopf Gallery, he knew: the artist’s hand must have slipped on the canvas. Munch could not have planned such perfection. He would not have dared to. He may have had intimations of it, he may have had aspirations, but he could never have achieved it intentionally. Bruno recognized this with a grieving heart: all his life he had been longing for—as he called it—“the day the world would shed its scales like a fabulous lizard.” “The Age of Genius,” he called that day, and till that day he cautioned us never to forget that the words we use are but fragments of primeval stories; that we have built our homes—like barbarians—out of shattered idols, the graven images of archaic gods, snatched from mighty mythologies.” The question remains, however, Will the Age of Genius ever dawn? This is difficult to answer. Bruno is not certain either. “Because some things never happen to the full. They are too immense to be contained in the turn of events. They try to happen, they try the groundwork of reality out to see if it will hold, but they retreat, afraid to lose their integrity through a faulty materialization, leaving behind those pale marks in our biographies, the fragrant tokens or faded silver footprints of barefoot angels, sporadic giant steps across our days and nights …” So he wrote in Sanitorium under the Sign of the Hourglass. I know the book by heart.
A little yolk of a sun was blotted up by leaden clouds, and the light faded. Slowly God put his toys away. Bruno knew: the kind of perfection Munch discovered was either a mistake or a case of serendipity. Because someone had bungled it. Someone somewhere distracted momentarily had leaked the truth out in the wrong quarters. Bruno wondered how many pictures Munch had dashed off in a panic to blur the strong impression of his intrusion into that forbidden zone. Munch himself, thought Bruno (stepping into an oily puddle and shattering a series of iridescent arabesques with the heel of his shoe), must have been staggered by his catch.
Atoms of indivisible truth. An ultimate, crystalline truth. Bruno sought this high and low: in the people he met, in snatches of conversation that drifted to his ears, in cases of synchronicity, in himself; in the books he read he sought the one phrase, the pearl, which launched the writer on a voyage hundreds of pages long. The bite of truth. He rarely found it. A masterpiece sometimes yielded two, three such phrases to record in his notebook: bits of solid evidence, collected with the greatest of effort and care, out of which one day to piece together the original mosaic. The truth. Coming across these passages later, he often mistook the writing for his own. And no wonder, he told himself, it’s all from the same source.
Bruno had perceived that Munch was a weak link, too. He’d guessed as much long before, on finding reproductions of The Scream in art books back in Drohobycz. But seeing the original with his own eyes convinced him: Munch was a weak link, too. Like Kafka and Mann and Dürer and Hogarth and Goya and the others gracing his notebook. A fragile network of weak links across the world. Look after Munch. Look after Bruno for his sake, for ours. Cherish thine artist, but guard him well. Ring him round with love, join hands and circle him. Study his paintings. Cheer him. Rejoice in his stories, but remember to be shocked on occasion, and thank him for his beautiful expression of blah-blah-blah, and join hands around him to let him feel your sympathy and your toughness, too, and your iron-door-like impenetrability. Spread your fingers while you clap, suggesting prison bars, and always love him, because that is the bargain: your love for his prudence. His loyalty for your aplomb.
Munch turned traitor. He allowed himself to be unraveled, and the scream burst rudely into your midst. And now it is here, so quickly patch the hole. And they loved Munch all the more! Gather round him and let him feel your breath on his face: he who failed once may fail again. Join hands and cordon him off with a red sign warning: DO NOT TOUCH.
Bruno is still running. Hewing the wind with his sharp features, rounding his lips in an effort to case the pain; oh, the fullness in Bruno, and his fear of that fullness. Look after him, for his sake, and for ours. Don’t let his dangerous passions tempt him to forgo your trusty, threadbare words. Do not allow him to write in body code, to a rhythm unmeasured by clock or metronome. And for heaven’s sake, don’t let him talk to himself in that unintelligible language he had to invent because of “those sly merchants we know who are only too eager to lead him by the hand to their filthy stalls of human speech, so they can open up their odious display cases and offers him their wares with a truckling smile; oh, no, sir, it’s absolutely free of charge, yes yes, a brand-new language, and it’s all yours. Still in its cellophane wrapping complete with your very own, very private dictionary, the pages of which appear to be blank but are covered in fact with invisible writing you have to smear with bile, your own pungent essence, in order to read and, no sir, no sir, we will not take a single penny from you! It isn’t often a customer stumbles—happens by, so we would be daft to scare him away with vulgar talk of costs and spending, rather let us say, dear sir, that me consider you a kind of modest investment, a down payment, as it were, ha-ha, a foot in the door of markets at present closed to us, and would you be kind enough to sign here and here and here.”
Munch signed, Kafka signed, Proust signed, and Bruno signed too, it seems. He can’t remember when exactly, but it seems that something was signed. Because his sense of loss grew deeper. And then the war came, and he began to think he’d made a mistake: people were turning treacherous, and the stalls of the sly merchants concealed “untrod markets, dark and deep, corrupt streets curbed with the debris of crumbling walls like rows of crocodile teeth …”
So Bruno ran away.
From the Drohobycz he loved. From the house on the corner of Samburska and Market Streets, Olympus of his private mythology, dwelling place of gods and angels in human form, or—forms less than human … ah, Bruno’s house! What pleasure pervades him at the thought of this ordinary-looking house, so utterly insignificant, yet transformed by the architectural wonders of Bruno’s imagination into a fabulous mansion with halls and labyrinthine corridors and gardens filled with life and color. On the ground floor was the family dry-goods store, Henrietta, named after his mother and bunglingly mismanaged by Bruno’s father, Yacob Schulz, “the secret poet, singlehandedly parrying the mighty forces of boredom, his father, brave explorer of mutable existence, who used his will and vision to transform himself into a bird, an insect, a crab, his father, forever dead-and-alive …”
And over the store—the living quarters. And Mother Henrietta. Plump, soft, devoted to Yacob the seer who was suffering from cancer, and whose business deteriorated before his wandering, unseeing eyes; and Mother is especially attuned to Bruno, this tender shoot of their declining years. This hypersensitive child, struggling against foes she can’t begin to imagine …
(One hazy, melancholy evening, she entered his room to find him feeding sugar crystals to the last flies of a chilly autumn.
“Bruno?”
“To give them strength for winter.”)
He has no friends. Not that he isn’t a gifted pupil, our Bruno. In fact, his teachers are quite astounded. Particularly the drawing master, Adolf Arendt. Bruno has been drawing in this mature fashion since the age of six. How puzzling he is. First he went through his coach phase, drew nothing but coaches, or drushkas. A fast coach with a folding top. Again and again he drew the coach with a “team of black horses sallying forth from the woods at midnight, its passengers unclad, their eyes dusted silver with sylvan reveries.” Then later he started to draw automobiles. Like most children, but not like children draw them. He drew horses, and he drew runners, too. Always motion. Yet the drawings are suffused with age and death and bitterness.
And he has no friends. “Nyedoenga,” the boys call him. A shlimazel.
And at home Adela the servant girl.
Her legs. Her body. Her female smell. Her combs. And the combings all over the house. Adela dispelling father Yacob’s chimeras with threats of a sound tickling, and Adela provocatively strutting on dainty heels; notice the shoes, Bruno!
The rhythmical movement of his lips and his slight, swift-moving body give Bruno the appearance of a fish. He walks along the pier, with eyes shut, reviewing his actions back at the gallery: a quick hop over the chain with the warning sign, and a kiss on the picture. An old woman in one of the boats stands looking out at the ocean. Her long, brittle hair flies around her face in the fierce wind. The sleepy gallery guard jumped up in alarm and blew the whistle. Another guard joined him and they dragged Bruno out of the painting zone and into their own. There they thrashed him silently, dispassionately, it seemed. A spot of dribble remained on the picture. Bruno had missed the mouth on the screaming figure and kissed one of the wooden posts on the bridge instead. But it was enough for him. First aid: mouth-to-mouth respiration. And Bruno was saved.
He opens his eyes now and sees that his feet are leading him to the bow-shaped jetty curving out to sea. With a sinewy tongue the sea probes the driftwood stuck between its rocky teeth. The many eyes of the sea follow Bruno from the holes in a reef.
Bruno reflected on the unfinished manuscript in his briefcase. After his forcible removal from the gallery, the trams and automobiles on Langasse had splashed him with puddle water. Surreptitiously he reached out to touch the tall wooden lampposts, then licked his fingertips. He seemed to be savoring the taste of the bridge posts. Every time he did so, a tortured muscle inside him contracted. He thought about his life, a life which had never been his. Not really his. Because force of habit had always deprived him of it. People lived by robbing each other’s lives. Before the war, they had at least shown some tact, taking care not to inflict more pain than necessary, with a sense of humor, in fact, but nowadays nobody even made an effort to pretend. He had come to understand lately that his first two books, and this third one, The Messiah, in which he had been drowning and floundering for the past four years, were merely the clumsy scaffold he had built with his own two hands around a creature unknown. As yet unknown. He realized he had spent most of his life as a daring trapeze artist on that high scaffold, and that he had always been careful not to look down, because looking downward and inward would have frightened him and made him recognize, much to his sorrow, that he wasn’t a trapeze artist after all but a jailor. That somewhere along the line force of habit, fatigue, and negligence had turned him into the accomplice of the people with their hands joined around him.
And so he was making his last escape. He was not afraid of the Germans or the Poles, nor was this a protest against the war. No. At last he was running away to meet something new, not the tenses and verbs by the dozen he had served as junction for till now.
Bruno already knows he’s going to die. An hour from now, a day from now. So many are dying. There is an air of silent resignation in the streets of the Drohobycz Ghetto. Bruno has succumbed to it: perhaps he really is guilty of something. Of looking as he does. Of being the Jew he is. Of writing as he does. The question of justice lapsed long ago, of course, but there is a different question now, Bruno thinks, walking faster, to which I must address myself, the question of life; the life I have lived and the life I have failed to live because of my shortcomings and my fears. And I have neither the strength left nor the time to wait for a miracle. Bruno smiles inwardly, a wry, impassioned smile. His bruised face lights up for an instant. Was it Lenin who said that one death is a tragedy, a million are statistics; yes, it must have been Lenin who said that, and now Bruno wishes to salvage the one tragedy of his life out of the million, to comprehend, however briefly, what he has been inscribing in the big book of life. And in his heart he cherishes the even deeper hope that by being split off from that final, crystallized truth, he may yet learn what sent the Supreme Creator coursing through an infinity of pages.
Bruno removes his tattered overcoat and throws it on the concrete. His eyes are blank. What is he thinking? I don’t know. I’ve lost his train of thought. Maybe he’s thinking about Mirabeau, the revolutionary poet turned thief, or Thoreau, the recluse of Walden Pond?
Bruno shudders. No. Such protests will not do: the thief robs people. The recluse is reclusive from people. He gauges his solitude in proportion to their fellowship. But more than this is needed: an uprising that will banish your inner self. He trembles, hypnotized by the rich, dark waves rolling by, the waves that can sense in him the tension of one who has reached the brink, and whose extremities are even now in the process of being transformed into another substance, midway between flesh and longing.
The old woman in the boat looks on motionlessly. She guesses what is about to happen. But this is the way of the world, and death is more than the opposite of life. Death has dominion over all our schemes. Two stevedores catch sight of him in the distance and start to scream.
Bruno throws off his shirt and trousers. With moist, airy fingers the sea probes the emaciation and fatigue that rack his body. The sea doesn’t care: an eager merchant spits at the submissive customer. The sea buys everything. Who knows when all the junk in the cellar will come in handy. Bruno opens his anguished eyes. Someone inside him is still trying to save the frail body: the writer in him must be quailing at the thought that he, too, will be lost if his host is drowned. Then suddenly he realizes that it was the prisoner in him who planned the escape. The jailor—trapeze artist is now the hostage. And in his terror he tries this last pitiful ploy: why not at least leave your shoes on the pile of clothes so you’ll have something to wear when you get back; just a minute, not so fast, let’s talk this over rationally. (The writer can see what Bruno himself cannot: that from the far end of the dock people are running toward the pier: two stevedores and a third man, an officer.)
He kicks the pile of clothes and they drop into the water, float for a moment, swell briefly, and sink down. The sea smiles. It slides a wave Bruno’s way, an experienced croupier dealing out a lucky card to a regular customer. The writer clenches his teeth in horror. How well I understand him! He spits with disgust at the moldering culture of humanity, his insane and unexpected former abode and writing hand. And he is the frightened, pampered, rational one, who lays two delicate fingers on Bruno’s nose and melts away as Bruno sinks into the cold water and floats up to the surface again, happiness inflating him like a sail. Then there was a long, muffled sound: perhaps a ship blaring in the distance, or the sea itself blaring as this new bastard landed on its bosom.
