The Uncanny Reader (22 page)

As I sat deciphering the execrable French, I felt more lenient toward the old man. He was a victim of physical and nervous suffering, as was I; and my metaphysical studies had taught me kindness. In the silence there came a slight sound from the window—the shutter must have rattled in the night wind, and for some reason I started almost as violently as did Erich Zann. So when I had finished reading, I shook my host by the hand, and departed as a friend.

The next day Blandot gave me a more expensive room on the third floor, between the apartments of an aged money-lender and the room of a respectable upholsterer. There was no one on the fourth floor.

It was not long before I found that Zann's eagerness for my company was not as great as it had seemed while he was persuading me to move down from the fifth story. He did not ask me to call on him, and when I did call he appeared uneasy and played listlessly. This was always at night—in the day he slept and would admit no one. My liking for him did not grow, though the attic room and the weird music seemed to hold an odd fascination for me. I had a curious desire to look out of that window, over the wall and down the unseen slope at the glittering roofs and spires which must lie outspread there. Once I went up to the garret during theatre hours, when Zann was away, but the door was locked.

What I did succeed in doing was to overhear the nocturnal playing of the dumb old man. At first I would tip-toe up to my old fifth floor, then I grew bold enough to climb the last creaking staircase to the peaked garret. There in the narrow hall, outside the bolted door with the covered keyhole, I often heard sounds which filled me with an indefinable dread—the dread of vague wonder and brooding mystery. It was not that the sounds were hideous, for they were not; but that they held vibrations suggesting nothing on this globe of earth, and that at certain intervals they assumed a symphonic quality which I could hardly conceive as produced by one player. Certainly, Erich Zann was a genius of wild power. As the weeks passed, the playing grew wilder, whilst the old musician acquired an increasing haggardness and furtiveness pitiful to behold. He now refused to admit me at any time, and shunned me whenever we met on the stairs.

Then one night as I listened at the door, I heard the shrieking viol swell into a chaotic babel of sound; a pandemonium which would have led me to doubt my own shaking sanity had there not come from behind that barred portal a piteous proof that the horror was real—the awful, inarticulate cry which only a mute can utter, and which rises only in moments of the most terrible fear or anguish. I knocked repeatedly at the door, but received no response. Afterward I waited in the black hallway, shivering with cold and fear, till I heard the poor musician's feeble effort to rise from the floor by the aid of a chair. Believing him just conscious after a fainting fit, I renewed my rapping, at the same time calling out my name reassuringly. I heard Zann stumble to the window and close both shutter and sash, then stumble to the door, which he falteringly unfastened to admit me. This time his delight at having me present was real; for his distorted face gleamed with relief while he clutched at my coat as a child clutches at its mother's skirts.

Shaking pathetically, the old man forced me into a chair whilst he sank into another, beside which his viol and bow lay carelessly on the floor. He sat for some time inactive, nodding oddly, but having a paradoxical suggestion of intense and frightened listening. Subsequently he seemed to be satisfied, and crossing to a chair by the table wrote a brief note, handed it to me, and returned to the table, where he began to write rapidly and incessantly. The note implored me in the name of mercy, and for the sake of my own curiosity, to wait where I was while he prepared a full account in German of all the marvels and terrors which beset him. I waited, and the dumb man's pencil flew.

It was perhaps an hour later, while I still waited and while the old musician's feverishly written sheets still continued to pile up, that I saw Zann start as from the hint of a horrible shock. Unmistakably he was looking at the curtained window and listening shudderingly. Then I half fancied I heard a sound myself; though it was not a horrible sound, but rather an exquisitely low and infinitely distant musical note, suggesting a player in one of the neighboring houses, or in some abode beyond the lofty wall over which I had never been able to look. Upon Zann the effect was terrible, for, dropping his pencil, suddenly he rose, seized his viol, and commenced to rend the night with the wildest playing I had ever heard from his bow save when listening at the barred door.

It would be useless to describe the playing of Erich Zann on that dreadful night. It was more horrible than anything I had ever overheard, because I could now see the expression of his face, and could realize that this time the motive was stark fear. He was trying to make a noise; to ward something off or drown something out—what, I could not imagine, awesome though I felt it must be. The playing grew fantastic, delirious, and hysterical, yet kept to the last the qualities of supreme genius which I knew this strange old man possessed. I recognized the air—it was a wild Hungarian dance popular in the theatres, and I reflected for a moment that this was the first time I had ever heard Zann play the work of another composer.

Louder and louder, wilder and wilder, mounted the shrieking and whining of that desperate viol. The player was dripping with an uncanny perspiration and twisted like a monkey, always looking frantically at the curtained window. In his frenzied strains I could almost see shadowy satyrs and Bacchanals dancing and whirling insanely through seething abysses of clouds and smoke and lightning. And then I thought I heard a shriller, steadier note that was not from the viol; a calm, deliberate, purposeful, mocking note from far away in the West.

At this juncture the shutter began to rattle in a howling night wind which had sprung up outside as if in answer to the mad playing within. Zann's screaming viol now outdid itself emitting sounds I had never thought a viol could emit. The shutter rattled more loudly, unfastened, and commenced slamming against the window. Then the glass broke shiveringly under the persistent impacts, and the chill wind rushed in, making the candles sputter and rustling the sheets of paper on the table where Zann had begun to write out his horrible secret. I looked at Zann, and saw that he was past conscious observation. His blue eyes were bulging, glassy and sightless, and the frantic playing had become a blind, mechanical, unrecognizable orgy that no pen could even suggest.

A sudden gust, stronger than the others, caught up the manuscript and bore it toward the window. I followed the flying sheets in desperation, but they were gone before I reached the demolished panes. Then I remembered my old wish to gaze from this window, the only window in the Rue d'Auseil from which one might see the slope beyond the wall, and the city outspread beneath. It was very dark, but the city's lights always burned, and I expected to see them there amidst the rain and wind. Yet when I looked from that highest of all gable windows, looked while the candles sputtered and the insane viol howled with the night-wind, I saw no city spread below, and no friendly lights gleamed from remembered streets, but only the blackness of space illimitable; unimagined space alive with motion and music, and having no semblance of anything on earth. And as I stood there looking in terror, the wind blew out both the candles in that ancient peaked garret, leaving me in savage and impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium before me, and the daemon madness of that night-baying viol behind me.

I staggered back in the dark, without the means of striking a light, crashing against the table, overturning a chair, and finally groping my way to the place where the blackness screamed with shocking music. To save myself and Erich Zann I could at least try, whatever the powers opposed to me. Once I thought some chill thing brushed me, and I screamed, but my scream could not be heard above that hideous viol. Suddenly out of the blackness the madly sawing bow struck me, and I knew I was close to the player. I felt ahead, touched the back of Zann's chair, and then found and shook his shoulder in an effort to bring him to his senses.

He did not respond, and still the viol shrieked on without slackening. I moved my hand to his head, whose mechanical nodding I was able to stop, and shouted in his ear that we must both flee from the unknown things of the night. But he neither answered me nor abated the frenzy of his unutterable music, while all through the garret strange currents of wind seemed to dance in the darkness and babel. When my hand touched his ear I shuddered, though I knew not why—knew not why till I felt the still face; the ice-cold, stiffened, unbreathing face whose glassy eyes bulged uselessly into the void. And then, by some miracle, finding the door and the large wooden bolt, I plunged wildly away from that glassy-eyed thing in the dark, and from the ghoulish howling of that accursed viol whose fury increased even as I plunged.

Leaping, floating, flying down those endless stairs through the dark house; racing mindlessly out into the narrow, steep, and ancient street of steps and tottering houses; clattering down steps and over cobbles to the lower streets and the putrid canyon-walled river; panting across the great dark bridge to the broader, healthier streets and boulevards we know; all these are terrible impressions that linger with me. And I recall that there was no wind, and that the moon was out, and that all the lights of the city twinkled.

Despite my most careful searches and investigations, I have never since been able to find the Rue d'Auseil. But I am not wholly sorry; either for this or for the loss in undreamable abysses of the closely written sheets which alone could have explained the music of Erich Zann.

 

THE BIRDS

Bruno Schulz

Translated by John Curran Davis

Yellow and filled with boredom, the winter days were here. A threadbare and patchy, too-short mantle of snow was spread over the reddened earth. It was too meagre for the many roofs, which remained black or rust coloured, slatted roofs and arches, concealing within them the smoke-blackened expanses of attics—charred-black cathedrals bristling with ribs of rafters, purlins and joists, 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—black pipes of the Devil's organs. The 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, which rose up again, flapping, finally to cling once more, each to its own place on its own branch, while at daybreak they took to the air in vast flocks, clouds of soot, flecks of undulating and fantastic lampblack, smearing with their twinkling cawing the dull-yellow streaks of dawn. The days hardened in the cold and boredom, like last year's bread loaves. They were cut with blunt knives, without appetite, in idle sleepiness.

Father no longer left the house. He lit the stoves and studied the never-to-be-fathomed essence of fire. He savoured the salty, metallic taste and smoky aroma of the winter flames, a cool caress of salamanders, licking at the shiny soot in the throat of the chimney.

He undertook with enthusiasm in those days all of the repairs in the loftier regions of the parlour. He could be seen at any time of day, squatting at the top of a stepladder as he tinkered at something close to the ceiling, around the cornices of the tall windows or the counterweights and chains of the hanging lamps. As house painters do, he used his stepladder like enormous stilts, and he felt happy 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 and concern 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, utterly vexed, twitches affecting his absent face. He would occasionally interrupt her with a sudden, imploring gesture of the hand, to scurry into a corner and press his ear to a chink between the floorboards, and—with the index fingers of both hands upraised to indicate the supreme importance of the investigation—to listen. We had not yet come to understand the lamentable background to these eccentricities, the gloomy complex that was ripening in the depths.

Mother held no influence over him; though upon Adela he bestowed much reverence and attention. When she swept his chamber it was a great and momentous ceremony to him, one that he never neglected to witness, following Adela's every movement with a mixture of fear and a shudder of delight. He ascribed to her every action some deeper, symbolic meaning, and when the girl pushed a long-handled brush across the floor, with youthful and bold thrusts, it was almost beyond his endurance. Tears streamed from his eyes then; his face was choked up with silent laughter and his body shook with a pleasurable spasm of orgasm. His ticklishness bordered on madness. Adela had merely to point a finger at him, with a motion that suggested tickling, and he would fly through room after room in a wild panic, 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. Because of this, Adela held almost unlimited authority over Father.

At that time, we first began to notice Father's passionate interest in animals. In the early stages, it was the passion of a hunter and an artist combined. It was also, perhaps, one creature's deeper, zoological affinity with kindred and yet so different forms of life, experimentation in the unexplored registers of being. It was not until a later stage that the affair took that peculiar, embroiled and profoundly sinful turn against nature that it would be better not to bring to the light of day.

It all began with the incubation of birds' eggs.

With a considerable outlay of effort and expense, Father obtained—from Hamburg, Holland and African zoological stations—fertilised birds' eggs, and he set enormous Belgian hens to the task of incubating them. It was a process that I too found highly absorbing, that hatching out of nestlings, real anomalies of shape and colouration. One could scarcely have envisioned in those monsters, their enormous, fantastic beaks yawning wide open the moment they were born, hissing voraciously in the abysses of their throats—those salamanders with the frail and naked bodies of hunchbacks—the peacocks, pheasants, wood grouse and condors they were to become. Consigned to baskets, in cotton wool, that dragon brood lifted up on thin necks their blind and walleyed heads, squawking voicelessly from their mute throats. My father walked along his shelves in a green apron, like a gardener along his cactus frames, and coaxed from nothingness those blind blisters pulsating with life, those clumsy abdomens taking in the external world only in the form of food, those excrescences of life, scrabbling gropingly toward the light. And when, some weeks later, those blind buds of life finally did burst into the light, the rooms were all filled with 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 the tin branches and arabesques of the many-armed hanging lamps.