Collected Stories

by Bruno Schulz

A throng of urchins who had survived the fiery broom of sweltering heat in a corner of the market square besieged a section of a wall, throwing buttons and coins at it to test it, as if it were possible to read from the horoscope of those metal disks the true secret of a wall etched with the hieroglyphs of scratches and cracks.

There was something tragic in this untidy and unconstrained fecundity; it was the abjection of a creature struggling on the border of nothingness and death, it was a kind of heroism of femaleness triumphing with its fecundity even over a deformity of nature, over the insufficiency of the male. But the progeny demonstrated the rightness of that maternal panic, that frenzy for giving birth, that exhausted itself in unsuccessful creatures, in an ephemeral generation of phantoms without blood or faces.

One condor in particular, an enormous bird with a naked neck, a face wrinkled and rank with growths, remains in my memory. He was a thin ascetic, a Buddhist lama, full of unshakable dignity in his entire demeanor, who conducted himself with the iron decorum of his great race.

Only today do I understand the lonely heroism with which he, all by himself, waged war on the boundless element of boredom stupefying our city. Deprived of all support, without recognition on our part, that most peculiar man defended the lost cause of poetry. He was a wonderful mill into whose hoppers the bran of empty hours poured that it might bloom within its cogwheels with all the colors and fragrances of the spices of the East. But, accustomed to the splendid juggling of that metaphysical prestidigitator, we were inclined simply to accept the value of his sovereign magic, which saved us from the lethargy of empty days and nights.

Ah! how little did they demand from reality. They had everything in themselves; they had an excess of everything in themselves.

“How full of charm and how fortunate is the form of being that you ladies have chosen. How beautiful and simple is the thesis that you were granted to reveal with your life. But with what mastery, with what finesse you discharge that task. If, casting aside respect for the Creator, I should wish to entertain myself with a critique of creation, I would cry out, ‘Less content, more form!’ Ah, how that diminution of content would relieve the world. More modesty in intentions, more restraint in pretensions, gentlemen demiurges, and the world would be more perfect!”