BRUNO SCHULZ

BJA Samuel

       The bullet passed through the skull and bone, like a cracked egg, like a broken clock. It sliced through the infinite space and whistled through the prismatic structures there. It passed through the many rooms of the sordid and the decadent, veiled behind red velvet curtains. Through the labyrinthine streets lined with shops, dusty rooms, , tunnels and parkland, depth upon depth of clear blue sky.

       It passed through streets peopled with gentlemen and ladies, beggars and prostitutes. Into shops filled with confectionary and scented with spice and sugar. It passed voluptuous ladies with perfumed cheeks, blushing with rouge. It passed little children biting through layers of buttered pastry and powdery sugar. It passed through lines of tailor’s dummies, through crocodiles and chirruping birds. It passed through front rooms, back rooms, cellars and attics.

       It passed through rooms curtained with tapestries of exquisite beauty and rooms curtained with cheap moldering muslin. Silk and hemp rotted alike and deliquesced on impact. It shattered stained glass windows and ordinary windows alike. It tore open canvases ancient and new. It penetrated the dark layers of unborn tales, stacked high in dank piles that moldered like rotten autumn leaves. It buried tangled vine strewn columbariums filled with spicy smells and desiccated corpses and sealed the reliquaries there forever.

       It destroyed musical instruments, doctor’s tools and tools for carpentry. It put an end to the ravings of a madman and the sensual yearnings of another. It sterilized the fecund hummus of the human brain. It disturbed the sediment at the bottom of ancient wine barrels. It emptied vessels filled with honey, ginger beer and syrup with a single solitary piercing sound. A little boy turned the pages of a stamp collection as the bullet passed. He watched men with coal black mustaches and smoothly oiled expressive eyes walk the streets doffing their caps to passers by.

       The endless rooms there had a mythic power. The storerooms were the depositories for a million ideas. The objects stored there took on meanings beyond mere objects; the air itself took on a meaning but with subtlety of purpose. The hot odorous air there was fragranced with jasmine with raspberry syrup. The sensual aroma of ladies bodies carnally perfumed, holding a boot to the mouth and standing proudly over their lovers. The aura of femininity imbibed the backrooms and parlours, breasts swollen with milk, mothers nursing babies, was lost as the bullet flew through it.

       Within the infinitely solid blackness of the hot nights of summer, black roses bloomed within the black firmament and across the blanket darkness of the mind white poppy seeds were scattered and swirled in milky eddies. Then like sun-spoiled photographs it faded to nothing in the bullets wake.

       The bullet drew a single thread of red silk through the rooms of his mind. It slayed the neonate metaphors and myths just coming into being. The line it drew bled, it seeped blood red and fresh, an iron taste and smell. Mangy corpses lay gutted beneath blackly entangled shrubbery. They dragged themselves through the thickets there.         The bullet flew through an old apothecary shattering the lachrymatories, bell jars and demijohns. It split the glass, spilling the perfume, bath salts and medicines that evaporated.

       The bullet flew through time over the corpse-strewn battlefields of the western front and across the wet ink of newly written treaties. It passed into the future, over concentration camps and the piles of dead too big to be contained by mere facts.  The bullet incinerated the people cowering in Dresden and it poisoned the survivors of Hiroshima. It had started in a factory, one of many others in a line of millions but ended in the chamber of a gun and now it travels through this infinite space. Each of its brothers found a target, in flesh in bone, in trees, in shop fronts, in masonry and brickwork. It pulls behind it the bloodstained tapestry of time. The finely woven moth-eaten tapestry is ugly to behold, moldering with raspberry red patches that spread like spilt ink. The bullet falls indiscriminately through events, through contingency, it travels with an iron will through the subcutaneous layers of the mind. “You killed my Jew. Now I’ve killed yours!” he boasted.

       The loaf of bread kneaded in the bakery. The dough folded and thumped in clouds of flour. Elasticated, stretching, smelling faintly of yeast. Left to rise then baked crusty and brown. Then he paid his money and took the loaf under his arm. He walked home alone on the streets of Drohobycz. That’s where the bullet found him.  The weight of history bore down on him extinguished him like fingers on a candle flame. It propelled the bullet from the pistol. It gave the officer agency to pull the trigger.