Nocturnal Apparitions by Bruno Schulz

Author:Bruno Schulz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2022-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

2.

Once I awoke on a dark winter’s morning, the gloomy dawn glowing from under piles of darkness, with foggy forms and signs still swimming beneath my eyelids, and I began to rave in anguish and helpless sorrow about the old lost Book.

Nobody could understand what I wanted. Irritated by their obtuseness, I began to badger and pester my parents with feverish impatience.

Barefoot and dressed in only a shirt, trembling with excitement, I rummaged through my father’s library, disappointed and angry, trying desperately to describe to my dumbfounded audience that indescribable thing, which no word or image traced by my trembling finger could ever equal. I exhausted myself in explanations filled with tangled contradictions, and then wept in impotent despair.

They stood above me, helpless and confused, ashamed of their powerlessness. Deep in their hearts, they knew they were not without blame. My rage—the impatient and furious tone of my demands—gave me the appearance of being in the right, the superiority of a well-founded complaint. They came running with various books and thrust them into my hands. I threw them down with indignation.

One of them, a hefty folio, my father kept trying to pass to me with timid encouragement. I opened it. It was the Bible. On its pages, I saw a great migration of animals pouring down the roads and branching out in columns across a vast country; I saw the sky covered in fluttering flocks of birds—an enormous, inverted pyramid whose distant apex touched the Ark.

I looked up at Father, my eyes filled with accusation: ‘You know!’ I cried. ‘You know perfectly well! Don’t pretend! Don’t try to weasel out of it! This book has given you away. Why do you hand me these tainted apocrypha, this thousandth copy of a copy, this shoddy falsification? What have you done with the Book?’

Father averted his eyes.

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