Signs and Wonders in
the Heavens
by Bruno Schulz
An introduction to this story by James E. Starrs
One day my brother, on his return from school, brought the improbable and yet true news of the imminent end of the world. We asked him to repeat it, thinking that we had misheard. We hadn't. This is what that incredible, that completely baffling piece of news was: unready and unfinished, just as it was, at a random point in time and space, without closing its accounts, without having reached any goal, in mid-sentence as it were, without a period or exclamation mark, without a last judgment or God's Wrath -- in an atmosphere of friendly understanding, loyally, by mutual agreement and in accordance with rules observed by both parties -- the world was to be hit on the head, simply and irrevocably.
No, it was not to be an eschatological, tragic finale as forecast long ago by the prophets, nor the last act of the Divine Comedy. No. It was to be a trick cyclist's, a prestidigitator's end of the world, splendidly hocus-pocus and bogus-experimental -- accompanied by the plaudits of all the spirits of Progress. There was almost no one to whom the idea would not appeal. The frightened, the protesters, were immediately hushed up. Why did not they understand that this was a simply incredible chance, the most progressive, freethinking end of the world imaginable, in line with the spirit of the times, an honorable end, a credit to the Supreme Wisdom?
People discussed it with enthusiasm, drew pictures 'ad oculos' on pages torn from pocket notebooks, provided irrefutable proofs, knocking their opponents and the skeptics out of the ring. In illustrated journals whole-page pictures began to appear, drawings of the anticipated catastrophe with effective staging. These usually represented panic-stricken populous cities under a night sky resplendent with lights and astronomical phenomena. One saw already the astonishing action of the distant comet, whose parabolic summit remained in the sky in immobile flight, still pointing toward the earth, and approaching it at a speed of many miles per second. As in a circus farce, hats and bowlers rose into the air, hair stood on an end, umbrellas opened by themselves, and bald patches were disclosed under escaping wigs -- and above it all there spread a black enormous sky, shimmering with the simultaneous alert of all the stars.
Something festive had entered our lives, an eager enthusiasm. An importance permeated our gestures and swelled our chests with cosmic sighs. The earthly globe seethed at night with a solemn uproar from the unanimous ecstacy of thousands. The nights were black and vast. The nebulae of stars around the earth became more numerous and denser. In the dark interplanetary spaces these stars appeared in different positions, strewing the dust of meteors from abyss to abyss. Lost in the infinite, we had almost forsaken the earthly globe under our feet; we were disoriented, losing our bearings; we hung head-down like antipodes over the upturned zenith and wandered over the starry heaps, moving a wetted finger across maps of the sky, from star to star. Thus we meandered in extended, disorderly, single file, scattering in all directions on the rungs of the infinite ladders of the night -- emigrants from the abandoned globe, plundering the immense antheap of stars. The last barriers fell, the cyclists rode into stellar space, rearing on their vehicles, and were perpetuated in an immobile flight in the interplanetary vacuum, which revealed ever new constellations. Thus circling on an endless track, they marked the paths of a sleepless cosmography, while in reality, black as soot, they succumbed to a planetary lethargy, as if they had put their heads into the fireplace, the final goal of all those blind flights.
After short, incoherent days, partly spent in sleeping, the nights opened up like an enormous, populated motherland. Crowds filled the streets, turned out in public squares, head close to head, as if the top of a barrel of caviar had been removed and it was now flowing out in a stream of shiny buckshot, a dark river under a pitch-black night noisy with stars. The stair broke under the weight of thousands, at all the upper floor windows little figures appeared, matchstick people jumping over the rails in a moon-struck fervor, making living chains, like ants, living structures and columns -- one astride another's shoulders -- flowing down from windows to the platforms of squares lit by the glare of burning tar barrels.
I must beg forgiveness if in describing these scenes of enourmous crowds and general uproar, I tend to exagerate, modeling myself unwittingly on certain old engravings in the great book of disasters and catastrophes of the human species. But they all create a pre-image and the megalomanic exaggeration, the enormous pathos of all these scenes proved that we had removed the bottom of the eternal barrel of memories, of an ultrabarrel of myth, and had broken into a prehuman night of untamed elements, of incoherent anamnesis, and could not hold back the swelling flood. Ah, these nights filled with stars shimmering like fishscales! Ah, these banks of mouths incessantly swallowing in small gulps, in hungry draught, the swelling undrunk steams of those dark rain-drenched nights! In what fatal nets, in what miserable trammels did those multiplicated generations end?
Oh, skies of those days, skies of luminous signals and meteors, covered by the calculations of astronomers, copied a thousand times, numbered, marked with the water-marks of algebra! With faces blue from the glory of those nights, we wandered through space pulsating from the explosions of distant suns, in a sidereal brightness -- human ants, spreading in a broad heap on the sandbanks of the milky way spilled over the whole sky -- a human river overshadowed by the cyclists on their spidery machines. Oh, stellar arena of night, scarred by the evolutions, spirals the leaps of those nimble riders; oh, cycloids and epi-cycloids executed in inspiration along the diagonals of the sky, amid lost wire spokes, hoops shed with indifference, to reach the bright goal denuded, with nothing but the pur idea of cycling! From these days dates a new constellation, the thirteenth group of stars, included forever in the zodiac and resplendent since then in the firmament of our nights: THE CYCLIST.
from The Street of Crocodiles