Martin Ainsley: Drohobycz, November 1942

Drohobycz, November 1942

 I was happy. My lungs soaked up the blissful spring in the air, the freshness of snow and stars. Before the horse’s breast the rampart of white snowy foam grew higher and higher, and it could hardly wade through that pure fresh mass. At last we stopped. I got out of the cab. The horse was panting, hanging its head. I hugged its head to my breast and saw that there were tears in its large eyes. I noticed a round black wound on its belly. “Why did not you tell me?” I whispered, crying. “My dearest, I did it for you,” the horse said and became very small, like a wooden toy.

            — Bruno Schulz, “Cinnamon Shops”

 

. . . and I, all my life, never could stand the smell of cinnamon, but only when he described it I loved it. . . . And suddenly I see him dead. I was about seventeen at the time, and I had already seen many dead, but suddenly – him.

— Ze’ev Fleischer, student of Bruno Schulz and survivor of the Shoah.[1] In the poem that follows, all italicized words are his.

 

something like a piece of bread

I come reluctant,
peer
as through
a keyhole
into a room I
would rather not enter

this dead man, and I guess I wanted to take his bread

 

Click click fit the bits
like tumblers in the lock
or a revolver.
All the cinnamon is burnt.

it seems

The boy searches for his mother.
but when I saw the bread
I drew closer
The streets of Drohobycz
violet stone.
I almost walked right past that one dead man

Can it have been far
from home?

 to pull out the bread and go

apparently I wanted
it was something shocking, so much

from the gymnasium, where Schulz
taught drawing and painting?

that I’m not sure that
what did I do?

The same streets
turned upside down.
A strange light
fluttering.

I can’t tell you

The boy bends

over the body of his teacher.

My instinct was

A piece of bread, a promise

of another day

of

 

this?

to take the bread and run away

 

Birdlike, curled as though asleep.

Apparently, yes. Maybe not.

 

 

I don’t know what I did with that bread

I even thought, I’ll come to Imma with bread, how happy she will be, but I

What country are we in today?

I saw his face, with blood here

 

His teacher

and here

Some bread in his pocket

The boy is hungry

and it seems

 

in the daytime they went hunting

And it seems I didn’t do that

Look, a person who doesn’t eat

 

 

The teacher, Schulz. A storyteller,

a partisan of the imagination

he was painting with words

even the wildest animals

listened

of dressmakers’ dummies

cinnamon shops and other

worlds held in mirrors.

My double walking away. Wounded horses become

toys. And birds.

 

apparently I wanted

 

 

The student. To live

I think I ate. Very little. Two or three bites. Not more. Then it broke

in half in my hand. I wanted to run away.

with

 

It was a loaf of bread

To live with this

I stayed alive and didn’t help them.

I felt that this was my sin.

I still feel this way now.

 

 

this?

 

His music was in the quiet.

 

My eyes are full of birds.

 

Martin Ainsley