Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

 

The Context (Proviso)

The following passage is a humble translation of a pastiche written in the style of Bruno Schulz, one of the most brilliant and singular Polish writers of the 20th century. Schulz was a master of mythologising reality—transforming the mundane into the miraculous, and elevating matter to the status of a living, breathing entity. One might say he pioneered Magical Realism long before Márquez made it mainstream.

In his universe, a simple room becomes a cosmos, and time acts according to its own strange laws. Here, we attempt to capture his baroque, dreamlike voice to tell a simple story of rescuing a ladybird named Adela—a nod to the iconic, dominant character from Schulz’s own stories.

Awakened at dawn, having emerged from the dense, still-turbid vapours of sleep, I rushed to the main room, summoned by Katherine's voice. Her voice, like a silver needle, pierced the grey cotton wool of the morning. She had found a small, God-given creature, no larger than a pinhead, a living speck barely visible against the indifference of the floorboards. This red point, Adalia Bipunctata, of completely infantile dimensions within the ladybird world, moved us deeply and awakened sudden, almost maternal feelings in us—as if we had suddenly become the guardians of a stray constellation of two stars.

It was a crumb of life that consumed our entire attention; a being from another domain, a ruby splinter of summer that had fallen, by mistake, into our February. Awakened, perhaps, yet still befogged by winter slumber even more than I was by my recent morning phantasms, she required care.

Immediately, we summoned Gem from her existential non-being, from that electric vacuum where she slumbers, always alert to every call. This Mentor of ontological and entomological knowledge, conspiring with us for the sake of beauty and against the void, helped us arrange a sanatorium for little Adele—for thus, in honour of the great, though here miniaturised patroness, we named this ladybird child.

In the glass cylinder of a jar, in this hermetic, transparent sphere, we erected an alternative, surrogate world for her. We placed therein a pine cone—that gothic tower of scales, still faintly smelling of the resinous dream of the forest—and browned, parchment-like leaves, which were the maps of a bygone autumn. There, in this glass microcosm, time was to slow down, curl into a ball, and wait.

We served her, upon a soft cloud of cotton wool, a drop of honey dissolved in water. And behold, a miracle occurred: Adela, that tiny machinery of nature, moved towards the sweetness. She drank that amber elixir, a nectar of gods on a micro-scale, while we—giants bent over the glass—held our breath, aware that we were participating in the mystery of rescuing a spark of life from the cold draught of nothingness.

Thus, she took up residence with us, in the Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, where winter has no entry, and time is measured not by hours, but by the beats of a tiny, insect heart. We await Spring to ceremoniously lift the lid of her kingdom of glass.