Sweet Days of Discipline

by Fleur Jaeggy

She had a fine, high forehead, the kind of forehead that makes thought tangible, a forehead past generations had endowed with talent, intelligence and charm.

I still thought that to get something you had to go straight for your goal, whereas it is only distractions, uncertainty, distance that bring us closer to our targets, and then it is the target which strikes us.

It’s common knowledge that a new leader will hate the predecessors’ favourites. A boarding school is like a harem.

When you’re in boarding school you imagine how grand and fine the world is, and when you leave you’d sometimes like to hear the sound of the school bell again.

we saw life pass by beneath our windows, observed it in books and on our walks, watched the seasons change. It was always a reflection, a reflection that seemed to freeze on our windowsills.

With us there was a kind of fanaticism that prevented any physical expression.

Our minds are a series of graves in a wall. Our non-entities are all there when the register is called, gluttonous creatures; sometimes they fly up like vultures to hide the faces of those we loved. A multitude of faces dwell in the graves, a rich pasturage. While I write, the German girl is sketching out, as in a police station, her own particulars. What is her name? Her name is lost. But it’s not enough to forget a name to have forgotten the person. She’s all there, in her grave in the wall.

There is a mortuary look somehow to the faces of boarders, a faint mortuary smell to even the youngest and most attractive girls. A double image, anatomical and antique. In the one the girl runs about and laughs, and in the other she lies on a bed covered by a lace shroud. It’s her own skin has embroidered it.

There is something absolute and impregnable in certain people, it’s like a distance from the world, from the living, but it’s also somehow the sign of someone confronting a power we know nothing of.

The locker, dear little mortuary of our thoughts.

As if humanity were a language primer and every human being made up of letters.

I was in a wild hurry to be living in the world, and the halos of death had to do only with the past. The future meant the gates that must open and the walls that must turn into carpets.

But how can emptiness be represented? Is it perhaps a falsification of everything as it was in the beginning?

But I persevered in the pleasure of taking my sadness to the limit, the way one does with some practical joke. The pleasure of disappointment. It wasn’t new to me. I had been relishing it ever since I was eight years old, a boarder in my first, religious, school. And perhaps they were the best years, I thought. Those years of discipline. There was a kind of elation, faint but constant throughout all those days of discipline, the sweet days of discipline.

Joy over pain is malicious, there’s poison in it. It’s a vendetta. It is not so angelic as pain. I stood a while on the platform of a squalid station. The wind wrinkled the dark lake and my thoughts as it swept on the clouds, chopped them up with its hatchet; between them you could just glimpse the Last Judgement, finding each of us guilty of nothing.

Perhaps cheerfulness is getting to be tiresome for her too. Her low forehead beaded with sweat, her red cheeks. Daddy will wash her face, a face about to wither. Her beauty has become a parody. The old face is already sketched out in the young, and exhaustion lurks behind cheerfulness, the way some babies are scarcely born before they’re reminding you of the grandparent who just died.

Her hands touch nothing but the emptiness of her thoughts.