Sweet Days of Discipline

by Fleur Jaeggy

You only had to hear her reciting the French poets in class to realise that they had come down to her, were reincarnated in her.

There are always a few subversives tucked away in a boarding school.

I was getting to be unpleasant because Frédérique was eluding me and I had to conquer her, because it would be too humiliating to lose.

And at last she began to look at me. Maybe I was interesting too.

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

Of course we are experts when it comes to women, we who have spent our best years in boarding schools. And when we get out, since the world is divided in two, male and female, we’ll get to know the male side as well. But will it ever have the same intensity? Will conquering men, I wondered, be as difficult as conquering Frédérique?

Part of your education is learning how to thank with a smile. An awful smile.

Even in an authoritarian regime one is perhaps allowed to be lost in thought.

While the people sleep she cuts off their heads.

You see monsters everywhere, she said.

On a house the motto: ‘Accept in peace what fortune brings.’

The most commonly used word was freilich. Can I do this, can I have permission? ‘Ja, freilich. Freilich.’ (It meant ‘Of course,’ but it also meant: ‘freely’).

When she got something into her head, a little late perhaps, she couldn’t help but repeat it.

Some spiteful older people curse instead of answering the greetings of the girls on their walks. ‘Grüss Gott,’ the German girls said. But they don’t want God, those old people. They don’t want good wishes, they suspect they are being insulted.

There’s a breath of resurrection in the air, murder transformed into a state of grace.

But I persevered in the pleasure of taking my sadness to the limit, the way one does with some practical joke.

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.

And Frédérique arrives. She sits down. Her face is close to mine. We look at each other. Is it sorcery that brings lovers together? We joke. She smiles. It’s our last meeting.