Sweet Days of Discipline

by Fleur Jaeggy

Years and years have passed and I can still see her face, a face I have looked for in other women and never found. She was entire unto herself.

From the first day I saw her I wanted to be with her, and being with her really meant taking on her mind, becoming accomplices, disdaining all the others.

That day, on the stairs, I knew she was attracted to me. They really were an old woman’s hands, they were bony. Frédérique’s hands were broad, thick, square, like a boy’s. Both of us wore signet rings on our little fingers. You might imagine that we found physical pleasure in touching each other like this. As she touched my hand and I felt hers, cold, our contact was so anatomical that the thought of flesh or sensuality eluded us.

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.

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.

veils are becoming on women, even old women. They confer majesty and mystery. And treachery.

little nocturnal dancer.

When she embraced me, and I let her, I felt her strong healthy body against mine, like a wet nurse. Everything was soft and young and athletic. She embraced me the way she would have embraced a crowd. Without sin or vice. A real companionly embrace I might almost say, even though the term has lost its old sense.

One day we heard that her father had died. And Frédérique would be going. That day I learnt what terror was.

I waited for a letter from her. I sensed that she would never write to me. It wouldn’t be like her. She was the kind that disappear.

Her handwriting slept as if on a stone in this paper wall.

Sometimes I would walk to the little station in Teufen and stand there to listen: I heard Frédérique’s brief, philistine farewell: Adieu, a brief, sober sound. Farewells have distant ancestors and the hills and fields cover them with chaff and dust.

Joy over pain is malicious, there’s poison in it. It’s a vendetta. It is not so angelic as pain.

Childhood is ancient.

I didn’t want to keep house, nor, I dared to tell her, did I want to be a wife. Over the idyll of my education resentment was dawning. Resentment towards that idyll, towards nature, the lakes, the floral compositions. The mother superior listened. I remember neither her face nor her body. ‘Ich verstehe,’ she said. ‘I understand.’ And she left me in peace.