Sweet Days of Discipline Read online

  I’m taking piano lessons. Sometimes I think I’m playing with four hands, the other two being the hands that write the letters from Brasil. Towards the end of the first term we had the Christmas concert. December 17th. Frédérique played the piano. Beethoven, Sonata Op. 49, no. 2. They applauded her. There was a deathly silence in the room, for quite a few moments. The headmistress, the teachers, the little black girl were in the front row. Frédérique came in like an automaton, she played with a certain passion, she curtseyed like an automaton, the applause didn’t seem to reach her ears. Was she a great pianist that day before Christmas, Frédérique? I think so. The way she looked impressed everyone. She showed no emotion, no vanity, no modesty, as if walking behind her own coffin. She tensed her wrists and her hands played. She was impassive, though something fugitive fluttered in the eyes and mouth. For one rare moment a violence of spirit transfigured her nevertheless immobile features. Frédérique went back to her place. I thought she had even more quality than I had imagined. 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. I felt disturbed. I’d heard Clara Haskil once. I was in the front row, I didn’t want to lose anything of Clara’s old age. Frédérique never asked me how she had played. I tried a few compliments, I was still moved. ‘Ce n’est rien,’ she said, and we spoke no more about it. As I write now, I turn on the radio and they’re playing a Beethoven concerto. I wonder if Frédérique isn’t haunting me as I write about her. I turn off the radio. The silence flows back. The applause is over. Frédérique makes a slight curtsey, bows her head, and goes back to sit in her place, in the front row, next to the teachers, the little black girl. For a moment it occurs to me the little black girl is Frédérique’s ancestor.

  In the evening, in bed, I could still hear the applause for Frédérique. My room-mate was filing her nails. These moments seem so long, the nightly waiting as, before falling asleep, you have to invite a dream to come. Having filed and polished her nails my room-mate said: ‘Gute Nacht.’ She puts her hands outside the sheets so they’ll be visible when the boys come to invite her to dance. She surrenders herself to her nightly encounters with a smile, with her dimples. She came from Nuremburg, where her father was in some GmbH. She was born just in time to see the Germans march their goosestep and the geraniums in the windows. We never talked about the war, nor about the destruction and resurrection of her city. So she had grown up in the rubble, this little nocturnal dancer. She too had a house with geraniums whose leaves curled as the Wehrmacht passed. The warriors marched beneath her window; her mother held her in her arms, a little bundle with a cap and ribbons.

  Did her mother throw down flowers as though onto the stage at the theatre? They’re questions I should have asked then, when we slept in the same room and only a few years had passed since the end of the war. The German girl never pronounced the word Krieg. Nor nazism, nor Hitler. ‘Did you know Hitler?’ I could have asked her. The girl’s presence was an optical fact, I knew her body the way you know an illustration in a book, the way I knew my almost empty locker, I knew there was a pencil and exercise book at the bottom. A letter, a scrap of a souvenir, a handkerchief, a key. The locker, dear little mortuary of our thoughts. With its number. The little things that we thought important, that we could decide to lock up or not to lock up. Everything is optional. The authorities allowed us to use a key. It was a symbol. A symbol was part of the expensive fees. But there was no point in insisting on symbols, they’re gratuitous. I never used my key. Not because I disdained the symbol: just as I had no past, so I had no secrets. Frédérique sees my locker is empty, open. I possess nothing.

  Many of the girls possess diaries. With little brass studs. With keys. They think they possess their lives. My room-mate has a fine voice, she sings in tune. Even during the war she must have had a good voice, together with lots of other little girls, all in tune. I think of her now and of those diaries locked up as of the dead, barely distinguishing between a human being and the paper and writing. I feel, as one does with the dead, that I’ve left something unfinished, a conversation, and we go on with that conversation, addressing ourselves to the dead, even if a certain haziness of memory clouds our wake over these conversations we never had. If their faces are forgotten, if certain features have faded, as in a painting, all that remains are our own voices, which we feel can’t be answered. Yet, from somewhere, the dead do answer. Or they refuse to out of spite. Like stubborn schoolgirls who won’t speak. We go on speaking. We are aware of moving our lips, though there is no one there. But is there any way of thinking without words? As if humanity were a language primer and every human being made up of letters. I wouldn’t want to dwell very long on these reflections, which in some sense follow on from my discussions with Frédérique. Though partly they’re things I’d never thought of before. 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. Frédérique spoke to herself. I saw her moving her lips and staring at something like emptiness. But how can emptiness be represented? Is it perhaps a falsification of everything as it was in the beginning?

  Obedience and discipline set the tempo at the Bausler Institut. Day after day Frédérique gave her good example. Distracted, one might forget to greet the headmistress on meeting her in the corridor. Even in an authoritarian regime one is perhaps allowed to be lost in thought. Frédérique, who seemed to be constantly lost in thought, never forgot to greet the headmistress, or to bow her head. She even bowed her head when she saw Herr Hofstetter, husband of the headmistress, who kept himself out of the way and did the accounts.

  Did Frédérique have a double life? Her conversations with me were not only profound – and I must admit here that sometimes they sapped my energy – but some of her ideas, perhaps because of the complete freedom with which she expressed them, were not strictly and safely orthodox. I was ignorant, as I have said. Frédérique gave me the impression, and I know this word makes people smile, of being a nihilist. This made her all the more intriguing to me. A nihilist with no passion, with her gratuitous laugh, a gallows laugh. I had already heard the word at home, one holiday, spoken with scorn. When Frédérique drew me into that kind of conversation, which in any event I admired, there was an atmosphere of punishment, an absence of lightness, she was not frivolous. Her face was as though honed, the flesh covering the bones became sharp. I thought of her as of a sickle moon in an oriental sky. While the people sleep she cuts off their heads. She was eloquent. She didn’t talk about justice. Nor about good and evil, concepts I had heard from teachers and fellow boarders ever since I set foot in my first school at eight years old.

  It was as though she talked about nothing. Her words flew. What was left after them had no wings. She never said the word God and I can barely write it down myself when I think of the silence she surrounded it with. A word spoken every day in other schools ever since I was eight. Though perhaps it isn’t a word. What is the difference between a name and a word? Frédérique exhausted me. Even out in the fields, the woods, even when I pretended to be looking at the creases on the leaves, when I twisted their still damp surfaces, or got worried about the ants. She would roll the papers for her aromatic cigarettes. I postponed any serious thinking until I was out in the world, I played for time. Frédérique thought me distracted. I was in my seventh year of imprisonment. Not like her, it was her first. A novice. And maybe she had already had a couple of relationships, or crushes, given that she’d never been in boarding school, and the choice outside is wider, a market.

  Frédérique was violent. I was only violent – I can think of no other way to put it – carnally. Even though I was already grown up, I wouldn’t have minded a physical fight. I could have wrung my German room-mate’s neck. Her languid neck offered itself, but I had been brought up a lady. Just for fun, grab ho
ld of her to test the strength of my hands. ‘Tu es une enfant.’ Was I une enfant because I wanted to kill just for fun? Ideas are strength, she said. I answered that I knew that too, who would doubt it? But physical exercise was important as well. It’s training, I said.

  After some back and forth I said she was right. I turned away, the smell of her cigarettes was too strong. What kind of tobacco did she have in her initialled silver box, for heaven’s sake? It comes from Spain. From the South. And, since I would picture whatever she spoke about, I saw the Spanish coast and the sea rolling up to the grass; a small black man with a turban climbed out of a boat, the kind of figure you see on columns in antique shop windows, alive behind the glass, and offered her a packet. She had bare feet. A loose dress covered her body, on those southern shores where I had never been. But then I didn’t suppose she had either.

  ‘He who possesses a thing is he who actually has power over it.’ She looked at me in amazement, she seemed impressed, she asked for an explanation. I told her it was the Swiss Civil Code. Only the law.

  Then we would go back to the Bausler, and our conversations were walled up. She resumed her guise of perfect student, the authorities could trust her, a nation would have trusted her, even if nations don’t trust, but follow. Frédérique’s life was not important to her.

  As a student Frédérique did not win the affection of her peers. I don’t recall seeing anyone going up to her and speaking to her for more than five minutes. Her pigeon hole had no notes in it. She was avoided out of respect. If I had seen her with someone, I would have had the chance to get an idea of the kind of person she might eventually be interested in, and, since I kept constant watch over her, I was able to conclude, with a certain gloating joy, that she was more interested in ideas than in human beings. Though one can hardly speak of human beings in a boarding school. At table sometimes I would hear her laugh her gratuitous laugh that haunted me in my sleep. I turned, and everybody’s face was serious.

  It seems pointless repeating that I took no interest in any of the other girls; having said which, I could, if questioned, perhaps admit that I was in love with Frédérique. We never spoke of love, the way most people do. But we were certain that it was predestined. We never spoke about personal things, about our families, about money, about dreams. I knew her father was a banker in Geneva. A Protestant family. (Mine likewise. Not the one in Brasil.) Nothing about her mother. They never came to see her. It seemed Frédérique had a secret. I didn’t enquire. By now, nearing the end of the first term, we were united, I didn’t have to go and look for her or to knock on her door and say: ‘Je te dérange?’

  Fresh letters arrived from Brasil, fresh orders: it was hoped that Miss X would finally find some friends. She had been growing up too lonely and wild. So much I was told by the headmistress, Frau Hofstetter, as though she were the manager of some dating agency for lonely hearts. To which she had replied that: Miss X (myself) had made friends with the best student in the school, a girl of great talent and a pianist. Perhaps she would become a Brontë and the Bausler Institut would be proud to have had her as a student. Miss X could not have chosen better. Everybody admired the girl and she accepted praise with modesty and simplicity. This friendship could not be anything but positive. Miss X still studies very little, she takes no interest in her work, but she has made some progress in French literature. The head mistress omitted to mention that the student in question spoke French and not German, as had been ordered from Brasil. But omission is not deceit.

  Frédérique knew about my morning walks. Every day I got up at five; my room-mate was asleep. The school was cloaked in a subterranean wind, life was rotting, or regenerating itself. Making no noise, I passed close to her bed to go to the bathroom, a small space with two big washbasins, one for the German, the other for me. How many times we must have washed together. Frédérique hadn’t been able to bring herself to wash next to a room-mate. They took turns. But now Frédérique sleeps on her own. Since she is so deserving in everything, they have given her a room to herself. It wasn’t a problem for me, I didn’t find washing together too intimate, or worthy of note, or unpleasant. It was difficult to find it so when you always dressed and undressed in front of your room-mate, and had done so for term after term, year after year. We washed our feet in the washbasins too, but Frédérique hadn’t even been able to wash her feet with her room-mate. We washed very fast, a bit like soldiers, or life prisoners. The showers were in common and you had to queue.

  In any event, it would have been difficult to have taken turns with the German girl. She was always washing or she would stand for hours to look at herself in the mirror above the basins. And she spoke to the mirrors. Because of course they answer. What’s more, I was more chatty with my German room-mate when we were washing, I almost liked her then, with her perfumed skin, her slightly thick calves. They must have overdeveloped her legs making her walk in the mountains, I’ve seen little girls dragged along furiously, right to the peak. Her ankles were slim, but still had something rough and robust about them, like a Bursch, I told her in German, a working boy. At night she gave me the impression she was dressing for a dance, but I could also imagine her going off hunting in her lederhosen.

  Frédérique listened to my descriptions, since I couldn’t help talking about bodies, with a serious, questioning expression. You see monsters everywhere, she said. I saw shapes that I couldn’t forget. When I told her about the headmistress’s body – her thin legs that grew thicker at the groin, the broad muscliness of her bust, she started to laugh. Did she laugh, Frédérique? Her theory was that I must find others repulsive. She said I was an ascetic when it came to female bodies. I told her how years ago, in boarding school of course, a girl had climbed into my bed. Her breasts were just forming, they were still muscly. She felt hot, I threw her out, she fell like a sack.

  ‘Tu es une enfant,’ said Frédérique again. I knew almost nothing of the war, I knew that the cellars in our villa had been filled with food supplies in case of a German invasion. They also served as a shelter for seventy people. There were still some supplies left in the fifties. None of my family, who took turns at having me for the holidays, ever had the time or inclination to tell me the history of the world and its iniquities. I didn’t ask. I was often distracted. Distracted by nothing. With Frédérique I was constantly having to concentrate on precise things.

  Many girls had had crushes or flirtations or had been to dances. I had only danced in hotels, in Mont-Cervin di Zermatt, in Rigi Kaltbad, in Celerina and Wengen, with older men who asked me out of politeness toward my father, who didn’t dance. More often than dancing I would take part in games, wearing my evening dress sent from Brasil and my black varnished shoes. Gloomy games. I held a sort of rod with a ring attached that you had to lower into a bottle. My father and I were so much alone, sometimes in the evenings we went out to amuse ourselves in the Stube. And here again I was waiting to get out into the world. Sadly, almost without impatience. Time was out of joint.

  I couldn’t tell Frédérique about this. Even if she hadn’t lived quite so much as she seemed to have, all the same her tone of voice and a sort of intensity about her made you believe she had. She could have written a love story from a cold heart, like an old woman reminiscing. Or a blind woman. Sometimes her pupils would fix on one spot and stare and I didn’t dare interrupt. ‘Tu rêves.’ She wasn’t dreaming. She was rolling herself a cigarette and closing it with her tongue.

  I often spent my free time in her room, almost always standing up. She didn’t lie on her bed like my room-mate, she didn’t take her pullover off like the German girl who got hot. She was tidy, Frédérique, obsessively tidy, like her exercise books, like her handwriting, like her cupboards. I was convinced that it was a strategy for not attracting attention, for hiding, for not mixing with the others, or simply keeping her distance. ‘Tu es possédée par l’ordre.’‘j’aime l’ordre‚’ she answered, smiling. I understood those children who jump from the top floor of a
school simply to do something disordered, and I told her. Order was like ideas, something you possessed, something that possessed you. I would have liked to have met her father, but he died.

  Apples and pears on the branches of the Appenzell, pastureland and barbed wire. A boy with a St Gallen lace veil hanging round his shoulders. On a house the motto: ‘Accept in peace what fortune brings.’ Early in the morning I walked on the hills. From up there I could observe my mental dominions. It was my appointment with Nature. I climbed even higher, and below, on the horizon, I could see Lake Constance. Where later I was to go as a boarder in another college, on a small island, which we would walk right round every day in a column two by two. Perhaps it will seem obsessive, that walk round the island every day between one and three; even monks walk around their cloisters, eyes circling as they move. I ask myself what might not become obsessive. It was an idyll, an obsessive idyll. In the school on the island, a religious institution, a girl read out loud during meals. When she finished, Mater gave us permission to talk. We returned to pagan life.

  All of a sudden the voices, the rhythm of knives and forks. The Germans talking, laughing, eating, helping themselves to seconds, of Blutwurst too. I had seconds of the dessert, the rhubarb. There was no blood there. 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’).

  Mater Hermenegild, she was called. She was cheerful, she played with us. In the courtyard Mater raised her arms with strength and joy to catch a ball and she was a good runner. We could do what we wanted, on the island. Except go out on our own. Always stay together. If possible in a column, two by two. In even numbers. The girls immediately smelt out anyone anti-social. When it rained we would all be kept in the same room. We listened to the radio. Some girls read. A Krimi Roman. Others stared, lost, misty. The older girls, Germans, cooked. Bavarian lace makers. Mater Hermenegild kept guard. She kept guard over liberty. Those who weren’t enjoying themselves idled away the hours. The bathrooms looked out on a narrow, dark alleyway and a wall. The water had already been run for us. Very hot. I felt as if I were getting into it with my clothes on. There were two churches, Catholic and Protestant. We had freedom of religion on Lake Constance. Just for a change I went to the Protestant one. Even though the order from Brazil was: Catholic. She orders, I obey, she steers me through the terms, it’s all written in letters and stamps, bells with no sound. Dispatches.