The Water Statues by Fleur Jaeggy

Author:Fleur Jaeggy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780811229760
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2021-09-07T00:00:01+00:00

EPILOGUE

KATRIN: Distractedly, I came to a blind alley. In the middle of it was an apple tree so laden with fruit it rested on crutches, almost as though such opulence could only result in infirmity. The placid earth of the pavement invited me to linger a while longer. Metallic nets swayed from the house and solid shadows moved, as though they felt, half an hour away, the ineffable winds of destiny. An obese boy went by whistling. His features were smooth and he wore a black suit with white stripes. His puffy temples shone and his hair was brushed back. From a waistcoat the alarm on a pocket watch trilled. The year before three people had hung themselves in that house: a Swiss traveling salesman, a bicycle-riding evolutionist, and a student of botany, said the boy. And he pointed to a room. “Up there,” he said. “And I wouldn’t be surprised if one or another of them came toward me. But since they haven’t already done so, I couldn’t care less. Are you waiting for someone? I know that you often come here. I am a bit of a spy, you see, usually I am able to recognize, even years later, people I’ve seen only once. I take possession of the faces of people passing by, as others might look at plants. But I don’t look at plants. Nature, so often celebrated, does not enchant me, I am completely indifferent to it. I put the crutches here, supporting this tree, it enchanted me. If there weren’t exceptions, why look at all that surrounds us?

“Whereas people’s faces give me the impression that they could fit in the large palm of my hand, between my fat disgusting fingers. For me, to turn my eyes onto their faces — since it looks as though I’ll be a giant, at my age one keeps growing a lot more — yes, for me,” he said, “it is like erasing time because all those faces etched in my memory become fixed, and so my relationship to the world in movement is somewhat altered; and that is how I erase time — blowing once on the palm of my hand I extinguish the awful flow of hours. Don’t you find it flows too quickly? That it sweeps us away too soon, only certain trees are centuries old, shouldn’t there be an extra century of existence? Because then, even if the hours were to be filled to bursting, it wouldn’t matter, there would still be that extra century we wished for at our disposal. I am very nearly disgusted at how soon this life ends. Look at me, I am a child, but tomorrow I’ll already be fully exposed to the searchlights of old age, of decrepitude. And I’m not even through high school yet. I am still at that ungrateful age when one is ugly and flabby, though I am almost grateful for this state of transient puffiness, it makes me think there will be that other phase, too, of thinness.

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