CHILDREN LAUGH WHILE ADULTS CRY
The Water Statues by Fleur Jaeggy; translated by Gini Alhadeff
And Other StoriesMay 2022Selected by Barbara Epler
Even among Fleur Jaeggy’s intricate and prickly works, her early novel The Water Statues is shiningly peculiar. A rich recluse named Beeklam who keeps statues in his villa’s flooded basement lives surrounded by various relatives, servants and friends. Yet, as he moulders away in the long shadows cast by family and privilege, he seems utterly alone. Dedicated to Ingeborg Bachmann and fleshed out with Jaeggy’s signature austere yet voluptuous prose style, The Water Statues delivers an indelible picture of the swampiness of family life – with a band of deracinated, loosely related souls milling about in both the distant past and the mansion’s intoxicated-snail-filled garden, conversing less with each other than with inert marble figures. It has been brilliantly translated by Gini Alhadeff, who won the 2018 Society of Authors John Florio Prize for Jaeggy’s I Am the Brother of XX. – Barbara Epler
Though the years vanish as swiftly as ever, sorrow, and life coming to an end make time seem too long. I spend entire days observing nature, the gradual calming of nature: at such times my ideas become vague, undecided; without tiring them, a wild sadness rests in my eyes, and my gaze wanders over the rocks all around; every place here is a friend I am happy to see again. And somehow places I am not familiar with become my property; there is one spot there, high up on the cliff, from which the limestone humps descend ceremoniously and lethargically down to the water; and it’s as though a faint recollection were telling me that I’d lived there – or in the water long ago – though the exact trace of that time has been erased in me.
I was born, said Beeklam, in a house on a hill of boulders. Then he fell silent.
Ataraxic at the sight of the boulders, I opened the window to something very “fine” and welcome reaching me from the cracks between the rocks – an echo, repeating the last two or three syllables of a sentence, or by omitting one letter, resounding like a reply or a warning, perhaps even a hiss. Or a condemnation. Shh shh shh, said my father, interrupting in a low stinting voice, announcing the death of his wife (and my mother) Thelma. Who hasn’t seen children laugh while adults cry? Though, so as not to disturb him, I was laughing almost soundlessly, almost ruefully. Much has been said of the crystalline, celestial, happy laugh of children. I had often noticed the laughter of children, of the few I’d had a chance to meet: those few would laugh about everything – at themselves, at cool and collected dromedaries, at the boats of the Yucatan, at iridescent fish scales, and so on, ad infinitum: at their mothers, at the ample arms that held them, at the mighty arms that held me, too, when they came to our house as though in lifeboats to convey their solidarity with our mourning and silence. Those arms clasped me to them, hot gusts frosted my ears. In a detached tone of voice, as though surprised by the many visitors, I discussed the matters of the day. Mournful backs rested against our ample armchairs, and the blend of voices seemed to me melodious.
Approaching from one side the seated people, I became aware of something multicoloured – words pronounced distinctly, an attitude unaccustomed to ceremony, the slow movements of girdled bodies – I was even caught unawares by a nuanced red cherry resting on a hat (and that Ceres † basket on the head was filled with other meaty berries as time sped by all too quickly).
Fragments of shadow announced day’s end.
“Ladies,” I said, rising on my stilts, “thank you, and goodbye.”
I continued to wave goodbye even from the staircase.
They bent the flesh of their pale faces, Chinese porcelain cups in hand, and fingers waved back automatically, swiftly, rustling, remote. I climbed up to my room to greet the decline of light, perhaps so as not to forget the exact descent of night that day, that social day of the loss of my mother.
Like an island rising out of the mud, some joie de vivre spread its glow around the empty chair’s silent tyranny. The chair in which Thelma (just like the spiders that silently spin) used to weave was wrapped in a tight-fitting slipcover.
BEEKLAM: ‡ I saw the widower, long and narrow, as though in flight, sit, patiently undoing the petit point on its stretcher, that lovely harmony of a mountain landscape swept away by the man’s reckless fingers; such was his skill (as though he’d done little else in life) and zeal in untangling the coloured threads that soon that perforated skein displayed its natural tint – of soggy snow. ◉
† In ancient Rome, Ceres was the goddess of the harvest, queen of abundance, fecundity and excess. A Ceres basket may be like a cornucopia, the horn-shaped basket that symbolises plenty, filled with fruit, flowers and maize.
‡ The novel is in part structured as a play, in which Beeklam makes soliloquy-esque asides and the statues form a mute chorus. The particular unresponsive quality of the play form emphasises their – and the protagonist’s – flat subjectivity. Jaeggy spent some years in the late 1950s working as a model, another form of work which requires the cultivation of a reflective surface.