Valerie Fritsch: Winters Garten (‘Winter’s Garden’).

Excerpt de en fr span cz

The world outside lay concealed in the larva of winter, while inside the house Anton and Frederike were sleeping on rugs on the floor, naked under blankets and old sheets. With white faces and bright red lips, they lay turned towards each other, two lovers whose bodies had cooled off in the morning, the child with its arms wide open like a brace between them, connecting them. The cracking of the wood had fallen silent, and the tiles of the stove were cold from the night. The light sank down onto them, as if it were a magnifying glass, enlarging every pore, and was refracted in their eyes when, like dolls, they finally opened them. How many hours had they been asleep, how many hours had they been dreaming? It was long past noon when they awoke on this day. They came round with their eyes still framed by sleep and their bodies stiff, their eyelashes gummed, and their eyelid closure reflex so lazy it sometimes only made them close their eyes again after many seconds, once they had gazed for ages into an indeterminate distance and then observed the person beside them.

It seemed to Anton as if nothing had ever been as small as the woman curled up naked opposite him. Her lips were swollen from the night, as if they had kissed a lot, the skin around her mouth was chafed, reddened and thin. Her eyelids trembled, but he himself, who was reflected as an image in the middle of her eye, was quite still. When he looked at her face for too long, her pupils dilated very rapidly, yet when he looked away they shrank to the size of pinheads. Her otherwise unflinching face was marked by that grief which works its way millimetre by millimetre across the skin until it has covered the human being with a mask, behind which one can just about still recognise oneself, but has become alien to other people. Everything about her that had been absolutely resolute, now seemed inhibited, the clear features appearing reluctant to allow any space for an inkling, a shock or a defeat. Something distorted her facial expression, bent the corner of her mouth, lowered her gaze, broke the laughter lines, straightened the features, hollowed out the forms, destroyed the order by which they repeatedly saw each other anew, however familiar they actually were. The defiant invincibility of someone already injured for a long time gave way to pain. It was not the angry and desperate pain from which he had already seen her crying, it seemed to him to be more like a darkness which came over her, rendering everything that comprised her invisible. She became unfamiliar to Anton. To him it was as if he had never seen this woman before and had never held her in his arms. They did not move a single millimetre. They looked, listened and waited. They scanned each other with glances for an outer and an inner truth, but remained baffled. There was only the rise and fall of their chests, the thickening of the ice, and the cold air which streamed into their lungs and came out of their nostrils again as warm breath. They stared at each other for a long time until, at some point, they saw in the other’s eyes something that both of them secretly called fear.

(p. 144)

Translation by Peter Waugh.

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