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|  | | Be certain. Those were the parting words offered by the partner of the unnamed narrator before she set out alone for Spain, for Sevilla. Be certain, he said – he will be coming, will look for her and carry out with her the plan they forged together. And at first, this sentence in Nina Jäckle’s short novel Sevilla acts as a talisman, a spell, a command to be followed. It helps the young woman to endure her foreign surroundings and to remain hopeful for the future. Though after weeks, after months of waiting, alone, her trust dwindles, and the words lose their magic power. The time of “being a guest in one’s own life” begins.
What preceded her sudden departure and necessary separation from her partner is only revealed gradually, as in a slow, hesitant confession: “It was a rash break, changing location from one day to now, settling beneath a different light, suddenly alone in a foreign language.” A break that cuts off her former life like a lizard’s tail – and a new one won’t be growing back anytime soon. Until her body adjusts and accustoms itself to its new surroundings, the protagonist cannot manage without recalling her past life – she remains haunted by what she was forced to leave behind: “I think about the people I left, behind the trim. I seek sentences behind the trim.”
In the new life she leads – an existence geared towards safety but which amounts to little more than a makeshift solution – the young woman relies upon rituals and habits, things which may give rise to chance encounters: “The days go by, one after the other, and I become more familiar with the city, walking along the same routes again and again, retracing them to overcome my being a stranger, just as I repeat the words I want to learn.” Waiting for her partner banishes her to a place she would rather leave, and at the same time prevents her from feeling as though she has actually arrived, at a place she can call home.
In waiting the narrator is not merely biding her time, she is anticipating something – it is an act of tenacity and willpower. Only when her accomplice doesn’t show is she forced to make the best of her situation, meet people, and ultimately come to terms with what it means to wait and what the consequences are. How long does one remain who one is, and how long are others remembered? “What would happen if I were to forget to wait, if I were to pass my time here as though the only thing that mattered was for me to pass my time? And what are the sentences that would remain for us, that would remain for him, there, and for me, here?”
Over the course of this waiting, the narrator’s past is pieced together for the reader as well – the crime committed gets revealed. Language, too, slowly shifts. Whereas only individual Spanish words or terms are initially interspersed in the text, they gradually expand to become phrases and entire sentences. And as the narrator immerses herself in a new language (“I saved myself through a foreign language”), she also seems to successfully change her identity, invent a new life, and suppress her old one: “Living in a foreign language also makes the deception easier.”
Whatever cannot – or should not – be accepted into her new existence gets entirely excluded. Her guilt and complicity are thereby meant to abate just as her former language has (“I do not know what that means: cut throats”). Yet again, though, the narrator is forced to realize that such a wish is illusory, and that one does not obtain another life “just because one moves elsewhere.”
And though the story does takes a dramatic turn – the partner, whom the narrator has long since gotten over, suddenly appears, demanding the money and the future he once shared with her – Nina Jäckle’s artful prose text is still no thriller in any conventional sense. The novel is gripping not because of any suspense found within the story, but on account of its precise descriptions, its stylistic finesse and its expertise.
Born in 1966, the author, who debuted with a collection of stories entitled There are those and whose latest work is the play Hanne, succeeds in creating a vivid meditation on waiting – with all its attendant loops and coils – through her skillfully arranged prose miniatures. Waiting sharpens the senses and enables both observations and reflections on those observations. Just as the fascination for the man she once knew so intimately grew out of close observation (“I often saw him take his well-heeded steps.”), the narrator likewise becomes an observer of the foreign city – while also becoming an observed object in her own right, a foreigner, an intruder.
As her “life beyond the trim” loses its “contours”, the protagonist realizes how easily everything can be replaced, and how little one can rely on one’s feelings and plans one has made for one’s life regardless of how definitive they once seemed: “One used to spend all one’s time exclusively as a pair, so certain about everything, so certain about one’s own heart and the repeatability of all normal events, so certain about everyday truths and one’s own desires – yet from one moment to the next everything changes, one substitutes one mouth for another, substitutes one belief for another, one life for another, and in the end finds the very same certainty, the very same exclusivity with another, only that this time he is somebody else.”
Matthias Weichelt
September 2010
[Translated by Franklin Bolsillo Mares]
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