thickened and the lines in her hand were deep, almost cavernous,
and her ass, which as a woman had been mostly for shitting and occasional rape, had become an interior tunnel into which flesh sometimes flowed, or honey it seemed, or ice cream, in fact, the whole space between her ass and mouth had become a winding energy
passage so that any touch or breath in either place caused sweet
chills and exquisite tremors.
bertha schneider, once a woman, then a celibate, had become an
androgyne—and when I tell you that she lived happily ever after, I
hope you will know what I mean.
bertha schneiders unrelenting sadness
as she kissed his neck, bertha schneider remembered her unrelenting sadness, this was her hidden part, all covered in the luxuriant twine of personality, learned facts, sardonic humor.
“oh, what a life our bertha has led, ” said the ignorant, as she held
forth on her research into remote jungle tribes where hymens were
impaled on wooden spikes and urethras were split wide open to
resemble precious cuntlike flowers, it was almost as if she had been
there, heard the tribal drums, drunk the sweet or nauseating brews
of livers and brains of deceased enemy warriors, danced the raucous
gyrating dances of birth, death, and rebirth, but bertha, truth to tell,
had in fact been to the New York City Public Library at 42nd and
5th, especially on snowy storming days, there she had sat under that
pale and dreadful light (which, she believed, was part of the very
design of that building, calculated by those who wanted no one
civilian to know too much), books opened up like leaves fallen on the
earth in late October, her giantesque thighs pulsating on the stiff
wooden chairs to the beat of the cold hum around her.
bertha schneider had unrelenting sadness flowing through her very
veins, and this had been a fact all of her long lived life, it was her
heritage, in fact—a sadness so large, so soft, so sweet, so resonant,
that it interjected itself right into other peoples sentences and punctuated her own. the dead of bertha schneiders russian past churned in her, whole dead bodies of sadness never buried deep enough, this
sadness had passed, first in mother russia itself, from mother to
daughter and from mother to daughter and from mother to
daughter, in those dark grim russian urban alleys where her
forefathers had lived and studied Torah and died, the unrelenting
sadness had been bom, on those narrow dirt and stone streets, amid
shops and pogroms, amid hard benches and mountains of laundry to
do and meals to prepare and yes candles to light and heads to be
covered, that sadness had been bom. amid the hard screaming births and the quiet obedient deaths, amid the bone poor hunger and the melancholy prayers, amid the vile hatred of her kind, the sadness
had been bom.
bertha had her own idea, in fact, as to how the sadness had been
bom. she had long ago learned that the memories of men, in
whatever form, were not to be trusted, generations of men had
passed as scribes, rabbis, and storytellers and yet, bertha knew, the
real story had never been told, this was not mysterious to bertha,
since she knew that men avoided life, not respecting it, never daring
to look it squarely in the face, treasuring only their sons and their
own self-importance, this bertha might lament but she could not
change it. for those generations of scribes and rabbis and storytellers
life had been an abstract canvas full of abstract ideas—they had
obscured the actual shape of things and the actual facts of the case,
they had passed their avoidance of lines and proportions and direct
commitment on to each other over so many generations that now it
had soaked into the very marrow of their bones, and so they had invented Law and W ar and Philosophical Arguments and with all their arsenals of Culture and Learning and Civilization they had
stopped all dissent, even as their children were starving they could
ignore life and argue the philosophical ramifications of death, in
particular the men of whom bertha was thinking had worshiped
their dreadful god, Mighty Jehovah, they had argued with hard
hearts and stony arrogance His Laws to the nth degree as others who
cared only for life had washed and cooked and sewn and cleaned
and given birth and served and scrubbed and died around them, this
especially they would not look in the face.
these others, the mothers and the daughters and the mothers of
the mothers and the sisters and the aunts, had never written a word,
their arguments had no capital letters or commentaries, these others
had worked with their hands and hearts scrubbing and cooking and
enduring and though each separate life was due to them and
depended on them still they were required to be silent, not invited to
argue on the nature of existence about which they knew very much,
even as their legs were spread open in blood and pain, muscles
stretched as the head or feet came through, flesh tom from this, the
very mud of life, 8 times, 9 times, 13 times before they died, still their
views were not solicited, there the sadness was bom, over and over
again, as each new bloody head emerged and with it their insides
dislodged and gone from them and still no one asked their opinion,
this was no genteel sadness, small, pitiful, indulgent, weak, this was
a howl into the bowels of the earth, urgent, bellowing, expressed only
in the eye that cut like a knife, the mouth tangled trying to escape
the face.
this sadness grew as they saw these children flesh of their flesh live
and grow and die. this sadness grew as their children became sick,
hungry, afraid, this sadness grew during pogroms and on regular
days when there was just the family life, this sadness especially grew
as they saw their sons go off to the hard wooden benches where the
rabbis would teach them, the sons, how to read and write and
discourse on the Law and Life itself, this sadness especially grew as
their sons forgot them, disdained the gift of life given in blood and
pain, preferring instead to putter in stony arrogance in the world of
men. this sadness especially grew as they saw their daughters fight
against the unyielding silence of scrubbing and cleaning and each
month bleeding, and finally in the end or long before the end becoming servants at first smiling to those who would argue about this or that in the world of men. this, bertha suspected, was the actual story
of the sadness that came over her, handed down from mother to
daughter and from mother to daughter and from mother to
daughter, first in mother russia, that birthing, heaving, bloodsoaked
mother, then transported step by step on foot and by horse across
the vast land called Europe, then come to be bom and grow anew