Читаем Witz полностью

She’s always adjusting and readjusting, pulling one side to push the other, pushpulling, making taut to obtain slack, slackening to taut an other edge, the bunch, the corner, half on, off half — it’s a mess, a burden…just wait until you go away to college and become an adult; and yet this should be unnecessary — but Wanda won’t be bothered, can’t be this Friday this late despite — especially when Rubina knows that in her sleep she’ll, unconsciously, subconsciously, though she forgets which, tossturn the sheets awry again, away and off, again and again as always, her dreaming all the while that her bed’s less a bed than an ocean, the ocean — her sheets are blue, as is her blanket, which matches her comforter, the pillows — that her bedding’s the ocean’s water, its waters, the surface then the surface underneath the surface, the depth, rising and writhing, the depths falling yet again into wake, and that nothing, no amount, degree, work, hope, will ever succeed in mating the two waters above and below that God created before He slept, too.

It’s difficult, just as, this having of kinder. Hanna’s realization in one mundane moment, in the kitchen, at the sink with waters falling unseparated, unseparatable at the stairs with her kinder ascending, at their bedsides as they sleep amid the lapping of dreams — in one breath borne high above the sky wet with kisses — that these daughters of hers aren’t only her daughters, that they’re themselves, too, people like her and Israel, future husbands and wives and even, eventually, parents, let’s hope. And so we name them, you have to: the names flow out from the mouth as their bearers once flowed born from the womb; the names given them perhaps giving them, too — or just a portion of what they’d become — to themselves; names maybe making the named; naming being in essence a making; the name Itself the sacrosanct secret formula of Creationdom’s breast. Though these names — in this family, so liquid, so fluid, always in motion and moved — sometimes shift, are forgotten, go remembered again, are less reinvented than rotated around, rerotated, stirred then scooped from, filled then poured out; they’re assigned, reassigned, then selected at random, by whom they’re ladled and spooned — the Israelien daughters being bartered and bribed for, erroneously threatened against by intemperate parents, the names forced upon them remaking with chores (Simone’s cleaning of vessels, Liv’s ritual tub scrub, sponging the bath); not that any of this matters to them, even bothers, this calling and changing born of convenience, confusion, as it’s only to begin again with another rotation, clockwise the names handeddown, dripping, a leak: a hole in the ceiling, a wound in the cup of the hands — until one eventide a lunation, as the names freeze over with the stars and the moon, each one of the twelve kinder’s anointed again with her own given name, never His.