pretends it will cling forever, but bertha knows, it does or it doesnt. either way, once dust touches
dust, the spot is marked, loving, needing, or wanting dust is a waste
of time, especially for dust, even a legal purist like bertha resents it.
bertha understands dust but wishes she were not of it. she is tired of
dust clinging and she is tired of dust scattering and she is tired of
dust coming at her in terrible storms and she is tired of being made
of a substance so ultimately ridiculous, something so substantial and
so insubstantial at the same time, something that passes through
ones fingers* which are dust, like dust, bertha longs for the only lover
she has ever trusted, Disembodied Wisdom, but it is gone, strongly
reminding her of dust, maybe whatever dust touches turns to dust.
bertha had what was, from her point of view, a reliable com-
monsense perspective, all loss was measured against atrocity, she
was poor but bones she was not. her gums were getting soft and
squooshy from malnutrition but live she would, she had no chair to
sit in which led to constant backache and she slept on the floor
which led to constant colds in her bladder, but she wasnt pressed up
straight shitting in her pants in a cattle car on the way to Dachau,
she had been raped and was still haunted by fear and humiliation
but she had not also had cholera at the same time, she had fucked
for money, been destitute on street comers underdressed in freezing
winter, but hunger had not reduced her to eating rats, she had endured and continued to endure real hardship but she would probably live long enough— 1 more month—to turn 31.
this was not stupid of bertha, in Amerika such measuring was
called paranoia or, by liberal psychiatrists, survivors guilt, but bertha, with her european sensibility, knew that she was a realist with a very cogent understanding of history, she didnt imagine that she
could survive atrocity but she prepared for it by constant concentration on what it would require of her. unlike her contemporaries, she believed that normalcy differed from atrocity in degree, not in kind,
it was possible, bertha knew, that she might not survive normalcy
either, harassed as she was by its unambiguous cruelty, every day of
loss and more loss encouraged bertha to wonder: will I live longer
than this terrible time which is, on the grand scale, not terrible
enough to justify capitulation, tired, she measured her fatigue
against the unspeakable exhaustion of her own relatives who had
survived the Nazi death camps, they had not dropped dead of their
own accord, a fact that provided an eloquent rule of thumb, bertha
saw loss, all loss, from this unyielding perspective, this method of
measurement was the discipline by which she maintained an optimistic belief in the likelihood that she too might endure, for this reason, when despair gnawed, she did not welcome it or romanticize
it or enjoy it. self-pity made her sicker than deprivation, and for this
reason, when lovers left her all the while hurling foul epithets or
when friends fell away like diseased flies, she did not cry. she might
well feel sorrow, but tears had to be reserved for disasters that made
tears run dry. her attitude was unfashionable in a world in which
acne occasioned more sympathy than starvation, her own pimples
and the pimples of others did not move bertha and so others, comfortable in excessive emotional upheaval, saw her as cold and rigid, and she saw them as silly and vain, bertha did not share the common
emotional preoccupations of her time, then this new cycle of loss
