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
here in the sweatshops of Philadelphia, New York, and Pittsburgh,
those other houses of strained female compliance.
she remembered her dog. yes, her dog. let others, those abstract
painters, laugh but bertha knew the details and intricacies of life, no
single line or fact was hidden from her view, for life was life, each
day of it and every living thing of it, one after the other, and she had
loved her dog heart and soul, this dog had been her friend in straits
where people fled and no one could convince her that in any canvas
her dog did not figure.
bertha had given this dog away, with her own hands led it to a
huge dark building, left it abandoned like a child wrapped in swaddling clothes, its mother wants it to live but cannot feed it, there is a light, a stranger, a promise that is implicitly a threat, there is the
darkness of midnight, the despair of the next morning without food,
there are the tears that never no matter how many come wash away
the sorrow, there is the wretched agony of the heart, the dog not yet a
skeleton but too thin its bones showing while she had turned to fat,
the dog that would follow her anywhere, lick the tears of its own
abandonment from her face, the dog that had cowered beaten by the
same hand that had beaten her, and together, after, when he had
gone they had huddled together, both cowering in dread, insides
bruised beyond all knowing, this dog that had her eyes, the eyes of a
beaten woman, her eyes looking at her now as she led it trusting
perhaps to be gassed or mistreated she would never know.
dogs too, bertha knew, were conceived in suffering, this dog had
been bred, bred they call it, those cold calculators of markets and
worth, this dog had wailed out as a huge penis had plowed into it, a
wail that could have shattered bones, a wail that could have made
the dead rise and march, her husband had sat laughing drinking a
beer while the huge german shepherd a stranger off the street found
by her husband loved by him right away because its penis was so big
because its shoulders were so broad because its teeth were so sharp
because it sniffed and salivated from the smell of female blood had
come into the living room where the females were, she and her dog,
and her husband had held her back while the huge penis had plowed
into the swollen sore vulva of her bitch he called it and the wail had
come from this beast he called it, a wail that had shaken her bones
and reminded her of the screams of Dachau as she had always heard
them inside her. then the hour afterward when the dogs were locked
