"Oates, Joyce Carol - Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oates Joyce Carol)

Names. Like the wavy bluish glass, its perfect transparency marred by secret knots and curls, in the vestibule fanlight of the old house on Java Street: altering your vision unawares.

"Can you imagine me as 'Cornelius Courtney, Jr." for my entire life?"

As if the insult to his integrity were fresh and not thirty-odd years old, Duke can work himself up to actual anger. His eyes drain to the color of ice and his nostrils look like black holes punched in his face.

Iris laughs but quickly sobers, seeing that her father is in one of his serious moods.

He tells her he changed his name as soon as he'd come of age; which is to say, left home. Joined the army, joined the war.

"Thank God for the war!" says Duke. Though he was wounded in action has not one but two Purple Hearts to prove it he looks back, he says, upon his youth with real nostalgia. For one thing, the world was younger then.

"Did you change your name in court, with a judge and all?"

Iris asks.

"I changed it in here," Duke says. He makes a gentlemanly fist and strikes it against his heart.

Iris was told as a small child that she has no grandfather on her father's side of the family... no grandmother either. Duke Courtney and "his people" don't see eye to eye on life, thus why beat a dead horse?

It's the kind of question, appalling to envision, even a child knows isn't meant to be answered.

Persia tells Iris she is named for something special: the iris of the eye.

"I thought I was named for a flower," Iris says, disappointed.

'An iris is a flower, of course," Persia says, smiling, "but it's this other too. Our secret. 'The iris of the eye."

"The eye?"

"'The iris of the eye." The eye. The eyeball, silly!"

Persia snaps her fingers in Iris's eyes. The gesture is so rude and unexpected, Iris will remember it all her life.

After this disclosure, Iris doesn't know whether she likes her name.

Her favorite name at the time is Rose-of-Sharon, that of a pretty brown-skinned girl at school.

Persia's name really is "Persia." Her mother named her; it's her authentic Christian name, in black and white right on her birth certificate.

Over the years so many people... especially, Iris gathers, male admirers... have asked Persia about her exotic name, she has perfected a little story to explain. Each time Iris hears the story she feels an absurd thrill of apprehension, as if fearing the story will go wrong; each time Iris hears the story it is precisely the same.

"My parents had some perfectly normal, ordinary name picked out for me," Persia says, her vanity unconscious as a child's, "like Margaret, or Betty, or Barbara.... Then in the hospital my mother was glancing through a magazine and she saw pictures of this beautiful country-in Africa, I guess-but not, you know black Africa. The people there are white. Or, at any rate, light-skinned.

There were mountains in these pictures, and a sea like an emerald, and some strange kind of temple-a 'mosque'-and my mother said she knew she had to call me 'Persia." No one could talk her out of it, though they tried. 'Persia' she wanted, and 'Persia it is.

Gazing at her watery-seeming reflection in Persia's dressing table mirror, when Persia isn't home, Iris wets her lips with the pink tip of her tongue.

'Persia' she wanted, and 'Persia' it is."