An extract from The Witch by Marie NDiaye, translated by Jordan Stump

When my daughters turned twelve I initiated them into the mysterious powers. Mysterious not so much in that they didn’t know those powers existed, or in that I’d kept them secret (I hid nothing from my daughters, since we were of the same sex), but rather in that, having grown up dimly and apathetically aware of that reality, they no more understood the need to care about it or suddenly somehow master it than they saw the interest in learning to cook the dishes I served them, the product of a domain just as remote and unenticing. Nonetheless, they never thought of rebelling against the tedious instruction involved. Not once, some sunny afternoon, did they try to invent a pretext to get out of it. I liked to think that this docility in my undocile daughters, my unruly, impulsive twins, was born of a recognition that in spite of everything they had a sacred obligation to uphold.  

We gathered in a spot well away from their father’s eye, down in the basement. There, in that big, cold, low-ceilinged cinder-block room, which was my husband’s pride and joy for its very uselessness (a few old paint cans in one corner, nothing more), I set out to transmit the indispensable but imperfect abilities with which women of my family line have been endowed since time immemorial. In summer, the neighbor children’s shouts and laughs came to us from their nearby lawn; the sunlight that slanted through the basement window and fell onto the cement where we sat seemed to be trying to distract Maud and Lise from a dutiful concentration, the point of which they couldn’t quite fathom, but they refused to give up, their brows obstinately furrowed, their little faces, similarly diligent and intent, raised toward mine with a touching desire to pierce the enigma, a confident patience— certain as they were, from their earliest childhood on, that their turn to possess my gifts would come, certain and indifferent. When a session ended and I wiped the blood from my cheeks, drained, they sometimes went to the barred window to shout to the neighbor children: Yeah, yeah, we’re coming! and then off they ran, identical and brown in their shorts and striped rugby shirts, after each giving me a perfunctory, sweetly condescending kiss on my sweaty brow. I knew they’d reveal nothing I’d just taught them to their playmates. My daughters considered the secret of their powers strictly private, as well as fundamentally uninteresting. In another time, they would have felt slightly ashamed of it. But— practical, serene, resolute, intensely relaxed, grasping, asking a great deal of life with the most perfect innocence— they had next to no modesty or discretion, were rarely embarrassed by anything. In that those clever little barbarians, my daughters, amazed me. 

In winter, the basement was dark and frigid, a dull gray glow struggling through the frosted glass, but it was still with the same doggedness, without even a word of complaint about the material conditions of their training (whereas in any other situation they protested savagely the moment their comfort seemed in danger of being imperceptibly harmed) that they launched into the labors involved in assimilating our particular power. I didn’t have to say much. Their task was to observe me and, with all their being, with the whole of those little bodies born of mine, to internalize the arduous process of divination. Sitting cross- legged, they propped their chins on their clenched fists and stared at me almost unblinking, which sometimes made me uncomfortable, whereupon I gave them a smile, tossed out a joke, earning no response but a fresh rush of seriousness and a dour impatience that expressed the little value my daughters placed on any sort of humor, which they vaguely considered superfluous.