Gut Symmetries (10 page)

and the Bowery.

One evening, when I was six months old, pre-born, bouncing my hands and feet off Mama's womb wall, I heard the voices of Papa's business friends, talking quietly in our warm low kitchen. Mama shouldn't have been present at all, but she cared very little for the strict protocol of his Orthodox friends and banged about the kitchen, sometimes openly hostile, sometimes serving towers of blinis tall as the EmpireState. She did as she pleased and no one dared to challenge her because she had saved Papa's life and risked her own. They called her Rahab.

Somewhere from deep inside their coats, their jackets, their shirts, their vests, their skin, their bones, the men unfolded felt pouches and spread the contents, glittering. It was not their value that they were discussing with Papa, it was their capacity to stimulate the soul's deeper life. To a Jew, stones have meaning beyond value. The twelve jewels of the High Priest's breastplate were energy not hoard. The stones live.

Mama turned round from her usual awning of aluminium saucepans and saw the diamonds. I saw their light and pressed myself as close as I could to the membrane of my genial prison. The light struck through Mama's belly and fed me.

She stepped forward, picked up a diamond between thumb and finger, and swallowed it.

Then she swallowed another, and another, a voluntary force-feeding into a priceless pâté: Mama's oesophagus larded with light.

Papa's people are a patient people who have known adversity.

They have wept by the waters of Babylon. They have crossed the Red Sea. They have sat in the desert with their camels and their concubines. They have wandered in the wilderness forty years. They have bargained with their God. Yet not even Job in all his affliction had his inheritance eaten by a woman with child. There was some debate about what to do next.

Papa's people are a patient people. It was agreed that Papa would lock the door to our only lavatory on the landing and persuade Mama to use a commode.

A twenty-four-hour watch was rota'd in the kitchen and one of the off-duty men went out to buy surgical gloves.

Mama had no objection. She wanted only to eat the diamonds not to digest them. No one thought about me.

And I did not think, turning in the weightless water, charmed by cut faces of light.

At last it was over, hats off, sleeves rolled up, sweat on their beards, and the much travelled diamonds shining again on their sterilised cloths.

'a'dank! mazel tov! bo'ruch ha'bo! Schnapps!'

 
'What? One missing?
Oy oy oy oy oy! Oy va-avoy! Vai!'

Castor oil. Enema. Glycerine suppositories. Salt water colon irrigation. Cabbage soup.
Schnell, kroit zup!

No use. No use at all. I had captured it or it had captured me. After a night of prayer this was revealed to the Elders in a dream. 'We will attend the birth,' they said, at belly level, directly to me, usurper of jewels, infant smuggler of precious stones.

At night, when Mama slept and the lights were out and the night was dark, Papa stood over her in his shawl and guiltily lifted her nightdress. He had never seen her naked, not seen the gentle demands of her, the map that she was where he might have travelled.

He put out his hand but he was afraid. Her belly shone.

Still the snow. Pillow feathers of snow. Shook eiderdowns of snow. The snow in sheets on the river. The snow that quilted the park. The city had become a linen department of snow. Snow on snow at Rossetti's diner, the most famous little trat in town. FOOD TASTES BETTER IN ITALIAN. Their little boy used to hand out black olives. We think Mama was heading there on the night she gave birth. The olives tasted of jet.

It was the time of her confinement. A couple of Elders, on rota, sat with Papa in the kitchen, arguing about Sodom and Gomorrah. Mama was no pillar of salt and without looking back she left the apartment by the fire escape. She had her fur-collar coat from the Vienna days and warm boots. She felt well and happy, tired of the encampment of old men, and crazy to eat something bright and hard. I was ready to go anywhere.

Mama walked, thinking of better times when she had listened to Strauss and read Nietzsche. She thought of the café where she had met Papa, where everyone wanted to talk, and hardly noticed until it was too late, what was happening outside.

'Shadows, signs, wonders,' Papa had said, meaning the world. Didn't he admit by now that the shadow had substance enough?

And yet. . . her country, her family, her past seemed to have vanished as easily as Papa said they could. What was real? What was in her hands? Her father had joined the Nazis and had been hung from a hook in his own shop. She had no news of her mother or her brothers. No news of her war-beaten homeland. She was an exile now. She had joined Papa's people after all. How many years had passed, seven, eight, nine? What did it matter? Nowhere was real now but this twelve and a half by two and a half mile island.

She thought she was walking towards the lights but her thoughts had overrun her and she had lost her way. The snowed city was a white maze. Where was she? She had come down

and was at the Hudson river. She saw the great doors of the CunardBuilding. First Class. Cabin Class. She could hear rough noises from the Anchor Café where the sailors met and far out were the fog lamps of a trader ship passing through the Narrows.

Over the slow water, skimming towards her, a stellated brightness, a cast jewel, and another and another fast behind. Was it from the ship? She strained her eyes, she tried to make a telescope of her retina, to track the quick flashes as they moved. When she was little, her father had taken her to the sea and made flat stones skip over the tops of the waves. Each one, he had said, flew on to another country, rested at last at a shore beyond the sea. She fancied that these hard bright things were souls like her. Souls joining the bodies that had gone ahead of them, in rags, in sorrow, in haste, unwilling, dead bodies over the sea, leaving their souls behind.

The world had heaved up. Much had been left behind.

Perhaps this was her chance. Would her soul return? She put her hands down over her belly and felt me there. In a second of shock she realised she was going into labour. How cold it was. How dark. She saw the Morse uncoded light once more and fainted.

It was Raphael who found her.

Raphael, ears keen as his dogs', had been delivering cigarettes to the Anchor Café. As he came out of the smoky light into the unfiltered darkness, he heard someone calling him . . . 'Raphael! Raphael!'

'Here I am, Lord,' he said, remembering the story of Samuel.

Who called him? My mother was unconscious.

He drove his sled over to the rail and although he was a tiny man he picked up Mama and me and laid her in the sacks on the sled. We set off, Raphael wondering wildly what to do with the unknown woman and her almost-child. He was afraid of hospitals.

Along

, past the grand houses lit with candles, in an heroic effort to save electricity. When Raphael had first come to New York he used to stand opposite Mrs Vanderbilt's on the corner of 51st and marvel at her four red roses, fresh each day, in the window of her huge library. Now they were building the RockefellerCenter on the site. Raphael admired the progress but missed the roses.

Not there. Not there. The grandees wouldn't take them in, the improbable duo on their snow-sped sledge. The dogs ran faster and faster, not driven, leading, hoping for a sign, a place to stop. There was no one out on the streets.

And Papa?

He began to call. He called from the Creation. He called from the flocks of Abraham. He called from Jacob's wiliness. He called out of Pharaoh's dream. He called with the rod of Moses. He called with the voice of the prophets he called with the ecstasy of David. He called up the light that was in him and Raphael heard it. 'Raphael, Raphael!' Again 'Raphael, Raphael!'

The dogs slithered to a stop, turned, obeyed the frequency, higher than 30 megahertz, and ran forwards.

The Temple Emanu-el. Papa was on the steps. As the sledge curved to a halt there was a cry from behind.

I was born.

A life for a life. She had saved him. Now he had saved us. Mama never believed that, of course not. That Papa with his shawl, his boxes, his stones, his books, his mutterings, his sleepless years, could pierce events and alter them, that was not science. Not common sense. She thanked chance and Raphael, and only once did she look at Papa as though she might, perhaps, believe him. He said, 'I was able to find you because you were radiant. That night the light in you was strong.'

She thought of the stellated brightness spinning towards her and what had she fancied about it being, her soul?

She looked at him, and whether or not she believed him, from that time a debt was paid. They had rescued each other. It was the end of their marriage though we continued under the same roof, the three of us until 1959, when I was twelve.

Whether or not she believed him she named me Stella after her star. Papa named me Sarah, after the wife of Abraham who gave birth to a child when she was ninety-three. 'For with God,' Papa said, 'nothing is impossible.'

You will want to know about the diamond.

When it was discovered that I had been born, every diamond dealer on

came to visit me. The placenta was thoroughly examined before Mama ate it as was the custom among her Bavarian ancestors. She had it fried with onions in one of the aluminium saucepans. That was one, at least, that Papa would not use again.

A doctor came, and the man who rigged the lights for Times Square. In the old days, before neon, Times Square was incandescent, and it was some of these incandescent wands of power that Duke brought with him.

The doctor positioned me. The diamond dealers crowded round. Signora Rossetti, from Mama's favourite diner, had brought squid and ciabatta to hand round. This was a party, a fairground, a miracle, the world's first pre-mortem.

Duke switched on his lights bright as Creation, and I hung there, turning, turning in my harness, my skin a pale transparent shawl over my new made bones.

The diamond was at the base of my spine by the sacroiliac joint.

Oy oy oy, nu?

Well?

The doctor said that the diamond could not be mined without crippling me. No one wanted to do that even if I had been born of a shikseh.

Papa shrugged. 'OK, OK, let's talk
tackles.'

The men sat down to business, and at last agreed to raise a collection for the lost diamond, so that its rightful owner need not lose more than face. Would that settle it?

Yes and no.

Even today the man's son still follows me wherever I go, waiting for the moment when he can claim his family property. When I die I shall go to the Jewish mortuary and have my birthright surgically removed.

I have left the diamond to the Glinerts in my Will.

'What kind of a story is that?' said Jove.

TEN OF SWORDS

August 14 1940. Rome, Italy. Sun in Leo.

Jove, born Giovanni Baptista Rossetti, a lion cub of goatish parents who emigrated to New York City in 1942.

Signora Rossetti remade herself from peasant into one of Pasta's Famous Faces. In 1942 she had sunk her small savings into a delicatessen and trattoria and built up the business into an export empire and restaurant franchise. Her shrewd success had been based on more than olive oil and durum wheat. She was something of a back-kitchen psychologist.

Signora Rossetti had realised that her American-speaking customers would learn only two words of Italian: 'Spaghetti' and 'Quanto?' Faced with a foreign language they ordered by numbers. 'I'll take an eighteen.' To save them further trouble Signora Rossetti dispensed with language altogether. Her menu was a list of numbers, out of series, with further numbers in dollars, lire and sterling, to reassure the cost-conscious monoglot looking for an authentic foreign experience. So homely and honest and genuine seemed Signora Rossetti that British and American customers formed long queues outside the front door. They did not realise that the Italians and the Irish went around the back with a
'Ciao Mama bella bella'
and took any table they liked.

No. 18, the most popular item on the menu, a secret recipe hamburger made with garlic and herbs. Although it was the only hamburger on the menu, her front door diners seemed to find it by instinct. 'I'll take an eighteen.' When they did not, Mama served it to them anyway . . .

'Diciotto . . '

Soon, the people who queued at the front door came to believe that
diciotto
was Italian for hamburger and Signora Rossetti was able to sell a franchise of Diciotto Houses all over America. There, anyone could buy diciotto and fries on a warm bed of spaghetti topped with a sesame-seed bun.

Of course, when the Sixties came, and America was looking outwards again, everyone spoke Italian and Signora Rossetti was rumbled. By then, who cared? Signora Rossetti, fat and famous, wrote a ribbon at the top of her syndicated menus: FOOD TASTES
 
BETTER IN ITALIAN.

At least that was the story as Jove told it to me.

'Story of my life, Alice?' he said. 'The bright boy who loves and hates America. Loves it because it has given him everything. Hates it because it has given him everything. The ambivalence of the immigrant everywhere.'

Endlessly he talked of returning to Italy and never returned and lost in him were the warm slow days, the smell of ripening tomatoes, the dogs yapping out on the terrace, his father's country vineyard where the hills were steep with donkeys.

Sometimes the lost places overtook him and he started shouting about crazy progress and crazy life and why were the best brains in their field voluntarily working harder than in the bad days of bought slaves in the cotton field?