Gut Symmetries (8 page)

On the sixth day of his absence my mother appeared in the dining room, in her mink coat, carrying a small suitcase. The three of us were doing a jigsaw while the inadequate fire tried to melt the icicles that were hanging in long spears around the room.

'I have to go to your father,' she said and kissed us with her cold red mouth. 'Grandmother will be here.'

Grandmother was here, wrapped from head to foot in woollens, her face entirely obscured by a seaman's balaclava. She made us a cup of cocoa and my mother swept off in a taxi.

'Where has she gone?'

'London,' said my grandmother, pronouncing it Hell.

'There's no sea there is there?'

I felt that my father had gone to his death.

I helped Grandmother unpack her things; a week's supply of kippers and her Bible. I opened it at the marker and found that we were back at the Book of Job. This meant my grandmother was in tribulation, though on this occasion her tribulation had a kind of glittering intensity about it that heated the indifferent house and made us excited again. Very often she said, 'The horse that crieth among the trumpets Aha!' and I wondered what kind of a horse it was that would do that. Undeterred, we imitated him and soon the zero house was filled with smells and smoke and voices crying Aha!

I said,'If we were good always would we be happy always?'

'No,' said Grandmother.

'Then I shall be bad.'

'Where's the difficulty in that?'

The difficulty. Something in her, something in him, something that I inherited that my sisters did not. The horse that crieth among the trumpets Aha! Why wrestle all night with an angel when the fight can only leave you lame? Why not walk away? Why not sleep?

My grandmother loved me because she recognised the same stubbornness that she had gened in her son. The difficulty and the dream were not separate. To pan the living clay that you are is to stand in the freezing waters and break yourself on a riddle of your own making. No one can force you to it. No one can force you away. Rhinegold, pure gold and somewhere in the Rhinegold, the ring.

Later, much later when I heard Wagner's
Ring
cycle I thought of the times when I had been a very little child and my father had taken me to watch the sunset on the estuary. He loved the gold light dabbling the water. His mind played in it. He and his images were still free but then the moving gold hardened around him and he began to count it. The stories agree that in the difficulty and the dream the hero should never count the cost.

There was a terrific rattling and thundering at the door and my mother and father burst into the hall; she in a silver fox, he in a new overcoat and trilby. Behind them, a taxi-driver struggled up the steps with a pile of boxes.

My father swung us up in his arms and laughed and said we were going on an adventure.

'We're going to live in London,' he said.

'Why Daddy?'

'Because Daddy has a new job.'

My father had heard that Cunard, the most illustrious and prestigious shipping line in the United Kingdom, was to be bought up by Trafalgar House Investments. Cunard had recently taken delivery of their new flagship, the
QE2,
and were making money on her. My father had been to the launch party in Southampton and met a few men he liked and who had liked him. Two of them had been to one of his
foie gras
parties. One of them had suggested he might consider a key role in the reorganisation of the Cunard enterprise, with particular responsibility for the QE2's Atlantic crossings. For my father it seemed like the dream again, youth again, just married again, a place where the sea was still alive and where he too would be alive. Cunard's headquarters were in London and in a matter of weeks so were we.

Before we left we went to see my headmaster. I had just started secondary school and was restless and inattentive. The headmaster, noting that I had every advantage life could offer, assumed that I was either a bad child or a dull one. He was too afraid of my rugger-square father to use either of those words, at least I know that now, but at the time I believed he meant what he said. For the next eight years I lived shut away in the misery of his drawer.

There were compensations. Now that I was officially not clever my father began to take me with him on his business trips. He reckoned that if I could not benefit from an expensive education I could perhaps benefit from experience. My sisters were sent to board at Benenden, I went to the local Catholic school, from whose piety and Home Economics lessons I was frequently removed to accompany my father. In 1973, when I was thirteen, we flew to New York to join the
QE2
on a Comet Watch. It was this that constellated my future.

The idea, his idea, was a three-day cruise to chase the comet Kohoutek, named after the Czech astronomer who had discovered it. It was expected to be one of the brightest comets of the twentieth century, and in some ways the cruise was the beginning of millennium fever. Religion may lose its appeal but portents are popular. The sell-out cruise, itself something of a
foie gras,
was packed with atheists looking for mystery. Unfortunately the weather was so bad that most of the adults found their best visions in a champagne bottle. My father was very busy and I was left alone.

It was night, about a quarter to twelve, the sky divided in halves, one cloudy, the other fair. The stars were deep recessed, not lying on the surface of the night but hammered into it. The water, where the ship cutted it, was broken and white, but once the ship had passed the water healed the intrusion and I could not see where the black of the sky and the black of the water changed into each other. I thought of my often-dream where Time poured the fishes into the sky and the sky was full of star fish; Stella maris of the upper air. There are many legends among seafaring people of a bright fish so hot that it shines in the deepest water, a star dropped and finned from God, an alchemical mystery, the union of fire and water,
coniuntis oppositorum
that transforms itself and others. Some writers mix the Stella maris with the remora, a tiny fish that sticks to the rudder of a vessel and brings it to a halt. Whatever it is, the fateful decisive thing that utterly alters a confident course.

My father had told me about the rémoras and how the Greek fishermen in the little boats still fear him. My father feared no remoras.

Dog. Dog-fish. Dog star.

Horse. Sea-horse. Pegasus.

Monk. Monk fish. Angel.

Spider. Spider-crab. Cancer.

Worm. Eel. The Old Serpent.

I was at the age of making lists but the lists I made were correspondences, half true and altogether fanciful, of the earth the sea and the sky. Perhaps I was trying to hold together my own world that was in so much danger of falling away. Perhaps I wanted order where there was none. As the
QE2
floated so confidently on the waters I thought of the
Titanic,
ghostly and abandoned beneath, and somewhere above, in the secretive blackness, the Ship of Fools navigating the stars. Was it the comet?

Legend has it that the Ship, while seeking the Holy Grail, sailed off the end of the world and continued forever. At particular conjunctions of time and timelessness, it appears again as a bright light, shooting its course through the unfathomable universe, chasing that which has neither beginning nor end.

What can a little girl see that astronomers and telescopes cannot? There was no comet sighted on the official log of the journey. What was it then that hooped together ordinary night with infinity? I saw the silver prow pass over me and the sails in tattered cloth. Men and women crowded at the deck. There was a shuddering, as though the world-clock had stopped, though in fact it was our own ship that had thrown its engines into reverse. In the morning my father told me that we had identified an unknown signal, thought to be a vessel just ahead of us, though nothing at all was found.

For myself, in the dark, watching the thin silver line speed away, I had joined that band of pilgrims uncenturied, unquantified, who, call it art, call it alchemy, call it science, call it god, are driven by a light that will not stay.

The
Godspeed.
My father at the wheel. My mother on a hard couch giving birth to me.

My mother lay with her skirts up over her face, her perfect stockings round her ankles, her pain groaning against the heavy noise of the engine.

My head was engaged and I was pushing out of my mother's chthonic underworld into my father's world of difficulty and dream. I never expected to go back down again.

My grandmother was singing a hymn, essentially praising God but effectively preventing my father from hearing what was happening. It was a quick birth and when I was laid on my mother's breast, my grandmother ate a sandwich and went to tell my father that he had the pleasure of a daughter.

He lit every one of his distress flares and burnt up the river in a blaze of phosphorous red. Every tug and patrol boat on the stretch surrounded us, but far from sinking we were celebrating. My grandmother called it the Miracle of the Sardines and the Gin. She had only fetched enough for herself but there seemed to be plenty for everyone and so I was born, in dirt, in delight, in water and in spirits, with fish above and below and under an exacting star.

THE STAR

November 10 1947. City of New York. Sun in Scorpio.

Papa was a bookseller in Vienna. Mama designed posters for die Austrian railway. There was nothing extraordinary about my parents before World War Two, only that Mama was German and Papa was Jewish.

'Der Paß wird ungültig am 24 März 1939 wenn er nicht verlängert wird.'

'If not extended, this passport will expire by March 24 1939.' On the first page of the Reisepass, inside the blood-brown cover, was a blood-bright 'J'.

Papa had friends in New York, and it was his friends who arranged his papers so that he could travel before his passport expired and while he still had funds. The authorities were ready crouched to confiscate his goods, his business, his house, his wife.

As a German, Mama would have been granted an immediate divorce.

This is the odd thing: my parents were not happily married. Mama was out of love with Papa. Papa was sunk in his books. When he left for the steamer to New York, Mama need never have seen him again.

What did she do?

She applied for a separate passport which was granted. She filed for divorce, which won her the approval of the authorities, and of her Catholic priest, Father Rohr. While he instructed her in the Church's view of the Jewish Question, she flirted with a high-ranking Nazi officer, and let him indulge her in selling off as much of Papa's property as she could. She smelted the price into gold belts.

When she had done as much as she dared to do, she excused herself from her lover and her job on the pretext of a short holiday to visit her father in Bavaria. In fact, she took a train to Switzerland, crossed into France and met the boat to New York. She walked slowly, weighed down as she was with a belt of gold ingots strapped under her dress.

Had she been discovered she would have been shot.

She had her own job, she was German, she could have married again and married well. She had never thought of herself as political. Why did she risk her life for a man from whom she had longed to be free?

It was an extravagant gesture and one of unpredicted alchemical success. The trodden clay of their marriage was transformed into a noble bolus. Out of time, for a time, they flourished.

Papa opened a bookshop on Amsterdam Avenue by 75th St. He sold anything second hand, and it was there that I began to read literature and poetry and the texts of the Kabbalah, often taking books back home, slowly crossing the Park, to read them on the fire escape of our apartment building, while the courting couples sang to one another in Yiddish.

'The child squints,' said Mama when I was born.

'She will be a poet,' said Papa, who was a student of physiognomy.

A Knife and Fork

A Bottle and a Cork

That's the way to spell

New York.

That was the first poem that I learned by heart from a child whose father sold bagels. Mama despaired and bought me an illuminated copy of Faust. Papa said, 'Look up.'

Not at the skyscrapers being built overnight from nothing out of Manhattan bedrock. Not at the fierce cranes preying over the sky. He said, 'Every blade of grass that grows here on earth has its corresponding influence in the stars. This is the Mazalot.'

He said, 'Intensity is the Desire to Receive. Open yourself to light and you will become light.'

I did not understand my mystical Papa, who each morning bound on tefillin, the small black boxes containing portions of the Torah which would contain and direct his energy.

'Is it magic?' I asked Mama, who shrugged and seemed to find no spells in the stacks of aluminium pots and pans burnt with food she didn't like to cook.

My Teutonic Mama, Br
ü
nnhilde in her belly, her own spell the ring of fire that surrounded her. No man could approach. She was the woman on the burning rock, waiting, waiting, for the hero who would be worthy of her. It was not my Papa. Hadn't she been the one to rescue him? And so the dream burned.

New York was pulling itself up by its own pigtail. In those days, after the war, cement mixers used to trawl around the city, ready to jack their load at a whistle from a gang-man. Higher up, on the steel frames of the giant buildings, men with monkey courage tossed red-hot rivets into steel buckets. We were bolting together the future. Rich and poor alike, the rivets of a new world.

I read William Wordsworth:'Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,/ But to be young was very heaven.'

I read William Blake: 'How do you know but every bird that cuts the airy way/Is an immense world of delight, closed by your senses five?'

I read Whitman: 'I moisten the roots of all that has grown.'