Gut Symmetries

by Jeanette Winterson

  When we had finished scooping out the dunny, and put fresh sawdust in the bottom to activate the new midden, my grandmother said she had a surprise for me. She made me stand in the corner of the kitchen behind the memorial oilskin, while she wheezed and whirred something out of the coal-hole. I could hear a crackling and a scratching and what sounded like fluff on the end of a record-player needle.

  ‘Come out,’ said Grandmother.

  On the kitchen table was a brand-new bright blue Dansette turntable. On the turntable was a 45 r.p.m. of the Beatles singing ‘Help!’

  Whilst I was adjusting to this unlikely apparition, my grandmother was doing the Twist or perhaps it would be better to say the Wiggle, since the two mobile parts were her bottom and her head. Her arms, bent at the elbow, were rigid in front of her, her feet were planted apart.

  ‘I’ll teach you,’ she said.

  She did teach me and we did not tell my mother or my father about the privy or the scones or the dancing lessons or the unnamed grog or the teenage turntable in its vinyl zip case or the happiness that was unhygienic or the sense of peace that had the smell of buttered kippers.

  ‘You must be bored there,’ said my mother.

  · · ·

  My parents’ house was so clean it made me ill. Much has been aired about the benefits of sanitation but less is told about the eczema of washing powder, the asthma of fitted carpets, allergic reactions to cream cleaner, itchy fingers round the bleach bottle, drug-out on the fumes of metal polish. Worse, my mother had discovered nylon, so easy to wash, and ignored my athlete’s foot and the red weals between my legs where the nylon lace of the nylon knickers warred against my non-nylon skin.

  It would have been better if I had been made of nylon; easier then to soak out the miseries that were soaking in.

  I grew. At nine, tall and silent, I was unhappy. My father, who had given up his religion but not the superstition that accompanied it, interpreted my misery as proof positive of Original Sin. Since there could be no reason for me to be unhappy, unhappiness must be the human condition. How could he hope to escape what an innocent child could not escape? Like my grandmother, he had a Gothic disposition, but she had kept her God and therefore her mercy. My father could find no mercy for himself and offered none.

  As his world darkened, the shadows in our house increased. We lived in a big light spacious well-windowed generous house, designed by Lutyens. My father had bought it for my mother in a grand gesture of love and pride. Not for her a poky terrace with a dog kennel and an outside toilet. The garden shrubbed and green had a noose of trees all round it and in the centre of the rolled lawn was a Victorian sun-dial of granite and slate. At the bottom of the dial was the hooded figure of Time scything the hours, but at the top, over the position of the twelve was an angel with a trumpet bearing the inscription ‘Aliquem alium internum’. I did not know what this meant and when I was able to translate it I did not understand it. Later it came to mean a great deal to me but that is not yet.

  When the hours were golden and green it seemed as if the whole house levitated. My father pleased with his work, my mother pleased with her home and her children. I don’t remember the exact moment of the eclipse, only a gradual chilliness and the golden light paling yellow-pale-yellow-yellow to fade. I do remember that my father felt cheated. His salary was insufficient, his bonus was insufficient, his challenges were puny, his achievements were not fully recognised. He said those things to my mother, I heard him, but to me he said, by the sun-dial, ‘I’m forty-one and the sea is dying.’ He ran his finger back and forth over the hooded Time.

  In my nightmares Time scooped up the sea in his hood and carried it away. He stood at the end of the world and poured the sea into space.

  The glittering fish were stars.

  It was inevitable that the air should fight its war with the sea. Cargo and passengers alike preferred to fly and as shipping costs increased air prices dropped. My father’s company, man and boy, was suffering unsustainable losses. Trident Shipping, founded 1809, was slowly going bankrupt and taking my father with it.

  He had enough money. It was his life they were draining away. His friends interpreted his resentment as a normal response to a difficult situation. My mother took the simple view that a man must have his work. My father though, was not simple and he was still aware enough to turn the mask over and over in his hands and ask what it was. Uncharacteristically, he went to visit my grandmother.

  ‘What have I made of my life?’

  ‘David you’ve got everything you wanted.’

  ‘What did I want?’

  ‘Didn’t you want to be somebody?’

  ‘Didn’t you?’

  Yes. No. The clock ticking and the smell of buttered kippers. The young man out of his mother’s body and wearing his father’s clothes. Be someone. Be someone. Redeem history. Make our lives not an endless sacrifice but a gathering of energy, the strength to jump, but we fall, the strength to jump, but we fall, until you who leap and do not fall. Then we see what we were for, the single stuttered words gain the momentum of narrative. This is the story of a humble family who became a name. My son David whose father grandfather and great-grandfather unto the sixth generation worked the docks. My son David, rich, respected, powerful, a man. My son David whose eyes have the shine in them. My son David pulling history home.

  ‘Mother?’

  ‘David.’

  They did not speak of it again. My father took his hat and scarf and walked down to the docks. There were men there he knew, idle like him, and they envied him his money and although he was not stupid enough to envy them their poverty, there was part of him that regretted all he had done. They drank together. He drank alone. He wanted to go with them to the filthy Admiral Arms but what right had he to sit in his cups when they would be going home to cheap rations and unpaid bills? He desperately wanted to say, ‘I am unhappy.’ How could he say that to them?

  He didn’t come home that night, nor the night after. The telephone rang each evening at six o’clock until a week had passed. My mother looked vaguer than usual and kept her light on all night. We were supposed not to notice. Now that it was winter the house was dark almost all day and the frost whitened the lawn. My sisters and I played quietly in the petrified air, our breath briefly warming the frozen spaces around us. We were waiting, waiting, watching the clock.

  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 cri
eth 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 starfish; 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 remoras 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, unqualified, 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 the 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 w
as 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.