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 Christopher Street and was at the Hudson river. She saw the great doors of the Cunard Building. 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 Fifth Avenue, 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 Rockefeller Center 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 Canal St 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 tachles.’
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?
He said, ‘If I am master of my life why do I feel so out of control?’
Jove. He had been among the first of the younger physicists to criticise The Standard Model; the comprehensive theory of matter that seems to fit with so much of the experimental data. Jove called it ‘The Flying Tarpaulin’; big, ugly, useful, covers what you want and ignores gravity. The attraction of the Model is that it recognises the symmetries of the three fundamental forces, weak force, strong force, electromagnetic force. Difficulties begin when these three separate forces are arbitrarily welded together.
His wife, his mistress, met.
In the 1970s Jove was working on his GUTs: Grand Unified Theories that sought to unite the strong, weak, and electromagnetic quanta in a sympathetic symmetry that would include gravity and overturn the bolt-it-together-somehow methods of The Standard Model.
GUTs had their heart in the right place; they wanted to recognise the true relationship between the three fundamental forces. Now, more than ever, crossing into the twenty-first century, our place in the universe and the place of the universe in us, is proving to be one of active relationship. This is more than a scientist’s credo. The separateness of our lives is a sham. Physics, mathematics, music, painting, my politics, my love for you, my work, the star-dust of my body, the spirit that impels it, clocks diurnal, time perpetual, the roll, rough, tender, swamping, liberating, breathing, moving, thinking nature, human nature and the cosmos are patterned together.
Symmetry. Beauty. Perhaps it seems surprising that physicists seek beauty but in fact they have no choice. As yet there has not been an exception to the rule that the demonstrable solution to any problem will turn out to be an aesthetic solution.
‘The tougher the problem the more beautiful the solution,’ said Jove, smiling at me, frowning at my mathematics.
Later, in bed, inside me, ‘The short and organised equations of physics are as beautiful and surprising as the natural forces they interpret.’
Jove had a way of being in the right place at the right time. As enthusiasm for GUTs weakened (negative experimental data), he hauled himself up through the body of science on a Superstring.
According to the theory, any particle, sufficiently magnified, will be seen not as a solid fixed point but as a tiny vibrating string. Matter will be composed of these vibrations. The universe itself would be symphonic.
If this seems strange, it is stranger that the image of the universe as a musical instrument, vibrating divine harmonies, was a commonplace of Renaissance thought. Robert Fludd’s Utriusque Cosmi Historia (1617–19) has a diagram of the tunings and harmonies of this instrument, according to the heavenly spheres. ‘As above, so below’ may prove to be more than a quaint alchemical axiom. Following the Superstring theory, the symmetry we observe in our universe is only a remnant of the symmetry to be observed in perfect ten-dimensional space.
· · ·
‘Jove only works on Superstrings because it reminds him of spaghetti,’ said Signora Rossetti.
‘Mama!’ screamed Jove, forgetting that he was grown up, distinguished, important, respected and nearly bald.
Mama had long since packed up and bought a villa in Positano and an apartment in Rome. She wanted Jove to go home and be an Italian again. Jove, for all his dreams of basil plants on a sunny window-sill, had New York in his belly. New York was where he belonged. He fought with his Roman Mama, but liked her nickname for him as King of the Gods. He could not bring himself to disbelieve it quite, nor could he quite forget that his real name was Giovanni, as in Don Giovanni, his favourite opera. Mozart 1787.
He said, ‘Who are the world’s most famous seducers?’
1) Lothario. A fiction character who first appeared on stage in 1703.
2) Casanova. A fact/fiction. Born in 1725. The man for whom chocolate and mussels were aphrodisiac, and a half lemon (properly inserted) contraceptive.
3) Don Juan/Giovanni. A fiction/fact. Nobody knows whether or not he was real. Everybody knows that this unsheathed-sword-of-a-lifetime was dragged down to Hell for his sins.
‘Purché porti la gonnella, Voi sapete quel che fa.’
‘If she wears a petticoat you know what he does,’ sang Jove in the opera chamber of his shower.
Jove/Giovanni, a man with two reputations he wanted to protect: his primacy and his potency. A mistress was as necessary to him as an atom smasher. He had a joke about it.
What’s the difference between a mistress and an atom smasher?
An atom smasher will only cost you $12 billion.
What’s the difference between an atom smasher and a mistress?
An atom smasher knows when to stop.
Our affair, like every other, was conducted inside a vas hermeticum: a sealed vessel, shut off from the world, to boil and cool according to its own laws.
What did we hope for, heating and re-heating ourselves to absurd temperatures? As matter heats up it is subject to demonstrable change. Boiling in our vessel, our water molecules would begin to break down, stripping us back to elemental hydrogen and oxygen gases. Would this help us to see ourselves as we really are?
Heated further, our atomic structure would be ripped apart. He and she as plasma again, the most common state of matter in the universe. Would this bring us closer together?
At about a billion degrees K, give or take a furnace or two, he and she might begin to counterfeit the interior of a neutron star and could rapidly be heated further into sub-atomic particles. You be a quark and I’ll be a lepton.
If we had the courage to cook ourselves to a quadrillion degrees, the splitting, the dividing, the ripping, the hurting, will be over. At this temperature, the weak force and the electromagnetic force are united. A little hotter, and the electroweak and the strong force move together as GUT symmetries appear.
And at last? When gravity and GUTs unite? Listen: one plays the lute and another the harp. The strings are vibrating and from the music of the spheres a perfect universe is formed. Lover and beloved pass into one another identified by sound.
‘And behold I saw a new heaven and a new earth.’
Grandmother reading from the Bible to a child who hardly understood the words but felt strange intimations of grandeur.
Jove and I walking in Vermont among the whirling profligacy of leaves. Under the red, under the orange, red in our pockets, orange in haloes at our head, veins of gold on the ivory-find of each other’s bodies.
The sceptical world knee-deep in yods of falling fire.
And after symmetries of autumn, symmetries of austerity. Bare winter’s thin beauty, rib and spine. The back of him sharp-boned, my hands leaf-broad covering him, patterning him. Us making love on the leaf-shed in the cold of the year.
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