Free Gut Symmetries by Jeanette Winterson Page A

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