Judgement
Walk with me.
At this point in the story I can say only what happened: that Stella had plastic surgery. That she always will walk with a slight limp.
That Jove was able to avoid criminal charges on the grounds of temporary insanity.
'Temporary all his life,' said Stella.
I visited them both in hospital. He, surrounded by Italian nurses listening to his extraordinary story of survival, which did not include eating his wife. She, reflective in a room without mirrors, sun at her head and feet.
SHE: I had decided to divorce Jove before he took a bite out of me.
ME: Will you stop it? He could have killed you.
SHE: Victim or volunteer?
ME: He lied to you.
SHE: He is a liar.
ME: And that forgives him?
SHE: I forgive him.
ME: What?
SHE: And I forgive you.
ME: I don't understand.
SHE: Shouldn't I forgive the woman who first took my husband and then took his wife?
ME: You took me. Both of you.
SHE: Victim or volunteer?
ME: Accomplice?
SHE: Rights begin where love ends. Shall we argue over who is the most to blame?
ME: He could have killed you.
SHE: This year, last year, any year. I am the one who has to say 'Stop'.
ME: Does that mean me?
SHE: Does it?
She put her finger to my lips.
SHE: This is not the time.
Summer curved into autumn and Stella came back to New York. We went to see Abel Glinert, whose family have followed Stella since she was a child. He had not been at the port. He had lost track of his inherited quarry when she had left for Italy. We took the diamond to him, and he held it up, confident in the light. I thought I too was in the red kitchen on that snowy night when Uta had escaped and seen her soul skimming towards her across the impassive sea.
Her soul? Stella's? The Jews believe that the soul comes to inhabit the body at the moment of birth. Until then, until the image of itself becomes flesh, it pursues its crystal pattern, untied. Wave function of life scattered down to one dear face. How else can I know you but through the body you rent? Forgive me if I love it too much.
What was it Uta saw? Uta, down at the water, First Class, Cabin Class, the great doors of Cunard? Perhaps it was my grandmother polishing her brass plaques, light of her skipping sea miles and common sense.
My father had loved Uta. Stella remembered him on the ferry to Staten Island, bringing her a game of iron filings under a sheet of plastic. By using a magnetic pen she could pull the iron chips into patterns and faces. She had drawn a picture of my father and her mother making love in a children's animal park. Papa had seen it and shut himself further away.
I am my father's daughter. I look like him. Stella has her mother's eyes. I do not know what this signifies, if anything at all. Perhaps some things take more than a single lifetime to complete. Perhaps I too have begun to imagine more than can be seen with the instruments we as yet possess.
'Signs, shadows, wonders.' Abel sat rocking in his chair, listening to our story, rolling the diamond between finger and thumb.
'A dybbuk,' he said.
'Papa,' said Stella.
Abel alternatively shook and nodded his head, and finally he dropped the diamond into Stella's palm.
'It is given to you,' he said.
Walk with me. The streets, the cross-streets, the Hudson river where the cattle used to come up to the abbatoir. Stella, dismantling and rebuilding the invented city, showing me what had been and what had not been, sweat and ingenuity of the slowly hoisted dream.
The difficulty. The dream. To pan the living river that you are and find gold in it. But the river moves on, never step in the same river twice, time surging forward and sometimes leaving a caracol, its half-turn backwards that mocks the clock.
My time, my father's time, my grandmother's time. Now separate, now flowing together, and joined with the floods and cries of men and women I have never met, places and years that snag their movement in mine and choose me, for a moment, as a conscious depot of history.
What is it that you contain? The dead, time, light patterns of millennia opening in your gut. What is salted up in the memory of you? Memory past and memory future. If the universe is movement it will not be in one direction only. We think of our lives as linear but it is the spin of the earth that allows us to observe time.
Walk with me.
Two sparrows were diving at a bread roll. A woman's shoes were spattered with mud. A small child in long socks poked at the bucket of eels outside the Chinese grocery store. His father's belly swagged over his head. Through the window, in the barber's shop, white towels were bibbed around weathered necks. An old man shuffled inside his sandwich board: THE END IS NIGH.
The freight train and the rose garden. The hot-dog stand and the evening news. Closing Down Sale. Everything Must Go.
From a room up above, the smell of frying. Above that, Mozart on a tinkly piano '. . . Purché porti la gonnella ...'
From the open window of an attic a canary cage dangled over the street, its occupant feather and beak in song.
They were raising the roof next door. Girders in the mouths of cranes, the steel squawk of the construction bird, hard-hats crane lit, beams and specks of men balanced on the threshold of the built and the unbuilt.
Up higher, far away, the red digital flash of date and time: November 10 19:47 (Sun in Scorpio. City of New York).
Blue sky light had turned black, red tracks of automobiles wound across the bridge, safety lights on brake reflectors, red on red.
The universe hangs here, in this narrow strait, infinity and compression caught in the hour. Space and time cannot be separated. History and futurity are now. What you remember. What you invent. The universe curving in your gut. Put out your hand. Kiss me. The city is a scintilla, light to light, quartz and neon of the Brooklyn Bridge and the incandescence of the stars.
They were letting off fireworks down at the waterfront, the sky exploding in grenades of colour. Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough.