The Passion

by Jeanette Winterson

Nowadays people talk about the things he did as though they made sense. As though even his most disastrous mistakes were only the result of bad luck or hubris. It was a mess.

Words like devastation, rape, slaughter, carnage, starvation are lock and key words to keep the pain at bay. Words about war that are easy on the eye. I’m telling you stories. Trust me.

My mouth went dry as I heard the wood take and splinter until the first flame pushed its way out. I wished I were a holy man then with an angel to protect me so I could jump inside the fire and see my sins burned away. I go to confession but there’s no fervour there. Do it from the heart or not at all.

Last time we had this bonfire, a neighbour tried to pull down the boards of his house. He said it was nothing but a stinking pile of dung, dried meat and lice. He said he was going to burn the lot. His wife was tugging at his arms. She was a big woman, used to the churn and the field, but she couldn’t stop him. He smashed his fist into the seasoned wood until his hand looked like a skinned lamb’s head. Then he lay by the fire all night until the early wind covered him in cooling ash. He never spoke of it. We never spoke of it. He doesn’t come to the bonfire any more.

We knew about the English; how they ate their children and ignored the Blessed Virgin.

How they committed suicide with unseemly cheerfulness. The English have the highest suicide rate in Europe.

barrel. Domino the midget says that being near him is like having a great wind rush about your ears. He says that’s how Madame de Stäel put it and she’s famous enough to be right. She doesn’t live in France now. Bonaparte had her exiled because she complained about him censoring the theatre and suppressing the newspapers. I once bought a book of hers from a travelling pedlar who’d had it from a ragged nobleman. I didn’t understand much but I learned the word ‘intellectual’ which I would like to apply to myself. Domino laughs at me. At night I dream of dandelions.

I can’t be a priest because although my heart is as loud as hers I can pretend no answering riot. I have shouted to God and the Virgin, but they have not shouted back and I’m not interested in the still small voice. Surely a god can meet passion with passion? She says he can. Then he should.

She told me about my grandparents and their house and their piano, and a shadow crossed her eyes when she thought I would never see them, but I liked my anonymity. Everyone else in the village had strings of relations to pick fights with and know about. I made up stories about mine. They were whatever I wanted them to be depending on my mood.

I asked him why he was a priest, and he said if you have to work for anybody an absentee boss is best.

I’m telling you stories. Trust me.

It’s hard to remember that this day will never come again. That the time is now and the place is here and that there are no second chances at a single moment.

New recruits cry when they come here and they think about their mothers and their sweethearts and they think about going home. They remember what it is about home that holds their hearts; not sentiment or show but faces they love. Most of these recruits aren’t seventeen and they’re asked to do in a few weeks what vexes the best philosophers for a lifetime; that is, to gather up their passion

for life and make sense of it in the face of death.

They don’t know how but they do know how to forget, and little by little they put aside the burning summer in their bodies and al...

‘I don’t care about the facts, Domino, I care about how I feel. How I feel will change, I want to remember that.’ He shrugged and left me. He

me he’d want me with him after that. Told me we were going to do great things. Told me he liked a smiling face with his dinner. It’s always been the way with me; either everyone ignores me, or they take me into their confidence. At first I thought it was just priests because priests are more intense than ordinary people. It’s not just priests, it must be something about the way I look.

She’d be different if God hadn’t violated her.’

‘See, women like you to treat them with respect. To ask before you touch. Now I’ve never thought it was right and proper of God to send his angel with no by your leave and then have his way before she’d even had time to comb her hair. I don’t think she ever forgave him for that. He was too hasty. So I don’t blame her that she’s so haughty now.’

This year is gone, I told myself. This year is slipping away and it will never return. Domino’s right, there’s only now. Forget it. Forget it. You can’t bring it back. You can’t bring them back. They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get

up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?

What made cold and hungry people so sure that another year could only be better? Was it Him, Him on the throne? Their little Lord in his simple uniform? What does it matter? Why do I question what I see to be real?

Her baby is wide awake with clear blue eyes and curious fingers that move from buttons to nose to stretch at me. I wrap my arms around them both and we make a strange shape swaying slightly near the wall. The hymn is over and the moment of silence takes me by surprise. The baby burps. Then the flares go out across the Channel and a great cheer from our camp two miles away comes clearly to where we stand. The woman pulls away, kisses me and disappears with her sparking heels. Queen of Heaven, go with her.

Sequester my heart. Wherever love is, I want to be, I will follow it as surely as the land-locked salmon finds the sea.

Soldiers and women. That’s how the world is. Any other role is temporary. Any other role is a gesture.

Even the calmest, the richest, have that smell. It’s somewhere between fear and sex. Passion I suppose.

Bridges join but they also separate.

I’m never tempted by God but I like his trappings. Not tempted but I begin to understand why others are. With this feeling inside, with this wild love that threatens, what safe places might there be? Where do you store gunpowder? How do you sleep at night again?

Lovers are not at their best when it matters. Mouths dry up, palms sweat, conversation flags and all the time the heart is threatening to fly from the body once and for all. Lovers have been known to have heart attacks. Lovers drink too much from nervousness and cannot perform. They eat too little and faint during their fervently wished consummation. They do not stroke the favoured cat and their face-paint comes loose. This is not all. Whatever you have set store by, your dress, your

dinner, your poetry, will go wrong.

How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?

Travellers at least have a choice. Those who set sail know that things will not be the same as at home. Explorers are prepared. But for us, who

travel along the blood vessels, who come to the cities of the interior by chance, there is no preparation. We who were fluent find life is a foreign language. Somewhere between the swamp and the mountains. Somewhere between fear and sex. Somewhere between God and the ...

Could a woman love a woman for more than a night? I stepped out and in the morning they say a beggar was running round the Rialto talking about a young man who’d walked across the canal like it was solid. I’m telling you stories. Trust me.

She buried my head in her hair and I became her creature. Her smell, my atmosphere, and later when I was alone I cursed my nostrils for breathing the everyday air and emptying my body of her.

Hopeless heart that thrives on paradox; that longs for the beloved and is secretly relieved when the beloved is not there. That gnaws away at the night-time hours desperate for a sign and appears at breakfast so self-composed. That longs for certainty, fidelity, compassion, and plays roulette

with anything precious. Gambling is not a vice, it is an expression of our humanness. We gamble. Some do it at the gaming table, some do not. You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play.

What a wonder, joining yourself to God, pitting your wits against him, knowing that you win and lose simultaneously. Where else could you indulge without fear the exquisite masochism of the victim? Lie beneath his lances and close your eyes. Where else could you be so in control?

I didn’t know what hate felt like, not the hate that comes after love. It’s huge and desperate and it longs to be proved wrong. And every day it’s proved right

grows a little more monstrous. If the

love was passion, the hate will be obsession. A need to see the once-loved weak and cowed and beneath pity. Disgust is close and dignity is far away. The hate is not only for the once loved, it’s ...

There is a story about an exiled

Princess whose tears turned to jewels as she walked. A magpie followed her and picked up all the jewels and dropped them on the windowsill of a thoughtful Prince. This Prince scoured the land until he found the Princess and they lived happily ever after. The magpie was made a royal bird and given an oak forest to live in and the Princess had her tears made into a great necklace, not to wear, but to look at whenever she felt unhappy. When she looked at the necklace, she knew that she was not.

We avoided the worst ravages of frostbite and we got food every day. But canvas and potatoes do not challenge the zero winter; if anything, they denied us the happy oblivion that comes with dying of cold. When soldiers finally lie down, knowing they won’t get up again, most of them smile. There’s a comfort in falling asleep in the snow.

baize.

With my hands I began scooping away that deadly heady stuff that tempts me to plunge in and never bother to come out. Snow doesn’t look cold, it doesn’t look as though it has any temperature at all. And when it falls and you catch those pieces of nothing in your hands, it seems so unlikely that they could hurt anyone. Seems so unlikely that simple multiplication can make such a difference.

ineluctably,

He said it made sense, whether you believed or not, it made sense to go to church and think about someone who wasn’t your family or your enemy. I said it was hypocritical and he said Domino was right about me; that I was a puritan at heart, didn’t understand weakness and mess and simple humanness. I was very much hurt by this, but I think what he said was true and it is a fault in me.

recently. Bonaparte said war was in our blood. Could that be true? And if it is true there will be no end to these wars. Not now, not ever. Whenever we shout Peace! and run home to our sweethearts and till the land we will be not in peace but in a respite from the war to come. War will always be in the future. The future crossed out.

Being with her was like pressing your eye to a particularly vivid kaleidoscope. She was all primary colour and although she understood better than I the ambiguities of the heart she was not equivocal in her thinking.