GRAVITY RAINBOW (29 page)

Could anything with him ever have lasted? If the Jewish wolf Pflaumbaum had not set the torch to his own paint factory by the canal, Franz might have labored out their days dedicated to the Jew's impossible scheme of developing patterned paint, dissolving crystal after patient crystal, controlling tie temperatures with obsessive care so that on cooling the amorphous swirl might, this time might, suddenly shift, lock into stripes, polka-dots, plaid, stars of David-instead of finding one early morning a blackened waste, paint cans exploded in great bursts of crimson and bottle-green, smells of charred wood and naphtha, Pflaumbaum wringing his hands oy, oy, oy, the sneaking hypocrite. All for the insurance.

So Franz and Leni were very hungry for a time, with Ilse growing in her belly each day. What jobs came along were menial and paid hardly enough to matter. It was breaking him. Then he met his old friend from the T.H. Munich one night out in the swampy suburbs.

He'd been out all day, the proletarian husband, out pasting up bills to advertise some happy Max Schlepzig film fantasy, while Leni lay pregnant, forced to turn when the pain in her back got too bad, inside their furnished dustbin in the last of the tenement's Hinterhofe. It was

well after dark and bitter cold by the time his paste bucket was empty and the ads all put up to be pissed on, torn down, swastikaed over. (It may have been a quota film. There may have been a misprint. But when he arrived at the theatre on the date printed on the bill, he found the place dark, chips of plaster littering the floor of the lobby, and a terrible smashing far back inside the theatre, the sound of a demolition crew except that there were no voices, nor even any light that he could see back there… he called, but the wrecking only went on, a loud creaking in the bowels behind the electric marquee, which he noticed now was blank…) He had wandered, bone-tired, miles northward into Reinickendorf, a quarter of small factories, rusted sheeting on the roofs, brothels, sheds, expansions of brick into night and disuse, repair shops where the water in the vats for cooling the work lay stagnant and scummed over. Only a sprinkling of lights. Vacancy, weeds in the lots, no one in the streets: a neighborhood where glass breaks every night. It must have been the wind that was carrying him down a dirt road, past the old army garrison the local police had taken over, among the shacks and tool cribs to a wire fence with a gate. He found the gate open, and pushed through. He'd become aware of a sound, somewhere ahead. One summer before the World War, he'd gone to Schaffhausen on holiday with his parents, and they'd taken the electric tram to the Rhine Falls. They went down a stairway and out on to a little wood pavilion with a pointed roof-all around them were clouds, rainbows, drops of fire. And the roar of the waterfall. He held on to both their hands, suspended in the cold spray-cloud with Mutti and Papi, barely able to see above to the trees that clung to the fall's brim in a green wet smudge, or the little tour boats below that came up nearly to where the cataract crashed into the Rhine. But now, in the winter heart of Reinickendorf, he was alone, hands empty, stumbling over frozen mud through an old ammunition dump grown over with birch and willow, swelling in the darkness to hills, sinking to swamp. Concrete barracks and earthworks 40 feet high towered in the middle distance as the sound beyond them, the sound of a waterfall, grew louder, calling from his memory. These were the kinds of revenants that found Franz, not persons but forms of energy, abstractions…

Through a gap in the breastwork he saw then a tiny silver egg, with a flame, pure and steady, issuing from beneath, lighting the forms of men in suits, sweaters, overcoats, watching from bunkers or trenches. It was a rocket, in its stand: a static test.

The sound began to change, to break now and then. It didn't sound ominous to Franz in his wonder, only different. But the light

grew brighter, and the watching figures suddenly started dropping for cover as the rocket now gave a sputtering roar, a long burst, voices screaming
get down
and he hit the dirt just as the silver thing blew apart, a terrific blast, metal whining through the air where he'd stood, Franz hugging the ground, ears ringing, no feeling even for the cold, no way for the moment of knowing if he was still inside his body…

Feet approached running. He looked up and saw Kurt Mondau-gen. The wind all night, perhaps all year, had brought them together. This is what he came to believe, that it was the wind. Most of the schoolboy fat was replaced now by muscle, his hair was thinning, his complexion darker than anything Franz had seen in the street that winter, dark even in the concrete folds of shadow and the flames from the scattered rocket fuel, but it was Mondaugen sure enough, seven or eight years gone but they knew each other in the instant. They'd lived in the same drafty mansarde in the Liebigstrasse in Munich. (Franz had seen the address then as a lucky omen, for Justus von Liebig had been one of his heroes, a hero of chemistry. Later, as confirmation, his course in polymer theory was taught by Professor-Doctor Laszlo Jamf, who was latest in the true succession, Liebig to August Wilhelm von Hofmann, to Herbert Canister to Laszlo Jamf, a direct chain, cause-and-effect.) They'd ridden the same rattling Schnellbahnwagen with its three contact arms frail as insect legs squeaking along the wires overhead to the TH.: Mondaugen had been in electrical engineering. On graduating he'd gone off to South-West Africa, on some kind of radio research project. They had written for a while, then stopped.

Their reunion went on till very late, in a Reinickendorf beer hall, undergraduate hollering among the working-class drinkers, a jubilant and grandiose post-mortem on the rocket test-scrawling on soggy paper napkins, all talking at once around the glass-cluttered table, arguing through the smoke and noise heat flux, specific impulse, propel-lant flow…

"It was a failure," Franz weaving under their electric bulb at three or four in the morning, a loose grin on his face, "it failed, Leni, but they talk only of success! Twenty kilograms of thrust and only for a few seconds, but
no one's ever done it before.
I couldn't believe it Leni I saw something that, that no one ever did before…"

He meant to accuse her, she imagined, of conditioning him to despair. But she only wanted him to grow up. What kind of Wandervogel idiocy is it to run around all night in a marsh calling yourselves the Society for Space Navigation?

Leni grew up in Lubeck, in a row of kleinburger houses beside the Trave. Smooth trees, spaced evenly all along the riverward edge of her cobbled street, arched their long boughs over the water. From her bedroom window she could see the twin spires of the Dom rising above the housetops. Her fetid back-court existence in Berlin was only a decompression lock-
must
be. Her way out of that fussy Biedermeier strangulation, her dues payable against better times, after the Revolution.

Franz, in play, often called her "Lenin." There was never doubt about who was active, who passive-still she had hoped he'd grow beyond it. She has talked to psychiatrists, she knows about the German male at puberty. On their backs in the meadows and mountains, watching the sky, masturbating, yearning. Destiny waits, a darkness latent in the texture of the summer wind. Destiny will betray you, crush your ideals, deliver you into the same detestable Burgerlichkeit as your father, sucking at his pipe on Sunday strolls after church past the row houses by the river-dress you in the gray uniform of another family man, and without a whimper you will serve out your time, fly from pain to duty, from joy to work, from commitment to neutrality. Destiny does all this to you.

Franz loved her neurotically, masochistically, he belonged to her and believed that she would carry him on her back, away to a place where Destiny couldn't reach. As if it were gravity. He had half-awakened one night burrowing his face into her armpit mumbling, "Your wings… oh, Leni, your wings…"

But her wings can only carry her own weight, and she hopes Ilse's, for a while. Franz is a dead weight. Let him look for flight out at the Raketenflugplatz, where he goes to be used by the military and the cartels. Let him fly to the dead moon if he wants to…

Ilse is awake, and crying. No food all day. They ought to try Peter's after all. He'll have milk. Rebecca holds out what's left of the end crust she's been eating. "Would she like this?"

Not much of the Jew in her. Why are half the Leftists she knows Jewish? She immediately reminds herself that Marx was one. A racial affinity for the books, the theory, a rabbinical love of loud argument… She gives the crust to her child, picks her up.

"If he comes here, tell him you haven't seen me."

They arrive at Peter Sachsa's well after dark. She finds a seance just about to begin. She is immediately aware of her drab coat and cotton dress (hemline too high), her scuffed and city-dusted shoes, her lack of jewelry. More middle-class reflexes… vestiges, she hopes. But most

of the women are old. The others are
too
dazzling. Hmm. The men look more affluent than usual. Leni spots a silver lapel-swastika here and there. Wines on the tables are the great '20s and '21s. Schloss Vollrads, Zeltinger, Piesporter-it is an Occasion.

The objective tonight is to get in touch with the late foreign minister Walter Rathenau. At the Gymnasium, Leni sang with the other children the charming anti-Semitic street refrain of the time:

Knallt ab den Juden Rathenau, Die gottverdammte Judensau…

After he was assassinated she sang nothing for weeks, certain that, if the singing hadn't brought it about, at least it had been a prophecy, a spell…

There are specific messages tonight. Questions for the former minister. A gentle sorting-out process is under way. Reasons of security. Only certain guests are allowed to go on into Peter's sitting room. The preterite stay outside, gossiping, showing their gums out of tension, moving their hands… The big scandal around IG Farben this week is the unlucky subsidiary Spottbilligfilm AG, whose entire management are about to be purged for sending to OKW weapons procurement a design proposal for a new airborne ray which could turn whole populations, inside a ten-kilometer radius, stone blind. An IG review board caught the scheme in time. Poor Spottbilligfilm. It had slipped their collective mind what such a weapon would do to the dye market after the next war. The Gotterdammerung mentality again. The weapon had been known as L-5227, L standing for light, another comical German euphemism, like the A in rocket designations which stands for aggregate, or IG itself, Interessengemeinschaft, a fellowship of interests… and what about the case of catalyst poisoning in Prague-was it true that the VI b Group Staffs at the Chemical Instrumentality for the Abnormal have been flown east on emergency status, and that it's a complex poisoning, both selenium and tellurium… the names of the poisons sober the conversation, like a mention of cancer…

The elite who will sit tonight are from the corporate Nazi crowd, among whom Leni recognizes who but Generaldirektor Smaragd, of an IG branch that was interested, for a time, in her husband. But then abruptly there'd been no more contact. It would have been mysterious, a little sinister, except that everything in those days could reasonably be blamed on the economy…

In the crowd her eyes meet Peter's. "I've left him," she whispers, nodding, as he shakes hands.

"You can put Ilse to sleep in one of the bedrooms. Can we talk later?" There is to his eyes tonight a definite faunish slant. Will he accept that she is not
his,
any more than she belonged to Franz?

"Yes, of course. What's going on?"

He snorts, meaning
they haven't told me.
They are using him-have been, various theys, for ten years. But he never knows how, except by rare accident, an allusion, an interception of smiles. A distorting and forever clouded mirror, the smiles of clients…

Why do they want Rathenau tonight? What did Caesar really whisper to his protege as he fell? Et tu, Brute, the official lie, is about what you'd expect to get from them-it says exactly nothing. The moment of assassination is the moment when power and the ignorance of power come together, with Death as validator. When one speaks to the other then it is not to pass the time of day with et-tu-Brutes. What passes is a truth so terrible that history-at best a conspiracy, not always among gentlemen, to defraud-will never admit it. The truth will be repressed or in ages of particular elegance be disguised as something else. What will Rathenau, past the moment, years into a new otherside existence, have to say about the old dispensation? Probably nothing as incredible as what he might have said just as the shock flashed his mortal nerves, as the Angel swooped in…

But they will see. Rathenau-according to the histories-was prophet and architect of the cartelized state. From what began as a tiny bureau at the War Office in Berlin, he had coordinated Germany's economy during the World War, controlling supplies, quotas and prices, cutting across and demolishing the barriers of secrecy and property that separated firm from firm-a corporate Bismarck, before whose power no account book was too privileged, no agreement too clandestine. His father Emil Rathenau had founded AEG, the German General Electric Company, but young Walter was more than another industrial heir-he was a philosopher with a vision of the postwar State. He saw the war in progress as a world revolution, out of which would rise neither Red communism nor an unhindered Right, but a rational structure in which business would be the true, the rightful authority-a structure based, not surprisingly, on the one he'd engineered in Germany for fighting the World War.

Thus the official version. Grandiose enough. But Generaldirektor Smaragd and colleagues are not here to be told what even the masses

believe. It might almost-if one were paranoid enough-seem to be a collaboration here, between both sides of the Wall, matter and spirit. What
is
it they know that the powerless do not? What terrible structure behind the appearances of diversity and enterprise?