GRAVITY RAINBOW (61 page)

"Results have not been encouraging. We seem up against a dilemma built into Nature, much like the Heisenberg situation. There is nearly complete parallelism between analgesia and addiction. The more pain it takes away, the more we desire it. It appears we can't have one property without the other, any more than a particle physicist can specify position without suffering an uncertainty as to the particle's velocity-"

"I could have told you that. But why-"

"Why.
My dear captain.
Why?"

"The money, Wimpe. To pour funds down the latrine on such a hopeless search-"

A man-to-man touch then on his buttoned epaulet. A middle-aged smile full of Weltschmerz. "Trade-off, Tchitcherine," whispers the salesman. "A question of balancing priorities. Research people come

cheap enough, and even an IG may be allowed to dream, to hope

against hope… Think of what it would mean to find such a drug-to abolish pain rationally, without the extra cost of addiction. A
surplus

cost-surely there is something in Marx and Engels," soothe the customer, "to cover this. A demand like 'addiction,' having nothing to do with real pain, real economic needs, unrelated to production or labor… we need fewer of these unknowns, not more. We know how to produce real pain. Wars, obviously… machines in the factories, industrial accidents, automobiles built to be unsafe, poisons in food, water, and even air-these are quantities tied directly to the economy. We know them, and we can control them. But 'addiction'? What do we know of that? Fog and phantoms. No two experts will even agree on how to define the word. 'Compulsion'? Who is not compelled? 'Tolerance'? 'Dependence'? What do they mean? All we have are the thousand dim, academic theories. A rational economy cannot depend on psychological quirks. We could
not plan.
…"

What premonition has begun to throb in Tchitcherine's right knee? What direct conversion between pain and gold?

"Are you really this evil, or is it just an act? Are you really trafficking in pain?"

"Doctors traffick in pain and no one would dream of criticizing their noble calling. Yet let the Verbindungsmann but reach for the latch on his case, and you all start to scream and run. Well-you won't find many addicts among us. The medical profession is full of them, but we salesmen believe in real pain, real deliverance-we are knights in the service of that Ideal. It must all be real, for the purposes of our market. Otherwise my employer-and our little chemical cartel is the model for the very structure of nations-becomes lost in illusion and dream, and one day vanishes into chaos. Your own employer as well."

"My 'employer' is the Soviet State."

"Yes?" Wimpe did say
"is
the model," not "will be." Surprising they could have got this far, if indeed they did-being of such different persuasions and all. Wimpe, however, being far more cynical, would have been able to admit more of the truth before starting to feel uncomfortable. His patience with Tchitcherine's Red Army version of economics may have been wide enough. They did part amiably. Wimpe was reassigned to the United States (Chemnyco of New York) shortly after Hitler became Chancellor. Tchitcherine's connection, according to the garrison gossip, ceased then, forever.

But these are rumors. Their chronology can't be trusted. Contradictions creep in. Perfect for passing a winter in Central Asia, if you happen not to be Tchitcherine. If you
are
Tchitcherine, though, well, that puts you in more of a peculiar position. Doesn't it. You have to

get through the winter on nothing but paranoid suspicions about why you're here…

It's because of Enzian, it's got to be damned Enzian. Tchitcherine has been to the Krasnyy Arkhiv, has seen the records, the diaries and logs from the epical, doomed voyage of Admiral Rozhdestvenski, some still classified even after 20 years. And now he knows. And if it's all in the archives, then They know, too. Nubile young ladies and German dope salesmen are reason enough to send a man east in any period of history. But They would not be who or where They are without a touch of Dante to Their notions of reprisal. Simple talion may be fine for wartime, but politics between wars demands symmetry and a more elegant idea of justice, even to the point of masquerading, a bit deca-dently, as mercy. It is more complicated than mass execution, more difficult and less satisfying, but there are arrangements Tchitcherine can't see, wide as Europe, perhaps as the world, that can't be disturbed very much, between wars…

It seems that in December, 1904, Admiral Rozhdestvenski, commanding a fleet of 42 Russian men-o'-war, steamed into the South-West African port of Luderitzbucht. This was at the height of the Russo-Japanese War. Rozhdestvenski was on route to the Pacific, to relieve the other Russian fleet, which had been bottled up for months in Port Arthur by the Japanese. Out of the Baltic, around Europe and Africa, bound across the whole Indian Ocean and then north along the final coast of Asia, it was to be among the most spectacular sea voyages of history: seven months and 18,000 miles to an early summer day in the waters between Japan and Korea, where one Admiral Togo, who'd been lying in wait, would come sailing out from behind the island of Tsushima and before nightfall hand Rozhdestvenski's ass to him. Only four Russian ships would make it in to Vladivostok-nearly all the rest would be sunk by the wily Jap.

Tchitcherine's father was a gunner on the Admiral's flagship, the
Suvorov.
The fleet paused in Luderitzbucht for a week, trying to take on coal. Storms lashed through the crowded little harbor. The
Suvorov
kept smashing up against her colliers, tearing holes in the sides, wrecking many of her own 12-pound guns. Squalls blew in, clammy coal dust swirled and stuck to everything, human and steel. Sailors worked around the clock, with searchlights set up on deck at night, hauling coal sacks, half blind in the glare, shoveling, sweating, coughing, bitching. Some went crazy, a few tried suicide. Old Tchitcherine,

after two days of it, went AWOL, and stayed away till it was over. He

found a Herero girl who'd lost her husband in the uprising against the Germans. It was nothing he had planned or even dreamed about before going ashore. What did he know of Africa? He had a wife back in Saint Petersburg, and a child hardly able to roll over. Up till then Kron-stadt was the farthest he'd been from home. He only wanted a rest from the working parties, and from the way it looked… from what the black and white of coal and arc-light were about to say… no color, and the unreality to go with it-but a
familiar
unreality, that warns This Is All Being Staged To See What I'll Do So I Mustn't Make One Wrong Move… on the last day of his life, with Japanese iron whistling down on him from ships that are too far off in the haze for him even to see, he will think of the slowly carbonizing faces of men he thought he knew, men turning to coal, ancient coal that glistened, each crystal, in the hoarse sputter of the Jablochkov candles, each flake struck perfect… a conspiracy of carbon, though he never phrased it as "carbon," it was power he walked away from, the feeling of too much meaningless power, flowing wrong… he could smell Death in it. So he waited till the master-at-arms turned to light a cigarette, and then just walked away-they were all too black, artificially black, for it to be easily noticed-and found ashore the honest blackness of the solemn Herero girl, which seemed to him a breath of life after long confinement, and stayed with her at the edge of the flat sorrowful little town, near the railroad, in a one-room house built of saplings, packing-cases, reeds, mud. The rain blew. The trains cried and puffed. The man and woman stayed in bed and drank kari, which is brewed from potatoes, peas, and sugar, and in Herero means "the drink of death." It was nearly Christmas, and he gave her a medal he had won in some gunnery exercise long ago on the Baltic. By the time he left, they had learned each other's names and a few words in the respective languages-afraid, happy, sleep, love… the beginnings of a new tongue, a pidgin which they were perhaps the only two speakers of in the world.

But he went back. His future was with the Baltic fleet, it was something neither he nor the girl questioned. The storm blew out, fog covered the sea. Tchitcherine steamed away, shut back down in a dark and stinking compartment below the
Suvorov's
waterline, drinking his Christmas vodka and yarning about his good times in a space that didn't rock, back at the edge of the dry veld with something warm and kind around his penis besides his lonely fist. He was already describing her as a sultry native wench. It is the oldest sea story. As he told it he was no longer Tchitcherine, but a single-faced crowd before and after,

all lost but not all unlucky. The girl may have stood on some promontory watching the gray ironclads dissolve one by one in the South Atlantic mist, but even if you'd like a few bars of
Madame Butterfly
about here, she was more probably out hustling, or asleep. She was not going to have an easy time. Tchitcherine had left her with a child, born a few months after the gunner went down in sight of the steep cliffs and green forests of Tsushima, early in the evening of 27 May.

The Germans recorded the birth and the father's name (he had written it down for her, as sailors do-he had given her his name) in their central files at Windhoek. A travel pass was issued for mother and child to return to her tribal village, shortly after. A census by the colonial government to see how many natives they'd killed, taken just after Enzian was returned by Bushmen to the same village, lists the mother as deceased, but her name is in the records. A visa dated December 1926 for Enzian to enter Germany, and later an application for German citizenship, are both on file in Berlin.

It took no small amount of legwork to assemble all these pieces of paper. Tchitcherine had nothing to start with but a brief word or two in the Admiralty papers. But this was in the era of Feodora Alexan-drevna, she of the kidskin underwear, and the access situation was a little better for Tchitcherine than it is now. The Rapallo Treaty was also in force, so there were any number of lines open to Berlin. That weird piece of paper… in his moments of sickest personal grandeur it is quite clear to him how his own namesake and the murdered Jew put together an elaborate piece of theatre at Rapallo, and that the real and only purpose was to reveal to Vaslav Tchitcherine the existence of Enzian… the garrison life out east, like certain drugs, makes these things amazingly clear…

But alas, seems like the obsessive is his own undoing. The dossier that Tchitcherine put together on Enzian (he'd even got to see what Soviet intelligence had on then Lieutenant Weissmann and his political adventures in Sudwest) was reproduced by some eager apparatchik and stashed in Tchitcherine's
own
dossier. And so it transpired, no more than a month or two later, that somebody equally anonymous had cut Tchitcherine's orders for Baku, and he was grimly off to attend the first plenary session of the VTsK NTA (Vsesoynznyy Tsentral'nyy Komitet Novogo Tyurkskogo Alfavita), where he was promptly assigned to the
Committee.

seems to be a kind of G, a voiced uvular plosive. The distinction

between it and your ordinary G is one Tchitcherine will never learn to appreciate. Come to find out, all the Weird Letter Assignments have