GRAVITY RAINBOW (63 page)

But right about now, here come Tchitcherine and Dzaqyp Qulan riding up over some low hills and down into the village they've been looking for. The people are gathered in a circle: there's been a feast all day. Fires are smoldering. In the middle of the crowd a small space has been cleared, and two young voices can be heard even at this distance.

It is an ajtys-a singing-duel. The boy and girl stand in the eye of the village carrying on a mocking well-I-sort-of-like-you-even-if-there's-one-or-two-weird-things-about-you-for-instance-kind of game while the tune darts in and out of qobyz and dombra strummed and plucked. The people laugh at the good lines. You have to be on your toes for this: you trade four-line stanzas, first, second, and last lines all have to rhyme though the lines don't have to be any special length, just breathable. Still, it's tricky. It gets insulting too. There are villages where some partners haven't spoken to each other for years after an ajtys. As Tchitcherine and Dzaqyp Qulan ride in, the girl is making fun of her opponent's horse, who is just a little-nothing serious, but kind of heavy-set… well, fat, really.
Really
fat. And it's getting to the kid. He's annoyed. He zips back a fast one about bringing all his friends around and demolishing her and her

family too. Everybody sort of goes hmm. No laughs. She smiles, tightly, and sings:

You've been drinking a lot of qumys, I must be hearing the words of qumys- For where were you the night my brother Came looking for his stolen qumys?

Oh-oh. The brother she mentioned is laughing fit to bust. The kid singing is not so happy.

"This could go on for a while." Dzaqyp Qulan dismounts, and sets about straightening his knee joints. "That's him, over there."

A very old aqyn-a wandering Kazakh singer-sits with a cup of qumys, dozing near the fire.

"Are you sure he'll-"

"He'll sing about it. He's ridden right through that country. He'd betray his profession if he didn't."

They sit down and are passed cups of the fermented mare's milk, with a bit of lamb, lepeshka, a few strawberries… The boy and girl go on battling with their voices-and Tchitcherine understands, abruptly, that soon someone will come out and begin to write some of these down in the New Turkic Alphabet he helped frame… and this is how they will be lost.

Now and then he glances over at the old aqyn, who only appears to be sleeping. In fact he radiates for the singers a sort of guidance. It is kindness. It can be felt as unmistakably as the heat from the embers.

Slowly, turn by turn, the couple's insults get gentler, funnier. What might have been a village apocalypse has gone on now into comic cooperation, as between a pair of vaudeville comedians. They are out of themselves, playing it all for the listeners to enjoy. The girl has the last word.

Did I hear you mention a marriage? Here there has been a marriage- This warm circle of song, Boisterous, loud as any marriage…

And I like you, even if there are one or two things- For a little while the feast gathers momentum. Drunks holler and women talk, and the little kids totter in and out of the huts, and the wind has

picked up some speed. Then the wandering singer begins to tune his dombra, and the Asian silence comes back.

"Are you going to get it all?" asks Dzaqyp Qulan.

"In stenography," replies Tchitcherine, his g a little glottal.

the aqyn's song

I have come from the edge of the world. I have come from the lungs of the wind, With a thing I have seen so awesome Even Dzambul could not sing it. With a fear in my heart so sharp It will cut the strongest of metals.

In the ancient tales it is told In a time that is older than Qorqyt, Who took from the wood of Syrghaj The first qobyz, and the first song- It is told that a land far distant Is the place of the Kirghiz Light.

In a place where words are unknown, And eyes shine like candles at night, And the face of God is a presence Behind the mask of the sky- At the tall black rock in the desert, In the time of the final days.

If the place were not so distant, If words were known, and spoken, Then the God might be a gold ikon, Or a page in a paper book. But It comes as the Kirghiz Light- There is no other way to know It.

The roar of Its voice is deafness, The flash of Its light is blindness. The floor of the desert rumbles, And Its face cannot be borne. And a man cannot be the same, After seeing the Kirghiz Light.

For I tell you that I have seen It

In a place which is older than darkness,

Where even Allah cannot reach.

As you see, my beard is an ice-field,

I walk with a stick to support me,

But this light must change us to children.

And now I cannot walk far, For a baby must learn to walk. And my words are reaching your ears As the meaningless sounds of a baby. For the Kirghiz Light took my eyes, Now I sense all Earth like a baby.

It is north, for a six-day ride,

Through the steep and death-gray canyons,

Then across the stony desert

To the mountain whose peak is a white dzurt.

And if you have passed without danger,

The place of the black rock will find you.

But if you would not be born, Then stay with your warm red fire, And stay with your wife, in your tent, And the Light will never find you, And your heart will grow heavy with age, And your eyes will shut only to sleep.

"Got it," sez Tchitcherine. "Let's ride, comrade." Off again, the fires dying at their backs, the sounds of string music, of village carousing, presently swallowed behind the wind.

And on into the canyons. Far away to the north, a white mountain-top winks in the last sunlight. Down here, it is already shadowed evening.

Tchitcherine will reach the
Kirghiz
Light, but not his birth. He is no aqyn, and his heart was never ready. He will see It just before dawn. He will spend 12 hours then, face-up on the desert, a prehistoric city greater than Babylon lying in stifled mineral sleep a kilometer below his back, as the shadow of the tall rock, rising to a point, dances west to east and Dzaqyp Qulan tends him, anxious as child and doll, and drying foam laces the necks of the two horses. But someday, like the mountains, like the young exiled women in their certain love, in their

innocence of him, like the morning earthquakes and the cloud-driving wind, a purge, a war, and millions after millions of souls gone behind him, he will hardly be able to remember It.

But in the Zone, hidden inside the summer Zone, the Rocket is waiting. He will be drawn the same way again…

Last week, in the British sector someplace, Slothrop, having been asshole enough to drink out of an ornamental pond in the Tiergarten, took sick. Any Berliner these days knows enough to boil water before drinking, though some then proceed to brew it with various things for tea, such as tulip bulbs, which is not good. Word is out that the center of the bulb is deadly poison. But they keep doing it. Once Slothrop- or Rocketman, as he is soon to be known-thought he might warn them about things like tulip bulbs. Bring in a little American enlightenment. But he gets so desperate with them, moving behind their scrims of European pain: he keeps pushing aside gauze after wavy gauze but there's always still the one, the impenetrable…

So there he is, under the trees in summer leaf, in flower, many of them blasted horizontal or into chips and splinters-fine dust from the bridle paths rising in the sunrays by itself, ghosts of horses still taking their early-morning turns through the peacetime park. Up all night and thirsty, Slothrop lies on his stomach and slurps up water, just an old saddle tramp at the water hole here… Fool. Vomiting, cramps, diarrhea, and who's he to lecture about tulip bulbs? He manages to crawl as far as an empty cellar, across the street from a wrecked church, curls up and spends the next days feverish, shivering, oozing shit that burns like acid-lost, alone with that sovereign Nazi movie-villain fist clamping in his bowels ja-you vill
shit
now, ja? Wondering if he'll ever see Berkshire again. Mommy, Mommy! The War's over, why can't I go home now? Nalline, the reflection from her Gold Star brightening her chins like a buttercup, smirks by the window and won't answer…

A terrible time. Hallucinating Rolls Royces and bootheels in the night, coming to get him. Out in the street women in babushkas are lackadaisically digging trenches for the black iron water pipe that's stacked along the curbside. All day long they talk, shift after shift, into evening. Slothrop lies in the space where sunlight visits his cellar

for half an hour before going on to others with mean puddles of warmth-sorry, got to go now, schedule to keep, see you tomorrow if it doesn't rain, heh heh…

Once Slothrop wakes to the sound of an American work detail marching down the street, cadence being counted by a Negro voice-
yo
lep,
yo
lep,
yo
lep O right O lep… kind of little German folk tune with some sliding up-scale on the word "right"-Slothrop can imagine his mannered jog of arm and head to the left as he comes down hard on that heel, the way they teach it in Basic… can see the man's smile. For a minute he has the truly unbalanced idea of running out in the street and asking them to take him back, requesting political asylum in America. But he's too weak. In his stomach, in his heart. He lies, listening the tramping and the voice out of earshot, the sound of his country fading away… Fading like the WASP ghosts, the old-time DPs trailing rootless now down the roads out of his memory, crowding the rooftops of the freights of forgetfulness, knapsacks and poor refugee pockets stuffed with tracts nobody'd read, looking for another host: given up for good on Rocketman here. Somewhere between the burning in his head and the burning in his asshole, if the two can be conveniently separated, and paced to that dying cadence, he elaborates a fantasy in which Enzian, the African, finds him again-conies to offer him a way out.

Because it seems a while back that they did meet again, by the reedy edge of a marsh south of the capital. Unshaven, sweating, stinking Rocketman restlessly tripping out to the suburbs, among his people: there is haze over the sun, and a rotting swamp odor worse than Slothrop's own. Only two or three hours' sleep in the last couple of days. He stumbles on the Schwarzkommando, busy dredging for pieces of rocket. Formations of dark birds are cruising in the sky. The Africans have a partisan look: pieces here and there of old Wehrmacht and SS uniform, tattered civilian clothes, only one insigne in common, worn wherever it will show, a painted steel device in red, white and blue, thus:

Adapted from insignia the German troopers wore in South-West Africa when they came in 1904 to crush the Herero Rebellion-it was used to pin up half the brim of a wide-awake hat. For the Zone-Hereros it has become something deep, Slothrop gathers, maybe a little mystical. Though he recognizes the letters-

Klar, Entluftung, Zundung, Vorstufe, Hauptstufe, the five positions of the launching switch in the A4 control car-he doesn't let on to Enzian.

They sit on a hillside eating bread and sausages. Children from the town move by in every direction. Someone has set up an army tent, someone has brought beer in kegs. A scratch band, a dozen brasses in tasseled, frayed gold and red uniforms play selections from
Der Mei-
stersmger.
Fat-smoke drifts in the air. Choruses of drinkers in the distance break from time to time into laughter or a song. It's a Rocket-raising: a festival new to this country. Soon it will come to the folk-attention how close Wernher von Braun's birthday is to the Spring Equinox, and the same German impulse that once rolled flower-boats through the towns and staged mock battles between young Spring and deathwhite old Winter will be erecting strange floral towers out in the clearings and meadows, and the young scientist-surrogate will be going round and round with old Gravity or some such buffoon, and the children will be tickled, and laugh…

Schwarzkommando struggle knee-deep in mud, engaged entirely with the salvage, with the moment. The A4 they're about to uncover was used in the last desperate battle for Berlin-an abortive firing, a warhead that didn't explode. Around its grave they're driving in planks for shoring, sending back mud in buckets and wood casks along a human chain to be dumped on shore, near where their rifles and kits are stacked.

"So Marvy was right. They didn't disarm you guys."

"They didn't know where to find us. We were a surprise. There are even now powerful factions in Paris who don't believe we exist. And most of the time I'm not so sure myself."

"How's that?"

"Well, I think we're here, but only in a statistical way. Something like that rock over there is just about 100% certain-it knows it's there, so does everybody else. But our own chances of being right here right now are only a little better than even-the slightest shift in the probabilities and we're gone-schnapp! like that."

"Peculiar talk, Oberst."

"Not if you've been where we have. Forty years ago, in Sudwest, we were nearly exterminated. There was no reason. Can you understand that? No
reason.
We couldn't even find comfort in the Will of God Theory. These were Germans with names and service records, men in blue uniforms who killed clumsily and not without guilt. Search-and-destroy missions, every day. It went on for two years. The

orders came down from a human being, a scrupulous butcher named von Trotha. The thumb of mercy never touched his scales.

"We have a word that we whisper, a mantra for times that threaten to be bad. Mba-kayere. You may find that it will work for you. Mba-kayere. It means 'I am passed over.' To those of us who survived von Trotha, it also means that we have learned to stand outside our history and watch it, without feeling too much. A little schizoid. A sense for the statistics of our being. One reason we grew so close to the Rocket, I think, was this sharp awareness of how contingent, like ourselves, the Aggregat 4 could be-how at the mercy of small things… dust that gets in a timer and breaks electrical contact… a film of grease you can't even see, oil from a touch of human fingers, left inside a liquid-oxygen valve, flaring up soon as the stuff hits and setting the whole thing off-I've seen that happen… rain that swells the bushings in the servos or leaks into a switch: corrosion, a short, a signal grounded out, Brennschluss too soon, and what was alive is only an Aggregat again, an Aggregat of pieces of dead matter, no longer anything that can move, or that has a Destiny with a shape-stop doing that with your eyebrows, Scuffling. I may have gone a bit native out here, that's all. Stay in the Zone long enough and you'll start getting ideas about Destiny yourself."