GRAVITY RAINBOW (70 page)

And what's waiting for Slothrop, what unpleasant surprise, past the tops of Greta's stockings here? laddering suddenly, the pallid streak flowing downthigh, over intricacies of knee and out of sight… What waits past this whine and crack of velvet lashes against her skin, long red stripes on the white ground, her moans, the bruise-colored flower that cries at her breast, the jingling of the hardware holding her down? He tries not to tear his victim's stockings, or whip too close to her stretched vulva, which shivers, unprotected, between thighs agape and straining, amid movements of muscle erotic, subdued, "monumental" as any silver memory of her body on film. She comes once, then perhaps again before Slothrop puts the whip down and climbs on top, covering her with the wings of his cape, her Schlepzig-surrogate, his latest reminder of Katje… and they commence fucking, the old phony rack groaning beneath them, Margherita whispering
God how
you hurt me
and
Ah, Max…
and just as Slothrop's about to come, the name of her child: strained through her perfect teeth, a clear extrusion of pain that is not in play, she cries,
Bianca…

… yes, bitch-yes, little bitch-poor helpless
bitch
you're coming can't stop yourself now I'll whip you again whip till you
bleed.…
Thus Pokler's whole front surface, eyes to knees: flooded with tonight's image of the delicious victim bound on her dungeon rack, filling the movie screen-close-ups of her twisting face, nipples under the silk

gown amazingly erect, making lies of her announcements of pain-
bitch!
she loves it… and Leni no longer solemn wife, embittered source of strength, but Margherita Erdmann underneath him, on the bottom for a change, as Pokier drives in again, into her again, yes, bitch, yes…

Only later did he try to pin down the time. Perverse curiosity. Two weeks since her last period. He had come out of the Ufa theatre on the Friedrichstrasse that night with an erection, thinking like everybody else only about getting home, fucking somebody, fucking her into some submission… God, Erdmann was beautiful. How many other men, shuffling out again into depression Berlin, carried the same image back from
Alpdrucken
to some drab fat excuse for a bride? How many shadow-children would be fathered on Erdmann that night?

It was never a real possibility for Pokier that Leni might get pregnant. But looking back, he knew that had to be the night,
Alpdrucken
night, that Ilsewas conceived. They fucked so seldom any more. It was not hard to pinpoint.
That's how it happened. A film. How else? Isn't
that what they made of my child, a film'?

He sits tonight by his driftwood fire in the cellar of the onion-topped Nikolaikirche, listening to the sea. Stars hang among the spaces of the great Wheel, precarious to him as candles and goodnight cigarettes. Cold gathers along the strand. Child phantoms- white whistling, tears never to come, range the wind behind the wall. Twists of faded crepe paper blow along the ground, scuttling over his old shoes. Dust, under a moon newly calved, twinkles like snow, and the Baltic crawls like its mother-glacier. His heart shrugs in its scarlet net, elastic, full of expectation. He's waiting for Use, for his movie-child, to return to Zwolfkinder, as she has every summer at this time.

Storks are asleep among two- and three-legged horses, rusted gearwork and splintered roof of the carousel, their heads jittering with aircurrents and yellow Africa, dainty black snakes a hundred feet below meandering in the sunlight across the rocks and dry pans. Oversize crystals of salt lie graying, drifted in the cracks of the pavement, in the wrinkles of the dog with saucer eyes in front of the town hall, the beard of the goat on the bridge, the mouth of the troll below. Frieda the pig hunts a new place to nestle and snooze out of the wind. The plaster witch, wire mesh visible at her breasts and haunches, leans near the oven, her poke at corroded Hansel in perpetual arrest. Gretel's eyes lock wide open, never a blink, crystal-heavy lashes batting at the landings of guerrilla winds from the sea.

If there is music for this it's windy strings and reed sections stand-

ing in bright shirt fronts and black ties all along the beach, a robed organist by the breakwater-itself broken, crusted with tides-whose languets and flues gather and shape the resonant spooks here, the can-dleflame memories, all trace, particle and wave, of the sixty thousand who passed, already listed for taking, once or twice this way. Did you ever go on holiday to Zwolfkinder? Did you hold your father's hand as you rode the train up from Lubeck, gaze at your knees or at the other children like you braided, ironed, smelling of bleach, boot-wax, caramel? Did small-change jingle in your purse as you swung around the Wheel, did you hide your face in his wool lapels or did you kneel up in the seat, looking over the water, trying to see Denmark? Were you frightened when the dwarf tried to hug you, was your frock scratchy in the warming afternoon, what did you say, what did you feel when boys ran by snatching each other's caps and too busy for you?

She must have always been a child on somebody's list. He only avoided thinking about it. But all the time she was carrying her disappearance in her drawn face, her reluctant walk, and if he hadn't needed her protection so much he might have seen in time how little she could protect anything, even their mean nest. He couldn't talk to her-it was arguing with his own ghost from ten years ago, the same idealism, the adolescent fury-items that had charmed him once-a woman with spirit!-but which he came to see as evidence of her single-mindedness, even, he could swear, some desire to be actually destroyed…

She went out to her street-theatre each time expecting not to come back, but he never really knew that. Leftists and Jews in the streets, all right, noisy, unpleasant to look at, but the police will keep them channeled, she's in no danger unless she wants to be… Later, after she left, he got a little drunk one forenoon, a little sentimental, and went out at last, his first and last time, hoping that somehow the pressures of Fate or crowd hydrodynamics might bring them together again. He found a street full of tan and green uniforms, truncheons, leather, placards fluttering unstable in all modes but longitudinal, scores of panicked civilians. A policeman aimed a blow at him, but Pokier dodged, and it hit an old man instead, some bearded old unreconstructed geezer of a Trotskyite… he saw the strands of steel cable under black rubber skin, a finicky smile on the policeman's face as he swung, his free hand grasping his opposite lapel in some feminine way, the leather glove of the hand with the truncheon unbuttoned at the wrist, and his eyes flinching at the last possible moment, as if the truncheon shared his nerves and might get hurt against the old man's skull.

Pokier made it to a doorway, sick with fear. Other police came running as some dancers run, elbows close to sides, forearms thrusting out at an angle. They used firehoses to break up the crowd, finally. Women slid like dolls along the slick cobbles and on tram rails, the thick gush catching them by belly and head, its brute white vector dominating them. Any of them might have been Leni. Pokier shivered in his doorway and watched it. He couldn't go out in the street. Later he thought about its texture, the network of grooves between the paving stones. The only safety there was ant-scaled, down and running the streets of Ant City, bootsoles crashing overhead like black thunder, you and your crawling neighbors in traffic all silent, jostling, heading down the gray darkening streets… Pokier knew how to find safety among the indoor abscissas and ordinates of graphs: finding the points he needed not by running the curve itself, not up on high stone and vulnerability, but instead tracing patiently the
xs
andjys, P (atu), W (m/sec), Ti (° K), moving always by safe right angles along the faint lines…

When he began to dream about the Rocket with some frequency, it would sometimes not be a literal rocket at all, but a street he knew was in a certain district of the city, a street in a certain small area of the grid that held something he thought he needed. The coordinates were clear in his mind, but the street eluded him. Over the years, as the Rocket neared its fullness, about to go operational, the coordinates switched from the Cartesian x and y of the laboratory to the polar azimuth and range of the weapon as deployed: once he knelt on the lavatory floor of his old rooming house in Munich, understanding that if he faced exactly along a certain compass-bearing his prayer would be heard: he'd be safe. He wore a robe of gold and orange brocade. It was the only light in the room. Afterward he ventured out into the house, knowing people slept in all the rooms, but feeling a sense of desertion. He went to switch on a light-but in the act of throwing the switch he knew the room had really been lit to begin with, and he had just turned everything out,
everything…

The A4 operational-at-last hadn't crept up on him. Its coming true was no climax. That hadn't ever been the point.

"They're using you to kill people," Leni told him, as clearly as she could. "That's their only job, and you're helping them."

"We'll all use
it,
someday, to leave the earth. To transcend."

She laughed. "Transcend," from Polder?

"Someday," honestly trying, "they won't have to kill. Borders won't mean anything. We'll have all outer space…"

"Oh
you're blind," spitting it as she spat his blindness at him every day, that and "Kadavergehorsamkeit," a beautiful word he can no longer imagine in any voice but hers…

But really he did not obey like a corpse. He
was
political, up to a point-there was politics enough out at the rocket field. The Army Weapons Department was showing an ever-quickening interest in the amateur rocketeers of the Verein fur Raumschiffahrt, and the VfR had recently begun making available to the Army records of their experiments. The corporations and the universities-the Army said-didn't want to risk capital or manpower on developing anything as fantastic as a rocket. The Army had nowhere to turn but to private inventors and clubs like the VfR.

"Shit," said Leni. "They're all in on it together. You really can't see that, can you."

Within the Society, the lines were drawn clear enough. Without money the VfR was suffocating-the Army had the money, and was already financing them in roundabout ways. The choice was between building what the Army wanted-practical hardware-or pushing on in chronic poverty, dreaming of expeditions to Venus.

"Where do you think the Army's getting the money?" Leni asked.

"What does it matter? Money is money."

Major Weissmann was one of several gray eminences around the rocket field, able to talk, with every appearance of sympathy and reason, to organized thinker and maniac idealist alike. All things to all men, a brand-new military type, part salesman, part scientist. Pokier, the all-seeing, the unmoving, must have known that what went on in the VfR committee meetings was the same game being played in Leni's violent and shelterless street. All his training had encouraged an eye for analogies-in equations, in theoretical models-yet he persisted in thinking the VfR was special, preserved against the time. And he also knew at first hand what happens to dreams with no money to support them. So, presently, Pokier found that by refusing to take sides, he'd become Weissmann's best ally. The major's eyes always changed when he looked at Pokier: his slightly prissy face to relax into what Pokier had noticed, in random mirrors and display windows, on his own face when he was with Leni. The blank look of one who is taking another for granted. Weissmann was as sure of Pokler's role as Polder was of Leni's. But Leni left at last. Pokier might not have had the will.

He thought of himself as a practical man. At the rocket field they talked continents, encirclements-seeing years before the General

Staff the need for a weapon to break ententes, to leap like a chess knight over Panzers, infantry, even the Luftwaffe. Plutocratic nations to the west, communists to the east. Spaces, models, game-strategies. Not much passion or ideology. Practical men. While the military wallowed in victories not yet won, the rocket engineers had to think non-fanatically, about German reverses, German defeat-the attrition of the Luftwaffe and its decline in power, the withdrawals of fronts, the need for weapons with longer ranges… But others had the money, others gave the orders-trying to superimpose their lusts and bickerings on something that had its own vitality, on a
technologique
they'd never begin to understand. As long as the Rocket was in research and development, there was no need for them to believe in it. Later, as the A4 was going operational, as they found themselves with a real rocket-in-being, the struggles for power would begin in earnest. Pokier could see that. They were athletic, brainless men without vision, without imagination. But they had power, and it was hard for him not to think of them as superior, even while holding them in a certain contempt.

But Leni was wrong: no one was using him. Pokier was an extension of the Rocket, long before it was ever built. She'd seen to that. When she left him, he fell apart. Pieces spilled into the Hinterhof, down the drains, away in the wind. He couldn't even go to the movies. Only rarely did he go out after work and try to fish lumps of coal from the Spree. He drank beer and sat in the cold room, autumn light reaching him after impoverishments and fadings, from gray clouds, off courtyard walls and drainpipes, through grease-darkened curtains, bled of all hope by the time it reached where he sat shivering and crying. He cried every day, some hour of the day, for a month, till a sinus got infected. He went to bed and sweated the fever out. Then he moved to Kummersdorf, outside Berlin, to help his friend Mondaugen at the rocket field.

Temperatures, velocities, pressures, fin and body configurations, stabilities and turbulences began to slip in, to replace what Leni had run away from. There were pine and fir forests out the windows in the morning, instead of a sorrowful city courtyard. Was he giving up the world, entering a monastic order?