GRAVITY RAINBOW (77 page)

Saure has included a map showing how to get to where he is. It's clear back in the British sector. Groaning, Slothrop pushes on back out in the mud and early morning. Around the Brandenburg Gate, a slight drizzle starts up again. Chunks of the Gate still lie around in the street-leaning shell-spalled up in the rainy sky, its silence is colossal, haggard as he pads by flanking it, the Chariot gleaming like coal, driven and still, it is the 30th century and swashbuckling Rocketman has just landed here to tour the ruins, the high-desert traces of an ancient European order…

The Jacobistrasse and most of its quarter, slums, survived the street-fighting intact, along with its interior darkness, a masonry of shadows that will persist whether the sun is up or down. Number 12 is an entire block of tenements dating from before the Inflation, five or six stories and a mansarde, five or six Hinterhofe nested one inside the

other-boxes of a practical joker's gift, nothing in the center but a last hollow courtyard smelling of the same cooking and garbage and piss decades old. Ha, ha!

Slothrop moseys toward the first archway. Streetlight throws his caped shadow forward into a succession of these arches, each labeled with a faded paint name, Erster-Hof, Zweiter-Hof, Dritter-Hof u.s.w., shaped like the entrance to the Mittelwerke, parabolic, but more like an open mouth and gullet, joints of cartilage receding waiting, waiting to swallow… above the mouth two squared eyes, organdy whites, irises pitch black, stare him down… it laughs as it has for years without stopping, a blubbery and percussive laugh, like heavy china rolling or bumping under the water in the sink. A brainless giggle, just big old geometric me, nothin' t' be nervous about, c'mon in… But the pain, the twenty, twentyfive years of pain paralyzed back in that long throat… old outcast, passive, addicted to survival now, waiting the years out, waiting for vulnerable saps like Slothrop here to expose itself to, laughing and crying and all in silence… paint peels from the Face, burned, diseased, long time dying and how can Slothrop just walk down into such a schizoid throat? Why, because it is what the guardian and potent Studio wants from him, naturlich: Slothrop is the character juvenile tonight: what's kept him moving the whole night, him and the others, the solitary Berliners who come out only in these evacuated hours, belonging and going noplace, is Their unexplained need to keep some marginal population in these wan and preterite places, certainly for economic though, who knows, maybe emotional reasons too…

Saure's on the move too, though inside, prowling his dreams. It looks like one big room, dark, full of tobacco and kif smoke, crumbled ridges of plaster where walls have been knocked out, straw pallets all over the floor, a couple on one sharing a late, quiet cigarette, somebody snoring on another… glossy Bosendorfer Imperial concert grand piano over which Trudi, wearing only an army shirt, leans, a desperate muse, bare legs long and stretching,
"Please
come to bed Gustav, it'll be light soon." The only answer is a peevish strumming among the lower strings. Saure is on his side, quite still, a shrunken child, face long worked at by leaps from second-story windows, "first rubdowns" under gloved and womanish sergeants' fists in the precinct stations, golden light in the afternoons over the racetrack at Karls-horst, black light from the pavements of boulevards at night finely wrinkled like leather stretched over stone, white light from satin dresses, glasses stacked shining in front of bar mirrors, sans-serif Us at

the entrances to underground stations pointing in smooth magnetism at the sky to bring down steel angels of exaltation, of languid surrender-a face that in sleep is awesomely old, abandoned to its city's history…

His eyes open-for an instant Slothrop is only shadowed green folds, highlighted helmet, light-values still to be put together. Then comes the sweet nodding smile, everything's O.K., ja, howdy Rocket-man, was ist los? Though the unregenerate old doper is not quite kindly enough to keep from opening the ditty bag right away and peering in, eyes like two pissholes in a snowbank, to see what he has.

"I thought you'd be in the slam or something."

Out with a little Moroccan pipe and Saure sets to flattening a fat crumb of that hashish, humming the popular rumba

A little something from Moroc-co, With just a lit-tle bit of sock-o,

"Oh. Well, Springer blew the whistle on our counterfeiting operation. Kind of a little temporary hitch, you understand."

"I don't. You're supposed to be ace buddies."

"Not nearly. And he moves in higher orbits." It is something very complicated having to do with American yellow-seal scrip being discontinued in the Mediterranean theatre, with the reluctance of Allied forces here to accept Reichsmarks. Springer has a balance-of-payments problem too, and he's been speculating heavily in Sterling, and…

"But," sez Slothrop, "but, uh, where's my million marks, then, Emu?"

Saure sucks yellow flame flowing over the edge of the bowl. "It is gone where the woodbine twineth." Exactly what Jubilee Jim Fisk told the Congressional committee investigating his and Jay Gould's scheme to corner gold in 1869. The words are a reminder of Berkshire. With nothing more than that to go on, it occurs to Slothrop that Saure can't possibly be on the Bad Guys' side. Whoever They are, Their game has been to extinguish, not remind.

"Well, I can sell by the ounce from what I have," Slothrop reckons. "For occupation scrip. That's stable, isn't it?"

"You aren't angry. You really aren't."

"Rocketman is above all that shit, Emil."

"I have a surprise for you. I can get you the Schwarzgerat you asked about."

"You?"

"Springer. I asked him for you."

"Quit fooling. Really? Jeepers, that's so swell of you! How can I-"

"Ten thousand pounds sterling."

Slothrop loses a whole lungful of smoke. "Thanks Emil…" He tells Saure about the run-in with Tchitcherine, and also about how he saw that Mickey Rooney.

"Rocketman! Spaceman! Welcome to our virgin planet. We only want to be left in some kind of peace here, O.K.? If you kill us, don't eat us. If you eat, don't digest. Let us come out the other end again, like diamonds in the shit of smugglers…"

"Look"-remembering now the tip that that Geli gave him long ago in Nordhausen-"did your pal Springer mention he was hanging out in Swinemunde these days, anyplace like that?"

"Only the price of your instrument, Rak. Half the money in front. He said it would cost him at least that much to track it down."

"So he doesn't know where it is. Shit, he could have us all on the hook, bidding us up, hoping somebody's fool enough to front him some dough."

"Usually he delivers. You didn't have any trouble, did you, with that pass he forged?"

"Yaaahhh-" Oh. Oh, wow, aha, yes been meaning to ask you about this little Max Schlepzig item here- "Now then." But meantime Trudi has abandoned Gustav in the piano and comes over now to sit and rub her cheeks against the nap of Slothrop's trousers, dear naked legs whispering together, hair spilling, shirt half unbuttoned, and Saure has at some point rolled over and gone groaning back into sleep. Trudi and Slothrop retire to a mattress well away from the Bosendorfer. Slothrop settles back sighing, takes his helmet off and lets big sweet and saftig Trudi have her way with him. His joints are aching with rain and city wandering, he's half blitzed, Trudi is kissing him into an amazing comfort, it's an open house here, no favored senses or organs, all are equally at play… for possibly the first time in his life Slothrop does not feel obliged to have a hardon, which is just as well, because it does not seem to be happening with his penis so much as with… oh mercy, this is embarrassing but… well his
nose
actually seems to be erecting, the mucus beginning to flow yes a nasal hardon here and Trudi has certainly noticed all right, how could she help but… as she slides her lips over the throbbing snoot and sends a yard of torrid tongue up one of his nostrils… he can feel each pink taste-bud as she penetrates even farther, pulling aside the vestibule walls and nose-hair now to accommodate her head, then shoulders and

… well she's halfway in, might as well-pulling up her knees, crawling using the hair for hand and footholds she is able to stand at last inside the great red hall which is quite pleasantly lit, no walls or ceiling she can really discern but rather a fading to seashell and springtime grades of pink in all directions…

They fall asleep in the roomful of snoring, with low-pitched twangs out of the piano, and the rain's million-legged scuttle in the courtyards outside. When Slothrop wakes up it's at the height of the Evil Hour, Trudi is in some other room with Gustav rattling coffee cups, a tortoiseshell cat chases flies by the dirty window. Back beside the Spree, the White Woman is waiting for Slothrop. He isn't especially disposed to leave. Trudi and Gustav come in with coffee and half a reefer, and everybody sits around gabbing.

Gustav is a composer. For months he has been carrying on a raging debate with Saure over who is better, Beethoven or Rossini. Saure is for Rossini. "I'm not so much for Beethoven qua Beethoven," Gustav argues, "but as he represents the German dialectic, the incorporation of more and more notes into the scale, culminating with dodecaphonic democracy, where all notes get an equal hearing. Beethoven was one of the architects of musical freedom-he submitted to the demands of history, despite his deafness. While Rossini was retiring at the age of 36, womanizing and getting fat, Beethoven was living a life filled with tragedy and grandeur."

"So?" is Saure's customary answer to that one. "Which would you rather do? The point is," cutting off Gustav's usually indignant scream, "a person feels
good
listening to Rossini. All you feel like listening to Beethoven is going out and invading Poland. Ode to Joy indeed. The man didn't even have a sense of humor. I tell you," shaking his skinny old fist, "there is more of the Sublime in the snare-drum part to
La Gazza Ladra
than in the whole Ninth Symphony. With Rossini, the whole point is that lovers always get together, isolation is overcome, and like it or not that is the one great centripetal movement of the World. Through the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power,
love occurs.
All the shit is transmuted to gold. The walls are breached, the balconies are scaled-listen!" It was a night in early May, and the final bombardment of Berlin was in progress. Saure had to shout his head off. "The Italian girl is in Algiers, the Barber's in the crockery, the magpie's stealing everything in sight! The World is rushing together…"

This rainy morning, in the quiet, it seems that Gustav's German Dialectic has come to its end. He has just had the word, all the way

from Vienna along some musicians' grapevine, that Anton Webern is dead. "Shot in May, by the Americans. Senseless, accidental if you believe in accidents-some mess cook from North Carolina, some late draftee with a.45 he hardly knew how to use, too late for WWII, but not for Webern. The excuse for raiding the house was that Webern's brother was in the black market. Who isn't? Do you know what kind of myth
that's
going to make in a thousand years? The young barbarians coming in to murder the Last European, standing at the far end of what'd been going on since Bach, an expansion of music's polymorphous perversity till all notes were truly equal at last… Where was there to go after Webern? It was the moment of maximum freedom. It all had to come down. Another Gotterdammerung-"

"Young fool," Saure now comes cackling in from out in Berlin, trailing a pillowcase full of flowering tops just in from that North Africa. He's a mess-red-drenched eyes, fatbaby arms completely hairless, fly open and half the buttons gone, white hair and blue shirt both streaked with some green horrible scum. "Fell in a shell-hole. Here, quick, roll up some of this."

"What do you mean,
'young
fool,' " inquires Gustav.

"I mean you and your musical mainstreams," cries Saure. "Is it finally over? Or do we have to start da capo with Carl Orff?"

"I never thought of that," sez Gustav, and for a moment it is clear that Saure has heard about Webern too, and trying in his underhanded way to cheer Gustav up.

"What's wrong with
Rossini?"
hollers Saure, lighting up.
"Eh?"

"Ugh," screams Gustav, "ugh, ugh, Rossini," and they're at it again, "you wretched antique. Why doesn't anybody go to concerts any more? You think it's because of the war?
Oh
no, /'// tell you why, old man-because the halls are full of people like you!
Stuffed
full! Half asleep, nodding and smiling, farting through their dentures, hawking and spitting into paper bags, dreaming up ever more ingenious plots against their children-not just their own, but
other people's
children too! just sitting around, at the concert with all these other snow-topped old rascals, just a nice background murmur of wheezing, belching, intestinal gurgles, scratching, sucking, croaking, an entire opera house crammed full of them right up to standing room, they're doddering in the aisles, hanging off the tops of the highest balconies, and you know what they're
all listening to,
Saure? eh? They're all listening to Rossini! Sitting there drooling away to some medley of predictable little tunes, leaning forward elbows on knees muttering, 'C'mon, c'mon then Rossini, let's get all this pretentious fanfare stuff

out of the way, let's get on to the
real good tunes!'
Behavior as shameless as eating a whole jar of peanut butter at one sitting. On comes the sprightly
Tancredi
tarantella, and they stamp their feet in delight, they pop their teeth and pound their canes-'Ah, ah!
that's
more like it!"

"It's a
great
tune," yells Saure back. "Smoke another one of these and I'll just play it for you here on the Bosendorfer."

To the accompaniment of this tarantella, which really is a good tune, Magda has come in out of the morning rain, and is now rolling reefers for everybody. She hands Saure one to light. He stops playing and peers at it for a long time. Nodding now and then, smiling or frowning.