GRAVITY RAINBOW (78 page)

Gustav tends to sneer, but Saure really turns out to be an adept at the difficult art of papyromancy, the ability to prophesy through contemplating the way people roll reefers-the shape, the licking pattern, the wrinkles and folds or absence thereof in the paper. "You will soon be in love," sez Saure, "see, this line here."

"It's long, isn't it? Does that mean-"

"Length is usually intensity. Not time."

"Short but sweet," Magda sighs. "Fabelhaft, was?" Trudi comes over to hug her. They are a Mutt and Jeif routine, Trudi in heels is a foot or so taller. They know how it looks, and travel around in the city together whenever they can, by way of intervening, if only for a minute, in people's minds.

"How do you like this shit?" sez Saure.

"Hubsch,
" allows Gustav. "A trifle
stahlig,
and perhaps the infinitesimal hint of a
Bodengeschmack
behind its
Korper,
which is admittedly
suffig."

"I would rather have said
spritztg,"
Saure disagrees, if that indeed is what it is. "Generally more
bukettreich
than last year's harvests, wouldn't you say?"

"Oh, for an Haut Atlas herbage it does have its
Art.
Certainly it can be described as
kernig,
even-as can often be said of that
sauber
quality prevailing in the Oued Nfis region-authentically
pikant."

"Actually I would tend to suspect an origin somewhere along the southern slope of Jebel Sarho," Saure sez-"note the
Spiel,
rather
glatt
and
blumig,
even the suggestion of a
Fulle
in its
wurzig
audacity-"

"No no no,
Fulle
is overstating it, the El Abid Emerald we had last month had
Fulle.
But this is obviously more
zart
than that."

The truth is they are both so blitzed that neither one knows what he's talking about, which is just as well, for at this point comes a godawful hammering at the door and a lot of achtungs from the other

side. Slothrop screams and heads for the window, out onto the roof and over, scrambling down a galvanized pipe to the next streetward courtyard. Back in Saure's room the heat come busting in. Berlin police supported by American MPs in an adviser status.

"You will show me your papers!" hollers the leader of the raid.

Saure smiles and holds up a pack of Zig-Zags, just in from Paris.

Twenty minutes later, somewhere in the American sector, Slothrop is ambling past a cabaret where blank-faced snowdrops are lounging in front and inside, and a radio or phonograph somewhere is playing an Irving Berlin medley. Slothrop goes hunching paranoiacally along the street, here's "God Bless America," a-and "This Is the Army, Mister Jones," and they are his country's versions of the Horst Wessel Song, although it is Gustav back at the Jacobistrasse who raves (nobody gonna pull an Anton Webern on him) to a blinking American lieutenant-colonel, "A parabola! A trap! You were never immune over there from the simple-minded German symphonic arc, tonic to dominant, back again to tonic. Grandeur! Gesellschaft!"

"Teutonic?" sez the colonel. "Dominant? The war's over, fella. What kind of talk is that?"

In from the soggy fields of the Mark comes a cold drizzle blowing. Russian cavalry are crossing the Kurfurstendamm, driving a herd of cows to slaughter lowing and muddy, eyelashes beaded with the fine rain. In the Soviet sector, girls with rifles slung across bouncing wool-covered breasts are waving the traffic around with bright orange pennants. Bulldozers growling, trucks straining push over teetering walls, and little kids cheer at each wet crash. Silver tea-services ring on fronded terraces where water drips, waiters in lean black coats wheel and tilt their heads. An open victoria splashes by, two Russian officers covered with medals sitting with their ladies in silk frocks and great floppy-brimmed hats trailing ribbons in the breeze. On the river, ducks with green heads glittering drift among shock-waves of one another's passage. Woodsmoke scatters out the dented pipe of Mar-gherita's house. Inside the door, the first thing Slothrop sees is a high-heeled shoe come flying straight at his head. He twitches out of the way in time. Margherita is kneeling on the bed, breathing rapidly, staring. "You left me."

"Had some chores." He rummages in covered cans on a shelf over the stove, finds dried clover tops for tea.

"But you left me alone." Her hair blows in a gray-black cloud around her face. She is prey to interior winds he never felt.

"Only for a little while. Do you want tea?" Starting outside with an empty can.

"What's a little while? For God's sake, haven't you been alone?"

"Sure." Dipping up water from a rain barrel outside the door. She lies, shaking, her face working, helpless.

Slothrop puts the can on to boil. "You were sleeping pretty soundly. Isn't it safe here? Is that what you mean?"

"Safe." A terrible laughter. He wishes she wouldn't. The water has begun to creak. "Do you know what they were doing to me? What they were piling on my breasts? The
names they were calling me?"

"Who, Greta?"

"When you left I woke up. I called to you but you didn't come back. When they were sure you'd left, they came in…"

"Why didn't you try to stay awake?"

"/
was awake!"
Sunlight, switched on, breaks through. At the harsh lighting she turns her face away.

While he makes tea, she sits on the bed, cursing him in German and Italian, in a voice always just at the edge of falling apart. He hands her a cup. She knocks it out of his hand.

"Look, take it easy, all right?" He sits down next to her and blows on his tea. The cup she refused stays on its side where it is. The dark stain steams into the wood planks. Faraway clover rises, disperses: a ghost… After a while she takes his hand.

"I'm sorry I left you alone."

She starts to cry.

And cries all day. Slothrop falls asleep, keeps drifting up to her sobs, and to feel her, always in touch, some part of her, some part of him… In a dream from this time, his father has come to find him. Slothrop has been wandering at sundown by the Mungahannock, near a rotting old paper mill, abandoned back in the nineties. A heron rises in silhouette against luminous and dying orange. "Son," a falling tower of words tumbling over and over themselves, "the president died three months ago." Slothrop stands and curses him. "Why didn't you tell me? Pop, I loved him. You only wanted to sell me to the IG. You sold me out." The old man's eyes fill with tears. "Oh son…" trying to take his hand. But the sky is dark, the heron gone, the empty skeleton of the mill and the dark increase of the river saying
it is time to go…
then his father is gone too, no time to say good-by, though his face stays, Broderick who sold him out, long after waking, and the sadness Slothrop brought into it, fool loudmouth kid. Margherita is lean-

ing over him, brushing tears from his face with the tips of her nails. The nails are very sharp, and pause often when they approach his eyes.

"I'm afraid," she whispers. "Everything. My face in the mirror- when I was a child, they said not to look in the mirror too often or I'd see the Devil behind the glass… and…" glancing back at the white-flowered mirror behind them, "we have to cover it, please, can't we cover it… that's where they…
especially at night
-"

"Easy." He moves to put as much of their bodies in touch as he can. He holds her. The tremor is strong, and maybe uncalmable: after a while Slothrop has started to tremble too, in phase. "Please, take it easy." Whatever possesses her needs touch, to drink touch insatiably.

The depth of this frightens him. He feels responsible for her safety, and often trapped. At first they stay together days at a clip, till he has to go out dealing, or foraging. He doesn't sleep much. He finds himself by reflex telling lies-"It's all right," "There's nothing to worry about." Sometimes he manages to be alone out by the river, fishing with a piece of string and one of her hairpins. They manage a fish a day, on lucky days two. They are goofy fish, anything swimming in Berlin waters these days has to be everybody's last choice. When Greta cries in her sleep for longer than he can listen to, he has to wake her. They will try to talk, or to screw, though he's less and less often in the mood, and that makes her worse because she feels he's rejecting her, which indeed he is. Whippings seem to comfort her, and they let him off the hook. Sometimes he's too tired even for that. She keeps provoking him. One night he puts in front of her a broiled fish, an unwholesome yellow loach with brain damage. She can't eat it, she'll get sick.

"You have to eat."

She moves her head aside, first one side, then the other.

"Oh boy, what a sad story, listen cunt, you ain't the only one's ever suffered-you been out
there
lately?"

"Of course. I keep forgetting
how you
must have suffered."

"Shit
you Germans are crazy, you
all
think the world's against you."

"I'm not German," just remembering, "I'm a Lombard."

"Close enough, sweetheart."

With a hiss, nostrils wide, she grabs the little table and wrenches it away, plates, silverware, fish flying
splot
against the wall where it commences to drip down toward the woodwork, still, even in death, getting all the lousy breaks. They sit in their two straight chairs, a meter and a half of perilously empty space between. It is the warm, romantic summer of'45, and surrender or not, the culture of death still prevails: what Grandmother called "a crime of passion" has become, in the absence of much passion over anything today, the technique of preference in resolving interpersonal disputes.

"Clean it up."

She flicks a pale bitten thumbnail from one of her top teeth and laughs, that delightful Erdmann laugh. Slothrop, shaking, is about to say, "You don't know how close you are-" Then, by chance, he happens to get a look at her face. Of course she knows how close she is. "O.K., O.K." He throws her underwear around the room till he finds the black girdle he's looking for. The metal clips of the suspenders raise dark little curved welts over fading earlier bruises on her buttocks and thighs. He has to draw blood before she cleans up the fish. When she's finished she kneels and kisses his boots. Not exactly the scenario she wanted but close enough, sweetheart.

Getting closer every day, and he's afraid. He's never seen anything like it. When he goes out to the city she begs to be tied with her stockings, star-fashion, to the bedposts. Sometimes she'll leave the house, and stay away for days, coming home with stories about Negro MPs beating her with nightsticks, screwing her in the asshole, how much she loved it, hoping to trigger some race/sex reaction, something a little bizarre, a little different…

Whatever it is with her, he's catching it. Out in the ruins he sees darkness now at the edges of all the broken shapes,
showing from behind them.
Light nests in Margherita's hair like black doves. He will look at his chalk hands, and along the borders of each finger, darkness will gutter and leap. In the sky over the Alexanderplatz he has seen Oberst Enzian's KEZVH mandala, and the face of Tchitcherine on more than one random snowdrop. Across the facade of the Titania-palast, in red neon through a mist one night he saw DIE, SLOTHROP. One Sunday out at Wannsee, an armada of sails all bent the same way, patiently, dreamlike into the wind, passing forever against the other shore, a crowd of little kids in soldier hats folded from old army maps plotted to drown and sacrifice him. He escaped only by murmuring
Hauptstufe
three times.

The house by the river is an enclosure that acts as a spring-suspension for the day and the weather, allowing only mild cycling of light and heat, down into evening, up again into morning to the midday peak but all damped to a gentle sway from the earthquake of the day outside.

When Greta hears shots out in the increasingly distant streets, she will think of the sound stages of her early career, and will take the ex-

plosions as cue calls for the titanic sets of her dreams to be smoothly clogged with a thousand extras: meek, herded by rifle shots, ascending and descending, arranged into patterns that will suit the Director's ideas of the picturesque-a river of faces, made up yellow and white-lipped for the limitations of the film stock of the time, sweating yellow migrations taken over and over again, fleeing nothing, escaping nowhere…

It's early morning now. Slothrop's breath is white on the air. He is just up from a dream. Part I of a poem, with woodcuts accompanying the text-a woman is attending a dog show which is also, in some way, a stud service. She has brought her Pekingese, a female with a sicken-ingly cute name, Mimsy or Goo-Goo or something, here to be serviced. She is passing the time in a garden setting, with some other middle-class ladies like herself, when from some enclosure nearby she hears the sound of her bitch, coming. The sound goes on and on for much longer than seems appropriate, and she suddenly realizes that the sound is her own voice, this interminable cry of dog-pleasure. The others, politely, are pretending not to notice. She feels shame, but is helpless, driven now by a need to go out and find other animal species to fuck. She sucks the penis of a multicolored mongrel who has tried to mount her in the street. Out in a barren field near a barbed-wire fence, winter fires across the clouds, a tall horse compels her to kneel, passively, and kiss his hooves. Cats and minks, hyenas and rabbits, fuck her inside automobiles, lost at night in the forests, out beside a water-hole in the desert.

As Part II begins, she has discovered she's pregnant. Her husband, a dumb, easygoing screen door salesman, makes an agreement with her: her own promise is never stated, but in return, nine months from now, he will take her where she wants to go. So it is that close to the end of her term he is out on the river, an American river, in a rowboat, hauling on the oars, carrying her on a journey. The key color in this section is violet.