GRAVITY RAINBOW (84 page)

Morituri saw them often. They would meet and bow, exchange Heil Hitlers, and the Ensign would be permitted a few minutes to practice his German. Except for waiters and barmen, they were the only people he spoke with. Out at the tennis courts, waiting in line at

the pump room under the cool colonnade, at an aquatic
corso,
a battle of flowers, a Venetian fete, Sigmund and Margherita hardly changed, he with his-Morituri thought of it as his American Smile, around the amber stern of his dead pipe… his head like a flesh Christmas ornament… how long ago it was… she with her yellow sunglasses and Garbo hats. The flowers were all that changed about her day to day: morning glory, almond blossom, foxglove. Morituri grew to look forward so to these daily meetings. His wife and daughters clear on the other side of the world, himself exiled in a country that bewildered and oppressed him. He needed the passing zoogoers' civility, the guidebook words. He knows he stared back, every bit as curious. In their European slickness, they all fascinated him: the white-plumed old ladies in the lying-out chairs, the veterans of the Great War like serene hippopotamuses soaking in the steel baths, their effeminate secretaries chattering shrill as monkeys across the Sprudelstrasse, while far down the arches of lindens and chestnuts you could hear the endless roar of carbon dioxide at the bubbling spring, coming out of solution in great shuddering spheres… but Sigmund and Margherita fascinated him most of all. "They seemed as alien here as I was. We each have antennas, don't we, tuned to recognize our own…"

One forenoon, by accident, he met Sigmund, alone, a tweed statue on his walking stick in front of the Inhalatorium, looking as if he'd lost his way, no real place to go, no desire. Without premeditation, then, they began to talk. The time was right. They moved off presently, strolling through the crowds of sick foreigners, while Sigmund told of his troubles with Greta, her Jewish fantasy, her absences. The day before, he had caught her out in a lie. She'd come in very late. Her hands had taken a fine tremor that wouldn't stop. He'd begun to notice things. Her shoes, beaded with drying black mud. A seam in her dress widened, nearly ripped, though she'd been losing weight. But he hadn't the courage to have it out with her.

Morituri, who had been reading the papers, for whom the connection had sprung up like a monster from the tamed effervescences of the Trinkhalle, but who did not have the words, German or otherwise, to tell Sigmund, Morituri, the Beer Ensign, began to follow her then. She never looked back, but she knew he was there. At the weekly ball in the Kursaal he felt, for the first time, a reticence among them all. Margherita, eyes he was accustomed to seeing covered with sunglasses naked now, burning terribly, never took her gaze from him. The Kur-Orchestra played selections from
The Merry Widow
and
Secrets of

Suzanne,
out-of-date music, and yet, when bits of it found Morituri years later in the street, over the radio, they never failed to bring back the unwritten taste of that night, the three of them at the edge of a deepness none could sound… some last reprise of the European thirties he had never known… which are also for him a particular room, a salon in the afternoon: lean girls in gowns, mascara all around their eyes, the men with faces shaven very smooth, film-star polished… not operetta but dance music here, sophisticated, soothing, a bit "modern," dipping elegantly in the up-to-date melodic lines… an upstairs room, with late sunlight coming in, deep carpets, voices saying nothing heavy or complex, smiles informed and condescending. He has awakened that morning in a soft bed, he looks forward to an evening at a cabaret dancing to popular love songs played in just such a mannered and polished style. His afternoon salon with its held tears, its smoke, its careful passion has been a way-station between the comfortable morning and the comfortable night: it was Europe, it was the smoky, citied fear of death, and most perilous it was Margherita's scrutable eyes, that lost encounter in the Kursaal, black eyes among those huddled jewels and nodding old generals, in the roar from the Brodelbrunnen outside, filling the quiet spaces in the music as machinery was soon to fill the sky.

Next evening, Morituri followed her out for the last time. Down the worn paths, under the accustomed trees, past the German goldfish pool that reminded him of home, across the golf links, the day's last white-mustached men struggling up out of traps and hazards, their caddies standing at allegorical attention in the glow of the sunset, the bundled clubs in Fascist silhouette… Twilight came down on Bad Karma that night pallid and violent: the horizon was a Biblical disaster. Greta had dressed all in black, a hat with a veil covering most of her hair, purse slung by a long strap over one shoulder. As choices of a destination narrowed to one, as Morituri ran into snares the night began to lay out for him, prophecy filled him like the river wind: where she had been on her absences, how the children in those headlines had-

They had arrived at the edge of the black mud pool: that underground presence, old as Earth, partly enclosed back at the Spa and a name given to… The offering was to be a boy, lingering after all the others had gone. His hair was cold snow. Morituri could only hear fragments of what they said. The boy wasn't afraid of her at first. He might not have recognized her from his dreams. It would have been

his only hope. But they had made that impossible, his German overseers. Morituri stood by in his uniform, waiting, unbuttoning the jacket so that he could move, though he didn't want to. Certainly they were all repeating this broken act from an earlier time…

Her voice began its rise, and the boy his trembling. "You have been in exile too long." It was a loud clap in the dusk. "Come home, with me," she cried, "back to your people." Now he was trying to break away, but her hand, her gloved hand, her claw had flown out and seized his arm. "Little piece of Jewish shit. Don't try to run away from me."

"No…" but at the very end rising, in a provocative question.

"You know who I am, too. My home is the form of Light," burlesquing it now, in heavy Yiddish dialect, actressy and false, "I wander all the Diaspora looking for strayed children. I am Israel. I am the Shekhinah, queen, daughter, bride, and mother of God. And I will take you back, you fragment of smashed vessel, even if I must pull you by your nasty little circumcised penis-"

"No
…"

So Ensign Morituri committed then the only known act of heroism in his career. It's not even in his folder. She had gathered the boy struggling, one glove busy between his legs. Morituri rushed forward. For a moment the three of them swayed, locked together. Gray Nazi statuary: its name may have been "The Family." None of the Greek stillness: no, they
moved.
Immortality was not the issue. That's what made them different. No survival, beyond the senses' taking of it-no handing-down. Doomed as d'Annunzio's adventure at Fiume, as the Reich itself, as the poor creatures from whom the boy now tore loose and ran off into the evening.

Margherita collapsed by the edge of the great lightless pool. Morituri knelt beside her while she cried. It was terrible. What had brought him there, what had understood and moved in so automatically, fell back now to sleep. His conditioning, his verbal, ranked and uniformed self took over again. He knelt shivering, more afraid than he'd ever been in his life. It was she who led their way back to the Spa.

She and Sigmund left Bad Karma that night. The boy may have been too frightened, the light too faint, Morituri himself may have had strong protectors, for God knows he was visible enough there-but no police came. "It never occurred to me to go to them. In my heart, I knew she had murdered. You may condemn me for it. But I saw what I'd be handing her over to, and it came to the same

thing, in official custody or not, you see." The next day was 1 September. There was no longer any way for children to vanish mysteriously.

The forenoon has gone dark. Rain spits in under the awning. The bowl of porridge has stayed after all untouched in front of Morituri. Slothrop is sweating, staring at the bright remains of an orange. "Listen," it has occurred to his agile brain, "what about Bianca, then? Is she going to be safe with that Greta, do you think?"

Frisking his great mustache, "What do you mean? Are you asking, 'Can she be saved?' "

"Oh, pip, pip, old Jap, come off it-"

"Look, what canj/ow save her from?" His eyes are prying Slothrop away from his comfort. Rain is drumming now on the awnings, spilling in clear lacework from the edges.

"But wait a minute. Oh, shit, that
woman
yesterday, in that Sprudelhof-"

"Yes. Remember Greta also saw you coming up out of the river. Now think of all the folklore among these people about radioactivity-these travelers from spa to spa, season after season. It's grace. It's the holy waters of Lourdes. This mysterious radiation that can cure so much-might it be the
ultimate
cure?"

"Uh…"

"I watched her face as you came aboard. I was with her at the edge of one radioactive night. I know what she saw this time. One of those children-preserved, nourished by the mud, the radium, growing taller and stronger while slowly, viscous and slow, the currents bore him along underground, year by year, until at last, grown to manhood, he came to the river, came up out of the black radiance of herself to find her again, Shekhinah, bride, queen, daughter. And mother. Motherly as sheltering mud and glowing pitchblende-"

Almost directly overhead, thunder suddenly breaks in a blinding egg of sound. Somewhere inside the blast, Slothrop has murmured, "Quit fooling."

"Are you going to risk finding out?"

Who is this, oh
sure
it's a Jap ensign, looking at me like this. But where are Bianca's arms, her defenseless mouth… "Well in a day or two we'll be in Swinemunde, right?" talking to keep from-get up from the table then, you asshole-

"We'll all just keep moving, that's all. In the end it doesn't matter."

"Look, you've got kids, how can you say that? Is that all you want, just to 'keep moving'?"

"I want to see the war over in the Pacific so that I can go home. Since you ask. It's the season of the plum rains now, the Bai-u, when all the plums are ripening. I want only to be with Michiko and our girls, and once I'm there, never to leave Hiroshima again. I think you'd like it there. It's a city on Honshu, on the Inland Sea, very pretty, a perfect size, big enough for city excitement, small enough for the serenity a man needs. But these people are not returning, they are leaving their homes you see-"

But one of the knots securing the rain-heavy awning to its frame has given way, white small-stuff unlacing rapidly, whipping around in the rain. The awning sags, tunneling rainwater at Slothrop and Mori-turi, and they flee below decks.

They get separated in a crowd of newly-risen roisterers. There is hardly a thing now in Slothrop's head but getting to Bianca. At the end of the passageway, across a score of empty faces, he spots Stefania in white cardigan and slacks, beckoning. It takes him five minutes to thread his way to her, by which time he's picked up a brandy Alexander, a party hat, a sign taped to his back urging whoever reads it, in Low Pomeranian, to kick Slothrop, lipstick smudges in three shades of magenta, and a black Italian maduro someone has thoughtfully already lit.

"You may look like the soul of conviviality," Stefania greets him, "but it doesn't fool me. Under that cheerful mask is the face of a Jonah."

"You mean, uh, the, uh-"

"I mean Margherita. She's locked herself in the head. Hysterical. Nobody can bring her out."

"So you're looking at me. How about Thanatz?"

"Thanatz has disappeared, and so has Bianca."

"Oh, shit."

"Margherita thinks you've done away with her."

"Not me." He gives her a quick rundown of Ensign Morituri's tale. Some of her elan, her resilience, go away. She bites a fingernail.

"Yes, there were rumors. Sigmund, before he vanished, leaked just enough to titillate people, but never got specific. That was his style. Listen, Slothrop. Do you think Bianca's in any danger?"

"I'll try to find out." He is interrupted here by a swift kick in the ass.

"Unlucky you," crows a voice behind them. "I'm the only one on board who reads Low Pomeranian."

"Unlucky you," Stefania nods.

"All I wanted was a free ride to Swinemunde."

But like Stefania sez, "There's only one free ride. Meantime, start working off the fare for this one. Go see Margherita."

"You want
me
to-come on."

"We don't want anything to happen."

One of the General Orders aboard this vessel. Nothing shall happen. Well, Slothrop politely sticks the rest of his cigar between Mme. Procalowska's teeth and leaves her puffing on it, fists jammed in her sweater pockets.

Bianca isn't in the engine room. He moves around in pulsing bulb-light, among asbestos-packed masses, burning himself once or twice where insulation's missing, looking into pale recesses, shadows, wondering about his own insulation here. Nothing but machinery, noise. He heads for the ladder. A scrap of red is waiting for him… no, only her frock, with a damp trace of his own semen still at the hem… this loud humidity has kept it there. He crouches, holding the garment, smelling her smell. I'm a child, I know how to hide, and I can hide you. "Bianca," he calls, "Bianca, come out."

Gathered about the door to the head, he finds an assortment of upper-class layabouts and drunks blocking the passageway along with a litter of bottles and glassware, and a seated circle of cocaine habitues, crystal birds flying up into forests of nose hair off the point of a gold and ruby dagger. Slothrop pushes through, leans on the door and calls Margherita's name.

"Go away."

"You don't have to come out. Just let me in."

"I know who you are."

"Please."