Gravity's Rainbow (17 page)

“Mexico.” Standing very still, seaward half of his face seeming to have aged fifty
years in the instant, watching the tide three full times leave behind its sterile
film of ice. “Help me.”

I can’t help anyone, Roger thinks. Why is he so tempted? It’s dangerous and perverse.
He does want to help, he feels the same unnatural fear of Slothrop that Jessica does.
What about the girls?
It may be his loneliness in Psi Section, in a persuasion he can’t in his heart share,
nor quite abandon . . . their faith, even smileless Gloaming’s, that there must be
more, beyond the senses, beyond death, beyond the Probabilities that are all Roger
has to believe in. . . .
Oh Jessie
, his face against her bare, sleeping, intricately boned and tendoned back,
I’m out of my depth in this. . . .

Halfway between the water and the coarse sea-grass, a long stretch of pipe and barbed
wire rings in the wind. The black latticework is propped up by longer slanting braces,
lances pointing out to sea. An abandoned and mathematical look: stripped to the force-vectors
holding it where it is, doubled up in places one row behind another, moving as Pointsman
and Mexico begin to move again, backward in thick moiré, repeated uprights in parallax
against repeated diagonals, and the snarls of wire below interfering more at random.
Far away, where it curves into the haze, the openwork wall goes gray. After last night’s
snowfall, each line of the black scrawl was etched in white. But today wind and sand
have blown the dark iron bare again, salted, revealing, in places, brief streaks of
rust . . . in others, ice and sunlight turn the construction to electric-white lines
of energy.

Farther up, past buried land mines and antitank posts of corroding concrete, up in
a pillbox covered with netting and sod, halfway up the cliff, young Dr. Bleagh and
his nurse Ivy are relaxing after a difficult lobotomy. His scrubbed and routinized
fingers dart in beneath her suspender straps, pull outward, release in a sudden great
smack and ho-ho-ho from Bleagh as she jumps and laughs too, trying not too hard to
squirm away. They lie on a bed of faded old nautical charts, maintenance manuals,
burst sandbags and spilled sand, burned match-sticks and unraveled cork-tips from
cigarettes long decomposed that comforted through the nights of ’41 and the sudden
rush of heart at any glimpse of a light at sea. “You’re mad,” she whispers. “I’m randy,”
he smiles, and snaps her garter again, boy-and-slingshot.

In the uplands a line of cylindrical blocks to cripple the silent King Tigers that
now will never roll the land chains away like so many white muffins across the dun
pasture, among the low patches of snow and the pale lime outcrops. Out on a little
pond the black man is down from London, ice-skating, improbable as a Zouave, riding
his blades tall, dignified, as if born to them and ice not desert. Small townschildren
scatter before him, close enough to have their cheeks stung by curved wakes of powdered
ice whenever he turns. Until he smile they dare not speak, only follow, tag, flirt,
wanting the smile, fearing it, wanting it. . . . He has a magic face, a face they
know. From the shore, Myron Grunton and Edwin Treacle, both chain-smoking, brooding
over Operation Black Wing and the credibility of the Schwarzkommando, watch their
magic Negro, their prototype, neither caring to risk the ice, loping Fen or any style,
in front of these children.

The winter’s in suspense—all the sky a bleak, luminous gel. Down on the beach, Pointsman
fishes a roll of toilet paper, each sheet stenciled P
ROPERTY
of H.M. G
OVERNMENT
, from a pocket to blow his nose. Roger now and then pushes hair back under his cap.
Neither speaks. So, the two of them: trudging, hands in and out of pockets, their
figures dwindling, fawn and gray and a lick of scarlet, very sharp-edged, their footprints
behind them a long freezing progress of exhausted stars, the overcast reflecting from
the glazed beach nearly white. . . . We have lost them. No one listened to those early
conversations—not even an idle snapshot survives. They walked till that winter hid
them and it seemed the cruel Channel itself would freeze over, and no one, none of
us, could ever completely find them again. Their footprints filled with ice, and a
little later were taken out to sea.

• • • • • • •

In silence, hidden from her, the camera follows as she moves deliberately nowhere
longlegged about the rooms, an adolescent wideness and hunching to the shoulders,
her hair not bluntly Dutch at all, but secured in a modish upsweep with an old, tarnished
silver crown, yesterday’s new perm leaving her very blonde hair frozen on top in a
hundred vortices, shining through the dark filigree. Widest lens-opening this afternoon,
extra tungsten light laid on, this rainiest day in recent memory, rocket explosions
far away to south and east now and then visiting the maisonette, rattling not the
streaming windows but only the doors, in slow three-and fourfold shudderings, like
poor spirits, desperate for company, asking to be let in, only a moment, a touch . . .

She’s alone in the house, except for the secret cameraman and Osbie Feel, who’s out
in the kitchen, doing something mysterious with a harvest of mushrooms from up on
the roof. They have shiny red-orange cups with raised patches of whitish-gray veil.
Now and then the geometry of her restlessness brings her to glance in a doorway at
his boyish fussing with the
Amanita muscaria
(for it is this peculiar relative of the poisonous Destroying Angel that claims Osbie’s
attention, or what passes with him for attention)—flash him a smile she means to be
friendly but which to Osbie seems terribly worldly, sophisticated, wicked. She being
the first Dutch girl he’s ever spoken to, he’s surprised at finding high heels instead
of wooden shoes, struck in fact a bit witless by her so groomed and (he imagines)
Continental style, the intellect behind the fair-lashed eyes or dark glasses she affects
out on the street, behind the traces of baby fat, the dimples countersunk each side
of her mouth. (In close-up her skin, though nearly perfect, is seen to be lightly
powdered and rouged, the eyelashes a touch darkened, brows reshaped a matter of two
or three empty follicles. . . . )

What
can
young Osbie possibly have in mind? He is carefully scraping out the inside of each
persimmon-colored mushroom cup and shredding the rest. Dispossessed elves run around
up on the roof, gibbering. He now has a growing heap of orange-gray fungus, which
he proceeds to add in fistfuls to a pot of steaming water. A previous batch also simmers
atop the stove, reduced to a thick gruel covered with yellow scum, which Osbie now
removes and purees further in Pirate’s blending machine. Then he spreads the fungoid
mush over a tin cookie sheet. He opens the oven, removes with asbestos potholders
another sheet covered with dark caked dust, and replaces it with the one he has just
prepared. With a mortar and pestle he pulverizes the substance and dumps it into an
old Huntley & Palmers biscuit tin, reserving only enough to roll deftly up in a Rizla
liquorice cigarette paper, light, and inhale the smoke of.

But she happens to’ve glanced in just at the instant Osbie opened the echoing oven.
The camera records no change in her face, but why does she stand now so immobile at
the door? as if the frame were to be stopped and prolonged into just such a lengthwise
moment of gold fresh and tarnished, innocence microscopically masked, her elbow slightly
bent, hand resting against the wall, fingers fanned on the pale orange paper as if
she touches her own skin, a pensive touch. . . . Outside, the long rain in silicon
and freezing descent smacks, desolate, slowly corrosive against the mediaeval windows,
curtaining like smoke the river’s far shore. This city, in all its bomb-pierced miles:
this inexhaustibly knotted victim . . . skin of glistening roofslates, sooted brick
flooded high about each window dark or lit, each of a million openings vulnerable
to the gloom of this winter day. The rain washes, drenches, fills the gutters singing,
the city receives it, lifting, in a perpetual shrug. . . . With a squeak and metal
slam the oven is closed again, but for Katje it will never close. She has posed before
the mirrors too often today, knows her hair and make-up are perfect, admires the frock
they have brought her from Harvey Nicholls, a sheer crepe that flows in from padded
shoulders down to a deep point between her breasts, a rich cocoa shade known as “nigger”
in this country, yards and yards of this delicious silk spun and thrown, tied loosely
at the waist, soft pleats falling to her knees. The cameraman is pleased at the unexpected
effect of so much flowing crepe, particularly when Katje passes before a window and
the rainlight coming through changes it for a few brief unshutterings to murky glass,
charcoal-saturated, antique and weather-worn, frock, face, hair, hands, slender calves
all gone to glass and glazing, for the celluloid instant poised—the translucent guardian
of a rainfall shaken through all day by rocket blasts near and far, downward, dark
and ruinous behind her the ground which, for the frames’ passage, defines her.

At the images she sees in the mirror Katje also feels a cameraman’s pleasure, but
knows what he cannot: that inside herself, enclosed in the
soignée
surface of dear fabric and dead cells, she is corruption and ashes, she belongs in
a way none of them can guess cruelly to the Oven . . . to
Der Kinderofen. .
 . remembering now his teeth, long, terrible, veined with bright brown rot as he speaks
these words, the yellow teeth of Captain Blicero, the network of stained cracks, and
back in his nightbreath, in the dark oven of himself, always the coiled whispers of
decay. . . . She recalls his teeth before any other feature, teeth were to benefit
most directly from the Oven: from what is planned for her, and for Gottfried. He never
uttered it clearly as threat, nor ever addressed to either of them directly, but rather
across her trained satin thighs to the evening’s guests, or down the length of Gottfried’s
docile spine (“the Rome-Berlin Axis” he called it the night the Italian came and they
were all on the round bed, Captain Blicero plugged into Gottfried’s upended asshole
and the Italian at the same time into his pretty mouth) Katje only passive, bound
and gagged and false-eyelashed, serving tonight as human pillow for the Italian’s
whitening perfumed curls (roses and fat just at the edge of turning rancid) . . .
each utterance a closed flower, capable of exfoliation and infinite revealing (she
thinks of a mathematical function that will expand for her bloom-like into a power
series
with no general term
, endlessly, darkly, though never completely by surprise) . . . his phrase
Padre Ignacio
unfolding into Spanish inquisitor, black robes, brown arching nose, the suffocating
smell of incense + confessor/executioner + Katje and Gottfried both kneeling, side
by side in dark confessional + children out of old Märchen kneeling, knees cold and
aching, before the Oven, whispering to it secrets they can tell no one else + Captain
Blicero’s witch-paranoia, suspecting them both, Katje despite her NSB credentials
+ the Oven as listener/avenger + Katje kneeling before Blicero in highest drag, black
velvet and Cuban heels, his penis squashed invisible under a flesh-colored leather
jockstrap, over which he wears a false cunt and merkin of sable both handcrafted in
Berlin by the notorious Mme. Ophir, the mock labia and bright purple clitoris molded
of—Madame had been abject, pleading shortages—synthetic rubber and Mipolam, the new
polyvinyl chloride . . . tiny blades of stainless steel bristle from lifelike pink
humidity, hundreds of them, against which Katje, kneeling, is obliged to cut her lips
and tongue, and then kiss blood-abstracts across the golden ungessoed back of her
“brother” Gottfried. Brother in play, in slavery . . . she had never seen him before
coming to the requisitioned house near the firing sites, hidden in the woods and parkland
of this settled tongue of small farms and estates that reaches eastward from the royal
city, between two expanses of polder, toward Wassenaar—yet his face, for that first
time, seen in autumn sunlight through the great west window of the drawing-room, kneeling
naked except for a studded dog collar, masturbating metronomic, at shouted commands
from Captain Blicero, all his fair skin stained by afternoon a luminous synthetic
orange she has never before associated with skin, his penis a blood monolith, its
thickly gasping mouth audible in the carpeted silence, his face raised to none of
them, but as if to something on the ceiling, or in the sky which ceilings may in his
vision stand for, eyes-down as he seems most of the time to be—his face, ascending,
tightening, coming, is so close to what she’s been seeing all her life in mirrors,
her own studied mannequin’s stare, that she catches her breath, feels for a moment
the speeded percussion of her heart, before turning just such a stare toward Blicero.
He is delighted. “Perhaps,” he tells her, “I will cut your hair.” He smiles at Gottfried.
“Perhaps I’ll have him grow his.” The humiliation would be good for the boy each morning
at quarters, ranked with his battery near Schußstelle 3, where horses thundered once
before the frantic, the losing railbirds of the old peace—failing inspections time
after time yet protected by his Captain from Army discipline. Instead, between firings,
day or night, short of sleep, odd hours, suffering the Captain’s own “Hexeszüchtigung.”
But did Blicero also cut her hair? She can’t remember now. She knows she wore Gottfried’s
uniforms once or twice (pushing her hair, yes, up under his forage cap), looking easily
his double, spending these nights “in the cage,” as Blicero has set the rules, while
Gottfried must wear her silk stockings, her lace apron and cap, all her satin and
her ribboned organdy. But afterward he must always go back again to the cage. That’s
how it is. Their Captain allows no doubt as to which, brother or sister, really is
maidservant, and which fattening goose.