Gravity's Rainbow (18 page)

How seriously is she playing? In a conquered country, one’s own occupied country,
it’s better, she believes, to enter into some formal, rationalized version of what,
outside, proceeds without form or decent limit day and night, the summary executions,
the roustings, beatings, subterfuge, paranoia, shame . . . though it is never discussed
among them openly, it would seem Katje, Gottfried, and Captain Blicero have agreed
that this Northern and ancient form, one they all know and are comfortable with—the
strayed children, the wood-wife in the edible house, the captivity, the fattening,
the Oven—shall be their preserving routine, their shelter, against what outside none
of them can bear—the War, the absolute rule of chance, their own pitiable contingency
here, in its midst. . . .

It isn’t safe, even inside, in the house . . . nearly every day a rocket misfires.
Late in October, not far from this estate, one fell back and exploded, killing 12
of the ground crew, breaking windows for hundreds of meters all around, including
the west window of the drawing-room where Katje first saw her golden game-brother.
The official rumor stated that only fuel and oxidizer had gone off. But Captain Blicero,
with a trembling—she must say nihilistic—pleasure, said that the Amatol charge in
the warhead had also exploded, making them as much target as launch site. . . . That
they were all condemned. The house lies west of the Duindigt racecourse, quite the
other direction from London, but no bearing is exempt—often the rockets, crazed, turn
at random, whinnying terribly in the sky, turn about and fall according each to its
madness so unreachable and, it is feared, incurable. When there’s time to, their owners
destroy them, by radio, in mid-convulsion. Between rocket launches there are the English
raids. Spitfires come roaring in low over the dark sea at suppertime, the searchlights
in the city staggering on, the after-hum of sirens hangs in the sky high above the
wet iron seats in the parks, the AA guns chug, searching, and the bombs fall in woodland,
in polder, among flats thought to be billeting rocket troops.

It adds an overtone to the game, which changes the timbre slightly. It is she who,
at some indefinite future moment, must push the Witch into the Oven intended for Gottfried.
So the Captain must allow for the real chance she’s a British spy, or member of the
Dutch underground. Despite all German efforts, intelligence inputs still flow from
Holland back to RAF Bomber Command in a steady torrent, telling of deployments, supply
routes, of which dark-green crumble of trees may hide an A4 emplacement—data changing
hour-to-hour, so mobile are the rockets and their support equipment. But the Spitfires
will settle for a power station, a liquid-oxygen supply, a battery commander’s billet . . .
that’s the intriguing question. Will Katje feel her obligation canceled by someday
calling down English fighter-bombers on this very house, her game’s prison, though
it mean death? Captain Blicero can’t be sure. Up to a point he finds the agony delightful.
Certainly her record with Mussert’s people is faultless, she’s credited with smelling
out at least three crypto-Jewish families, she attends meetings faithfully, she works
at a Luftwaffe resort near Scheveningen, where her superiors find her efficient and
cheerful, no shirker. Nor, like so many of them, using party fanaticism to cover a
lack of ability. Perhaps there’s the only shadow of warning: her commitment is not
emotional. She appears to have reasons for being in the Party. A woman with some background
in mathematics, and with
reasons. . . .
“Want the Change,” Rilke said, “O be inspired by the Flame!” To laurel, to nightingale,
to wind . . .
wanting
it, to be taken, to embrace, to fall toward the flame growing to fill all the senses
and . . . not to love because it was no longer possible to act . . . but to be helplessly
in a condition of love. . . .

But not Katje: no mothlike plunge. He must conclude that secretly she fears the Change,
choosing instead only trivially to revise what matters least, ornament and clothing,
going no further than politic transvestism, not only in Gottfried’s clothing, but
even in traditional masochist uniform, the French-maid outfit so inappropriate to
her tall, longlegged stride, her blondeness, her questing shoulders like wings—she
plays at this only . . . plays at playing.

He can do nothing. Among dying Reich, orders lapsing to paper impotence he needs her
so, needs Gottfried, the straps and whips leathern, real in his hands which still
feel, her cries, the red welts across the boy’s buttocks, their mouths, his penis,
fingers and toes—in all the winter these are sure, can be depended on—he can give
you no reason but in his heart he trusts, perhaps only, by now, in the form, this
out of all Märchen und Sagen, trusts that this charmed house in the forest will be
preserved, that no bombs could ever fall here by accident, only betrayal, only if
Katje really were a spotter for the English and bade them—and he knows she cannot:
that through some magic, below the bone resonance of any words, a British raid is
the one prohibited shape of all possible pushes from behind, into the Oven’s iron
and final summer. It will come, it will, his Destiny . . . not that way—but it will
come. . . .
Und nicht einmal sein Schritt klingt aus dem tonlosen Los. . . .
Of all Rilke’s poetry it’s this Tenth Elegy he most loves, can feel the bitter lager
of Yearning begin to prickle behind eyes and sinuses at remembering any passage of . . .
the newly-dead youth, embracing his Lament, his last link, leaving now even her marginally
human touch forever, climbing all alone, terminally alone, up and up into the mountains
of primal Pain, with the wildly alien constellations overhead. . . .
And not once does his step ring from the soundless Destiny. . . .
It’s he, Blicero, who climbs the mountain, has been so climbing for nearly 20 years,
since long before he embraced the Reich’s flame, since Südwest . . . alone. No matter
what flesh was there to appease the Witch, cannibal, and sorcerer, flourishing implements
of pain—alone, alone. He doesn’t even know the Witch, can’t understand the hunger
that defines him/her, is only, in times of weakness, bewildered that it should coexist
in the same body as himself. An athlete and his skill, separate awarenesses. . . .
Young Rauhandel at least had said so . . . how many years back into the peace . . .
Blicero had watched his young friend (even then already so blatantly, so pathetically
doomed to some form of Eastern Front) inside a bar, out in the street, wearing whatever
tight or awkward suit, whatever fragile shoes, react in all grace to the football
which jokers would recognizing him toss out of nowhere—the deathless performances!
that one impromptu boot so impossibly high, so perfectly parabolic, the ball soaring
miles to pass exactly between the two tall, phallic electric columns of the Ufa-theatre
on the Friedrichstrasse . . . the head-control he could keep up for city blocks, for
hours, the feet articulate as poetry. . . . Yet he could only shake his head, wanting
to be a good fellow when they asked, but unable really to say—“It’s . . . it happens . . .
the muscles do it—” then recalling an old trainer’s words—“it’s muscular,” smiling
beautifully and already, by the act, conscripted, already cannon fodder, the pale
bar-light across the grating of his close-shaved skull—“it’s reflexes, you see. . . .
Not me. . . . Just the reflexes.” When did it begin to change for Blicero, among those
days, from lust to simple sorrow, dumb as Rauhandel’s amazement with his own talent?
He has seen so many of these Rauhandels, especially since ’39, harboring the same
mysterious guests, strangers, often no more bizarre than a gift for being always where
shells were not . . . do any of
them
, this raw material, “want the Change”? Do they even know? He doubts it. . . . Their
reflexes are only being used, hundreds of thousands at a time, by others—by royal
moths the Flame has inspired. Blicero has lost, years ago, all his innocence on this
question. So his Destiny is the Oven: while the strayed children, who never knew,
who change nothing but uniforms and cards of identity, will survive and prosper long
beyond his gases and cinders, his chimney departure. So, so. A Wandervogel in the
mountains of Pain. It’s been going on for much too long, he has chosen the game for
nothing if not the kind of end it will bring him, nicht wahr? too old these days,
grippes taking longer to pass, stomach too often in day-long agony, eyes measurably
blinder with each examination, too “realistic” to prefer a hero’s death or even a
soldier’s. He only wants now to be out of the winter, inside the Oven’s warmth, darkness,
steel shelter, the door behind him in a narrowing rectangle of kitchen-light gonging
shut, forever. The rest is foreplay.

Yet he cares, more than he should and puzzled that he does, about the children—about
their motives. He gathers it is their freedom they look for, yearningly as he for
the Oven, and such perversity haunts and depresses him . . . he returns again and
again to the waste and senseless image of what was a house in the forest, reduced
now to crumbs and sugar-smears, the black indomitable Oven all that remains, and the
two children, the peak of sweet energy behind them, hunger beginning again, wandering
away into a green blankness of trees. . . . Where will they go, where shelter the
nights? The improvidence of children . . . and the civil paradox of this their Little
State, whose base is the same Oven which must destroy it. . . .

But every true god must be both organizer and destroyer. Brought up into a Christian
ambience, this was difficult for him to see until his journey to Südwest: until his
own African conquest. Among the abrading fires of the Kalahari, under the broadly-sheeted
coastal sky, fire and water, he learned. The Herero boy, long tormented by missionaries
into a fear of Christian sins, jackal-ghosts, potent European strand-wolves, pursuing
him, seeking to feed on his soul, the precious worm that lived along his backbone,
now tried to cage his old gods, snare them in words, give them away, savage, paralyzed,
to this scholarly white who seemed so in love with language. Carrying in his kit a
copy of the
Duino Elegies
, just off the presses when he embarked for Südwest, a gift from Mother at the boat,
the odor of new ink dizzying his nights as the old freighter plunged tropic after
tropic . . . until the constellations, like the new stars of Pain-land, had become
all unfamiliar and the earth’s seasons reversed . . . and he came ashore in a high-prowed
wooden boat that had 20 years earlier brought blue-trousered troops in from the iron
roadstead to crush the great Herero Rising. To find, back in the hinterland, up in
an outstretch of broken mountains between the Namib and the Kalahari, his own faithful
native, his night-flower.

An impassable waste of rock blasted at by the sun . . . miles of canyons twisting
nowhere, drifted at the bottoms with white sand turning a cold, queenly blue as the
afternoons lengthened. . . .
We make Ndjambi Karunga now, omuhona
 . . . a whisper, across the burning thorn branches where the German conjures away
energies present outside the firelight with his slender book. He looks up in alarm.
The boy wants to fuck, but he is using the Herero name of God. An extraordinary chill
comes over the white man. He believes, like the Rhenish Missionary Society who corrupted
this boy, in blasphemy. Especially out here in the desert, where dangers he can’t
bring himself to name even in cities, even in daylight, gather about, wings folded,
buttocks touching the cold sand, waiting. . . . Tonight he feels the potency of every
word: words are only an eye-twitch away from the things they stand for. The peril
of buggering the boy under the resonance of the sacred Name fills him insanely with
lust, lust in the face—the mask—of instant talion from outside the fire . . . but
to the boy Ndjambi Karunga is what happens when they couple, that’s all: God is creator
and destroyer, sun and darkness, all sets of opposites brought together, including
black and white, male and female . . . and he becomes, in his innocence, Ndjambi Karunga’s
child (as are all his preterite clan, relentlessly, beyond their own history) here
underneath the European’s sweat, ribs, gut-muscles, cock (the boy’s own muscles staying
fiercely tight for what seems hours, as if he intends to kill, but not a word, only
the long, clonic, thick slices of night that pass over their bodies).

What did I make of him? Captain Blicero knows that the African at this moment is halfway
across Germany, deep in the Harz, and that, should the Oven this winter close behind
him, why they have already said auf Wiedersehen for the last time. He sits, stomach
crawling, glands stuffed with malaise, bowed over the console, inside the swarm-painted
launch-control car. The sergeants at motor and steering panels are out taking a cigarette
break—he’s alone at the controls. Outside, through the dirty periscope, gnarled fog
unloosens from the bright zone of frost that belly-bands the reared and shadowy rocket,
where the liquid-oxygen tank’s being topped off. Trees press close: overhead you see
barely enough sky for the rocket’s ascent. The Bodenplatte—concrete plate laid over
strips of steel—is set inside a space defined by three trees, blazed so as to triangulate
the exact bearing, 260°, to London. The symbol used is a rude mandala, a red circle
with a thick black cross inside, recognizable as the ancient sun-wheel from which
tradition says the swastika was broken by the early Christians, to disguise their
outlaw symbol. Two nails are driven into the tree at the center of the cross. Next
to one of the painted blaze-marks, the most westerly, someone has scratched in the
bark with the point of a bayonet the words I
N
H
OC
S
IGNO
V
INCES
. No one in the battery will admit to this act. Perhaps it is the work of the Underground.
But it has not been ordered removed. Pale yellow stump-tops wink around the Bodenplatte,
fresh chips and sawdust mix with older fallen leaves. The smell, childlike, deep,
is confused by petrol and alcohol. Rain threatens, perhaps, today, snow. The crews
move nervously gray-green. Shiny black India-rubber cables snake away into the forest
to connect the ground equipment with the Dutch grid’s 380 volts.
Erwartung. . . .