Gravity's Rainbow (19 page)

For some reason he finds it harder these days to remember. What is framed, dirt-blurry,
in the prisms, the ritual, the daily iteration inside these newly cleared triangles
in the forests, has taken over what used to be memory’s random walk, its innocent
image-gathering. His time away, with Katje and Gottfried, has become shorter and more
precious as the tempo of firings quickens. Though the boy is in Blicero’s unit, the
captain hardly sees him when they’re on duty—a flash of gold helping the surveyors
chain the kilometers out to the transmitting station, the guttering brightness of
his hair in the wind, vanishing among trees. . . . How strangely opposite to the African—a
color-negative, yellow and blue. The Captain, in some sentimental overflow, some precognition,
gave his African boy the name “Enzian,” after Rilke’s mountainside gentian of Nordic
colors, brought down like a pure word to the valleys:

Bringt doch der Wanderer auch vom Hange des Bergrands nicht eine Hand voll Erde ins
Tal, die alle unsägliche, sondern ein erworbenes Wort, reines, den gelben und blaun
Enzian.

“Omuhona. . . . Look at me. I’m red, and brown . . .
black
, omuhona. . . .”

“Liebchen, this is the other half of the earth. In Germany you would be yellow and
blue.” Mirror-metaphysics. Self-enchanted by what he imagined elegance, his bookish
symmetries. . . . And yet why speak so purposeless to the arid mountain, the heat
of the day, the savage flower from whom he drank, so endlessly . . . why lose
those
words into the mirage, the yellow sun and freezing blue shadows in the ravines, unless
it was prophesying, beyond all predisaster syndrome, beyond the terror of contemplating
his middle age however glancingly, however impossible the chance of any “providing”
—beyond
was something heaving, stirring, forever below, forever before his words, something
then that could see a time coming terrible,
at least
as terrible as this winter and the shape to which the War has now grown, a shape
making unavoidable the shape of one last jigsaw piece: this Oven-game with the yellowhaired
and blueeyed youth and silent doubleganger Katje (who was
her
opposite number in Südwest? what black girl he never saw, hidden always in the blinding
sun, the hoarse and cindered passage of the trains at night, a constellation of dark
stars no one, no anti-Rilke, had named . . .)—but 1944 was much too late for any of
it to matter. Those symmetries were all prewar luxury. Nothing’s left him to prophesy.

Least of all her sudden withdrawal from the game. The one variation he didn’t provide
for, perhaps indeed because he never saw the black girl either. Perhaps the black
girl is a genius of meta-solutions—knocking over the chessboard, shooting the referee.
But after the act of wounding, breaking, what’s to become of the little Oven-state?
Can’t it be fixed? Perhaps a new form, one more appropriate . . . the archer and his
son, and the shooting of the apple . . . yes and the War itself as tyrant king . . .
it can still be salvaged can’t it, patched up, roles reassigned, no need to rush outside
where . . .

Gottfried, in the cage, watches her slip her bonds and go. Fair and slender, the hair
on his legs only visible in sunlight and then as a fine, imponderable net of gold,
his eyelids already wrinkling in oddly young/old signatures, flourishes, the eyes
a seldom-encountered blue that on certain days, in sync with the weather, is too much
for these almond fringes and brims over, seeps, bleeds out to illuminate the boy’s
entire face, virgin-blue, drowned-man blue, blue drawn so insatiably into the chalky
walls of Mediterranean streets we quietly cycled through in noontimes of the old peace. . . .
He can’t stop her. If the Captain asks, he’ll tell what he saw. Gottfried has seen
her sneak out before, and there are rumors—she’s with the Underground, she’s in love
with a Stuka pilot she met in Scheveningen. . . . But she must love Captain Blicero
too. Gottfried styles himself a passive observer. He has waited for his present age,
and the conscription notice, to catch him, with an impudent terror like watching the
inrush of a curve you mean to take for the first time in a controlled skid,
take me
, gathering speed till the last possible moment,
take me
his good-nights’ one prayer. The danger he thinks he needs is still fictional for
him: in what he flirts and teases with, death is not a real outcome, the hero always
walks out of the heart of the explosion, sooty-faced but grinning—the blast is noise
and change, and diving for cover. Gottfried hasn’t yet seen a stiff, not up close.
He hears now and then from home that friends have died, he’s watched long, flabby
canvas sacks being handled in the distances into the poisoned gray of the trucks,
and the headlamps cutting the mist . . . but when the rockets fail, and try to topple
back on you who fired them, and a dozen of you press down, bodies jammed together
in the slit trenches waiting all sweat-stunk wool and tense with laughter held in,
you only think—What a story to tell at mess, to write to Mutti. . . . These rockets
are his pet animals, barely domesticated, often troublesome, even apt to revert. He
loves them in the way he would have loved horses, or Tiger tanks, had he pulled duty
somewhere else.

Here he feels
taken
, at true ease. Without the War what could he have hoped for? But to be part of
this
adventure . . .
If you cannot sing Siegfried at least you can carry a spear.
On what mountainslope, from what tanning and adored face did he hear that? All he
remembers is the white sweep upward, the quilted meadows mobbed with cloud. . . .
Now he’s learning a trade, tending the rockets, and when the War ends he’ll study
to be an engineer. He understands that Blicero will die or go away, and that he will
leave the cage. But he connects this with the end of the War, not with the Oven. He
knows, like everyone, that captive children are always freed in the moment of maximum
danger. The fucking, the salt length of the Captain’s weary, often impotent penis
pushing into his meek mouth, the stinging chastisements, his face reflected in the
act of kissing the Captain’s boots, their shine mottled, corroded by bearing grease,
oil, alcohol spilled in fueling, darkening his face to the one he can’t recognize—these
are necessary, they make specific his captivity, which otherwise would hardly be different
from Army stifling, Army repression. He’s ashamed that he enjoys them so much—the
word
bitch
, spoken now in a certain tone of voice, will give him an erection he cannot will
down—afraid that, if not actually judged and damned, he’s gone insane. The whole battery
knows of the arrangement: though they still obey the Captain it’s there, in their
faces, felt trembling out along the steel tape-measures, splashing onto his tray at
mess, elbowed into his right sleeve with each dressing of his squad. He dreams often
these days of a very pale woman who wants him, who never speaks—but the absolute confidence
in her eyes . . . his awful certainty that she, a celebrity everyone recognizes on
sight, knows him and has no reason to speak to him beyond the beckoning that’s in
her face, sends him vibrating awake in the nights, the Captain’s exhausted face inches
away across the silk of wrinkled silver, weak eyes staring as his own, whiskers he
suddenly must scrape his cheek against, sobbing, trying to tell how she was, how she
looked at him. . . .

The Captain’s seen her, of course. Who hasn’t? His idea of comfort is to tell the
child, “She’s real. You have no say in this. You must understand that she means to
have you. No use screaming awake, bothering me this way.”

“But if she comes
back
—”

“Submit, Gottfried.
Give it all up.
See where she takes you. Think of the first time I fucked you. How tight you were.
Until you knew I meant to come inside. Your little rosebud bloomed. You had nothing,
not even by then your mouth’s innocence, to lose. . . .”

But the boy continues to cry. Katje won’t help him. Perhaps she’s asleep. He never
knows. He wants to be her friend, but they hardly ever speak. She’s cold, mysterious,
he’s jealous of her sometimes and at others—usually when he wants to fuck her and
through some ingenuity of the Captain’s cannot—at such times he thinks he loves her
desperately. Unlike the Captain, he has never seen her as the loyal sister who’ll
free him from the cage. He dreams
that
release, but as a dark exterior Process that will happen, no matter what any of them
may want. Whether she goes or stays. So, when Katje quits the game for good, he is
silent.

Blicero curses her. He flings a boot-tree at a precious TerBorch. Bombs fall to the
west in the Haagsche Bosch. The wind blows, ruffling the ornamental ponds outside.
Staff cars snarl away, down the long drive lined with beeches. The half-moon shines
among hazy clouds, its dark half the color of aged meat. Blicero orders everyone down
into the shelter, a cellarful of gin in brown crocks, open-slat crates of anemone
bulbs. The slut has put his battery in the British crosshairs, the raid can come at
any moment! Everybody sits around drinking oude genever and peeling cheeses. Telling
stories, mostly funny ones, from before the War. By dawn, they’re all drunk and sleeping.
Scraps of wax litter the floor like leaves. No Spitfires come. But later that morning
Schußstelle 3 is moved, and the requisitioned house is abandoned. And she is gone.
Crossed over the English lines, at the salient where the great airborne adventure
lies bogged for the winter, wearing Gottfried’s boots and an old dress, black moiré,
calf-length, a size too large, dowdy. Her last disguise. From here on she will be
Katje. The only debt outstanding is to Captain Prentice. The others—Piet, Wim, the
Drummer, the Indian—have all dropped her. Left her for dead. Or else this is her warning
that—

“Sorry, no, we need the bullet,” Wim’s face in shadows her eye can’t compensate for,
bitterly whispering underneath the Scheveningen pier, ragged crowd-footfalls on the
wood overhead, “every fucking bullet we can get. We need the silence. We couldn’t
spare a man to get rid of the body. I’ve wasted five minutes with you already . . .”
so he will take up their last meeting with technical matters she can no longer share.
When she looks around, he’s gone, guerrilla-silent, and she has no way to bring this
together with how he felt last year for a while under the cool chenille, in the days
before he got so many muscles, and the scars on shoulder and thigh—a late bloomer,
a neutral man goaded finally past his threshold, but she’d loved him before that . . .
she must have. . . .

She’s worth nothing to them now. They were after Schußstelle 3. She gave them everything
else, but kept finding reasons not to pinpoint the Captain’s rocket site, and there
is too much doubt by now as to how good the reasons were. True, the site was often
moved about. But she could’ve been placed no closer to the decision-making: it was
her own expressionless servant’s face that leaned in over their schnapps and cigars,
the charts coffee-ringed across the low tables, the cream papers stamped purple as
bruised flesh. Wim and the others have invested time and lives—three Jewish families
sent east—though wait now, she’s more than balanced it, hasn’t she, in the months
out at Scheveningen? They were kids, neurotic, lonely, pilots and crews they all loved
to talk, and she’s fed back who knows how many reams’ worth of Most Secret flimsies
across the North Sea, hasn’t she, squadron numbers, fueling stops, spin-recovery techniques
and turning radii, power settings, radio channels, sectors, traffic patterns—hasn’t
she? What more do they want? She asks this seriously, as if there’s a real conversion
factor between information and lives. Well, strange to say, there is. Written down
in the Manual, on file at the War Department. Don’t forget the real business of the
War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can
be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many
ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It
provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught
History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the
adult world. Best of all, mass death’s a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows,
to try ’n’ grab a piece of that Pie while they’re still here to gobble it up. The
true war is a celebration of markets. Organic markets, carefully styled “black” by
the professionals, spring up everywhere. Scrip, Sterling, Reichsmarks continue to
move, severe as classical ballet, inside their antiseptic marble chambers. But out
here, down here among the people, the truer currencies come into being. So, Jews are
negotiable. Every bit as negotiable as cigarettes, cunt, or Hershey bars. Jews also
carry an element of guilt, of future blackmail, which operates, natch, in favor of
the professionals. So Katje here is hollering into a silence, a North Sea of hopes,
and Pirate Prentice, who knows her from hurried meetings—in city squares that manage
to be barracksfaced and claustrophobic, under dark, soft-wood smells of staircases
steep as ladders, on a gaffrigger by an oily quai and a cat’s amber eyes staring down,
in a block of old flats with rain in the courtyard and a bulky, ancient Schwarzlose
stripped to toggle links and oil pump littered about the dusty room—who has each time
seen her as a face belonging with others he knows better, at the margin of each enterprise,
now, confronted with this face out of context, an enormous sky all sea-clouds in full
march, tall and plum, behind her, detects danger in her loneliness, realizes he’s
never heard her name, not till the meeting by the windmill known as “The Angel.” . . .

She tells him why she’s alone—more or less—why she can’t ever go back, and her face
is somewhere else, painted on canvas, hung with other survivals back in the house
near Duindigt, only witnessing the Oven-game—centuries passing like the empurpled
clouds, darkening an infinitesimal layer of varnish between herself and Pirate, granting
her the shield of serenity she needs, of classic irrelevance. . . .