Gravity's Rainbow (28 page)

Group Captain St. Blaise did not include an account of this angel in his official
debriefing, the W.A.A.F. officer who interrogated him being known around the base
as the worst sort of literal-minded dragon (she had reported Blowitt to psychiatric
for his rainbowed Valkyrie over Peenemünde, and Creepham for the bright blue gremlins
scattering like spiders off of his Typhoon’s wings and falling gently to the woods
of The Hague in little parachutes of the same color). But damn it, this was not a
cloud. Unofficially, in the fortnight between the fire-raising at Lübeck and Hitler’s
order for “terror attacks of a retaliatory nature”—meaning the V-weapons—word of the
Angel got around. Although the Group Captain seemed reluctant, Ronald Cherrycoke was
allowed to probe certain objects along on the flight. Thus the Angel was revealed.

Carroll Eventyr attempted then to reach across to Terence Overbaby, St. Blaise’s wingman.
Jumped by a skyful of MEs and no way out. The inputs were confusing. Peter Sachsa
intimated that there were in fact many versions of the Angel which might apply. Overbaby’s
was not as available as certain others. There are problems with levels, and with Judgment,
in the Tarot sense. . . . This is part of the storm that sweeps now among them all,
both sides of Death. It is unpleasant. On his side, Eventyr tends to feel wholly victimized,
even a bit resentful. Peter Sachsa, on his, falls amazingly out of character and into
nostalgia for life, the old peace, the Weimar decadence that kept him fed and moving.
Taken forcibly over in 1930 by a blow from a police truncheon during a street action
in Neukölln, he recalls now, sentimentally, evenings of rubbed darkwood, cigar smoke,
ladies in chiseled jade, panne, attar of damask roses, the latest angular pastel paintings
on the walls, the latest drugs inside the many little table drawers. More than any
mere “Kreis,” on most nights full mandalas came to bloom: all degrees of society,
all quarters of the capital, palms down on that famous blood veneer, touching only
at little fingers. Sachsa’s table was like a deep pool in the forest. Beneath the
surface things were rolling, slipping, beginning to rise. . . . Walter Asch (“Taurus”)
was visited one night by something so unusual it took three “Hieropons” (250 mg.)
to bring him back, and even so he seemed reluctant to sleep. They all stood watching
him, in ragged rows resembling athletic formations, Wimpe the IG-man who happened
to be holding the Hieropon keying on Sargner, a civilian attached to General Staff,
flanked by Lieutent Weissmann, recently back from South-West Africa, and the Herero
aide he’d brought with him, staring, staring at them all, at everything . . . while
behind them ladies moved in a sibilant weave, sequins and high-albedo stockings aflash,
black-and-white make-up in daintily nasal alarm, eyes wide going
oh. . . .
Each face that watched Walter Asch was a puppet stage: each a separate routine.

. . . shows good hands yes droop and wrists as far up as muscle relaxant respiratory
depression . . .

. . . same . . . same . . . my own face white in mirror three three-thirty four march
of the Hours clock ticking room no can’t go in no not enough light not enough no
aaahhh
—

. . . theatre nothing but Walter really look at head phony angle wants to catch light
good fill-light throw a yellow gel . . .

(A pneumatic toy frog jumps up onto a lily pad trembling: beneath the surface lies
a terror . . . a late captivity . . . but he floats now over the head of what would
take him back . . . his eyes cannot be read. . . . )

. . . mba rara m’eroto ondyoze . . . mbe mu munine m’oruroto ayo u n’omuinyo . . .
(further back than this is a twisting of yarns or cordage, a giant web, a wrenching
of hide, of muscles in the hard grip of something that comes to wrestle when the night
is deep . . . and a sense, too, of visitation by the dead, afterward a sick feeling
that they are not as friendly as they seemed to be . . . he has wakened, cried, sought
explanation, but no one ever told him anything he could believe. The dead have talked
with him, come and sat, shared his milk, told stories of ancestors, or of spirits
from other parts of the veld—for time and space on their side have no meaning, all
is together).

“There are sociologies,” Edwin Treacle, his hair going all directions, attempts to
light a pipeful of wretched leftovers—autumn leaves, bits of string, fag-ends, “that
we haven’t even begun to look into. The sociology of our own lot, for example. Psi
Section, the S.P.R., the old ladies in Altrincham trying to summon up the Devil, all
of us on this side, you see, are still only half the story.”

“Careful with that ‘we,’” Roger Mexico distracted today by a hundred things, chi-square
fittings that refuse to jibe, textbooks lost, Jessica’s absence. . . .

“It makes no sense unless we also consider those who’ve passed over to the other side.
We do transact with them, don’t we? Through specialists like Eventyr and their controls
over there. But all together we form a single subculture, a psychical community, if
you will.”

“I won’t,” Mexico says dryly, “but yes I suppose someone ought to be looking into
it.”

“There are peoples—these Hereros for example—who carry on business every day with
their ancestors. The dead are as real as the living. How can you understand them without
treating both sides of the wall of death with the same scientific approach?”

And yet for Eventyr it’s not the social transaction Treacle hopes it is. There’s no
memory on his side: no personal record. He has to read about it in the notes of others,
listen to discs. Which means he has to trust the others.
That’s
a complicated social setup. He must base the major part of his life on the probity
of men charged with acting as interface between what he is supposed to be and himself.
Eventyr knows how close he is to Sachsa on the other side, but he doesn’t
remember
, and he’s been brought up a Christian, a Western European, believing in the primacy
of the “conscious” self and its memories, regarding all the rest as abnormal or trivial,
and so he is troubled, deeply. . . .

The transcripts are a document on Peter Sachsa as much as on the souls he puts in
touch. They tell, in some detail, of his obsessive love for Leni Pökler, who was married
to a young chemical engineer and also active with the K.P.D., shuttling between the
12th District and Sachsa’s sittings. Each night she came he wanted to cry at the sight
of her captivity. In her smudged eyes was clear hatred of a life she would not leave:
a husband she didn’t love, a child she had not learned to escape feeling guilty for
not loving enough.

The husband Franz had a connection, too vague for Sachsa to pass across, with Army
Ordnance, and so there were also ideological barriers that neither one found energy
enough to climb. She attended street actions, Franz reported to the rocket facility
at Reinickendorf after swallowing his tea in an early-morning room full of women he
thought were sullen and waiting for him to leave: bringing their bundles of leaflets,
their knapsacks stuffed with books or political newspapers, filtering through the
slum courtyards of Berlin at sunrise. . . .

• • • • • • •

They are shivering and hungry. In the Studentenheim there’s no heat, not much light,
millions of roaches. A smell of cabbage, old second Reich, grandmothers’ cabbage,
of lard smoke that has found, over the years, some
détente
with the air that seeks to break it down, smells of long illness and terminal occupation
stir off the crumbling walls. One of the walls is stained yellow with waste from the
broken lines upstairs. Leni sits on the floor with four or five others, passing a
dark chunk of bread. In a damp nest of
Die Faust Hoch
, back issues no one will read, her daughter Ilse sleeps, breathing so shallow it
can hardly be seen. Her eyelashes make enormous shadows on the upper curves of her
cheeks.

They have left for good this time. This room will be all right for another day, even
two . . . after that Leni doesn’t know. She took one valise for both of them. Does
he know what it means for a woman born under the Crab, a mother, to have all her home
in a valise? She has a few marks with her, Franz has his toy rockets to the moon.
It is really over.

As she used to dream it, she’d go directly to Peter Sachsa. If he didn’t take her
in, he’d at least help her to find a job. But now that she’s really broken away from
Franz . . . there’s something, some nasty earth-sign belligerence that will rise up
in Peter now and then. . . . Lately she isn’t sure about his moods. He’s under pressure
from levels she guesses to be higher than usual, and he isn’t handling it well. . . .

But Peter’s worst infantile rages are still better than the most tranquil evenings
of her Piscean husband, swimming his seas of fantasy, death-wish, rocket-mysticism—Franz
is just the type they want. They know how to use
that.
They know how to use nearly everybody. What will happen to the ones they can’t use?

Rudi, Vanya, Rebecca, here we are a slice of Berlin life, another Ufa masterpiece,
token La Bohème Student, token Slav, token Jewess, look at us: the Revolution. Of
course there is no Revolution, not even in the Kinos, no German
October
, not under this “Republic.” The Revolution died—though Leni was only a young girl
and not political—with Rosa Luxemburg. The best there is to believe in right now is
a Revolution-in-exile-in-residence, a continuity, surviving at the bleak edge over
these Weimar years, waiting its moment and its reincarnated Luxemburg. . . .

AN ARMY OF LOVERS CAN BE BEATEN
. These things appear on the walls of the Red districts in the course of the night.
Nobody can track down author or painter for any of them, leading you to suspect they’re
one and the same. Enough to make you believe in a folk-consciousness. They are not
slogans so much as texts, revealed in order to be thought about, expanded on, translated
into action by the people. . . .

“It’s true,” Vanya now, “look at the forms of capitalist expression. Pornographies:
pornographies of love, erotic love, Christian love, boy-and-his-dog, pornographies
of sunsets, pornographies of killing, and pornographies of deduction—
ahh
, that sigh when we guess the murderer—all these novels, these films and songs they
lull us with, they’re approaches, more comfortable and less so, to that Absolute Comfort.”
A pause to allow Rudi a quick and sour grin. “The self-induced orgasm.”

“‘Absolute’?” Rebecca coming forward on her bare knees to hand him the bread, damp,
melting from the touch of her wet mouth, “Two people are—”

“Two people is what you are told,” Rudi does not quite smirk. Through her attention,
sadly and not for the first time around here, there passes the phrase
male supremacy
 . . . why do they cherish their masturbating so? “but in nature it is almost unknown.
Most of it’s solitary. You know that.”

“I know there’s coming together,” is all she says. Though they have never made love
she means it as a reproach. But he turns away as we do from those who have just made
some embarrassing appeal to faith there’s no way to go into any further.

Leni, from inside her wasted time with Franz, knows enough about coming alone. At
first his passivity kept her from coming at all. Then she understood that she could
make up anything at all to fill the freedom he allowed her. It got more comfortable:
she could dream such tendernesses between them (presently she was dreaming also of
other men)—but it became more solitary. Yet her lines will not deepen fast enough,
her mouth not learn hardening past a face she keeps surprising herself with, a daydreaming
child’s face, betraying her to anyone who’ll look, exactly the sort of fat-softened,
unfocused weakness that causes men to read her as Dependent Little Girl—even in Peter
Sachsa she’s seen the look—and the dream is the same one she went to find while Franz
groaned inside his own dark pain-wishes, a dream of gentleness, light, her criminal
heart redeemed, no more need to run, to struggle, a man arriving tranquil as she and
strong, the street becoming a distant memory: exactly the one dream that out here
she can least allow herself. She knows what she has to impersonate. Especially with
Ilse watching her more. Ilse is not going to be used.

Rebecca’s been carrying on an argument with Vanya, half flirting, Vanya trying to
keep it all in intellectual code, but the Jewess reverting, time and again, to the
bodily . . . so sensual: the insides of her thighs, just above the knee, smooth as
oil, the tenseness of all her muscles, the alert face, the Judenschnautze feinting,
pushing, the flashes of tongue against thick lips . . . what would it be like, to
be taken to bed by her? To do it not just with another woman, but
with a Jewess. . . .
Their animal darkness . . . sweating hindquarters, pushing aggressively toward her
face, black hairs darkening in fine crescent around each buttock from the crevice . . .
the face turned over a shoulder smiling in coarse delight . . . all by surprise, really,
during a moment’s refuge in a pale yellow room, while the men wandered the halls outside
with drugged smiles . . . “No, not that hard. Be gentle. I’ll tell you when to do
it harder. . . .” Leni’s fair skin, her look of innocence, and the Jewess’s darker
coloring, her rawness, contrasting with Leni’s delicacy of structure and skin, pelvic
bones stretching cobwebs smoothly down groins and around belly, the two women sliding,
snarling, gasping . . .
I know there’s coming together . . .
and Leni waking alone—the Jewess out already in some other room of the place—never
having known the instant at which she fell into her true infant sleep, a soft change
of state that just didn’t happen with Franz. . . . So she brushed and batted with
fingertips her hair to show something of how she felt about the night’s clientele
and strolled down to the baths, stripped without caring what eyes were on her and
slid into the body-warmth, the conventional perfume of it. . . . All at once, through
a shouting and humidity that might have made it hard to concentrate, she saw, there,
up on one of the ledges, looking down at her . . . Yes he was Richard Hirsch, from
the Mausigstrasse, so many years ago . . . she knew immediately that her face had
never looked more vulnerable—she could see it in his eyes. . . .