Gravity's Rainbow (50 page)

The fear balloons again inside his brain. It will not be kept down with a simple Fuck
You. . . . A smell, a forbidden room, at the bottom edge of his memory. He can’t see
it, can’t make it out. Doesn’t want to. It is allied with the Worst Thing.

He knows what the smell has to be: though according to these papers it would have
been too early for it, though he has never come across any of the stuff among the
daytime coordinates of his life, still, down here, back here in the warm dark, among
early shapes where the clocks and calendars don’t mean too much, he knows that what’s
haunting him now will prove to be the smell of Imipolex G.

Then there’s this recent dream he is afraid of having again. He was in his old room,
back home. A summer afternoon of lilacs and bees, and warm air through an open window.
Slothrop had found a very old dictionary of technical German. It fell open to a certain
page prickling with black-face type. Reading down the page, he would come to JAMF.
The definition would read: I. He woke begging It
no
—but even after waking, he was sure, he would remain sure, that It could visit him
again, any time It wanted. Perhaps you know that dream too. Perhaps It has warned
you never to speak Its name. If so, you know about how Slothrop’ll be feeling now.

What he does is lurch to his feet, over to the door of the freight car, which is going
up a grade. He drags open the door, slips out—action, action—and mounts a ladder to
the roof. A foot from his face, this double row of shiny bright teeth hangs in the
air. Just what he needs. It is Major Marvy of U.S. Army Ordnance, leader of Marvy’s
Mothers, the meanest-ass technical intelligence team in this whole fuckin’ Zone, mister.
Slothrop can call him Duane, if he wants. “Boogie, boogie, boogie! Catch all ’em
jungle
bunnies back ’ere in ’at
next car!
Sheee-
oo
!”

“Wait a minute,” sez Slothrop, “I think I’ve been asleep or something.” His feet are
cold. This Marvy is really fat. Pants bloused into shiny combat boots, roll of fat
hanging over a web belt where he keeps his sunglasses and .45, hornrims, hair slicked
back, eyes like safety valves that pop out at you whenever—as now—the pressure in
his head gets too high.

Marvy hitched a lift on a P-47 from Paris far as Kassel, got coupled onto this train
here west of Heiligenstadt. He’s headed for the Mittel-werke, like Ian Scuffling.
Needs to coordinate with some Project Hermes people from General Electric. Sure makes
him nervous, those niggers next door. “Hey, ought to be a good story for you people.
Warn the folks back home.”

“Are they GIs?”

“Shit no. Kraut. South-West African. Something. You mean you don’t know about that?
Come on. Aw. Limey intelligence sure ain’t too intelligent, hahah, no offense understand.
I thought the whole world knew.” Follows a lurid tale—which sounds like something
SHAEF made up, Goebbels’s less than giddy imagination reaching no further than Alpine
Redoubts and such—of Hitler’s scheme for setting up a Nazi empire in black Africa,
which fell through after Old Blood ’n’ Guts handed Rommel’s ass to him in the desert.”
‘Here’s yer ass, General.’ ‘Ach du lieber! Mein Arsch! YAH—hahaha . . .’” clutching
comically at the seat of his own large trousers. Well, the black cadres had no more
future in Africa, stayed on in Germany as governments-in-exile without even official
recognition, drifted somehow into the ordnance branch of the German Army, and pretty
soon learned how to be rocket technicians. Now they were just running loose. Wild.
Haven’t been interned as P/Ws, far as Marvy knows they haven’t even been disarmed.
“Not enough we have to worry about Russkys, frogs, limeys—hey, beg pardon, buddy.
Now we got not just niggers you see, but
kraut
niggers. Well, Jesus. V-E Day just about everyplace you had a rocket, you had you
a nigger. Never any all-boogie batteries, understand. Even the krauts couldn’t be
that
daffy! One battery, that’s 81 men,
plus
all your support, your launch-control, power, propellants, your surveying—champ,
that’d sure be one heap o’ niggers all in one place. But are they still all scattered
out, like they were? You find out, you got you a
scoop
, friend. Cause if they’re gettin’ together now, oh dat’s
bi-i-i-g
trouble! There’s at least two dozen in that car—right down there, look. A-and they’re
headin’ for Nordhausen
, pal!” a fat finger-poke in the chest with each word, “hah? Whatcha think they have
in mind? You know what I think? They have a
plan.
Yeah. I think it’s rockets. Don’t ask me how, it’s just something I feel here, in
m’heart. A-and you know, that’s
awful
dangerous. You can’t trust
them
— With
rockets?
They’re a childlike race. Brains are smaller.”

“But our patience,” suggests a calm voice now out of the darkness, “our patience is
enormous, though perhaps not unlimited.” So saying, a tall African with a full imperial
beard steps up grabs the fat American, who has time to utter one short yell before
being flung bodily over the side. Slothrop and the African watch the Major bounce
down the embankment behind them, arms and legs flying, out of sight. Firs crowd the
hills. A crescent moon has risen over one ragged crest.

The man introduces himself in English, as Oberst Enzian, of the Schwarzkommando. He
apologizes for his show of temper, notes Slothrop’s armband, declines an interview
before Slothrop can get in a word. “There’s no story. We’re DPs, like everybody else.”

“The Major seemed worried that you’re headed for Nordhausen.”

“Marvy is going to be an annoyance, I can tell. Still, he doesn’t pose as much of
a problem as—” He peers at Slothrop. “Hmm. Are you really a war correspondent?”

“No.”

“A free agent, I’d guess.”

“Don’t know about that ‘free,’ Oberst.”

“But you are free. We all are. You’ll see. Before long.” He steps away down the spine
of the freighttop, waving a beckoning German good-by. “Before long. . . .”

Slothrop sits on the rooftop, rubbing his bare feet. A friend? A good omen?
Black rocket troops?
What bizarre shit?

Well good mornin’ gang, let’s start it

Off with a bang, so long to

Double-u Double-u Two-o-o-o!

Now the fightin’s over and we’re all in clover

And I’m here ta bring sunshine to you—

Hey there Herman the German, stop yer fussin’ and squirmin’,

Don’tcha know you’re goin’ home ta stay—

No, there’s never a frown, here in Rocket, Sock-it Town,

Where ev’ry day’s a beautiful day—

(Quit kvetchin’, Gretchen!)

Go on and have a beautiful daa-aay!

Nordhausen in the morning: the lea is a green salad, crisp with raindrops. Everything
is fresh, washed. The Harz hump up all around, dark slopes bearded to the tops with
spruce, fir and larch. High-gabled houses, sheets of water reflecting the sky, muddy
streets, American and Russian GIs pouring in and out the doors of the taverns and
makeshift PXs, everybody packing a sidearm. Meadows and logged-off wedges up on the
mountainsides flow with mottled light as rainclouds blow away over Thuringia. Castles
perch high over the town, sailing in and out of torn clouds. Old horses with smudged
knobby knees, short-legged and big-chested, pull wagonloads of barrels, necks straining
at twin collars chained together, heavy horseshoes sending mudflowers at each wet
clop, down from the vineyards to the taverns.

Slothrop wanders into a roofless part of town. Old people in black are bat-flittering
among the walls. Shops and dwellings here are all long-looted by the slave laborers
liberated from the Dora camp. Lotta those
fags
still around, with baskets and 175 badges out on display, staring moistly from doorways.
From the glassless bay window of a dress shop, in the dimness behind a plaster dummy
lying bald and sprawled, arms raised to sky, hands curved for bouquets or cocktail
glasses they’ll never hold again, Slothrop hears a girl singing. Accompanying herself
on a balalaika. One of those sad little Parisian-sounding tunes in 3/4:

Love never goes away,

Never completely dies,

Always some souvenir

Takes us by sad surprise.

You went away from me,

One rose was left behind—

Pressed in my Book of Hours,

That is the rose I find. . . .

Though it’s another year,

Though it’s another me,

Under the rose is a drying tear,

Under my linden tree. . . .

Love never goes away,

Not if it’s really true,

It can return, by night, by day,

Tender and green and new

As the leaves from a linden tree, love, that I left with you.

Her name turns out to be Geli Tripping, and the balalaika belongs to a Soviet intelligence
officer named Tchitcherine. In a way, Geli does too—part-time, anyhow. Seems this
Tchitcherine maintains a harem, a girl in every rocket-town in the Zone. Yup, another
rocket maniac. Slothrop feels like a tourist.

Geli talks about her young man. They sit in her roofless room drinking a pale wine
known hereabouts as Nordhäuser Schattensaft. Overhead, black birds with yellow beaks
lace the sky, looping in the sunlight from their nests up in the mountain castles
and down in the city ruins. Far away, perhaps in the marketplace, a truck convoy is
idling all its engines, the smell of exhaust washing over the maze of walls, where
moss creeps, water oozes, roaches seek purchase, walls that baffle the motor sound
so that it seems to come in from all directions.

She’s thin, a bit awkward, very young. Nowhere in her eyes is there any sign of corrosion—she
might have spent all her War roofed and secure, tranquil, playing with small forest
animals in a rear area someplace. Her song, she admits, sighing, is mostly wishful
thinking. “When he’s away, he’s away. When you came in I almost thought you were Tchitcherine.”

“Nope. Just a hard-working newshound, is all. No rockets, no harems.”

“It’s an arrangement,” she tells him. “It’s so unorganized out here. There have to
be arrangements. You’ll find out.” Indeed he will—he’ll find thousands of arrangements,
for warmth, love, food, simple movement along roads, tracks and canals. Even G-5,
living its fantasy of being the only government in Germany now, is just the arrangement
for being victorious, is all. No more or less real than all these others so private,
silent, and lost to History. Slothrop, though he doesn’t know it yet, is as properly
constituted a state as any other in the Zone these days. Not paranoia. Just how it
is. Temporary alliances, knit and undone. He and Geli reach their arrangement hidden
from the occupied streets by remnants of walls, in an old fourposter bed facing a
dark pier glass. Out the roof that isn’t there he can see a long tree-covered mountain
ascending. Wine on her breath, nests of down in the hollows of her arms, thighs with
the spring of saplings in wind. He’s barely inside her before she comes, a fantasy
about Tchitcherine in progress, clear and touchingly, across her face. This irritates
Slothrop, but doesn’t keep him from coming himself.

The foolishness begins immediately on detumescence, amusing questions like, what kind
of word has gone out to keep everybody away from Geli but me? Or, is it that something
about me reminds her of Tchitcherine, and if so,
what?
And, say, where’s that Tchitcherine right now? He dozes off, is roused by her lips,
fingers, dewy legs sliding along his. The sun jumps across their section of sky, gets
eclipsed by a breast, is reflected out of her child’s eyes . . . then clouds, rain
for which she puts up a green tarp with tassels she’s sewn on, canopy style . . .
rain sluices down off the tassels, cold and loud. Night. She feeds him boiled cabbage
with an old heirloom of a spoon with a crest on it. They drink more of that wine.
Shadows are soft verdigris. The rain has stopped. Somewhere kids go booting an empty
gas can over the cobblestones.

Something comes flapping in out of the sky: talons scrabble along the top of the canopy.
“What’s that?” half awake and she’s got the covers again, c’mon Geli. . . .

“My owl,” sez Geli. “Wernher. There’s a candy bar in the top drawer of the chiffonier,
Liebchen, would you mind feeding him?”

Liebchen indeed. Staggering off the bed, vertical for the first time all day, Slothrop
removes a Baby Ruth from its wrapper, clears his throat, decides not to ask her how
she came by it because he knows, and lobs the thing up on the canopy for that Wernher.
Soon, lying together again, they hear peanuts crunching, and a clacking beak.

“Candy bars,” Slothrop grouches. “What’s the matter with him? Don’t you know he’s
supposed to be out foraging, for live mice or some shit? You’ve turned him into a
house owl.”

“You’re pretty lazy yourself.” Baby fingers creeping down along his ribs.

“Well—I bet—cut it out—I bet that
Tchitcherine
doesn’t have to get up and feed that owl.”

She cools, the hand stopping where it is. “He loves Tchitcherine. He never comes to
be fed, unless Tchitcherine’s here.”

Slothrop’s turn to cool. More correctly, freeze. “Uh, but, you don’t mean that Tchitcherine
is actually, uh . . .”

“He was supposed to be,” sighing.

“Oh. When?”

“This morning. He’s late. It happens.”

Slothrop’s off the bed halfway across the room with a softoff, one sock on and the
other in his teeth, head through one armhole of his undershirt, fly zipper jammed,
yelling
shit.

“My brave Englishman,” she drawls.

“Why didn’t you bring this up earlier, Geli, huh?”

“Oh, come back. It’s nighttime, he’s with a woman someplace. He can’t sleep alone.”

“I hope you can.”

“Hush. Come here. You can’t go out with nothing on your feet. I’ll give you a pair
of his old boots and tell you all his secrets.”