Gravity's Rainbow (58 page)

They soar up over a stand of firs. Geli and the children go dwindling to shadow-strokes
on the green lawn. The hills fall away, flatten out. Soon, looking back, Slothrop
can see Nordhausen: Cathedral, Rathaus, Church of St. Blasius . . . the roofless quarter
where he found Geli. . . .

Schnorp nudges and points. After a while Slothrop makes out a convoy of four olive-drab
vehicles dusting along toward the farm in a hurry. Marvy’s Mothers, by the looks of
things. And Slothrop hanging from this gaudy beach ball. Well, all right—

“I’m bad luck,” Slothrop hollers over a little later. They’ve found a steady course
now northeastward, and are huddling close to the alcohol flame, collars turned up,
with a gradient of must be 50�� between the wind at their backs and the warmth in
front. “I should’ve mentioned that. You don’t even know me, and here we’re flying
into that Russian zone.”

Schnorp, his hair blown like holidays of hay, does a wistful German thing with his
upper lip: “There are no zones,” he sez, which is also a line of Geli’s. “No zones
but the Zone.”

Before too long Slothrop has begun checking out these boxes here that Schnorp brought
along. There are a dozen of them, and each contains a deep, golden custard pie, which
will fetch a fantastic price in Berlin. “Wow,” cries Slothrop, “holy shit. Surely
I hallucinate,” and other such eager junior sidekick talk.

“You ought to have a PX card.” A sales pitch.

“Right now I can’t afford a ration stamp for an ant’s jockstrap,” replies Slothrop,
forthrightly.

“Well, I’ll split this one pie here with you,” Schnorp reckons after a time, “because
I’m getting kind of hungry.”

“Oboy, oboy.”

Well, Slothrop is just chowing on that pie! enjoying himself, licking custard off
of his hands, when he happens to notice off in the sky, back toward Nordhausen, this
funny dark object, the size of a dot. “Uh—”

Schnorp looks around, “Kot!” comes up with a brass telescope and braces it blazing
on the gunwale. “Kot, Kot—no markings.”

“I wonder . . .”

Out of air so blue you can take it between your fingers, rub, and bring them back
blue, they watch the dot slowly grow into a rusty old reconnaissance plane. Presently
they can hear its engine, snarling and sputtering. Then, as they watch, it banks and
starts a pass.

Along the wind between them, faintly, comes the singing of Furies:

There was a young man named McGuire,

Who was fond of the pitch amplifier.

But a number of shorts

Left him covered with warts,

And set half the bedroom on fire.

Ja, ja, ja, ja!

In Prussia they never eat pussy—

The plane buzzes by a yard or two away, showing its underbelly. It is a monster, about
to give birth. Out of a little access opening peers a red face in leather helmet and
goggles. “You limey ’sucker,” going past, “we fixin’ to hand your
ass
to
you.
”

Without planning to, Slothrop has picked up a pie. “Fuck you.” He flings it, perfect
shot, the plane peeling slowly past and
blop
gets Marvy right in the face. Yeah. Gloved hands paw at the mess. The Major’s pink
tongue appears. Custard drips into the wind, yellow droplets fall in long arcs toward
earth. The hatch closes as the recon plane slides away, slow-rolls, circles and heads
back. Schnorp and Slothrop heft pies and wait.

“There’s no cowling around that engine,” Schnorp has noticed, “so we’ll aim for that.”
Now they can see the dorsal side of the plane, its cockpit jammed to capacity with
beer-sodden Americans, singing:

There once was a fellow named Ritter,

Who slept with a guidance transmitter.

It shriveled his cock,

Which fell off in his sock,

And made him exceedingly bitter.

A hundred yards and closing fast. Schnorp grabs Slothrop’s arm and points off to starboard.
Providence has contrived to put in their way a big white slope of cloud, and the wind
is bringing them swiftly into it: the seething critter puts out white tentacles, beckoning
hurry . . . hurry . . . and they are inside then, inside its wet and icy reprieve. . . .

“Now they’ll wait.”

“No,” Schnorp cupping an ear, “they’ve cut the motor. They’re in here with us.” The
swaddled silence goes on for a minute or two, but sure enough:

There once was a fellow named Schroeder,

Who buggered the vane servomotor.

He soon grew a prong

On the end of his schlong,

And hired himself a promoter.

Schnorp is fiddling with the flame, a rose-gray nimbus, trying for less visibility,
but not too much loss of altitude. They float in their own wan sphere of light, without
coordinates. Outcrops of granite smash blindly upward like fists into the cloud, trying
to find the balloon. The plane is somewhere, with its own course and speed. There
is no action the balloon can take. Binary decisions have lost meaning in here. The
cloud presses in, suffocating. It condenses in fat drops on top of the pies. Suddenly,
raucous and hungover:

There was a young man from Decatur,

Who slept with a LOX generator.

His balls and his prick

Froze solid real quick,

And his asshole a little bit later.

Curtains of vapor drift back to reveal the Americans, volplaning along well inside
ten meters and only a little faster than the balloon.

“Now!” Schnorp yells, heaving a pie at the exposed engine. Slothrop’s misses and splatters
all over the windscreen in front of the pilot. By which time Schnorp has commenced
flinging ballast bags at the engine, leaving one stuck between two of the cylinders.
The Americans, taken by surprise, reach in confusion for sidearms, grenades, machine
guns, whatever it is your Ordnance types carry around in the way of light armament.
But they have glided on past, and now the fog closes in again. There are a few shots.

“Shit, man, if they hit that bag—”

“Shh. I think we got the wire from the booster magneto.” Off in the middle of the
cloud can be heard the nagging whicker of an engine refusing to start. Linkage squeaks
desperately.

“Oh, fuck!” A muffled scream, far away. The intermittent whining grows fainter until
there is silence. Schnorp is lying on his back, slurping pie, laughing bitterly. Half
of his inventory’s been thrown away, and Slothrop feels a little guilty.

“No, no. Stop worrying. This is like the very earliest days of the mercantile system.
We’re back to that again. A second chance. Passages are long and hazardous. Loss in
transit is a part of life. You have had a glimpse of the Ur-Markt.”

When the clouds fall away a few minutes later, they find themselves floating quietly
under the sun, shrouds dripping, gasbag still shiny with the moist cloud. No sign
at all of Marvy’s plane. Schnorp adjusts the flame. They begin to rise.

Toward sundown, Schnorp gets thoughtful. “Look. You can see the edge of it. At this
latitude the earth’s shadow races across Germany at 650 miles an hour, the speed of
a jet aircraft.” The cloud-sheet has broken up into little fog-banklets the color
of boiled shrimp. The balloon goes drifting, over countryside whose green patchwork
the twilight is now urging toward black: the thread of a little river flaming in the
late sun, the intricate-angled pattern of another roofless town.

The sunset is red and yellow, like the balloon. On the horizon the mild sphere goes
warping down, a peach on a china plate. “The farther south you go,” Schnorp continues,
“the faster the shadow sweeps, till you reach the equator: a thousand miles an hour.
Fantastic. It breaks through the speed of sound somewhere over southern France—around
the latitude of Carcassonne.”

The wind is bundling them on, north by east. “Southern France,” Slothrop remembers
then. “Yeah. That’s where I broke through the speed of sound. . . .”

• • • • • • •

The Zone is in full summer: souls are found quiescent behind the pieces of wall, fast
asleep down curled in shell-craters, out screwing under the culverts with gray shirttails
hoisted, adrift dreaming in the middles of fields. Dreaming of food, oblivion, alternate
histories. . . .

The silences here are retreats of sound, like the retreat of the surf before a tidal
wave: sound draining away, down slopes of acoustic passage, to gather, someplace else,
to a great surge of noise. Cows—big lummoxes splotched black and white, harnessed
now for the plowing because German horses in the Zone are all but extinct—will drudge
with straight faces right on into minefields, sown back in the winter. The godawful
blasts go drumming over the farmland, horns, hide and hamburger come showering down
all over the place, and the dented bells lie quiet in the clover. Horses might have
known to keep clear—but the Germans wasted their horses, squandered the race, herding
them into the worst of it, the swarms of steel, the rheumatic marshes, the unblanketed
winter chills of our late Fronts. A few might have found safety with the Russians,
who still care for horses. You hear them often in the evenings. Their campfires send
up rays for miles from behind the stands of beech, through northern-summer haze that’s
almost dry, only enough of it to give a knife’s edge to the firelight, a dozen accordions
and concertinas all going at once in shaggy chords with a reed-ringing to it, and
the songs full of plaintive
stvyeh
s and
znyi
s with voices of the girl auxiliaries clearest of all. The horses whicker and move
in the rustling grass. The men and women are kind, resourceful, fanatical—they are
the most joyous of the Zone’s survivors.

In and out of all the vibrant flesh moves the mad scavenger Tchitcherine, who is more
metal than anything else. Steel teeth wink as he talks. Under his pompadour is a silver
plate. Gold wirework threads in three-dimensional tattoo among the fine wreckage of
cartilage and bone inside his right knee joint, the shape of it always felt, pain’s
hand-fashioned seal, and his proudest battle decoration, because it is invisible,
and only he can feel it. A four-hour operation, and in the dark. It was the Eastern
Front: there were no sulfa drugs, no anaesthesia. Of course he’s proud.

He has marched here, with his limp as permanent as gold, out of coldness, meadows,
mystery. Officially he reports to TsAGI, which is the Central Aero and Hydrodynamics
Institute in Moscow. His orders mention technical intelligence. But his real mission
in the Zone is private, obsessive, and not—so his superiors have let him know, in
a number of delicate ways—in the people’s interest. Tchitcherine guesses that this,
taken literally, may be true enough. But he is not sure about the interests of those
who warned him. They could have their own reasons for wanting Enzian liquidated in
spite of what they say. Their differences with Tchitcherine may be over the timing,
or the motives. Tchitcherine’s motives are not political. The little State he is building
in the German vacuum is founded on a compulsive need he has given up trying to understand,
a need to annihilate the Schwarzkommando and his mythical half-brother, Enzian. He
comes from Nihilist stock: there are in his ancestry any number of bomb throwers and
jubilant assassins. He is no relation at all to the Tchitcherine who dealt the Rapallo
Treaty with Walter Rathenau. There was a long-term operator, a Menshevik turned Bolshevik,
in his exile and his return believing in a State that would outlive them all, where
someone would come to sit in his seat at the table just as he had slipped into Trotsky’s—sitters
would come and go but the seats would remain . . . well, fine. There is
that
kind of State. But then again, there is this other Tchitcherine’s kind, a mortal
State that will persist no longer than the individuals in it. He is bound, in love
and in bodily fear, to students who have died under the wheels of carriages, to eyes
betrayed by nights without sleep and arms that have opened maniacally to death by
absolute power. He envies their loneliness, their willingness to go it alone, outside
even a military structure, often without support or love from anyone. His own faithful
network of fräuleins around the Zone is a compromise: he knows there’s too much comfort
in it, even when the intelligence inputs are good. But the perceptible hazards of
love, of attachment, are still light enough for him to accept, when balanced against
what he has to do.

During the early Stalin days, Tchitcherine was stationed in a remote “bear’s corner”
(medvezhy ugolok)
, out in Seven Rivers country. In the summer, irrigation canals sweated a blurry fretwork
across the green oasis. In the winter, sticky teaglasses ranked the windowsills, soldiers
played
preference
and stepped outside only to piss, or to shoot down the street at surprised wolves
with a lately retooled version of the Moisin. It was a land of drunken nostalgia for
the cities, silent Kirghiz riding, endless tremors in the earth . . . because of the
earthquakes, nobody built higher than one story and so the town looked like a Wild
West movie: a brown dirt street, lined with grandiose two-and three-story false fronts.

He had come to give the tribesmen out here, this far out, an alphabet: it was purely
speech, gesture, touch among them, not even an Arabic script to replace. Tchitcherine
coordinated with the local Likbez center, one of a string known back in Moscow as
the “red džurts.” Young and old Kirghiz came in from the plain, smelling of horses,
sour milk and weed-smoke, inside to stare at slates filled with chalk marks. The stiff
Latin symbols were almost as strange to the Russian cadre—tall Galina in her cast-off
Army trousers and gray Cossack shirts . . . marcelled and soft-faced Luba, her dear
friend . . . Vaslav Tchitcherine, the political eye . . . all agents—though none thought
of it this way—representing the NTA (New Turkic Alphabet) in uncommonly alien country.