Gravity's Rainbow (76 page)

“No, I don’t
enjoy
it where I am”—
Franz?
—“but I have, I have my job. . . .”

“Yes. So do I. My job is being a prisoner. I’m a professional inmate. I know how to
get favors, who to steal from, how to inform, how to—”

Any minute she’d say it . . . “Please—
stop it
Ilse—” this time Pökler got hysterical and did slap her. Ducks surprised at the sharp
report about-faced and waddled away. Ilse gazed back at him, no tears, eyes room after
room strung into the shadows of an old prewar house he could wander for years, hearing
voices and finding doors, hunting himself, his life as it might have been. . . . He
could not bear indifference from her. Close to losing control, Pökler committed then
his act of courage. He quit the game.

“If you don’t want to come back next year,” even though “next year” meant so little
by that point in Germany, “you don’t have to. It would be better if you didn’t.”

She knew immediately what he’d done. She pulled one knee up, and rested her forehead
there, and thought. “I’ll come back,” she said very quietly.

“You?”

“Yes. Really.”

He did, then, let everything go, every control. He veered into the wind of his long
isolation, shuddering terribly. He cried. She took his hands. The floating ducks watched.
The sea cooled under the hazy sun. An accordion played somewhere back in the town.
From behind the decaying mythical statues, sentenced children shouted to each other.
Summer ended.

Back at the Mittelwerke he tried, and kept trying, to get into the Dora camp and find
Ilse. It didn’t matter any more about Weissmann. The SS guards each time were courteous,
understanding, impossible to get past.

The work load now was incredible. Pökler was getting less than two hours’ sleep a
day. News of the war reached under the mountain only as rumors and shortages. Procurement
philosophy had been “triangular”—three possible sources for the same part, in case
one was destroyed. Depending what didn’t come from where, or how late it was, you
knew which factories had been bombed, which rail connections taken out. Toward the
end you had to try and fabricate many of the components locally.

When Pökler had time to think, he was met by the growing enigma of Weissmann’s silence.
To provoke him, or the memory of him, Pökler went out of his way to talk to officers
in Major Förschner’s security detail, looking for news. None of them responded to
Pökler as anything more than a nuisance. They’d heard rumors that Weissmann was no
longer here but in Holland, in command of his own rocket battery. Enzian had dropped
out of sight, along with many key Schwarzkommando. Pökler grew more and more certain
that this time the game was really over, that the war had caught them all, given new
life-death priorities and no more leisure for torturing a minor engineer. He was able
to relax some, move through the day’s routine, wait for the end, even allow himself
to hope that the thousands in Dora would soon be free, among them Ilse, some acceptable
Ilse. . . .

But in the spring, he did see Weissmann again. He woke from a dream of a gentle Zwölfkinder
that was also Nordhausen, a city of elves producing toy moon-rockets, and there was
Weissmann’s face at the edge of his bunk, watching him. He seemed to have aged ten
years, and Pökler hardly recognized him.

“There isn’t much time,” Weissmann whispered. “Come with me.”

They moved through the white, sleepless bustle of the tunnels, Weissmann walking slowly
and stiffly, both men silent. In one of the office spaces, half a dozen others were
waiting, along with some SS and SD. “We’ve already obtained permission from your groups,”
Weissmann said, “to release you for work on a special project. This will be the highest
possible security. You’ll be billeted separately, eat separately, and speak to no
one who is not present in this room.” They all looked around to see who that might
be. No one they knew. They looked back at Weissmann.

He wanted a modification worked into one rocket, only one. Its serial number had been
removed, and five zeros painted in. Pökler knew immediately that this was what Weissmann
had been saving him for: this was to be his “special destiny.” It made no sense to
him: he had to develop a plastic fairing, of a certain size, with certain insulating
properties, for the propulsion section of the rocket. The propulsion engineer was
the busiest on the project, rerouting steam and fuel lines, relocating hardware. Whatever
the new device was, nobody saw it. According to the rumor, it was being produced elsewhere,
and was nicknamed the Schwarzgerät, because of the high secrecy surrounding it. Even
the weight was classified. They were through inside of two weeks, and the “Vorrichtung
für die Isolierung” was on its way to the field. Pökler reported back to his regular
supervisor, and the routine went on as before. He never saw Weissmann again.

The first week in April, with American units supposed to be arriving at any moment,
most of the engineers were packing, collecting addresses of co-workers, drinking farewell
toasts, drifting through the emptying bays. There was a graduation feeling in the
air. It was hard not to whistle “Gaudeamus igitur.” Suddenly the cloistered life was
about to come to an end.

A young SS guard, one of the last to leave, found Pökler in the dusty cafeteria, handed
him an envelope, and left without a word. It was the usual furlough form, superseded
now by the imminent death of the Government—and a travel permit to Zwölfkinder. Where
the dates should have been, someone had written, almost illegibly, “after hostilities
end.” On the back, in the same hand (Weissmann’s?) a note to Pökler.
She has been released. She will meet you there.
He understood that this was payment for the retrofit work he’d done on the 00000.
How long had Weissmann been keeping him deliberately on ice, all so he’d have a plastics
man he could depend on, when the time came?

On the last day, Pökler walked out the south end of the main tunnels. Lorries were
everywhere, all engines idling, farewell in the spring air, tall trees sunlit green
on the mountainsides. The Obersturmbannführer was not at his post when Pökler went
into Dora. He was not looking for Ilse, or not exactly. He may have felt that he ought
to look, finally. He was not prepared. He did not know. Had the data, yes, but did
not know, with senses or heart. . . .

The odors of shit, death, sweat, sickness, mildew, piss, the breathing of Dora, wrapped
him as he crept in staring at the naked corpses being carried out now that America
was so close, to be stacked in front of the crematoriums, the men’s penises hanging,
their toes clustering white and round as pearls . . . each face so perfect, so individual,
the lips stretched back into death-grins, a whole silent audience caught at the punch
line of the joke . . . and the living, stacked ten to a straw mattress, the weakly
crying, coughing, losers. . . . All his vacuums, his labyrinths, had been the other
side of this. While he lived, and drew marks on paper, this invisible kingdom had
kept on, in the darkness outside . . . all this time. . . . Pökler vomited. He cried
some. The walls did not dissolve—no prison wall ever did, not from tears, not at this
finding, on every pallet, in every cell, that the faces are ones he knows after all,
and holds dear as himself, and cannot, then, let them return to that silence. . . .
But what can he ever do about it? How can he ever keep them? Impotence, mirror-rotation
of sorrow, works him terribly as runaway heartbeating, and with hardly any chances
left him for good rage, or for turning. . . .

Where it was darkest and smelled the worst, Pökler found a woman lying, a random woman.
He sat for half an hour holding her bone hand. She was breathing. Before he left,
he took off his gold wedding ring and put it on the woman’s thin finger, curling her
hand to keep it from sliding off. If she lived, the ring would be good for a few meals,
or a blanket, or a night indoors, or a ride home. . . .

• • • • • • •

Back to Berlin, with a terrific thunderstorm blowing over the city. Margherita has
brought Slothrop to a rickety wood house near the Spree, in the Russian sector. A
burned-out Königstiger tank guards the entrance, its paint scorched, treads mangled
and blasted off of the drive sprocket, its dead monster 88 angled down to point at
the gray river, hissing and spiculed with the rain.

Inside are bats nesting in the rafters, remains of beds with a moldy smell, broken
glass and bat shit on the bare wood floor, windows boarded up except where the stove
is vented through because the chimney’s down. On a rocking chair lies a moleskin coat,
a taupe cloud. Paint from some long-ago artist is still visible over the floor in
wrinkled splashes of aged magenta, saffron, steel blue, reverse deformations of paintings
whose whereabouts are unknown. Back in a corner hangs a tarnished mirror, birds and
flowers painted in white all around its frame, reflecting Margherita and Slothrop
and the rain out the open door. Part of the ceiling, blown away when the King Tiger
died, is covered now with soggy and stained cardboard posters all of the same cloaked
figure in the broad-brimmed hat, with its legend
DER FEIND HÖRT ZU
. Water drips through in half a dozen places.

Greta lights a kerosene lamp. It warms the rainlight with a handful of yellow. Slothrop
builds a fire in the stove while Margherita ducks down under the house, where it turns
out there’s a great stash of potatoes. Jeepers, Slothrop hasn’t seen a potato for
months. There’s onions in a sack too, and even wine. She cooks, and they both sit
there just pigging on those spuds. Later, without paraphernalia or talk, they fuck
each other to sleep. But a few hours later Slothrop wakes up, and lies there wondering
where he’s going.

Well, to find that Säure Bummer, soon as this rain lets up, give the man his hashish.
But what then? Slothrop and the S-Gerät and the Jamf/Imipolex mystery have grown to
be strangers. He hasn’t really thought about them for a while. Hmm, when
was
that? The day he sat with Säure in the café, smoking that reefer . . . oh, that was
day before yesterday, wasn’t it? Rain drips, soaking into the floor, and Slothrop
perceives that he is losing his mind. If there is something comforting—religious,
if you want—about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected
to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long. Well right now Slothrop
feels himself sliding onto the anti-paranoid part of his cycle, feels the whole city
around him going back roofless, vulnerable, uncentered as he is, and only pasteboard
images now of the Listening Enemy left between him and the wet sky.

Either They have put him here for a reason, or he’s just here. He isn’t sure that
he wouldn’t, actually, rather have that
reason. . . .

The rain lets up at midnight. He leaves Margherita to creep out in the cold city with
his five kilos, having kept for himself the one Tchitcherine plundered from. Russian
troops are singing in their billets. The salt ache of accordion music cries on in
back of them. Drunks materialize, merry and pissing in the center grooves of cobbled
alleys. Mud occupies some streets like flesh. Shell craters brim with rainwater, gleaming
in the lights of midwatch work crews clearing debris. Shattered Biedermeier chair,
mateless boot, steel eyeglass frame, dog collar (eyes at the edges of the twisting
trail watching for sign, for blazing), wine cork, splintered broom, bicycle with one
wheel missing, discarded copies of
Tägliche Rundschau
, chalcedony doorknob dyed blue long ago with ferrous ferrocyanide, scattered piano
keys (all white, an octave on B to be exact—or H, in the German nomenclature—the notes
of the rejected Locrian mode), the black and amber eye from some stuffed animal. . . .
The strewn night. Dogs, spooked and shivering, run behind walls whose tops are broken
like fever charts. Somewhere a gas leak warps for a minute into the death and after-rain
smells. Ranks of blackened window-sockets run high up the sides of gutted apartment
buildings. Chunks of concrete are held aloft by iron reinforcing rod that curls like
black spaghetti, whole enormous heaps wiggling ominously overhead at your least passing
brush by. . . . The smooth-faced Custodian of the Night hovers behind neutral eyes
and smile, coiled and pale over the city, humming its hoarse lullabies. Young men
spent the Inflation like this, alone in the street, no place to go into out of the
black winters. Girls stayed up late on stoops or sitting on benches in lamplight by
the rivers, waiting for business, but the young men had to walk by, ignored, hunching
overpadded shoulders, money with no relation to anything it could buy, swelling, paper
cancer in their billfolds. . . .

The Chicago Bar is being guarded outside by two of their descendants, kids in George
Raft suits, many sizes too big, too many ever to grow into. One keeps coughing, in
uncontrolled dying spasms. The other licks his lips and stares at Slothrop. Gunsels.
When he mentions Säure Bummer’s name, they move together in front of the door, shaking
their heads. “Look, I’m supposed to deliver him a package.”

“Don’t know him.”

“Can I leave a message?”

“He’s not here.” The cougher makes a lunge. Slothrop sweeps aside, gives him a quick
veronica with his cape, sticks his foot out and trips the kid, who lies on the ground
cursing, all tangled up in his long keychain, while his pardner goes pawing inside
of his flapping suitcoat for what Slothrop surmises to be a sidearm, so him Slothrop
kicks in the balls, and screaming “Fickt nicht mit dem Raketemensch!” so they’ll remember,
kind of a hiyo Silver here, he flees into shadows, among the heaps of lumber, stone
and earth.

He takes a trail he thinks Säure led them along the other night—keeps losing it, wandering
into windowless mazes, tangles of barbed wire holidayed by the deathstorms of last
May, then into a strafed and pitted lorry-park he can’t find his way out of for half
an hour, a rolling acre of rubber, grease, steel, and spilled petrol, pieces of vehicles
pointing at sky or earth no differently than in a peacetime American junkyard, fused
into odd, brown
Saturday Evening Post
faces, except that they are not folksy so much as downright sinister . . . yes it’s
really the Saturday Evening
Post
, all right: they are the faces of the tricorned messengers coming in from out of
the long pikes, down past the elms, Berkshire legends, travelers lost at the edge
of the Evening. Come with a message. They unwrinkle, though, if you keep looking.
They smooth out into timeless masks that speak their entire meaning, all of it right
out on the surface.