Gravity's Rainbow (84 page)

“Yeah, I . . .” why is Slothrop drawling this way? “saw ya watching . . . last
night too
, mister. . . .”

“You think I am a voyeur. Yes you do. But it isn’t that. There is no thrill, I mean.
But when I watch people, I feel less alone.”

“W’l hell, Ensign . . . why don’tcha just. . . join in?
They’re
always lookin’ fer . . . company.”

“Oh, my goodness,” grinning one of them big polyhedral Jap grins, like they do, “then
I would feel
more
alone.”

Tables and chairs have been set out under orange-and-red-stripe awnings on the fantail.
Slothrop and Morituri have got the place almost to themselves, except for some girls
in two-piece swimsuits out to catch some sun before it goes away. Cumulonimbus are
building up dead ahead. You can hear thunder in the distance. The air is coming awake.

A steward brings coffee, cream, porridge and fresh oranges. Slothrop looks at the
porridge, doubtful. “I’ll take it,” Ensign Morituri grabbing the bowl.

“Oh, sure.” Slothrop notices now how this Nip also has this wide handle-bar mustache.
“Aha, aha. I’m hep to you. A porridge fan! Shameful. A latent Anglophile—yeah, you’re
blushing.” Pointing and hollering ha, ha, ha.

“You’ve found me out. Yes, yes. I’ve been on the wrong side for six years.”

“Ever try to get away?”

“And find out what you people are really like? Oh, my golly. What if phile changes
then to phobe? Where would I be?” He giggles, spits an orange pit over the side. Seems
he put in a few weeks’ training on that Formosa, in Kamikaze school, but they washed
him out. No one ever told him why, exactly. Something to do with his attitude. “I
just didn’t have a good attitude,” he sighs. “So they sent me back here again, by
way of Russia and Switzerland. This time with the Propaganda Ministry.” He would sit
most of the day watching Allied footage for what could be pulled and worked into newsreels
to make the Axis look good and the other side look bad. “All I know about Great Britain

comes from that raw material.”

“Looks like German movies have warped other outlooks around here too.”

“You mean Margherita’s. Did you know, that’s how we met! A mutual friend at Ufa. I
was on holiday at Bad Karma—just before the Polish invasion. The little town where
you joined us. It was a spa. I watched you fall in the water. Then you climbed aboard.
I also watched Margherita watching you. Please don’t be offended, Slothrop, but it
might be better to stay away from her right now.”

“Not at all. I know something creepy is going on.” He tells Morituri about the incident
in the Sprudelhof, and Margherita’s flight from the apparition in black.

The Ensign nods, grim, twisting half his mustache up so it points in a saber at one
eye. “She didn’t tell you what happened there? Golly, Jack, you had better know. . . .”

E
NSIGN
M
ORITURI’S
S
TORY

Wars have a way of overriding the days just before them. In the looking back, there
is such noise and gravity. But we are conditioned to forget. So that the war may have
more importance, yes, but still . . . isn’t the hidden machinery easier to see in
the days leading up to the event? There are arrangements, things to be expedited . . .
and often the edges are apt to lift, briefly, and we see things we were not meant
to. . . .

They’d tried to talk Margherita out of going to Hollywood. She went, and she failed.
Rollo was there when she returned, to keep the worst from happening. For a month he
impounded sharp objects, kept her at ground level and away from chemicals, which meant
she didn’t sleep much. She would drop off and wake up hysterical. Afraid to go to
sleep. Afraid she wouldn’t know how to get back.

Rollo did not have a keen mind. He meant well, but after a month of her he found he
couldn’t take any more. Actually it surprised everyone that he’d lasted so long. Greta
was handed over to Sigmund, hardly improved, but perhaps no worse.

The trouble with Sigmund was the place he happened to be living in, a drafty, crenelated
deformity overlooking a cold little lake in the Bavarian Alps. Parts of it must have
dated back to the fall of Rome. That was where Sigmund brought her.

She had got the idea somewhere that she was part Jewish. Things in Germany by then,
as everyone knows, were very bad. Margherita was terrified of being “found out.” She
heard Gestapo in every puff of air that slipped in, among any of a thousand windways
of dilapidation. Sigmund spent whole nights trying to talk it away. He was no better
at it than Rollo. It was around this time that her symptoms began.

However psychogenic these pains, tics, hives and nauseas, her suffering was real.
Acupuncturists came down by Zeppelin from Berlin, showing up in the middle of the
night with little velvet cases full of gold needles. Viennese analysts, Indian holy
men, Baptists from America trooped in and out of Sigmund’s castle, stage-hypnotists
and Colombian
curanderos
slept on the rug in front of the fireplace. Nothing worked. Sigmund grew alarmed,
and before long as ready as Margherita to hallucinate. Probably it was she who suggested
Bad Karma. It had a reputation that summer for its mud, hot and greasy mud with traces
of radium, jet black, softly bubbling. Ah. Anyone who’s been sick in that way can
imagine her hope. That mud would cure anything.

Where was anybody that summer before the War? Dreaming. The spas that summer, the
summer Ensign Morituri came to Bad Karma, were crowded with sleepwalkers. Nothing
for him to do at the Embassy. They suggested a holiday till September. He should have
known something was up, but he only went on holiday to Bad Karma—spent the days drinking
Pilsener Urquelle in the café by the lake in the Pavilion Park. He was a stranger,
half the time drunk, silly beer-drunk, and he hardly spoke their language. But what
he saw must have been going on all over Germany. A premeditated frenzy.

Margherita and Sigmund moved along the same magnolia-shaded paths, sat out in rolling-chairs
to hear concerts of patriotic music . . . when it rained they fidgeted over card games
in one of the public rooms of their Kurhaus. At night they watched the fireworks—fountains,
spark-foaming rockets, yellow starbursts high over Poland. That oneiric season. . . .
There was no one in all the spas to read anything in the patterns the fires made.
They were only gay lights, nervous as the fantasies that flickered from eye to eye,
trailing the skin like the ostrich fans of 50 years ago.

When did Sigmund first notice her absences, or when did they become for him more than
routine? Always she gave him plausible stories: a medical appointment, a chance meeting
with an old friend, drowsiness in the mud-baths, while time raced by. It may have
been this unaccustomed sleep that got him suspicious at last, because of what her
wakefulness had put him through in the South. The stories about the children in the
local newspapers could have made no impression, not then. Sigmund only read headlines,
and rarely at that, to fill up a dead moment.

Morituri saw them often. They would meet and bow, exchange Heil Hitlers, and the Ensign
would be permitted a few minutes to practice his German. Except for waiters and barmen,
they were the only people he spoke with. Out at the tennis courts, waiting in line
at the pump room under the cool colonnade, at an aquatic
corso
, a battle of flowers, a Venetian fête, Sigmund and Margherita hardly changed, he
with his—Morituri thought of it as his American Smile, around the amber stem of his
dead pipe . . . his head like a flesh Christmas ornament . . . how long ago it was . . .
she with her yellow sunglasses and Garbo hats. The flowers were all that changed about
her day to day: morning glory, almond blossom, foxglove. Morituri grew to look forward
so to these daily meetings. His wife and daughters clear on the other side of the
world, himself exiled in a country that bewildered and oppressed him. He needed the
passing zoogoers’ civility, the guidebook words. He knows he stared back, every bit
as curious. In their European slickness, they all fascinated him: the white-plumed
old ladies in the lying-out chairs, the veterans of the Great War like serene hippopotamuses
soaking in the steel baths, their effeminate secretaries chattering shrill as monkeys
across the Sprudelstrasse, while far down the arches of lindens and chestnuts you
could hear the endless roar of carbon dioxide at the bubbling spring, coming out of
solution in great shuddering spheres . . . but Sigmund and Margherita fascinated him
most of all. “They seemed as alien here as I was. We each have antennas, don’t we,
tuned to recognize our own. . . .”

One forenoon, by accident, he met Sigmund, alone, a tweed statue on his walking stick
in front of the Inhalatorium, looking as if he’d lost his way, no real place to go,
no desire. Without premeditation, then, they began to talk. The time was right. They
moved off presently, strolling through the crowds of sick foreigners, while Sigmund
told of his troubles with Greta, her Jewish fantasy, her absences. The day before,
he had caught her out in a lie. She’d come in very late. Her hands had taken a fine
tremor that wouldn’t stop. He’d begun to notice things. Her shoes, beaded with drying
black mud. A seam in her dress widened, nearly ripped, though she’d been losing weight.
But he hadn’t the courage to have it out with her.

Morituri, who had been reading the papers, for whom the connection had sprung up like
a monster from the tamed effervescences of the Trinkhalle, but who did not have the
words, German or otherwise, to tell Sigmund, Morituri, the Beer Ensign, began to follow
her then. She never looked back, but she knew he was there. At the weekly ball in
the Kursaal he felt, for the first time, a reticence among them all. Margherita, eyes
he was accustomed to seeing covered with sunglasses naked now, burning terribly, never
took her gaze from him. The Kur-Orchestra played selections from
The Merry Widow
and
Secrets of Suzanne
, out-of-date music, and yet, when bits of it found Morituri years later in the street,
over the radio, they never failed to bring back the unwritten taste of that night,
the three of them at the edge of a deepness none could sound . . . some last reprise
of the European thirties he had never known . . . which are also for him a particular
room, a salon in the afternoon: lean girls in gowns, mascara all around their eyes,
the men with faces shaven very smooth, film-star polished . . . not operetta but dance
music here, sophisticated, soothing, a bit “modern,” dipping elegantly in the up-to-date
melodic lines . . . an upstairs room, with late sunlight coming in, deep carpets,
voices saying nothing heavy or complex, smiles informed and condescending. He has
awakened that morning in a soft bed, he looks forward to an evening at a cabaret dancing
to popular love songs played in just such a mannered and polished style. His afternoon
salon with its held tears, its smoke, its careful passion has been a way-station between
the comfortable morning and the comfortable night: it was Europe, it was the smoky,
citied fear of death, and most perilous it was Margherita’s scrutable eyes, that lost
encounter in the Kursaal, black eyes among those huddled jewels and nodding old generals,
in the roar from the Brodelbrunnen outside, filling the quiet spaces in the music
as machinery was soon to fill the sky.

Next evening, Morituri followed her out for the last time. Down the worn paths, under
the accustomed trees, past the German goldfish pool that reminded him of home, across
the golf links, the day’s last white-mustached men struggling up out of traps and
hazards, their caddies standing at allegorical attention in the glow of the sunset,
the bundled clubs in Fascist silhouette. . . . Twilight came down on Bad Karma that
night pallid and violent: the horizon was a Biblical disaster. Greta had dressed all
in black, a hat with a veil covering most of her hair, purse slung by a long strap
over one shoulder. As choices of a destination narrowed to one, as Morituri ran into
snares the night began to lay out for him, prophecy filled him like the river wind:
where she had been on her absences, how the children in those headlines had—

They had arrived at the edge of the black mud pool: that underground presence, old
as Earth, partly enclosed back at the Spa and a name given to. . . . The offering
was to be a boy, lingering after all the others had gone. His hair was cold snow.
Morituri could only hear fragments of what they said. The boy wasn’t afraid of her
at first. He might not have recognized her from his dreams. It would have been his
only hope. But they had made that impossible, his German overseers. Morituri stood
by in his uniform, waiting, unbuttoning the jacket so that he could move, though he
didn’t want to. Certainly they were all repeating this broken act from an earlier
time. . . .

Her voice began its rise, and the boy his trembling. “You have been in exile too long.”
It was a loud clap in the dusk. “Come home, with me,” she cried, “back to your people.”
Now he was trying to break away, but her hand, her gloved hand, her claw had flown
out and seized his arm. “Little piece of Jewish shit. Don’t try to run away from me.”

“No . . .” but at the very end rising, in a provocative question.

“You know who I am, too. My home is the form of Light,” burlesquing it now, in heavy
Yiddish dialect, actressy and false, “I wander all the Diaspora looking for strayed
children. I am Israel. I am the Shekhinah, queen, daughter, bride, and mother of God.
And I will take you back, you fragment of smashed vessel, even if I must pull you
by your nasty little circumcised penis—”

“
No . . .”

So Ensign Morituri committed then the only known act of heroism in his career. It’s
not even in his folder. She had gathered the boy struggling, one glove busy between
his legs. Morituri rushed forward. For a moment the three of them swayed, locked together.
Gray Nazi statuary: its name may have been “The Family.” None of the Greek stillness:
no, they
moved.
Immortality was not the issue. That’s what made them different. No survival, beyond
the senses’ taking of it—no handing-down. Doomed as d’Annunzio’s adventure at Fiume,
as the Reich itself, as the poor creatures from whom the boy now tore loose and ran
off into the evening.