Gravity's Rainbow (101 page)

At nightfall the children roam the streets carrying round paper lanterns, singing
Laterne, Laterne, Sonne, Mond und Sterne . . .
spheres in country evenings, pale as souls, singing good-by to another summer. In
a coastal town, near Wismar, as he’s falling to sleep in a little park, they surround
Slothrop and tell him the story of Plechazunga, the Pig-Hero who, sometime back in
the 10th century, routed a Viking invasion, appearing suddenly out of a thunderbolt
and chasing a score of screaming Norsemen back into the sea. Every summer since then,
a Thursday has been set aside to celebrate the town’s deliverance—Thursday being named
after Donar or Thor, the thunder-god, who sent down the giant pig. The old gods, even
by the 10th century, still had some pull with the people. Donar hadn’t quite been
tamed into Saint Peter or Roland, though the ceremony did come to be held at the town’s
Roland-statue near the Peterskirche.

This year, though, it’s in jeopardy. Schraub the shoemaker, who has taken the role
of Plechazunga for the past 30 years, got drafted last winter into the Volksgrenadier
and never came back. Now the white lanterns come crowding around Tyrone Slothrop,
bobbing in the dark. Tiny fingers prod his stomach.

“You’re the fattest man in the world.”

“He’s fatter than anyone in the village.”

“Would you? Would you?”

“I’m not
that
fat—”

“Told you somebody would come.”

“And taller, too.”

“—waitaminute, would I what?”

“Be Plechazunga tomorrow.”

“Please.”

Being a soft touch these days, Slothrop gives in. They roust him up out of his grass
bed and down to the city hall. In the basement are costumes and props for the Schweinheldfest—shields,
spears, horned helmets, shaggy animal skins, wooden Thor’s hammers and ten-foot lightning
bolts covered with gold leaf. The pig costume is a little startling—pink, blue, yellow,
bright sour colors, a German Expressionist pig, plush outside, padded with straw inside.
It seems to fit perfectly. Hmm.

The crowd next morning is sparse and placid: old people and children, and a few silent
veterans. The Viking invaders are all kids, helmets sloping down over their eyes,
capes dragging the ground, shields as big as they are and weaponry twice as high.
Giant Plechazunga images with white stock and red and blue cornflowers woven onto
the wiremesh frames, line the square. Slothrop waits hidden behind the Roland, a particularly
humorless, goggle-eyed, curly-headed, pinch-waisted specimen. With Slothrop is an
arsenal of fireworks and his assistant Fritz, who’s about 8, and a Wilhelm Busch original.
Slothrop is a little nervous, unaccustomed as he is to pigherofestivals. But Fritz
is an old hand, and has thoughtfully brought along a glazed jug of some liquid brain
damage flavored with dill and coriander and distilled, unless
Haferschleim
means something else, from oatmeal.

“Haferschleim, Fritz?” He takes another belt, sorry he asked.

“Haferschleim, ja.”

“Well, Haferschleim is better than none, ho, ho. . . .” Whatever it is, it seems to
work swiftly on the nerve centers. By the time all the Vikings, to a solemn brass
chorale from the local band, have puffed and struggled up to the statue, formed ranks,
and demanded the town’s surrender, Slothrop finds his brain working with less than
the usual keenness. At which point Fritz strikes his match, and all hell breaks loose,
rockets, Roman candles, pinwheels and—PLECCCH-HAZUNNGGA! an enormous charge of black
powder blasts him out in the open, singeing his ass, taking the curl right out of
his tail. “Oh, yes, that’s right, uh . . .” Wobbling, grinning hugely, Slothrop hollers
his line: “I am the wrath of Donar—and this day you shall be my anvil!” Away they
all go in a good roaring chase through the streets, in a shower of white blossoms,
little kids squealing, down to the water, where everybody starts splashing and ducking
everybody else. Townspeople break out beer, wine, bread, Quark, sausages. Gold-brown
Kartoffelpuffer are lifted dripping hot from oil smoking in black skillets over little
peat fires. Girls commence stroking Slothrop’s snout and velvet flanks. The town is
saved for another year.

A peaceful, drunken day, full of music, the smell of salt water, marsh, flowers, frying
onions, spilled beer and fresh fish, overhead little frost-colored clouds blowing
along the blue sky. The breeze is cool enough to keep Slothrop from sweating inside
this pig suit. All along the shoreline, blue-gray woods breathe and shimmer. White
sails move out in the sea.

Slothrop returns from the brown back room of a pipesmoke-and-cabbage café, and an
hour’s game of hammer-and-forge with—every boy’s dream—TWO healthy young ladies in
summer dresses and woodsoled shoes to find the crowd begun to coagulate into clumps
of three and four. Oh, shit. Not now, come on. . . . Tight aching across his asshole,
head and stomach inflated with oat mash and summer beer, Slothrop sits on a pile of
nets and tries, fat chance, to will himself alert.

These little vortices appearing in a crowd out here usually mean black market. Weeds
of paranoia begin to bloom, army-green, among the garden and midday tranquillities.
Last of his line, and how far-fallen—no other Slothrop ever felt such fear in the
presence of Commerce. Newspapers already lie spread out on the cobbles for buyers
to dump out cans of coffee on, make sure it’s all Bohnenkaffee, and not just a thin
layer on top of ersatz. Gold watches and rings appear abruptly sunlit out of dusty
pockets. Cigarettes go flashing hand to hand among the limp and filthy and soundless
Reichsmarks. Kids play underfoot while the grownups deal, in Polish, Russian, north-Baltic,
Plattdeutsch. Some of the DP style here, a little impersonal, just passing through,
dealing on route, in motion, almost as an afterthought . . . where’d they all come
from, these gray hustlers, what shadows in the Gemütlichkeit of the day were harboring
them?

Materializing from their own weird office silence, the coppers show up now, two black
’n’ white charabancs full of bluegreen uniforms, white armbands, little bucket hats
with starburst insignia, truncheons already unsheathed, black dildos in nervous hands,
wobbling, ready for action. The eddies in the crowd break up fast, jewelry ringing
to the pavement, cigarettes scattered and squashed under the feet of stampeding civilians,
among the instant litter of watches, war medals, silkstuffs, rolls of bills, pinkskinned
potatoes all their eyes staring in alarm, elbow-length kid gloves twisted up fingers
clutching at sky, smashed light bulbs, Parisian slippers, gold picture-frames around
still-lifes of cobbles, rings, brooches, nobody gonna claim any of it, everybody scared
now.

No wonder. The cops go at busting these proceedings the way they must’ve handled anti-Nazi
street actions before the War, moving in, mmm ja, with these flexible clubs, eyes
tuned to the finest possibilities of threat, smelling of leather, of the wool-armpit
rankness of their own fear, jumping little kids three-on-one, shaking down girls,
old people, making them take off and shake out even boots and underwear, jabbing and
battering in with tireless truncheonwork among the crying kids and screaming women.
Beneath the efficiency and glee is nostalgia for the old days. The War must’ve been
lean times for crowd control, murder and mopery was the best you could do, one suspect
at a time. But now, with the White Market to be protected, here again are whole streets
full of bodies eager for that erste Abreibung, and you can bet the heat are happy
with it.

Presently they have Russian reinforcements, three truckloads of young Asiatics in
fatigues who don’t seem to know where they are exactly, just shipped in from someplace
very cold and far to the east. Out of their slatsided rigs like soccer players coming
on field, they form a line and start to clear the street by compressing the crowd
toward the water. Slothrop is right in the middle of all this, shoved stumbling backward,
pig mask cutting off half his vision, trying to shield whom he can—a few kids, an
old lady who was busy earlier moving cotton yardage. The first billy-clubs catch him
in the straw padding over his stomach, and don’t feel like much. Civilians are going
down right and left, but Plechazunga’s holding his own. Has the morning been only
a dress rehearsal? Is Slothrop expected to repel
real
foreign invaders now? A tiny girl is clutching to his leg, crying the Schweinheld’s
name in a confident voice. A grizzled old cop, years of home-front high living and
bribes in his face, comes swinging a club at Slothrop’s head. The Swine-hero dodges
and kicks with his free leg. As the cop doubles over, half a dozen yelling civilians
jump on, relieving him of hat and truncheon. Tears, caught by the sun, leak out of
his withered eyes. Then gunfire has started somewhere, panicking everybody, carrying
Slothrop half off his feet, the kid around his leg torn loose and lost in the rush
forever.

Out of the street onto the quai. The police have quit hitting people and begun picking
up loot off of the street, but now the Russians are moving in, and enough of them
are looking straight at Slothrop. Providentially, one of the girls from the café shows
up about now, takes his hand and tugs him along.

“There’s a warrant out for you.”

“A what? They’re doing pretty good without any paperwork.”

“The Russians found your uniform. They think you’re a deserter.”

“They’re right.”

She takes Slothrop home with her, in his pig suit. He never hears her name. She is
about seventeen, fair, a young face, easy to hurt. They lie behind a sperm-yellowed
bedsheet tacked to the ceiling, very close on a narrow bed with lacquered posts. Her
mother is carving turnips in the kitchen. Their two hearts pound, his for his danger,
hers for Slothrop. She tells how her parents lived, her father a printer, married
during his journeymanship, his wanderyears now stretched out to ten, no word where
he’s been since ’42, when they had a note from Neukölln, where he had dossed down
the night with a friend. Always a friend, God knows how many back rooms, roundhouses,
print shops he slept single nights in, shivering wrapped in back numbers of
Die Welt am Montag
, sure of at least shelter, like everybody in the Buchdrucherverband, often a meal,
almost certainly some kind of police trouble if the stay lasted too long—it was a
good union. They kept the German Wobbly traditions, they didn’t go along with Hitler
though all the other unions were falling into line. It touches Slothrop’s own Puritan
hopes for the Word, the Word made printer’s ink, dwelling along with antibodies and
iron-bound breath in a good man’s blood, though the World for him be always the World
on Monday, with its cold cutting edge, slicing away every poor illusion of comfort
the bourgeois takes for real . . . did he run off leaflets against his country’s insanity?
was he busted, beaten, killed? She has a snapshot of him on holiday, someplace Bavarian,
waterfalled, white-peaked, a tanned and ageless face, Tyrolean hat, galluses, feet
planted perpetually set to break into a run: the image stopped, preserved here, the
only way they could keep him, running room to room down all his cold Red suburbs,
freemason’s night to night . . . their aproned and kitchen way of going evening or
empty afternoon in to study the Δx’s and Δy’s of his drifter’s spirit, on the run—study
how he was changing inside the knife-fall of the shutter, what he might’ve been hearing
in the water, flowing like himself forever, in lost silence, behind him, already behind
him.

Even now, lying beside a stranger in a pig disguise, her father is the flying element
of Slothrop, of whoever else has lain here before, flightless, and heard the same
promise: “I’d go anywhere with you.” He sees them walking a railroad trestle, pines
on long slanted mountains all around, autumn sunlight and cold, purple rainclouds,
mid-afternoon, her face against some tall concrete structure, the light of the concrete
coming down oblique both sides of her cheekbones, blending into her skin, blending
with its own light. Her motionless figure above him in a black greatcoat, blonde hair
against the sky, himself at the top of a metal ladder in a trainyard, gazing up at
her, all their shining steel roads below crisscrossing and peeling off to all parts
of the Zone. Both of them on the run. That’s what she wants. But Slothrop only wants
to lie still with her heartbeat awhile . . . isn’t that every paranoid’s wish? to
perfect methods of immobility? But they’re coming, house to house, looking for their
deserter, and it’s Slothrop who has to go, she who has to stay. In the streets loudspeakers,
buzzing metal throats, are proclaiming an early curfew tonight. Through some window
of the town, lying in some bed, already browsing at the edges of the fields of sleep,
is a kid for whom the metal voice with its foreign accent is a sign of nightly security,
to be part of the wild fields, the rain on the sea, dogs, smells of cooking from strange
windows, dirt roads . . . part of this unrecoverable summer. . . .

“There’s no moon,” she whispers, her eyes flinching but not looking away.

“What’s the best way out of town?”

She knows a hundred. His heart, his fingertips hurt with shame.

“I’ll show you.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I want to.”

Her mother gives Slothrop a couple of hard rolls to stash inside his pig suit. She’d
find him something else to wear, but all her husband’s clothes have been traded for
food at the Tauschzentrale. His last picture of her is framed in the light of her
kitchen, through the window, a fading golden woman, head in a nod over a stove with
a single pot simmering, flowered wallpaper deep-orange and red behind her averted
face.

The daughter leads him over low stone walls, along drainage ditches and into culverts,
southwesterly to the outskirts of the town. Far behind them the clock in the Peterskirche
strikes nine, the sightless Roland below continuing to gaze across the square. White
flowers fall one by one from the images of Plechazunga. Stacks of a power station
rise, ghostly, smokeless, painted on the sky. A windmill creaks out in the countryside.