Gravity's Rainbow (102 page)

The city gate is high and skinny, with stairsteps to nowhere on top. The road away
goes curving through the ogival opening, out into the night meadows.

“I want to go with you.” But she makes no move to step through the arch with him.

“Maybe I’ll be back.” It’s no drifter’s lie, both of them are sure that someone will
be, next year at about this time, maybe next year’s Schweinheld, someone close enough . . .
and if the name, the dossier are not exactly the same, well, who believes in those?
She’s a printer’s kid, she knows the medium, she even learned from him how to handle
a Winkelhaken pretty good, how to set up a line and take it down, “You’re a May bug,”
she whispers, and kisses him good-by, and stands watching him go, a sniffling still
girl in pinafore and army boots by the isolated gate. “Good night. . . .”

Docile girl, good night. What does he have for her but a last snapshot of a trudging
pig in motley, merging with the stars and woodpiles, something to put beside that
childhood still of her father? He impersonates flight though his heart isn’t in it
and yet he’s lost all knowledge of staying. . . . Good night, it’s curfew, get back
inside, back in your room . . . good night. . . .

He keeps to open country, sleeping when he’s too tired to walk, straw and velvet insulating
him from the cold. One morning he wakes in a hollow between a stand of beech and a
stream. It is sunrise and bitter cold, and there seems to be a warm tongue licking
roughly at his face. He is looking here into the snout of another pig, very fat and
pink pig. She grunts and smiles amiably, blinking long eyelashes.

“Wait. How about this?” He puts on the pig mask. She stares for a minute, then moves
up to Slothrop and kisses him, snout-to-snout. Both of them are dripping with dew.
He follows her on down to the stream, takes off the mask again and throws water at
his face while she drinks beside him, slurping, placid. The water is clear, running
lively, cold. Round rocks knock together under the stream. A resonant sound, a music.
It would be worth something to sit day and night, in and out, listening to these sounds
of water and cobbles unfold. . . .

Slothrop is hungry. “Come on. We got to find breakfast.” Beside a small pond near
a farmhouse, the pig discovers a wood stake driven into the ground. She begins snuffling
around it. Slothrop kicks aside loose earth and finds a brick cairn, stuffed with
potatoes ensiled last year. “Fine for you,” as she falls to eagerly, “but I can’t
eat that stuff.” Sky is shining in the calm surface of the water. Nobody seems to
be around. Slothrop wanders off to check the farmhouse. Tall white daisies grow all
over the yard. Thatch-hooded windows upstairs are dark, no smoke comes from the chimneys.
But the chicken-house in back is occupied. He eases a big fat white hen up off of
her nest, reaches gingerly for the eggs—PKAWW she flies into a dither, tries to peck
Slothrop’s arm off, friends come shooting in from outside raising a godawful commotion,
at which point the hen has worked her wings through the wood slats so she can’t get
back in and is too fat below the wingpits to get the rest of the way out. So, there
she hangs, flapping and screaming, while Slothrop grabs three eggs then tries to push
her wings back inside for her. It is a frustrating job, especially trying to keep
the eggs balanced. The rooster is in the doorway hollering Achtung, Achtung, discipline
in his harem is shot to hell, noisy white tumbleweed hens are barrelassing all over
the inside of the coop, and blood is flowing from Slothrop in half a dozen places.

Then he hears a dog barking—time to give up on this hen—comes outside sees a lady
in her Wehrmacht auxiliary outfit 30 meters away leveling a shotgun and the dog charging
in growling, teeth bared, eyes on Slothrop’s throat. Slothrop goes scrambling around
the henhouse just as the gun kicks off a good-morning blast. About then the pig shows
up and chases off the dog. Away they go, eggs cradled in pig mask, lady yelling, hens
raising hell, pig galloping along beside. There’s a final shotgun blast, but by then
they’re out of range.

About a mile farther on they pause, for Slothrop’s breakfast. “Good show,” thumping
the pig affectionately. She crouches, catching her breath, gazing at him while he
eats raw eggs and smokes half a cigarette. Then they set off again.

Soon they have begun to angle toward the sea. The pig seems to know where she’s going.
Far away on another road, a great cloud of dust hangs, crawling southward, maybe a
Russian horse convoy. Fledgling storks are trying out their wings over the haystacks
and fields. Tops of solitary trees are blurred green, as if smudged accidentally by
a sleeve. Brown windmills turn at the horizon, across miles of straw-sprinkled red
earth.

A pig is a jolly companion,

Boar, sow, barrow, or gilt—

A pig is a pal, who’ll boost your morale,

Though mountains may topple and tilt.

When they’ve blackballed, bamboozled, and burned you,

When they’ve turned on you, Tory and Whig,

Though you may be thrown over by Tabby or Rover,

You’ll never go wrong with a pig, a pig,

You’ll never go wrong with a pig!

By nightfall they have entered a wooded stretch. Fog drifts in the hollows. A lost
unmilked cow complains somewhere in the darkness. The pig and Slothrop settled down
to sleep among pines thick with shreds of tinfoil, a cloud of British window dumped
to fox the German radars in some long-ago raid, a whole forest of Christmas trees,
tinsel rippling in the wind, catching the starlight, silent, ice-cold crownfire acres
wild over their heads all night. Slothrop keeps waking to find the pig snuggled in
a bed of pine needles, watching over him. It’s not for danger, or out of restlessness.
Maybe she’s decided Slothrop needs looking after. In the tinfoil light she’s very
sleek and convex, her bristles look smooth as down. Lustful thoughts come filtering
into Slothrop’s mind, little peculiarity here you know, hehheh, nothing he can’t handle. . . .
They fall asleep under the decorated trees, the pig a wandering eastern magus, Slothrop
in his costume a gaudy present waiting for morning and a child to claim him.

Next day, about noon, they enter a slow-withering city, alone on the Baltic coast,
and perishing from an absence of children. The sign over the city gate, in burned
bulbs and empty sockets, reads
ZWÖLFKINDER
. The great wheel, dominating the skyline for miles out of town, leans a little askew,
grim old governess, sun catching long streaks of rust, sky pale through the iron lattice
that droops its long twisted shadow across the sand and into the plum sea. Wind cat-howls
in and out the doorless halls and houses.

“Frieda.” A voice calling from the blue shadow behind a wall. Grunting, smiling, the
pig stands her ground—look who I brought home. Soon a thin freckled man, blond, nearly
bald, steps out into the sun. Glancing at Slothrop, nervous, he reaches to scratch
Frieda between the ears. “I am Pökler. Thank you for bringing her back.”

“No, no—she brought me.”

“Yes.”

Pökler is living in the basement of the town hall. He has some coffee heating on a
driftwood fire in the stove.

“Do you play chess?”

Frieda kibitzes. Slothrop, who tends to play more by superstition than strategy, is
obsessed with protecting his knights, Springer and Springer—willing to lose anything
else, thinking no more than a move or two ahead if that, he alternates long lethargic
backing and filling with bursts of idiot razzle-dazzle that have Pökler frowning,
but not with worry. About the time Slothrop loses his queen, “Sa-a-a-y, waita-minute,
did you say
Pökler
?”

Zip the man is out with a Luger as big as a house—really fast guy—with the muzzle
pointing right at Slothrop’s head. For a moment Slothrop, in his pig suit, thinks
that Pökler thinks that he, Slothrop, has been fooling around with Frieda the Pig,
and that there is about to be a shotgun, or Luger, wedding here—in fact the phrase
unto thee I pledge my trough
has just arrived in his brain when he realizes that what Pökler’s
actually
saying is, “You’d better leave. Only two more moves and I’d’ve had you anyway.”

“Lemme at least tell you my story,” blithering fast as he can the Zürich information
with Pökler’s name on it, the Russian-American-Herero search for the S-Gerät, wondering
meantime, in parallel sort of, if that Oberst Enzian wasn’t right about going native
in the Zone— beginning to get ideas, fixed and slightly, ah, erotic notions about
Destiny are you Slothrop? eh? tracing back the route Frieda the pig brought him along,
trying to remember forks where they might have turned another way. . . .

“The Schwarzgerät.” Pökler shakes his head. “I don’t know what it was. I was never
that interested. Is that really all you’re after?”

Slothrop thinks that over. Their coffee cups take sunlight from the window and bounce
it back up to the ceiling, bobbing ellipses of blue light. “Don’t know. Except for
this kind of personal tie-in with Imipolex G. . . .”

“It’s an aromatic polyimide,” Pökler putting the gun back in his shirt.

“Tell me about it,” sez Slothrop.

Well, but not before he has told something of his Ilse and her summer returns, enough
for Slothrop to be taken again by the nape and pushed against Bianca’s dead flesh. . . .
Ilse, fathered on Greta Erdmann’s silver and passive image, Bianca, conceived during
the filming of the very scene that was in his thoughts as Pökler pumped in the fatal
charge of sperm—how could they not be the same child?

She’s still with you, though harder to see these days, nearly invisible as a glass
of gray lemonade in a twilit room . . . still she is there, cool and acid and sweet,
waiting to be swallowed down to touch your deepest cells, to work among your saddest
dreams.

• • • • • • •

Pökler does manage to tell a little about Laszlo Jamf, but keeps getting sidetracked
off into talking about the movies, German movies Slothrop has never heard of, much
less seen . . . yes here’s some kind of fanatical movie hound all right— “On D-Day,”
he confesses, “when I heard General Eisenhower on the radio announcing the invasion
of Normandy, I thought it was really Clark Gable, have you ever noticed? the voices
are
identical. . . .”

In the last third of his life, there came over Laszlo Jamf—so it seemed to those who
from out in the wood lecture halls watched his eyelids slowly granulate, spots and
wrinkles grow across his image, disintegrating it toward old age—a hostility, a strangely
personal
hatred, for the covalent bond. A conviction that, for synthetics to have a future
at all, the bond must be improved on—some students even read “transcended.” That something
so mutable, so
soft
, as a sharing of electrons by atoms of carbon should lie at the core of life,
his
life, struck Jamf as a cosmic humiliation.
Sharing?
How much stronger, how everlasting was the
ionic
bond—where electrons are not shared, but
captured. Seized!
and held! polarized plus and minus, these atoms, no ambiguities . . . how he came
to love that clarity: how stable it was, such mineral stubbornness!

“Whatever lip-service we may pay to Reason,” he told Pökler’s class back at the T.H.,
“to moderation and compromise, nevertheless there remains the lion. A lion in each
one of you. He is either tamed—by too much mathematics, by details of design, by corporate
procedures—or he stays wild, an eternal predator.

“The lion does not know subtleties and half-solutions. He does not accept
sharing
as a basis for anything! He takes, he holds! He is not a Bolshevik or a Jew. You
will never hear relativity from the lion. He wants the absolute. Life and death. Win
and lose. Not truces or arrangements, but the joy of the leap, the roar, the blood.”

If this be National Socialist chemistry, blame that something-in-the-air, the Zeitgeist.
Sure, blame it. Prof.-Dr. Jamf was not immune. Neither was his student Pökler. But
through Inflation and Depression, Pökler’s idea of “the lion” came to have a human
face attached to it, a movie face natürlich, that of the actor Rudolf Klein-Rogge,
whom Pökler idolized, and wanted to be like.

Klein-Rogge was carrying nubile actresses off to rooftops when King Kong was still
on the tit with no motor skills to speak of. Well, one nubile actress anyway, Brigitte
Helm in
Metropolis.
Great movie. Exactly the world Pökler and evidently quite a few others were dreaming
about those days, a Corporate City-state where technology was the source of power,
the engineer worked closely with the administrator, the masses labored unseen far
underground, and ultimate power lay with a single leader at the top, fatherly and
benevolent and just, who wore magnificent-looking suits and whose name Pökler couldn’t
remember, being too taken with Klein-Rogge playing the mad inventor that Pökler and
his codisciples under Jamf longed to be—indispensable to those who ran the Metropolis,
yet, at the end, the untamable lion who could let it all crash, girl, State, masses,
himself, asserting his reality against them all in one last roaring plunge from rooftop
to street. . . .

A curious potency. Whatever it was the real visionaries were picking up out of the
hard tessitura of those days and city streets, whatever Käthe Kollwitz saw that brought
her lean Death down to hump Its women from behind, and they to love it so, seemed
now and then to have touched Pökler too, in his deeper excursions into the Mare Nocturnum.
He found delight not unlike a razor sweeping his skin and nerves, scalp to soles,
in ritual submissions to the Master of this night space and of himself, the male embodiment
of a technologique that embraced power not for its social uses but for just those
chances of surrender, personal and dark surrender, to the Void, to delicious and screaming
collapse. . . . To Attila the Hun, as a matter of fact, come west out of the steppes
to smash the precious structure of magic and incest that held together the kingdom
of the Burgundians. Pökler was tired that night, all day out scavenging for coal.
He kept falling asleep, waking to images that for a half a minute he could make no
sense of at all—a close-up of a face? a forest? the scales of the Dragon? a battle-scene?
Often enough, it would resolve into Rudolf Klein-Rogge, ancient Oriental thanatomaniac
Attila, head shaved except for a topknot, bead-strung, raving with grandiloquent gestures
and those enormous bleak eyes. . . . Pökler would nod back into sleep with bursts
of destroying beauty there for his dreams to work on, speaking barbaric gutturals
for the silent mouths, smoothing the Burgundians into something of the meekness, the
grayness of certain crowds in the beerhalls back at the T.H. . . . and wake again—it
went on for hours—into some further progression of carnage, of fire and smashing. . . .