Gravity's Rainbow (78 page)

“I mean you and your musical mainstreams,” cries Säure. “Is it finally over? Or do
we have to start da capo with Carl Orff?”

“I never thought of that,” sez Gustav, and for a moment it is clear that Säure has
heard about Webern too, and trying in his underhanded way to cheer Gustav up.

“What’s wrong with
Rossini?
” hollers Säure, lighting up.
“Eh?”

“Ugh,” screams Gustav, “ugh, ugh, Rossini,” and they’re at it again, “you wretched
antique. Why doesn’t anybody go to concerts any more? You think it’s because of the
war?
Oh
no,
I’ll
tell you why, old man—because the halls are full of people like you!
Stuffed
full! Half asleep, nodding and smiling, farting through their dentures, hawking and
spitting into paper bags, dreaming up ever more ingenious plots against their children—not
just their own, but
other people’s
children too! just sitting around, at the concert with all these other snow-topped
old rascals, just a nice background murmur of wheezing, belching, intestinal gurgles,
scratching, sucking, croaking, an entire opera house crammed full of them right up
to standing room, they’re doddering in the aisles, hanging off the tops of the highest
balconies, and you know what they’re
all listening to
, Säure? eh? They’re all listening to Rossini! Sitting there drooling away to some
medley of predictable little tunes, leaning forward elbows on knees muttering, ‘C’mon,
c’mon then Rossini, let’s get all this pretentious fanfare stuff out of the way, let’s
get on to the
real good tunes!
’ Behavior as shameless as eating a whole jar of peanut butter at one sitting. On
comes the sprightly
Tancredi
tarantella, and they stamp their feet in delight, they pop their teeth and pound
their canes—‘Ah, ah!
that’s
more like it!’”

“It’s a
great
tune,” yells Säure back. “Smoke another one of these and I’ll just play it for you
here on the Bosendorfer.”

To the accompaniment of this tarantella, which really is a good tune, Magda has come
in out of the morning rain, and is now rolling reefers for everybody. She hands Säure
one to light. He stops playing and peers at it for a long time. Nodding now and then,
smiling or frowning.

Gustav tends to sneer, but Säure really turns out to be an adept at the difficult
art of papyromancy, the ability to prophesy through contemplating the way people roll
reefers—the shape, the licking pattern, the wrinkles and folds or absence thereof
in the paper. “You will soon be in love,” sez Säure, “see, this line here.”

“It’s long, isn’t it? Does that mean—”

“Length is usually intensity. Not time.”

“Short but sweet,” Magda sighs. “Fabelhaft, was?” Trudi comes over to hug her. They
are a Mutt and Jeff routine, Trudi in heels is a foot or so taller. They know how
it looks, and travel around in the city together whenever they can, by way of intervening,
if only for a minute, in people’s minds.

“How do you like this shit?” sez Säure.

“
Hübsch
,” allows Gustav. “A trifle
stahlig
, and perhaps the infinitesimal hint of a
Bodengeschmack
behind its
Körper
, which is admittedly
süffig.
”

“I would rather have said
spritzig
,” Säure disagrees, if that indeed is what it is. “Generally more
bukettreich
than last year’s harvests, wouldn’t you say?”

“Oh, for an Haut Atlas herbage it does have its
Art.
Certainly it can be described as
kernig
, even—as can often be said of that
sauber
quality prevailing in the Oued Nfis region—authentically
pikant.
”

“Actually I would tend to suspect an origin somewhere along the southern slope of
Jebel Sarho,” Säure sez—“note the
Spiel
, rather
glatt
and
blumig
, even the suggestion of a
Fülle
in its
würzig
audacity—”

“No no no,
Fülle
is overstating it, the El Abid Emerald we had last month had
Fülle.
But this is obviously more
zart
than that.”

The truth is they are both so blitzed that neither one knows what he’s talking about,
which is just as well, for at this point comes a godawful hammering at the door and
a lot of achtungs from the other side. Slothrop screams and heads for the window,
out onto the roof and over, scrambling down a galvanized pipe to the next streetward
courtyard. Back in Säure’s room the heat come busting in. Berlin police supported
by American MPs in an adviser status.

“You will show me your papers!” hollers the leader of the raid.

Säure smiles and holds up a pack of Zig-Zags, just in from Paris.

Twenty minutes later, somewhere in the American sector, Slothrop is ambling past a
cabaret where blank-faced snowdrops are lounging in front and inside, and a radio
or phonograph somewhere is playing an Irving Berlin medley. Slothrop goes hunching
paranoiacally along the street, here’s “God Bless America,” a-and “This Is the Army,
Mister Jones,” and they are his country’s versions of the Horst Wessel Song, although
it is Gustav back at the Jacobistrasse who raves (nobody gonna pull an Anton Webern
on him) to a blinking American lieutenant-colonel, “A parabola! A trap! You were never
immune over there from the simple-minded German symphonic arc, tonic to dominant,
back again to tonic. Grandeur! Gesellschaft!”

“Teutonic?” sez the colonel. “Dominant? The war’s over, fella. What kind of talk is
that?”

In from the soggy fields of the Mark comes a cold drizzle blowing. Russian cavalry
are crossing the Kurfürstendamm, driving a herd of cows to slaughter lowing and muddy,
eyelashes beaded with the fine rain. In the Soviet sector, girls with rifles slung
across bouncing wool-covered breasts are waving the traffic around with bright orange
pennants. Bulldozers growling, trucks straining push over teetering walls, and little
kids cheer at each wet crash. Silver tea-services ring on fronded terraces where water
drips, waiters in lean black coats wheel and tilt their heads. An open victoria splashes
by, two Russian officers covered with medals sitting with their ladies in silk frocks
and great floppy-brimmed hats trailing ribbons in the breeze. On the river, ducks
with green heads glittering drift among shock-waves of one another’s passage. Woodsmoke
scatters out the dented pipe of Margherita’s house. Inside the door, the first thing
Slothrop sees is a high-heeled shoe come flying straight at his head. He twitches
out of the way in time. Margherita is kneeling on the bed, breathing rapidly, staring.
“You left me.”

“Had some chores.” He rummages in covered cans on a shelf over the stove, finds dried
clover tops for tea.

“But you left me alone.” Her hair blows in a gray-black cloud around her face. She
is prey to interior winds he never felt.

“Only for a little while. Do you want tea?” Starting outside with an empty can.

“What’s a little while? For God’s sake, haven’t you been alone?”

“Sure.” Dipping up water from a rain barrel outside the door. She lies, shaking, her
face working, helpless.

Slothrop puts the can on to boil. “You were sleeping pretty soundly. Isn’t it safe
here? Is that what you mean?”

“Safe.” A terrible laughter. He wishes she wouldn’t. The water has begun to creak.
“Do you know what they were doing to me? What they were piling on my breasts? The
names they were calling me?
”

“Who, Greta?”

“When you left I woke up. I called to you but you didn’t come back. When they were
sure you’d left, they came in. . . .”

“Why didn’t you try to stay awake?”

“
I was awake!
” Sunlight, switched on, breaks through. At the harsh lighting she turns her face
away.

While he makes tea, she sits on the bed, cursing him in German and Italian, in a voice
always just at the edge of falling apart. He hands her a cup. She knocks it out of
his hand.

“Look, take it easy, all right?” He sits down next to her and blows on his tea. The
cup she refused stays on its side where it is. The dark stain steams into the wood
planks. Faraway clover rises, disperses: a ghost. . . . After a while she takes his
hand.

“I’m sorry I left you alone.”

She starts to cry.

And cries all day. Slothrop falls asleep, keeps drifting up to her sobs, and to feel
her, always in touch, some part of her, some part of him. . . . In a dream from this
time, his father has come to find him. Slothrop has been wandering at sundown by the
Mungahannock, near a rotting old paper mill, abandoned back in the nineties. A heron
rises in silhouette against luminous and dying orange. “Son,” a falling tower of words
tumbling over and over themselves, “the president died three months ago.” Slothrop
stands and curses him. “Why didn’t you tell me? Pop, I loved him. You only wanted
to sell me to the IG. You sold me out.” The old man’s eyes fill with tears. “Oh son . . .”
trying to take his hand. But the sky is dark, the heron gone, the empty skeleton of
the mill and the dark increase of the river saying
it is time to go
 . . . then his father is gone too, no time to say good-by, though his face stays,
Broderick who sold him out, long after waking, and the sadness Slothrop brought into
it, fool loudmouth kid. Margherita is leaning over him, brushing tears from his face
with the tips of her nails. The nails are very sharp, and pause often when they approach
his eyes.

“I’m afraid,” she whispers. “Everything. My face in the mirror—when I was a child,
they said not to look in the mirror too often or I’d see the Devil behind the glass . . .
and . . .” glancing back at the white-flowered mirror behind them, “we have to cover
it, please, can’t we cover it . . . that’s where they . . .
especially at night
—”

“Easy.” He moves to put as much of their bodies in touch as he can. He holds her.
The tremor is strong, and maybe uncalmable: after a while Slothrop has started to
tremble too, in phase. “Please, take it easy.” Whatever possesses her needs touch,
to drink touch insatiably.

The depth of this frightens him. He feels responsible for her safety, and often trapped.
At first they stay together days at a clip, till he has to go out dealing, or foraging.
He doesn’t sleep much. He finds himself by reflex telling lies—“It’s all right,” “There’s
nothing to worry about.” Sometimes he manages to be alone out by the river, fishing
with a piece of string and one of her hairpins. They manage a fish a day, on lucky
days two. They are goofy fish, anything swimming in Berlin waters these days has to
be everybody’s last choice. When Greta cries in her sleep for longer than he can listen
to, he has to wake her. They will try to talk, or to screw, though he’s less and less
often in the mood, and that makes her worse because she feels he’s rejecting her,
which indeed he is. Whippings seem to comfort her, and they let him off the hook.
Sometimes he’s too tired even for that. She keeps provoking him. One night he puts
in front of her a broiled fish, an unwholesome yellow loach with brain damage. She
can’t eat it, she’ll get sick.

“You have to eat.”

She moves her head aside, first one side, then the other.

“Oh boy, what a sad story, listen cunt, you ain’t the only one’s ever suffered—you
been out
there
lately?”

“Of course. I keep forgetting how
you
must have suffered.”

“
Shit
you Germans are crazy, you
all
think the world’s against you.”

“I’m not German,” just remembering, “I’m a Lombard.”

“Close enough, sweetheart.”

With a hiss, nostrils wide, she grabs the little table and wrenches it away, plates,
silverware, fish flying
splot
against the wall where it commences to drip down toward the woodwork, still, even
in death, getting all the lousy breaks. They sit in their two straight chairs, a meter
and a half of perilously empty space between. It is the warm, romantic summer of ’45,
and surrender or not, the culture of death still prevails: what Grandmother called
“a crime of passion” has become, in the absence of much passion over anything today,
the technique of preference in resolving interpersonal disputes.

“Clean it up.”

She flicks a pale bitten thumbnail from one of her top teeth and laughs, that delightful
Erdmann laugh. Slothrop, shaking, is about to say, “You don’t know how close you are—”
Then, by chance, he happens to get a look at her face. Of course she knows how close
she is. “O.K., O.K.” He throws her underwear around the room till he finds the black
girdle he’s looking for. The metal clips of the suspenders raise dark little curved
welts over fading earlier bruises on her buttocks and thighs. He has to draw blood
before she cleans up the fish. When she’s finished she kneels and kisses his boots.
Not exactly the scenario she wanted but close enough, sweetheart.

Getting closer every day, and he’s afraid. He’s never seen anything like it. When
he goes out to the city she begs to be tied with her stockings, star-fashion, to the
bedposts. Sometimes she’ll leave the house, and stay away for days, coming home with
stories about Negro MPs beating her with nightsticks, screwing her in the asshole,
how much she loved it, hoping to trigger some race/sex reaction, something a little
bizarre, a little different. . . .

Whatever it is with her, he’s catching it. Out in the ruins he sees darkness now at
the edges of all the broken shapes,
showing from behind them.
Light nests in Margherita’s hair like black doves. He will look at his chalk hands,
and along the borders of each finger, darkness will gutter and leap. In the sky over
the Alexanderplatz he has seen Oberst Enzian’s KEZVH mandala, and the face of Tchitcherine
on more than one random snowdrop. Across the façade of the Titania-palast, in red
neon through a mist one night he saw
DIE, SLOTHROP
. One Sunday out at Wannsee, an armada of sails all bent the same way, patiently,
dreamlike into the wind, passing forever against the other shore, a crowd of little
kids in soldier hats folded from old army maps plotted to drown and sacrifice him.
He escaped only by murmuring
Hauptstufe
three times.