Gravity's Rainbow (88 page)

B
RIGHT
D
AYS
(F
OX-TROT
)

—bright days for the black mar-ket,

That silver ’n’ gold makes-it shine!

From the Cor-al Sea to, the sky, blue, Baltic,

Money’s the mainspring, that makes it
all
tick—like a

Blinkin’ beacon, there’s a pricetag peekin’

From each décolletage dee-vine—

Be she green or scar-let, even Mom’s a har-lot, it’s the

Good Lord’s grand design . . .

A-and it’s sunny days-for, the black, black ma(a)rket,

Cause silver and gold makes it shii-iine!

Närrisch and Otto joining in here on three-part harmony, while the idle and hungry
of Swinemünde look on, whitefaced as patient livestock. But their bodies are only
implied: wire racks for prewar suits and frocks, too ancient, too glossy with dirt,
with passage.

Leaving the promenade, they pause at a street corner while a detachment of Russian
infantry and horsemen marches by. “Gee, they’re pouring in,” notes Otto. “Where’s
the circus?”

“Up the coast, kid,” sez Närrisch.

“What’s up the coast,” inquires Slothrop.

“
Look out
,” warns Närrisch, “
he’s a spy.
”

“Don’t call me ‘kid,’” Otto snarls.

“Spy’s ass,” sez Slothrop.

“He’s all right,” Springer pats them all on the shoulders, Herr Gemütlich here, “the
word’s been out on him for a while. He isn’t even armed.” To Slothrop: “You’re welcome
to come along with us, up the coast. It might be interesting for you.” But Slothrop
is no dummy. He notices how he is getting funny looks from everybody now, including
that Springer.

Among the cargo headed up the coast are six chorus girls, wearing feathers and spangles
under old cloth coats to save trunk space, a small pit band at different levels of
alcoholic slumber, manymany cases of vodka, and a troupe of performing chimpanzees.
Otto’s nautical-piratical mother has one of these chimps cornered inside the pilot
house, where they are going at it, the Frau with her insults, the chimp reaching now
and then trying to slap her with this floppy banana peel. Ulcerous impresario G. M.
B. Haftung is trying to get Otto’s attention. He has a record of always making his
appeals to the wrong personnel. “That’s Wolfgang in there! He’ll murder her!” Wolfgang’s
his prize chimp, somewhat unstable, does a fair Hitler imitation but has this short
attention span.

“Well,” vaguely, “he’d better watch out for my Mom.”

Framed here in her lozenge of hatchway, it’s much clearer just how extensively this
old woman has been around: she is leaning, lilting, big sweet smile just as toothy
as can be, right into that Wolfgang,
cooing
at him: “Deine
Mut
ter . . .”

“Say,
she’s
never seen one of those critters before,” Slothrop turning to Otto, surprising the
youth with a faceful of, call it amiable homicide, “has she—”

“Ach, she’s fantastic. She knows by instinct—
exactly how
to insult
anybody.
Doesn’t matter, animal, vegetable—I even saw her insult a
rock
once.”

“Aw, now—”

“Really! Ja. A gigantic clummmp of felsitic debris, last year, off the coast of Denmark,
she criticized its,” just about to fall into one of those mirthless laughs we edge
away from, “its
crystalline structure
, for twenty minutes. Incredible.”

Chorus girls have already pried open a case of vodka. Haftung, brushing hair that
grows only in memory across the top of his head, rushes over to scream at them. Boys
and girls, all ages, tattered and thin, trail across the brow, stevedoring. Against
the fair sky, chimps swing from spars and antenna, above them seagulls glide by and
stare. Wind rises, soon a whitecap here and there will start to flicker out in the
harbor. Each child carries a bale or box of a different shape, color, and size. Springer
stands by, pince-nez clipped in front of agate eyes, checking off his inventory in
a green morocco book, snails in garlic sauce, one gross . . . three cases cognac . . .
tennis balls, two dozen . . . one Victrola . . . film,
Lucky Pierre Runs Amok
, three reels . . . binoculars, sixty . . . wrist-watches . . . u.s.w., a check-mark
for each child.

Presently all has been stowed below decks, chimps fall asleep, musicians wake up,
girls surround Haftung and call him names, and pinch his cheeks. Otto makes his way
along the side, hauling in lines as the children cast them off. As the last one is
flung away, its eye-splice still in midair framing a teardrop vista of gutted Swinemünde,
Frau Gnahb, sensing the release from land through her feet, gets under way in the
usual manner, nearly losing a chimp over the fantail and sending Haftung’s half-dozen
lovelies sprawling in a winsome tangle of legs, bottoms and breasts.

Crosscurrents tug at the boat as it moves out the widening funnel of the Swine, toward
the sea. Just inside the breakwaters, where it foams through breaches bombed underwater
in the spring
look
out, Frau Gnahb, with no change of expression, swings her wheel full over, goes barreling
straight at the Sassnitz ferry
whoosh
veers away just in time, cackling at passengers staggering back from the rail, gaping
after her. “Please, Mother,” silent Otto plaintive in the window of the pilot house.
In reply the good woman commences bellowing a bloodthirsty

S
EA
C
HANTY

I’m the Pirate Queen of the Baltic Run, and nobody fucks with me—

And those who’ve tried are bones and skulls, and lie beneath the sea.

And the little fish like messengers swim in and out their eyes,

Singing, “Fuck ye not with Gory Gnahb and her desperate enterprise!”

I’ll tangle with a battleship, I’ll massacre a sloop,

I’ve sent a hundred souls to hell in one relentless swoop—

I’ve seen the Flying Dutchman, and each time we pass, he cries,

“Oh, steer me clear of Gory Gnahb, and her desperate enterprise!”

Whereupon she grips her wheel and accelerates. They find themselves now leaping toward
the side of a half-sunken merchantman: black concave iron splashed with red-lead,
each crusted rivet and pitted plate closing in, looming over— The woman is clearly
unbalanced. Slothrop shuts his eyes and hangs on to a chorus girl. With a whoop from
the pilot house, the little boat is put over hard to port, missing collision by maybe
a few coats of paint. Otto, caught daydreaming of death, staggers wildly by heading
over the side. “It’s her sense of humor,” he points out, on the way past. Slothrop
reaches out grabs him by the sweater, and the girl grabs Slothrop by the tail of his
tuxedo.

“She gets into something a little illegal,” Otto a moment later catching his breath,
“you see what happens. I don’t know what to do with her.”

“Poor kid,” the girl smiles.

“Aw,” sez Otto.

Slothrop leaves them, always happy to see young people get together, and joins von
Göll and Närrisch on the fantail. Frau Gnahb has angled, wallowing, around to the
northwest. Presently they are heading up the coast, through white-streaked, salt-smelling
Baltic.

“Well. Where we going, fellas?” jovial Slothrop wants to know.

Närrisch stares. “That is the isle of Usedom,” von Göll explains, gently. “It is bounded
on one side by the Baltic Sea. It is also bounded by two rivers. Their names are the
Swine, and the Peene. We were just on the Swine River. We were in Swinemönde. Swinemönde
means ‘mouth of the Swine River.’”

“All right, all right.”

“
We
are headed around the island of Usedom, to a place that is at the mouth of the Peene
River.”

“Let’s see, so that would be called . . . wait . . . Peenemünde, right?”

“Very good.”

“So?” There is a pause. “Oh. Oh,
that
Peenemünde.”

Närrisch, as it turns out, used to work up there. He’s apt to brood some at the idea
of Russians occupying the place.

“There was a liquid-oxygen plant I had my eye on, too,” Springer a little down with
it himself, “I wanted to start a chain—we’re still angling for the one in Volkenrode,
at the old Goering Institute.”

“There’s a bunch of those LOX generators under Nordhausen,” Slothrop trying to be
helpful.

“Thanks. The Russians have that too, you’ll recall. That’s a problem: if it weren’t
so against Nature I’d say they don’t know what they want. The roads heading east are
jammed day and night with Russian lorries, full of materiel. All kinds of loot. But
no clear pattern to it yet, beyond strip-it-and-pack-it-home.”

“Jeepers,” clever Slothrop here, “do you reckon they’ve found that S
-Gerät
yet, huh, Mr. von Göll?”

“Ah, cute,” beams the Springer.

“He’s an OSS man,” groans Närrisch, “tell you, we ought to rub him out.”

“S-Gerät’s going for £10,000 these days, half of that in front. You interested?”

“Nope. But I did hear at Nordhausen that you already have it.”

“Wrong.”

“Gerhardt—”

“He’s all
right
, Klaus.” The look is one Slothrop’s had before, from auto salesmen signaling their
partners
got a real idiot here, Leonard, now don’t spook him please?
“We planted the story deliberately in Stettin. Wanted to see how a Colonel Tchitcherine
will respond.”

“Fuck. Him again? He’ll respond, all right.”

“Well, that’s what we’re going up to Peenemünde today to find out.”

“Oh, boy.” Slothrop goes on to tell about the run-in at Potsdam, and how Geli thought
Tchitcherine didn’t care about Rocket hardware nearly so much as working out some
plot against that Oberst Enzian. If the two marketeers are interested, they don’t
show it.

The talk has drifted on into that kind of slack, nameful recapitulating that Slothrop’s
mother Nalline loved to float away on in the afternoons—Helen Trent, Stella Dallas,
Mary Noble Backstage Wife. . . .

“Tchitcherine is a complex man. It’s almost as if . . . he thinks of Enzian as .. .
another
part
of him—a black version of something inside
himself.
A something he needs to . . . liquidate.”

N
ÄRRISCH
: Do you think there might be some . . . some
political
reason?

VON
G
ÖLL
(shaking his head): I just don’t know, Klaus. Ever since what happened in Central
Asia—

N
ÄRRISCH
: You mean—

VON
G
ÖLL
: Yes . . . the Kirghiz Light. You know, it’s funny—he’s never
wanted
to be thought of as an imperialist—

N
ÄRRISCH
: None of
them
do. But there’s the girl. . . .

VON
G
ÖLL
: Little Geli Tripping. The one who thinks she’s a witch.

N
ÄRRISCH
: But do you really think she means to go through with this—this plan of hers, to
find Tchitcherine?

VON
G
ÖLL
: I think . . .
They
 . . . do. . . .

N
ÄRRISCH
: But Gerhardt, she
is
in love with him—

VON
G
ÖLL
: He hasn’t been dating her, has he?

N
ÄRRISCH
: You can’t be implying—

“Say,” splutters Slothrop, “what th’ heck’re you guys
talkin’
about, anyway?”

“Paranoia,” Springer snaps reproachfully (as folks will snap when interrupted at a
game they enjoy). “You wouldn’t understand that.”

“Well excuse me, got to go vomit now,” a klassic komeback among charm-school washouts
like our Tactful Tyrone here, and pretty advanced stuff on dry land, but not out here,
where the Baltic is making it impossible not to be seasick. Chimps are all doing their
vomiting huddled under a tarp. Slothrop joins at the rail a miserable lot of musicians
and girls. They instruct him in fine points such as not vomiting into the wind, and
timing it for when the ship rolls toward the sea, Frau Gnahb having expressed the
hope that no one would get any vomit on her ship with the kind of glacial smile Dr.
Mabuse used to get, especially on a good day. She can be heard in the pilot house
now, bellowing her sea chanty. “Öööööö,” goes Slothrop over the side.

And this is how their desperate enterprise goes a-rollicking up the coast of Usedom,
under a hazy summer sky. On shore, the green downs roll up in two gentle steps: above
them is a chain of hills thick with pines and oaks. Little resort towns with white
beaches and forlorn jetties wheel abeam rheumatically slow. Military-looking craft,
probably Russian PT boats, will be seen now and then lying dead in the water. None
challenge the Frau’s passage. The sun is in and out, turning the decks a stark moment’s
yellow around everyone’s shadow. There’s a late time of day when all shadows are thrown
along the same east-northeast bearing as the test rockets were always fired out to
sea from Peenemünde. The exact clock time, which varies through the year, is known
as Rocket Noon . . . and the sound that must at that moment fill the air for its devout
can only be compared with a noontime siren the whole town believes in . . . and guts
resonate, hard as stone. . . .

Before you sight it, you can feel the place. Even draped over a gunwale, cheek against
a fender smelling of tar, eyes tearing and insides sloshing as the sea. Even barren
and scorched as Rossokovsky and the White Russian Army left it in the spring. It’s
a face. On the maps, it’s a skull or a corroded face in profile, facing southwest:
a small marshy lake for the eye-socket, nose-and-mouth cavity cutting in at the entrance
to the Peene, just below the power station . . . the draftsmanship is a little like
a Wilhelm Busch cartoon face, some old fool for mischievous boys to play tricks on.
Tapping his tanks for grain alcohol, scratching great naughty words across fields
of his fresh cement, or even sneaking in to set off a rocket in the middle of the
night. . . .