GRAVITY RAINBOW (17 page)

Farther up, past buried land mines and antitank posts of corroding concrete, up in a pillbox covered with netting and sod, halfway up the cliff, young Dr. Bleagh and his nurse Ivy are relaxing after a difficult lobotomy. His scrubbed and routinized fingers dart in beneath her suspender straps, pull outward, release in a sudden great smack and ho-ho-ho from Bleagh as she jumps and laughs too, trying not too hard to squirm away. They lie on a bed of faded old nautical charts, maintenance manuals, burst sandbags and spilled sand, burned match-sticks and unraveled cork-tips from cigarettes long decomposed that comforted through the nights of '41 and the sudden rush of heart at any glimpse of a light at sea. "You're mad," she whispers. "I'm randy," he smiles, and snaps her garter again, boy-and-slingshot.

In the uplands a line of cylindrical blocks to cripple the silent King Tigers that now will never roll the land chains away like so many white muffins across the dun pasture, among the low patches of snow and the pale lime outcrops. Out on a little pond the black man is down from London, ice-skating, improbable as a Zouave, riding his blades tall, dignified, as if born to them and ice not desert. Small townschil-dren scatter before him, close enough to have their cheeks stung by curved wakes of powdered ice whenever he turns. Until he smile they dare not speak, only follow, tag, flirt, wanting the smile, fearing it, wanting it… He has a magic face, a face they know. From the shore, Myron Grunton and Edwin Treacle, both chain-smoking, brooding over Operation Black Wing and the credibility of the Schwarzkoni-

mando, watch their magic Negro, their prototype, neither caring to risk the ice, loping Fen or any style, in front of these children.

The winter's in suspense-all the sky a bleak, luminous gel. Down on the beach, Pointsman fishes a roll of toilet paper, each sheet stenciled property of H.M. government, from a pocket to blow his nose. Roger now and then pushes hair back under his cap. Neither speaks. So, the two of them: trudging, hands in and out of pockets, their figures dwindling, fawn and gray and a lick of scarlet, very sharp-edged, their footprints behind them a long freezing progress of exhausted stars, the overcast reflecting from the glazed beach nearly white… We have lost them. No one listened to those early conversations-not even an idle snapshot survives. They walked till that winter hid them and it seemed the cruel Channel itself would freeze over, and no one, none of us, could ever completely find them again. Their footprints filled with ice, and a little later were taken out to sea.

In silence, hidden from her, the camera follows as she moves deliberately nowhere longlegged about the rooms, an adolescent wideness and hunching to the shoulders, her hair not bluntly Dutch at all, but secured in a modish upsweep with an old, tarnished silver crown, yesterday's new perm leaving her very blonde hair frozen on top in a hundred vortices, shining through the dark filigree. Widest lens-opening this afternoon, extra tungsten light laid on, this rainiest day in recent memory, rocket explosions far away to south and east now and then visiting the maisonette, rattling not the streaming windows but only the doors, in slow three- and fourfold shudderings, like poor spirits, desperate for company, asking to be let in, only a moment, a touch… She's alone in the house, except for the secret cameraman and Os-bie Feel, who's out in the kitchen, doing something mysterious with a harvest of mushrooms from up on the roof. They have shiny red-orange cups with raised patches of whitish-gray veil. Now and then the geometry of her restlessness brings her to glance in a doorway at his boyish fussing with the
Amanita muscaria
(for it is this peculiar relative of the poisonous Destroying Angel that claims Osbie's attention, or what passes with him for attention) -flash him a smile she means to be friendly but which to Osbie seems terribly worldly, sophisticated, wicked. She being the first Dutch girl he's ever spoken to, he's surprised at finding high heels instead of wooden shoes, struck in fact a bit witless by her so groomed and (he imagines) Continental style, the intellect behind the fair-lashed eyes or dark glasses she affects out on the street, behind the traces of baby fat, the dimples countersunk each side of her mouth. (In close-up her skin, though nearly perfect, is seen to be lightly powdered and rouged, the eyelashes a touch darkened, brows reshaped a matter of two or three empty follicles…)

What
can
young Osbie possibly have in mind? He is carefully scraping out the inside of each persimmon-colored mushroom cup and shredding the rest. Dispossessed elves run around up on the roof, gibbering. He now has a growing heap of orange-gray fungus, which he proceeds to add in fistfuls to a pot of steaming water. A previous batch also simmers atop the stove, reduced to a thick gruel covered with yellow scum, which Osbie now removes and purees further in Pirate's blending machine. Then he spreads the fungoid mush over a tin cookie sheet. He opens the oven, removes with asbestos potholders another sheet covered with dark caked dust, and replaces it with the one he has just prepared. With a mortar and pestle he pulverizes the substance and dumps it into an old Huntley Palmers biscuit tin, reserving only enough to roll deftly up in a Rizla liquorice cigarette paper, light, and inhale the smoke of.

But she happens to've glanced in just at the instant Osbie opened the echoing oven. The camera records no change in her face, but why does she stand now so immobile at the door? as if the frame were to be stopped and prolonged into just such a lengthwise moment of gold fresh and tarnished, innocence microscopically masked, her elbow slightly bent, hand resting against the wall, fingers fanned on the pale orange paper as if she touches her own skin, a pensive touch… Outside, the long rain in silicon and freezing descent smacks, desolate, slowly corrosive against the mediaeval windows, curtaining like smoke the river's far shore. This city, in all its bomb-pierced miles: this inexhaustibly knotted victim… skin of glistening roofslates, sooted brick flooded high about each window dark or lit, each of a million openings vulnerable to the gloom of this winter day. The rain washes, drenches, fills the gutters singing, the city receives it, lifting, in a perpetual shrug… With a squeak and metal slam the oven is closed again, but for Katje it will never close. She has posed before the mirrors too often today, knows her hair and make-up are perfect, admires the frock they have brought her from Harvey Nicholls, a sheer crepe that flows in from padded shoulders down to a deep point between her breasts, a rich cocoa shade known as "nigger" in this country, yards and yards of this delicious silk spun and thrown, tied loosely at the waist, soft pleats

falling to her knees. The cameraman is pleased at the unexpected effect of so much flowing crepe, particularly when Katje passes before a window and the rainlight coming through changes it for a few brief unshutterings to murky glass, charcoal-saturated, antique and weather-worn, frock, face, hair, hands, slender calves all gone to glass and glazing, for the celluloid instant poised-the translucent guardian of a rainfall shaken through all day by rocket blasts near and far, downward, dark and ruinous behind her the ground which, for the frames' passage, defines her.

At the images she sees in the mirror Katje also feels a cameraman's pleasure, but knows what he cannot: that inside herself, enclosed in the
soignee
surface of dear fabric and dead cells, she is corruption and ashes, she belongs in a way none of them can guess cruelly to the Oven… to
Der Kinderofen…
remembering now his teeth, long, terrible, veined with bright brown rot as he speaks these words, the yellow teeth of Captain Blicero, the network of stained cracks, and back in his nightbreath, in the dark oven of himself, always the coiled whispers of decay… She recalls his teeth before any other feature, teeth were to benefit most directly from the Oven: from what is planned for her, and for Gottfried. He never uttered it clearly as threat, nor ever addressed to either of them directly, but rather across her trained satin thighs to the evening's guests, or down the length of Gottfried's docile spine ("the Rome-Berlin Axis" he called it the night the Italian came and they were all on the round bed, Captain Blicero plugged into Gottfried's upended asshole and the Italian at the same time into his pretty mouth) Katje only passive, bound and gagged and false-eyelashed, serving tonight as human pillow for the Italian's whitening perfumed curls (roses and fat just at the edge of turning rancid)… each utterance a closed flower, capable of exfoliation and infinite revealing (she thinks of a mathematical function that will expand for her bloom-like into a power series
with no general term,
endlessly, darkly, though never completely by surprise)… his phrase
Padre
Ignacio
unfolding into Spanish inquisitor, black robes, brown arching nose, the suffocating smell of incense + confessor/executioner + Katje and Gottfried both kneeling, side by side in dark confessional + children out of old Marchen kneeling, knees cold and aching, before the Oven, whispering to it secrets they can tell no one else + Captain Blicero's witch-paranoia, suspecting them both, Katje despite her NSB credentials + the Oven as listener/avenger + Katje kneeling before Blicero in highest drag, black velvet and Cuban heels, his penis squashed invisible under a flesh-colored leather jockstrap, over which he wears a false cunt

and merkin of sable both handcrafted in Berlin by the notorious Mme. Ophir, the mock labia and bright purple clitoris molded of-Madame had been abject, pleading shortages-synthetic rubber and Mipolam, the new polyvinyl chloride… tiny blades of stainless steel bristle from lifelike pink humidity, hundreds of them, against which Katje, kneeling, is obliged to cut her lips and tongue, and then kiss blood-abstracts across the golden ungessoed back of her "brother" Gottfried. Brother in play, in slavery… she had never seen him before coming to the requisitioned house near the firing sites, hidden in the woods and parkland of this settled tongue of small farms and estates that reaches eastward from the royal city, between two expanses of polder, toward Wassenaar-yet his face, for that first time, seen in autumn sunlight through the great west window of the drawing-room, kneeling naked except for a studded dog collar, masturbating metronomic, at shouted commands from Captain Blicero, all his fair skin stained by afternoon a luminous synthetic orange she has never before associated with skin, his penis a blood monolith, its thickly gasping mouth audible in the carpeted silence, his face raised to none of them, but as if to something on the ceiling, or in the sky which ceilings may in his vision stand for, eyes-down as he seems most of the time to be-his face, ascending, tightening, coming, is so close to what she's been seeing all her life in mirrors, her own studied mannequin's stare, that she catches her breath, feels for a moment the speeded percussion of her heart, before turning just such a stare toward Blicero. He is delighted. "Perhaps," he tells her, "I will cut your hair." He smiles at Gottfried. "Perhaps I'll have him grow his." The humiliation would be good for the boy each morning at quarters, ranked with his battery near Schu?stelle 3, where horses thundered once before the frantic, the losing railbirds of the old peace-failing inspections time after time yet protected by his Captain from Army discipline. Instead, between firings, day or night, short of sleep, odd hours, suffering the Captain's own "Hexeszuchtigung." But did Blicero also cut her hair? She can't remember now. She knows she wore Gottfried's uniforms once or twice (pushing her hair, yes, up under his forage cap), looking easily his double, spending these nights "in the cage," as Blicero has set the rules, while Gottfried must wear her silk stockings, her lace apron and cap, all her satin and her ribboned organdy. But afterward he must always go back again to the cage. That's how it is. Their Captain allows no doubt as to which, brother or sister, really is maidservant, and which fattening goose.

How seriously is she playing? In a conquered country, one's own occupied country, it's better, she believes, to enter into some formal,

rationalized version of what, outside, proceeds without form or decent limit day and night, the summary executions, the roustings, beatings, subterfuge, paranoia, shame… though it is never discussed among them openly, it would seem Katje, Gottfried, and Captain Blicero have agreed that this Northern and ancient form, one they all know and are comfortable with-the strayed children, the wood-wife in the edible house, the captivity, the fattening, the Oven-shall be their preserving routine, their shelter, against what outside none of them can bear-the War, the absolute rule of chance, their own pitiable contingency here, in its midst…

It isn't safe, even inside, in the house… nearly every day a rocket misfires. Late in October, not far from this estate, one fell back and exploded, killing 12 of the ground crew, breaking windows for hundreds of meters all around, including the west window of the drawing-room where Katje first saw her golden game-brother. The official rumor stated that only fuel and oxidizer had gone off. But Captain Blicero, with a trembling-she must say nihilistic-pleasure, said that the Amatol charge in the warhead had also exploded, making them as much target as launch site… That they were all condemned. The house lies west of the Duindigt racecourse, quite the other direction from London, but no bearing is exempt-often the rockets, crazed, turn at random, whinnying terribly in the sky, turn about and fall according each to its madness so unreachable and, it is feared, incurable. When there's time to, their owners destroy them, by radio, in mid-convulsion. Between rocket launches there are the English raids. Spitfires come roaring in low over the dark sea at suppertime, the searchlights in the city staggering on, the after-hum of sirens hangs in the sky high above the wet iron seats in the parks, the AA guns chug, searching, and the bombs fall in woodland, in polder, among flats thought to be billeting rocket troops.

It adds an overtone to the game, which changes the timbre slightly. It is she who, at some indefinite future moment, must push the Witch into the Oven intended for Gottfried. So the Captain must allow for the real chance she's a British spy, or member of the Dutch underground. Despite all German efforts, intelligence inputs still flow from Holland back to RAF Bomber Command in a steady torrent, telling of deployments, supply routes, of which dark-green crumble of trees may hide an A4 emplacement-data changing hour-to-hour, so mobile are the rockets and their support equipment. But the Spitfires will settle for a power station, a liquid-oxygen supply, a battery commander's billet… that's the intriguing question. Will Katje feel her obligation