GRAVITY RAINBOW (76 page)

Back at the Mittelwerke he tried, and kept trying, to get into the Dora camp and find Use. It didn't matter any more about Weissmann. The SS guards each time were courteous, understanding, impossible to get past.

The work load now was incredible. Pokier was getting less than two hours' sleep a day. News of the war reached under the mountain only as rumors and shortages. Procurement philosophy had been "triangular"-three possible sources for the same part, in case one was destroyed. Depending what didn't come from where, or how late it was, you knew which factories had been bombed, which rail connections taken out. Toward the end you had to try and fabricate many of the components locally.

When Pokier had time to think, he was met by the growing enigma of Weissmann's silence. To provoke him, or the memory of him, Polder went out of his way to talk to officers in Major Forschner's security detail, looking for news. None of them responded to Pokier as anything more than a nuisance. They'd heard rumors that Weissmann was no longer here but in Holland, in command of his own rocket battery. Enzian had dropped out of sight, along with many key Schwarzkommando. Polder grew more and more certain that this time the game was really over, that the war had caught them all, given new life-death priorities and no more leisure for torturing a minor engineer. He was able to relax some, move through the day's routine, wait for the end, even allow himself to hope that the thousands in Dora would soon be free, among them Use, some acceptable Use…

But in the spring, he did see Weissmann again. He woke from a dream of a gentle Zwolfkinder that was also Nordhausen, a city of elves producing toy moon-rockets, and there was Weissmann's face at the edge of his bunk, watching him. He seemed to have aged ten years, and Pokier hardly recognized him.

"There isn't much time," Weissmann whispered. "Come with me."

They moved through the white, sleepless bustle of the tunnels, Weissmann walking slowly and stiffly, both men silent. In one of the office spaces, half a dozen others were waiting, along with some SS and SD. "We've already obtained permission from your groups," Weissmann said, "to release you for work on a special project. This will be the highest possible security. You'll be billeted separately, eat separately, and speak to no one who is not present in this room." They all looked around to see who that might be. No one they knew. They looked back at Weissmann.

He wanted a modification worked into one rocket, only one. Its serial number had been removed, and five zeros painted in. Pokier knew immediately that this was what Weissmann had been saving him for: this was to be his "special destiny." It made no sense to him: he had to develop a plastic fairing, of a certain size, with certain insulating properties, for the propulsion section of the rocket. The propulsion engineer was the busiest on the project, rerouting steam and fuel lines, relocating hardware. Whatever the new device was, nobody saw it. According to the rumor, it was being produced elsewhere, and was nicknamed the Schwarzgerat, because of the high secrecy surrounding it. Even the weight was classified. They were through inside of two weeks, and the "Vorrichtung fur die Isolierung" was on its way to the field. Pokier reported back to his regular supervisor, and the routine went on as before. He never saw Weissmann again.

The first week in April, with American units supposed to be arriving at any moment, most of the engineers were packing, collecting addresses of co-workers, drinking farewell toasts, drifting through the emptying bays. There was a graduation feeling in the air. It was hard not to whistle "Gaudeamus igitur." Suddenly the cloistered life was about to come to an end.

A young SS guard, one of the last to leave, found Polder in the dusty cafeteria, handed him an envelope, and left without a word. It was the usual furlough form, superseded now by the imminent death of the Government-and a travel permit to Zwolfkinder. Where the dates should have been, someone had written, almost illegibly, "after hostilities end." On the back, in the same hand (Weissmann's?) a note to Pokier.
She has been released. She will meet you there.
He understood that this was payment for the retrofit work he'd done on the 00000. How long had Weissmann been keeping him deliberately on ice, all so he'd have a plastics man he could depend on, when the time came?

On the last day, Pokier walked out the south end of the main tunnels. Lorries were everywhere, all engines idling, farewell in the spring air, tall trees sunlit green on the mountainsides. The Obersturmbann-fuhrer was not at his post when Pokier went into Dora. He was not looking for Use, or not exactly. He may have felt that he ought to look, finally. He was not prepared. He did not know. Had the data, yes, but did not know, with senses or heart…

The odors of shit, death, sweat, sickness, mildew, piss, the breathing of Dora, wrapped him as he crept in staring at the naked corpses being carried out now that America was so close, to be stacked in front of the crematoriums, the men's penises hanging, their toes clustering white and round as pearls… each face so perfect, so individual, the

lips stretched back into death-grins, a whole silent audience caught at the punch line of the joke… and the living, stacked ten to a straw mattress, the weakly crying, coughing, losers… All his vacuums, his labyrinths, had been the other side of this. While he lived, and drew marks on paper, this invisible kingdom had kept on, in the darkness outside… all this time… Pokier vomited. He cried some. The walls did not dissolve-no prison wall ever did, not from tears, not at this finding, on every pallet, in every cell, that the faces are ones he knows after all, and holds dear as himself, and cannot, then, let them return to that silence… But what can he ever do about it? How can he ever keep them? Impotence, mirror-rotation of sorrow, works him terribly as runaway heartbeating, and with hardly any chances left him for good rage, or for turning…

Where it was darkest and smelled the worst, Pokier found a woman lying, a random woman. He sat for half an hour holding her bone hand. She was breathing. Before he left, he took off his gold wedding ring and put it on the woman's thin finger, curling her hand to keep it from sliding off. If she lived, the ring would be good for a few meals, or a blanket, or a night indoors, or a ride home…

Back to Berlin, with a terrific thunderstorm blowing over the city. Margherita has brought Slothrop to a rickety wood house near the Spree, in the Russian sector. A burned-out Konigstiger tank guards the entrance, its paint scorched, treads mangled and blasted off of the drive sprocket, its dead monster 88 angled down to point at the gray river, hissing and spiculed with the rain.

Inside are bats nesting in the rafters, remains of beds with a moldy smell, broken glass and bat shit on the bare wood floor, windows boarded up except where the stove is vented through because the chimney's down. On a rocking chair lies a moleskin coat, a taupe cloud. Paint from some long-ago artist is still visible over the floor in wrinkled splashes of aged magenta, saffron, steel blue, reverse deformations of paintings whose whereabouts are unknown. Back in a corner hangs a tarnished mirror, birds and flowers painted in white all around its frame, reflecting Margherita and Slothrop and the rain out the open door. Part of the ceiling, blown away when the King Tiger died, is covered now with soggy and stained cardboard posters all of

the same cloaked figure in the broad-brimmed hat, with its legend DER FEIND HORT ZU. Water drips through in half a dozen places.

Greta lights a kerosene lamp. It warms the rainlight with a handful of yellow. Slothrop builds a fire in the stove while Margherita ducks down under the house, where it turns out there's a great stash of potatoes. Jeepers, Slothrop hasn't seen a potato for months. There's onions in a sack too, and even wine. She cooks, and they both sit there just pigging on those spuds. Later, without paraphernalia or talk, they fuck each other to sleep. But a few hours later Slothrop wakes up, and lies there wondering where he's going.

Well, to find that Saure Bummer, soon as this rain lets up, give the man his hashish. But what then? Slothrop and the S-Gerat and the Jamf/Imipolex mystery have grown to be strangers. He hasn't really thought about them for a while. Hmm, when
was
that? The day he sat with Saure in the cafe, smoking that reefer… oh, that was day before yesterday, wasn't it? Rain drips, soaking into the floor, and Slothrop perceives that he is losing his mind. If there is something comforting-religious, if you want-about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long. Well right now Slothrop feels himself sliding onto the anti-paranoid part of his cycle, feels the whole city around him going back roofless, vulnerable, uncentered as he is, and only pasteboard images now of the Listening Enemy left between him and the wet sky.

Either They have put him here for a reason, or he's just here. He isn't sure that he wouldn't, actually, rather have that
reason…

The rain lets up at midnight. He leaves Margherita to creep out in the cold city with his five kilos, having kept for himself the one Tchitcherine plundered from. Russian troops are singing in their billets. The salt ache of accordion music cries on in back of them. Drunks materialize, merry and pissing in the center grooves of cobbled alleys. Mud occupies some streets like flesh. Shell craters brim with rainwater, gleaming in the lights of midwatch work crews clearing debris. Shattered Biedermeier chair, mateless boot, steel eyeglass frame, dog collar (eyes at the edges of the twisting trail watching for sign, for blazing), wine cork, splintered broom, bicycle with one wheel missing, discarded copies of
Tagliche Rundschau,
chalcedony doorknob dyed blue long ago with ferrous ferrocyanide, scattered piano keys (all white, an octave on B to be exact-or H, in the German nomenclature-the notes of the rejected Locrian mode), the black and amber

eye from some stuffed animal… The strewn night. Dogs, spooked and shivering, run behind walls whose tops are broken like fever charts. Somewhere a gas leak warps for a minute into the death and after-rain smells. Ranks of blackened window-sockets run high up the sides of gutted apartment buildings. Chunks of concrete are held aloft by iron reinforcing rod that curls like black spaghetti, whole enormous heaps wiggling ominously overhead at your least passing brush by… The smooth-faced Custodian of the Night hovers behind neutral eyes and smile, coiled and pale over the city, humming its hoarse lullabies. Young men spent the Inflation like this, alone in the street, no place to go into out of the black winters. Girls stayed up late on stoops or sitting on benches in lamplight by the rivers, waiting for business, but the young men had to walk by, ignored, hunching overpadded shoulders, money with no relation to anything it could buy, swelling, paper cancer in their billfolds…

The Chicago Bar is being guarded outside by two of their descendants, kids in George Raft suits, many sizes too big, too many ever to grow into. One keeps coughing, in uncontrolled dying spasms. The other licks his lips and stares at Slothrop. Gunsels. When he mentions Saure Bummer's name, they move together in front of the door, shaking their heads. "Look, I'm supposed to deliver him a package."

"Don't know him."

"Can I leave a message?"

"He's not here." The cougher makes a lunge. Slothrop sweeps aside, gives him a quick veronica with his cape, sticks his foot out and trips the kid, who lies on the ground cursing, all tangled up in his long keychain, while his pardner goes pawing inside of his flapping suitcoat for what Slothrop surmises to be a sidearm, so him Slothrop kicks in the balls, and screaming "Fickt nicht mit dem Raketemensch!" so they'll remember, kind of a hiyo Silver here, he flees into shadows, among the heaps of lumber, stone and earth.

He takes a trail he thinks Saure led them along the other night- keeps losing it, wandering into windowless mazes, tangles of barbed wire holidayed by the deathstorms of last May, then into a strafed and pitted lorry-park he can't find his way out of for half an hour, a rolling acre of rubber, grease, steel, and spilled petrol, pieces of vehicles pointing at sky or earth no differently than in a peacetime American junkyard, fused into odd, brown
Saturday Evening Post
faces, except that they are not folksy so much as downright sinister… yes it's really the Saturday Evening
Post,
all right: they are the faces of the tricorned messengers coming in from out of the long pikes, down past the elms,

Berkshire legends, travelers lost at the edge of the Evening. Come with a message. They unwrinkle, though, if you keep looking. They smooth out into timeless masks that speak their entire meaning, all of it right out on the surface.

It takes an hour to find Saure's cellar. But it's dark, and it's empty. Slothrop goes in, lights the light. Looks like either a bust or a gang war: printing press vanished, clothes tossed all around, and some very strange clothes at that, there is, for example, a wickerware suit,
a yellow
wickerware suit actually, articulating along armpit, elbow, knee and groinlines… oh, hmm, well, Slothrop runs a quick search of his own here, looking inside shoes, not really shoes, some of them, but foot-gloves with individual
toes,
not, however, sewn but
cast
from some unpleasant variegated resin such as bowling balls are made of… behind the peeling scraps of wallpaper, up in the rolled-up windowshade, among the hatchings of one or two phony Reichsmarks let spill by the looters-fifteen minutes of this, finding nothing… and the white object on the table watching him out of its staring shadows the whole time. He feels its stare before he spots it finally: a chesspiece two inches high. A white knight, molded out of plastic-a-and wait'll Slothrop finds out what
kind
of plastic, boy!

It's a horse's skull: the eye-sockets are hollow far down into the base. Inside one of them is a tightly rolled cigarette paper with a message from Saure. "Raketemensch! Der Springer asks me to give you this, his symbol. Keep it-by it shall he know you. I am at Jacobi-strasse 12, 3
^er
Hof, number 7. As B/4, Me. I?" Now "As B/4" was John Dillinger's old signoff. Everybody in the Zone this summer is using it. It indicates to people how you feel about certain things…