Gravity's Rainbow (116 page)

The outermost sentry peers from his rusty-boned cement ruin, and for two full pedal-swings
they are both, he and Katje, out in the daylight, blending with packed earth, rust,
blobbing perforations of sunlight cold gold and slick as glass, the fresh wind in
the trees. Hyperthyroidal African eyes, their irises besieged as early cornflowers
by the crowding fields of white . . . Ooga
-booga!
Gwine jump on dis
drum
hyah! Tell de res’ ob de trahb back in de village, yowzah!

So, DUMdumdumdum, DUMdumdumdum, O.K., but still there’s no room in her demeanor for
even curiosity (of course weren’t there going to be drums, a chance for violence?
A snake jumping off of a limb, a very large presence ahead among the thousand bowing
tree-tops, a scream inside herself, a leap upward into primal terror, surrendering
to it and so—she has dreamt—regaining her soul, her long-lost self. . .). Nor will
she waste more than token glances now on the German lawns rushing so deeply away into
green hazes or hills, the pale limbs of marble balusters beside sanitarium walks that
curve restlessly, in a fever, a stifling, into thickets of penis-budded sprig and
thorn so old, so without comfort that eyes are drawn, seized by the tear-glands and
dragged to find, to find at all cost, the path that has disappeared so suddenly . . .
or to look behind to hold on to some trace of the spa, a corner of the Sprudelhof,
the highest peak of the white-sugar bandstand, something to counteract Pan’s whisper
inside the dark grove
Come in . . . forget them. Come in here. . . .
No. Not Katje. She has been into the groves and thickets. She has danced naked and
spread her cunt to the horns of grove-dwelling beasts. She has felt the moon in the
soles of her feet, taken its tides with the surfaces of her brain. Pan was a lousy
lover. Today, in public, they have no more than nervous glances for each other.

What does happen now, and this is quite alarming, is that out of nowhere suddenly
appear a full dancing-chorus of Herero men. They are dressed in white sailor suits
designed to show off asses, crotches, slim waists and shapely pectorals, and they
are carrying a girl all in silver lamé, a loud brassy dame after the style of Diamond
Lil or Texas Guinan. As they set her down, everyone begins to dance and sing:

Pa—ra—nooooiiiia, Pa-ra-noia!

Ain’t it grand ta see, that good-time face, again!

Pa-ra-
noi
-ya, boy oh boy, yer

Just a bit of you-know-what

From way back when!

Even Goya, couldn’t draw ya,

Not the way you looked, just kickin’ in that door—

Call a lawyer, Paranoia,

Lemme will my ass to you, for-ever-more!

Then Andreas and Pavel come out in tap shoes (liberated from a rather insolent ENSA
show that came through in July) to do one of those staccato tap-and-sing numbers:

Pa- ra- noi—(clippety-clippety-clippety cl[ya,]op!)

Pa- ra- noi—(shuffle
stomp!
shuffle
stomp!
shuffle
stomp!

    [and] cl[ya,]op! clickety cl[Ain’t]ick) it grand (clop)

    ta (clop) see (clippy
clop
) yer good-time face again! etc.

Well, Katje realizes long before the first 8 bars of all this that the brazen blonde
bombshell is none other than herself:
she
is doing a dance routine with these black sailors-ashore. Having gathered also that
she is the allegorical figure of Paranoia (a grand old dame, a little wacky but pure
heart), she must say that she finds the jazzy vulgarity of this music a bit distressing.
What she had in mind was more of an Isadora Duncan routine, classical and full of
gauzes, and—well,
white.
What Pirate Prentice briefed her on was folklore, politics, Zonal strategies—but
not blackness.
When that was what she most needed to know about. How can she pass now through so
much blackness to redeem herself? How can she expect to find Slothrop? among such
blackness
(subvocalizing the word as an old man might speak the name of a base public figure,
letting it gutter out into
real
blackness: into being spoken no more). There is that stubborn, repressive heat to
her thoughts. It is none of your
heavy
racist skin-prickling, no, but a feeling of one more burden, along with the scarcity
of food in the Zone, the chicken-coop, cave or basement lodgings at sunfall, the armed-occupation
phobias and skulkings as bad as Holland last year, comfortable in here at least, lotos-snuggly,
but disastrous out in the World of Reality she still believes in and will never give
up hoping to rejoin someday. All that’s not bad enough, no,
now
she must also endure blackness. Her ignorance of it must see her through.

With Andreas she is charming, she radiates that sensuality peculiar to women who are
concerned with an absent lover’s safety. But then she must see Enzian. Their first
meeting. Each in a way has been loved by Captain Blicero. Each had to arrive at some
way of making it bearable, just bearable, for just long enough, one day by one. . . .

“Oberst. I am happy—” her voice breaks. Genuinely. Her head inclines across his desk
no longer than is necessary to thank, to declare her passivity. The
hell
she’s happy.

He nods, angles his beard at a chair. This, then, is the Golden Bitch of Blicero’s
last letters from Holland. Enzian formed no image of her then, too taken up, too gagged
with sorrow at what was happening to Weissmann. She seemed then only one of the expected
forms of horror that must be populating his world. But, ethnic when he least wants
to be, Enzian came after a while to think of her as the great Kalahari rock painting
of the White Woman, white from the waist down, carrying bow and arrows, trailed by
her black handmaiden through an erratic space, stone and deep, figures of all sizes
moving to and fro. . . .

But here is the true Golden Bitch. He’s surprised at how young and slender she is—a
paleness as of having begun to leak away from this world, likely to vanish entirely
at any too-reckless grab. She knows her own precarious thinness, her leukemia of soul,
and she teases with it. You must want her, but never indicate it—not by eyes or move—or
she will clarify, dead gone as smoke above a trail moving into the desert, and you’ll
never have the chance again.

“You must have seen him more recently than I.” He speaks quietly. She is surprised
at his politeness. Disappointed: she was expecting more force. Her lip has begun to
lift. “How did he seem?”

“Alone.” Her brusque and sideways nod. Gazing back at him with the best neutrality
she can be sure of in the circs. She means, You were not with him, when he needed
you.

“He was always alone.”

She understands then that it isn’t timidity, she was wrong. It is decency. The man
wants to be decent. He leaves himself open. (So does she, but only because everything
that might hurt has long been numbed out. There’s small risk for Katje.) But Enzian
risks what former lovers risk whenever the Beloved is present, in fact or in word:
deepest possibilities for shame, for sense of loss renewed, for humiliation and mockery.
Shall she mock? Has he made that too easy—and then, turning, counted on her for fair
play? Can she be as honest as he, without risking too much? “He was dying,” she tells
him, “he looked very old. I don’t even know if he left Holland alive.”

“He—” and this hesitation may be (a) in consideration of her feelings, or (b) for
reasons of Schwarzkommando security, or (c) both of the above . . . but then, hell,
the Principle of Maximizing Risk takes over again: “he got as far as the Lüneberg
Heath. If you didn’t know, you ought to.”

“You’ve been looking for him.”

“Yes. So has Slothrop been, though I don’t think Slothrop knows that.”

“Slothrop and I—” she looks around the room, her eyes skitter off metal surfaces,
papers, facets of salt, cannot come to rest anywhere. As if making a desperate surprise
confession: “Everything is so remote now. I don’t really know why they sent me out
here. I don’t know any more who Slothrop really was. There’s a failure in the
light.
I can’t
see.
It’s all going away from me. . . .”

It isn’t yet time to touch her, but Enzian reaches out gives a friendly chin-up tap
on the back of her hand, a military now-see-here. “There
are
things to hold to. None of it may look real, but some of it is. Really.”

“Really.”
They both start laughing. Hers is weary-European, slow, head-shaking. Once she would
have been asessing as she laughed, speaking of edges, deeps, profit and loss, H-hours
and points of no return—she would have been laughing
politically
, in response to a power-predicament, because there might be nothing else to do. But
now she’s only laughing. As she once laughed with Slothrop, back at the Casino Hermann
Goering.

So she’s only been talking with Enzian about a common friend. Is this how the Vacuum
feels?

“Slothrop and I” didn’t work too well. Should she have said “Blicero and I”? What
would
that
have got her into with the African?

“Blicero and I,” he begins softly, watching her over burnished cheekbones, cigarette
smoldering in his curled right hand, “we were only close in certain ways. There were
doors I did not open. Could not. Around here, I play an omniscient. I’d say don’t
give me away, but it wouldn’t matter. Their minds are made up. I am the Berlin Snoot
supreme, Oberhauptberlinerschnauze Enzian. I know it all, and they don’t trust me.
They gossip in a general way about me and Blicero, as yarns to be spun—the truth wouldn’t
change either their distrust or my Unlimited Access. They’d only be passing a story
along, another story. But the truth must mean something to you.

“The Blicero I loved was a very young man, in love with empire, poetry, his own arrogance.
Those all must have been important to me once. What I am now grew from that. A former
self is a fool, an insufferable ass, but he’s still human, you’d no more turn him
out than you’d turn out any other kind of cripple, would you?”

He seems to be asking her for real advice. Are these the sorts of problems that occupy
his time? What about the Rocket, the Empty Ones, the perilous infancy of his nation?

“What
can
Blicero matter to you?” is what she finally asks.

He doesn’t have to think for long. He has often imagined the coming of a Questioner.
“At this point, I would take you to a balcony. An observation deck. I would show you
the Raketen-Stadt. Plexiglass maps of the webs we maintain across the Zone. Underground
schools, systems for distributing food and medicine. . . . We would gaze down on staff-rooms,
communications centers, laboratories, clinics. I would say—”

“All this will I give you, if you will but—”

“Negative.
Wrong story. I would say: This is what I have become. An estranged figure at a certain
elevation and distance . . .” who looks out over the Raketen-Stadt in the amber evenings,
with washed and darkening cloud sheets behind him—“who has lost everything else but
this vantage. There is no heart, anywhere now, no human heart left in which I exist.
Do you know what that feels like?”

He is a lion, this man, ego-mad—but despite everything, Katje likes him. “But if he
were still alive—”

“No way to know. I have letters he wrote after he left your city. He was changing.
Terribly. You ask what he could matter to me. My slender white adventurer, grown twenty
years sick and old—the last heart in which I might have been granted some being—was
changing, toad to prince, prince to fabulous monster. . . . ‘If he is alive,’ he may
have changed by now past our recognition. We could have driven under him in the sky
today and never seen. Whatever happened at the end, he has transcended. Even if he’s
only dead. He’s gone beyond
his
pain,
his
sin—driven deep into Their province, into control, synthesis and control, further
than—” well, he was about to say “we” but “I” seems better after all, “I haven’t transcended.
I’ve only been elevated. That must be as empty as things get: it’s worse than being
told you won’t have to die by someone you can’t believe in. . . .

“Yes he matters to me, very much. He is an old self, a dear albatross I cannot let
go.”

“And me?” She gathers that he expects her to sound like a woman of the 1940s. “And
me,” indeed. But she can think of no other way offhand to help him, to allow him a
moment of comfort. . . .

“You, poor Katje. Your story is the saddest of all.” She looks up to see exactly how
his face will be mocking her. She is stunned to see tears instead running, running
over his cheeks.
“You’ve only been set free,”
his voice then breaking on the last word, his face brushing forward a moment into
a cage of hands, then uncaging again for a try at her own gay waltztime gallows laugh.
Oh, no, is
he
about to go goofy on her too? What she needs right now in her life, from
some
man in her life, is stability, mental health and strength of character. Not this.
“I told Slothrop he was free, too. I tell anybody who might listen. I will tell them
as I tell you: you are free. You are free. You are free. . . .”

“How can my story be sadder than that?” Shameless girl, she isn’t humoring him, she’s
actually flirting with him now, any technique her crepe-paper and spider-italics young
ladyhood ever taught her, to keep from having to move into his blackness. Understand
it isn’t
his
blackness, but her own—an inadmissible darkness she is making believe for the moment
is Enzian’s, something beyond even the center of Pan’s grove, something not pastoral
at all, but of the city, a set of ways in which the natural forces are turned aside,
stepped down, rectified or bled to ground and come out very like the malignant dead:
the Qlippoth that Weissmann has “transcended,” souls whose journey across was so bad
that they lost all their kindness back in the blue lightning (the long sea-furrows
of it rippling), and turned to imbecile killers and jokers, making unintelligible
honks in the emptiness, sinewed and stripped thin as rats—a city-darkness that is
her own, a textured darkness in which flows go in all directions, and nothing begins,
and nothing ends. But as time passes things get louder there. It is shaking itself
into her consciousness.