Gravity's Rainbow Page 14

  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 canceled by someday calling down English fighter-bombers on this very house, her game’s prison, though it mean death? Captain Blicero can’t be sure. Up to a point he finds the agony delightful. Certainly her record with Mussert’s people is faultless, she’s credited with smelling out at least three crypto-Jewish families, she attends meetings faithfully, she works at a Luftwaffe resort near Scheveningen, where her superiors find her efficient and cheerful, no shirker. Nor, like so many of them, using party fanaticism to cover a lack of ability. Perhaps there’s the only shadow of warning: her commitment is not emotional. She appears to have reasons for being in the Party. A woman with some background in mathematics, and with reasons. . . . “Want the Change,” Rilke said, “O be inspired by the Flame!” To laurel, to nightingale, to wind . . . wanting it, to be taken, to embrace, to fall toward the flame growing to fill all the senses and . . . not to love because it was no longer possible to act . . . but to be helplessly in a condition of love. . . .

  But not Katje: no mothlike plunge. He must conclude that secretly she fears the Change, choosing instead only trivially to revise what matters least, ornament and clothing, going no further than politic transvestism, not only in Gottfried’s clothing, but even in traditional masochist uniform, the French-maid outfit so inappropriate to her tall, longlegged stride, her blondeness, her questing shoulders like wings—she plays at this only . . . plays at playing.

  He can do nothing. Among dying Reich, orders lapsing to paper impotence he needs her so, needs Gottfried, the straps and whips leathern, real in his hands which still feel, her cries, the red welts across the boy’s buttocks, their mouths, his penis, fingers and toes—in all the winter these are sure, can be depended on—he can give you no reason but in his heart he trusts, perhaps only, by now, in the form, this out of all Märchen und Sagen, trusts that this charmed house in the forest will be preserved, that no bombs could ever fall here by accident, only betrayal, only if Katje really were a spotter for the English and bade them—and he knows she cannot: that through some magic, below the bone resonance of any words, a British raid is the one prohibited shape of all possible pushes from behind, into the Oven’s iron and final summer. It will come, it will, his Destiny . . . not that way—but it will come. . . . Und nicht einmal sein Schritt klingt aus dem tonlosen Los. . . . Of all Rilke’s poetry it’s this Tenth Elegy he most loves, can feel the bitter lager of Yearning begin to prickle behind eyes and sinuses at remembering any passage of . . . the newly-dead youth, embracing his Lament, his last link, leaving now even her marginally human touch forever, climbing all alone, terminally alone, up and up into the mountains of primal Pain, with the wildly alien constellations overhead. . . . And not once does his step ring from the soundless Destiny. . . . It’s he, Blicero, who climbs the mountain, has been so climbing for nearly 20 years, since long before he embraced the Reich’s flame, since Südwest . . . alone. No matter what flesh was there to appease the Witch, cannibal, and sorcerer, flourishing implements of pain—alone, alone. He doesn’t even know the Witch, can’t understand the hunger that defines him/her, is only, in times of weakness, bewildered that it should coexist in the same body as himself. An athlete and his skill, separate awarenesses. . . . Young Rauhandel at least had said so . . . how many years back into the peace . . . Blicero had watched his young friend (even then already so blatantly, so pathetically doomed to some form of Eastern Front) inside a bar, out in the street, wearing whatever tight or awkward suit, whatever fragile shoes, react in all grace to the football which jokers would recognizing him toss out of nowhere—the deathless performances! that one impromptu boot so impossibly high, so perfectly parabolic, the ball soaring miles to pass exactly between the two tall, phallic electric columns of the Ufa-theatre on the Friedrichstrasse . . . the head-control he could keep up for city blocks, for hours, the feet articulate as poetry. . . . Yet he could only shake his head, wanting to be a good fellow when they asked, but unable really to say—“It’s . . . it happens . . . the muscles do it—” then recalling an old trainer’s words—“it’s muscular,” smiling beautifully and already, by the act, conscripted, already cannon fodder, the pale bar-light across the grating of his close-shaved skull—“it’s reflexes, you see. . . . Not me. . . . Just the reflexes.” When did it begin to change for Blicero, among those days, from lust to simple sorrow, dumb as Rauhandel’s amazement with his own talent? He has seen so many of these Rauhandels, especially since ’39, harboring the same mysterious guests, strangers, often no more bizarre than a gift for being always where shells were not . . . do any of them, this raw material, “want the Change”? Do they even know? He doubts it. . . . Their reflexes are only being used, hundreds of thousands at a time, by others—by royal moths the Flame has inspired. Blicero has lost, years ago, all his innocence on this question. So his Destiny is the Oven: while the strayed children, who never knew, who change nothing but uniforms and cards of identity, will survive and prosper long beyond his gases and cinders, his chimney departure. So, so. A Wandervogel in the mountains of Pain. It’s been going on for much too long, he has chosen the game for nothing if not the kind of end it will bring him, nicht wahr? too old these days, grippes taking longer to pass, stomach too often in day-long agony, eyes measurably blinder with each examination, too “realistic” to prefer a hero’s death or even a soldier’s. He only wants now to be o
ut of the winter, inside the Oven’s warmth, darkness, steel shelter, the door behind him in a narrowing rectangle of kitchen-light gonging shut, forever. The rest is foreplay.

  Yet he cares, more than he should and puzzled that he does, about the children—about their motives. He gathers it is their freedom they look for, yearningly as he for the Oven, and such perversity haunts and depresses him . . . he returns again and again to the waste and senseless image of what was a house in the forest, reduced now to crumbs and sugar-smears, the black indomitable Oven all that remains, and the two children, the peak of sweet energy behind them, hunger beginning again, wandering away into a green blankness of trees. . . . Where will they go, where shelter the nights? The improvidence of children . . . and the civil paradox of this their Little State, whose base is the same Oven which must destroy it. . . .

  But every true god must be both organizer and destroyer. Brought up into a Christian ambience, this was difficult for him to see until his journey to Südwest: until his own African conquest. Among the abrading fires of the Kalahari, under the broadly-sheeted coastal sky, fire and water, he learned. The Herero boy, long tormented by missionaries into a fear of Christian sins, jackal-ghosts, potent European strand-wolves, pursuing him, seeking to feed on his soul, the precious worm that lived along his backbone, now tried to cage his old gods, snare them in words, give them away, savage, paralyzed, to this scholarly white who seemed so in love with language. Carrying in his kit a copy of the Duino Elegies, just off the presses when he embarked for Südwest, a gift from Mother at the boat, the odor of new ink dizzying his nights as the old freighter plunged tropic after tropic . . . until the constellations, like the new stars of Pain-land, had become all unfamiliar and the earth’s seasons reversed . . . and he came ashore in a high-prowed wooden boat that had 20 years earlier brought blue-trousered troops in from the iron roadstead to crush the great Herero Rising. To find, back in the hinterland, up in an outstretch of broken mountains between the Namib and the Kalahari, his own faithful native, his night-flower.

  An impassable waste of rock blasted at by the sun . . . miles of canyons twisting nowhere, drifted at the bottoms with white sand turning a cold, queenly blue as the afternoons lengthened. . . . We make Ndjambi Karunga now, omuhona . . . a whisper, across the burning thorn branches where the German conjures away energies present outside the firelight with his slender book. He looks up in alarm. The boy wants to fuck, but he is using the Herero name of God. An extraordinary chill comes over the white man. He believes, like the Rhenish Missionary Society who corrupted this boy, in blasphemy. Especially out here in the desert, where dangers he can’t bring himself to name even in cities, even in daylight, gather about, wings folded, buttocks touching the cold sand, waiting. . . . Tonight he feels the potency of every word: words are only an eye-twitch away from the things they stand for. The peril of buggering the boy under the resonance of the sacred Name fills him insanely with lust, lust in the face—the mask—of instant talion from outside the fire . . . but to the boy Ndjambi Karunga is what happens when they couple, that’s all: God is creator and destroyer, sun and darkness, all sets of opposites brought together, including black and white, male and female . . . and he becomes, in his innocence, Ndjambi Karunga’s child (as are all his preterite clan, relentlessly, beyond their own history) here underneath the European’s sweat, ribs, gut-muscles, cock (the boy’s own muscles staying fiercely tight for what seems hours, as if he intends to kill, but not a word, only the long, clonic, thick slices of night that pass over their bodies).

  What did I make of him? Captain Blicero knows that the African at this moment is halfway across Germany, deep in the Harz, and that, should the Oven this winter close behind him, why they have already said auf Wiedersehen for the last time. He sits, stomach crawling, glands stuffed with malaise, bowed over the console, inside the swarm-painted launch-control car. The sergeants at motor and steering panels are out taking a cigarette break—he’s alone at the controls. Outside, through the dirty periscope, gnarled fog unloosens from the bright zone of frost that belly-bands the reared and shadowy rocket, where the liquid-oxygen tank’s being topped off. Trees press close: overhead you see barely enough sky for the rocket’s ascent. The Bodenplatte—concrete plate laid over strips of steel—is set inside a space defined by three trees, blazed so as to triangulate the exact bearing, 260°, to London. The symbol used is a rude mandala, a red circle with a thick black cross inside, recognizable as the ancient sun-wheel from which tradition says the swastika was broken by the early Christians, to disguise their outlaw symbol. Two nails are driven into the tree at the center of the cross. Next to one of the painted blaze-marks, the most westerly, someone has scratched in the bark with the point of a bayonet the words IN HOC SIGNO VINCES. No one in the battery will admit to this act. Perhaps it is the work of the Underground. But it has not been ordered removed. Pale yellow stump-tops wink around the Bodenplatte, fresh chips and sawdust mix with older fallen leaves. The smell, childlike, deep, is confused by petrol and alcohol. Rain threatens, perhaps, today, snow. The crews move nervously gray-green. Shiny black India-rubber cables snake away into the forest to connect the ground equipment with the Dutch grid’s 380 volts. Erwartung. . . .

  For some reason he finds it harder these days to remember. What is framed, dirt-blurry, in the prisms, the ritual, the daily iteration inside these newly cleared triangles in the forests, has taken over what used to be memory’s random walk, its innocent image-gathering. His time away, with Katje and Gottfried, has become shorter and more precious as the tempo of firings quickens. Though the boy is in Blicero’s unit, the captain hardly sees him when they’re on duty—a flash of gold helping the surveyors chain the kilometers out to the transmitting station, the guttering brightness of his hair in the wind, vanishing among trees. . . . How strangely opposite to the African—a color-negative, yellow and blue. The Captain, in some sentimental overflow, some precognition, gave his African boy the name “Enzian,” after Rilke’s mountainside gentian of Nordic colors, brought down like a pure word to the valleys:

  Bringt doch der Wanderer auch vom Hange des Bergrands nicht eine Hand voll Erde ins Tal, die alle unsägliche, sondern ein erworbenes Wort, reines, den gelben und blaun Enzian.

  “Omuhona. . . . Look at me. I’m red, and brown . . . black, omuhona. . . .”

  “Liebchen, this is the other half of the earth. In Germany you would be yellow and blue.” Mirror-metaphysics. Self-enchanted by what he imagined elegance, his bookish symmetries. . . . And yet why speak so purposeless to the arid mountain, the heat of the day, the savage flower from whom he drank, so endlessly . . . why lose those words into the mirage, the yellow sun and freezing blue shadows in the ravines, unless it was prophesying, beyond all predisaster syndrome, beyond the terror of contemplating his middle age however glancingly, however impossible the chance of any “providing”—beyond was something heaving, stirring, forever below, forever before his words, something then that could see a time coming terrible, at least as terrible as this winter and the shape to which the War has now grown, a shape making unavoidable the shape of one last jigsaw piece: this Oven-game with the yellowhaired and blueeyed youth and silent doubleganger Katje (who was her opposite number in Südwest? what black girl he never saw, hidden always in the blinding sun, the hoarse and cindered passage of the trains at night, a constellation of dark stars no one, no anti-Rilke, had named . . .)—but 1944 was much too late for any of it to matter. Those symmetries were all prewar luxury. Nothing’s left him to prophesy.

  Least of all her sudden withdrawal from the game. The one variation he didn’t provide for, perhaps indeed because he never saw the black girl either. Perhaps the black girl is a genius of meta-solutions—knocking over the chessboard, shooting the referee. But after the act of wounding, breaking, what’s to become of the little Oven-state? Can’t it be fixed? Perhaps a new form, one more appropriate . . . the archer and his son, and the shooting of the apple .
. . yes and the War itself as tyrant king . . . it can still be salvaged can’t it, patched up, roles reassigned, no need to rush outside where . . .

  Gottfried, in the cage, watches her slip her bonds and go. Fair and slender, the hair on his legs only visible in sunlight and then as a fine, imponderable net of gold, his eyelids already wrinkling in oddly young/old signatures, flourishes, the eyes a seldom-encountered blue that on certain days, in sync with the weather, is too much for these almond fringes and brims over, seeps, bleeds out to illuminate the boy’s entire face, virgin-blue, drowned-man blue, blue drawn so insatiably into the chalky walls of Mediterranean streets we quietly cycled through in noontimes of the old peace. . . . He can’t stop her. If the Captain asks, he’ll tell what he saw. Gottfried has seen her sneak out before, and there are rumors—she’s with the Underground, she’s in love with a Stuka pilot she met in Scheveningen. . . . But she must love Captain Blicero too. Gottfried styles himself a passive observer. He has waited for his present age, and the conscription notice, to catch him, with an impudent terror like watching the inrush of a curve you mean to take for the first time in a controlled skid, take me, gathering speed till the last possible moment, take me his good-nights’ one prayer. The danger he thinks he needs is still fictional for him: in what he flirts and teases with, death is not a real outcome, the hero always walks out of the heart of the explosion, sooty-faced but grinning—the blast is noise and change, and diving for cover. Gottfried hasn’t yet seen a stiff, not up close. He hears now and then from home that friends have died, he’s watched long, flabby canvas sacks being handled in the distances into the poisoned gray of the trucks, and the headlamps cutting the mist . . . but when the rockets fail, and try to topple back on you who fired them, and a dozen of you press down, bodies jammed together in the slit trenches waiting all sweat-stunk wool and tense with laughter held in, you only think—What a story to tell at mess, to write to Mutti. . . . These rockets are his pet animals, barely domesticated, often troublesome, even apt to revert. He loves them in the way he would have loved horses, or Tiger tanks, had he pulled duty somewhere else.