Gravity's Rainbow Read online

  Here he feels taken, at true ease. Without the War what could he have hoped for? But to be part of this adventure . . . If you cannot sing Siegfried at least you can carry a spear. On what mountainslope, from what tanning and adored face did he hear that? All he remembers is the white sweep upward, the quilted meadows mobbed with cloud. . . . Now he’s learning a trade, tending the rockets, and when the War ends he’ll study to be an engineer. He understands that Blicero will die or go away, and that he will leave the cage. But he connects this with the end of the War, not with the Oven. He knows, like everyone, that captive children are always freed in the moment of maximum danger. The fucking, the salt length of the Captain’s weary, often impotent penis pushing into his meek mouth, the stinging chastisements, his face reflected in the act of kissing the Captain’s boots, their shine mottled, corroded by bearing grease, oil, alcohol spilled in fueling, darkening his face to the one he can’t recognize—these are necessary, they make specific his captivity, which otherwise would hardly be different from Army stifling, Army repression. He’s ashamed that he enjoys them so much—the word bitch, spoken now in a certain tone of voice, will give him an erection he cannot will down—afraid that, if not actually judged and damned, he’s gone insane. The whole battery knows of the arrangement: though they still obey the Captain it’s there, in their faces, felt trembling out along the steel tape-measures, splashing onto his tray at mess, elbowed into his right sleeve with each dressing of his squad. He dreams often these days of a very pale woman who wants him, who never speaks—but the absolute confidence in her eyes . . . his awful certainty that she, a celebrity everyone recognizes on sight, knows him and has no reason to speak to him beyond the beckoning that’s in her face, sends him vibrating awake in the nights, the Captain’s exhausted face inches away across the silk of wrinkled silver, weak eyes staring as his own, whiskers he suddenly must scrape his cheek against, sobbing, trying to tell how she was, how she looked at him. . . .

  The Captain’s seen her, of course. Who hasn’t? His idea of comfort is to tell the child, “She’s real. You have no say in this. You must understand that she means to have you. No use screaming awake, bothering me this way.”

  “But if she comes back—”

  “Submit, Gottfried. Give it all up. See where she takes you. Think of the first time I fucked you. How tight you were. Until you knew I meant to come inside. Your little rosebud bloomed. You had nothing, not even by then your mouth’s innocence, to lose. . . .”

  But the boy continues to cry. Katje won’t help him. Perhaps she’s asleep. He never knows. He wants to be her friend, but they hardly ever speak. She’s cold, mysterious, he’s jealous of her sometimes and at others—usually when he wants to fuck her and through some ingenuity of the Captain’s cannot—at such times he thinks he loves her desperately. Unlike the Captain, he has never seen her as the loyal sister who’ll free him from the cage. He dreams that release, but as a dark exterior Process that will happen, no matter what any of them may want. Whether she goes or stays. So, when Katje quits the game for good, he is silent.

  Blicero curses her. He flings a boot-tree at a precious TerBorch. Bombs fall to the west in the Haagsche Bosch. The wind blows, ruffling the ornamental ponds outside. Staff cars snarl away, down the long drive lined with beeches. The half-moon shines among hazy clouds, its dark half the color of aged meat. Blicero orders everyone down into the shelter, a cellarful of gin in brown crocks, open-slat crates of anemone bulbs. The slut has put his battery in the British crosshairs, the raid can come at any moment! Everybody sits around drinking oude genever and peeling cheeses. Telling stories, mostly funny ones, from before the War. By dawn, they’re all drunk and sleeping. Scraps of wax litter the floor like leaves. No Spitfires come. But later that morning Schußstelle 3 is moved, and the requisitioned house is abandoned. And she is gone. Crossed over the English lines, at the salient where the great airborne adventure lies bogged for the winter, wearing Gottfried’s boots and an old dress, black moiré, calf-length, a size too large, dowdy. Her last disguise. From here on she will be Katje. The only debt outstanding is to Captain Prentice. The others—Piet, Wim, the Drummer, the Indian—have all dropped her. Left her for dead. Or else this is her warning that—

  “Sorry, no, we need the bullet,” Wim’s face in shadows her eye can’t compensate for, bitterly whispering underneath the Scheveningen pier, ragged crowd-footfalls on the wood overhead, “every fucking bullet we can get. We need the silence. We couldn’t spare a man to get rid of the body. I’ve wasted five minutes with you already . . .” so he will take up their last meeting with technical matters she can no longer share. When she looks around, he’s gone, guerrilla-silent, and she has no way to bring this together with how he felt last year for a while under the cool chenille, in the days before he got so many muscles, and the scars on shoulder and thigh—a late bloomer, a neutral man goaded finally past his threshold, but she’d loved him before that . . . she must have. . . .

  She’s worth nothing to them now. They were after Schußstelle 3. She gave them everything else, but kept finding reasons not to pinpoint the Captain’s rocket site, and there is too much doubt by now as to how good the reasons were. True, the site was often moved about. But she could’ve been placed no closer to the decision-making: it was her own expressionless servant’s face that leaned in over their schnapps and cigars, the charts coffee-ringed across the low tables, the cream papers stamped purple as bruised flesh. Wim and the others have invested time and lives—three Jewish families sent east—though wait now, she’s more than balanced it, hasn’t she, in the months out at Scheveningen? They were kids, neurotic, lonely, pilots and crews they all loved to talk, and she’s fed back who knows how many reams’ worth of Most Secret flimsies across the North Sea, hasn’t she, squadron numbers, fueling stops, spin-recovery techniques and turning radii, power settings, radio channels, sectors, traffic patterns—hasn’t she? What more do they want? She asks this seriously, as if there’s a real conversion factor between information and lives. Well, strange to say, there is. Written down in the Manual, on file at the War Department. Don’t forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death’s a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try ’n’ grab a piece of that Pie while they’re still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets. Organic markets, carefully styled “black” by the professionals, spring up everywhere. Scrip, Sterling, Reichsmarks continue to move, severe as classical ballet, inside their antiseptic marble chambers. But out here, down here among the people, the truer currencies come into being. So, Jews are negotiable. Every bit as negotiable as cigarettes, cunt, or Hershey bars. Jews also carry an element of guilt, of future blackmail, which operates, natch, in favor of the professionals. So Katje here is hollering into a silence, a North Sea of hopes, and Pirate Prentice, who knows her from hurried meetings—in city squares that manage to be barracksfaced and claustrophobic, under dark, soft-wood smells of staircases steep as ladders, on a gaffrigger by an oily quai and a cat’s amber eyes staring down, in a block of old flats with rain in the courtyard and a bulky, ancient Schwarzlose stripped to toggle links and oil pump littered about the dusty room—who has each time seen her as a face belonging with others he knows better, at the margin of each enterprise, now, confronted with this face out of context, an enormous sky all sea-clouds in full march, tall and plum, behind her, detects danger in her loneliness, realizes he’s never heard her name, not till the meeting by the windmill known as “The Angel.” . . .

  She tells him why she’s alone—more or less—wh
y she can’t ever go back, and her face is somewhere else, painted on canvas, hung with other survivals back in the house near Duindigt, only witnessing the Oven-game—centuries passing like the empurpled clouds, darkening an infinitesimal layer of varnish between herself and Pirate, granting her the shield of serenity she needs, of classic irrelevance. . . .

  “But where will you go?” Both of them hands in pockets, scarves tightly wrapped, stones the water has left behind shining black wait like writing in a dream, about to make sense printed here along the beach, each fragment so amazingly clear yet . . .

  “I don’t know. Where would be a good place?”

  “‘The White Visitation,’” Pirate suggested.

  “‘The White Visitation’ is fine,” she said, and stepped into the void. . . .

  “Osbie, have I gone mad?” a snowy night, five rocket bombs since noon, shivering in the kitchen, late and candlelit, Osbie Feel the house idiot-savant so far into an encounter with nutmeg this evening that the inquiry seems quite proper, the pale cement Jungfrau asquat, phlegmatic and one gathers nettled in a dim corner.

  “Of course, of course,” sez Osbie, with a fluid passage of fingers and wrist based on the way Bela Lugosi handed a certain glass of doped wine to some fool of a juvenile lead in White Zombie, the first movie Osbie ever saw and in a sense the last, ranking on his All-Time List along with Son of Frankenstein, Freaks, Flying Down to Rio and perhaps Dumbo, which he went to see in Oxford Street last night but mid-way through noticed, instead of a magic feather, the humorless green and magenta face of Mr. Ernest Bevin wrapped in the chubby trunk of the longlashed baby elephant, and decided it would be prudent to excuse himself. “No,” since Pirate meantime has misunderstood whatever it was Osbie said, “not ‘of course you’ve gone mad, Prentice,’ that wasn’t it at all. . . .”

  “What then,” Pirate asks, after Osbie’s lapse has passed the minute mark.

  “Ah?” sez Osbie.

  Pirate is having second thoughts, is what it is. He keeps recalling that Katje now avoids all mention of the house in the forest. She has glanced into it, and out, but the truth’s crystal sheets have diffracted all her audible words—often to tears—and he can’t quite make sense of what’s spoken, much less infer to the radiant crystal itself. Indeed, why did she leave Schußstelle 3? We are never told why. But now and then, players in a game will, lull or crisis, be reminded how it is, after all, really play—and be unable then to continue in the same spirit. . . . Nor need it be anything sudden, spectacular—it may come in gentle—and regardless of the score, the number of watchers, their collective wish, penalties they or the Leagues may impose, the player will, waking deliberately, perhaps with Katje’s own tough, young isolate’s shrug and stride, say fuck it and quit the game, quit it cold. . . .

  “All right,” he continues alone, Osbie lost in a mooning doper’s smile, tracking the mature female snow-skin of the Alp in the corner, he and the frozen peak above and the blue night . . . “it’s a lapse of character then, a crotchet. Like carrying the bloody Mendoza.” Everyone else in the Firm packs a Sten you know. The Mendoza weighs three times as much, no one’s even seen any 7 mm Mexican Mauser bullets lately, even in Portobello Road: it hasn’t the grand Garage Simplicity or the rate of fire and still he loves it (yes, most likely it’s love these days) “you see, it’s a matter of trade-off, i’n’t i’,” the nostalgia of its Lewis-style straight pull, and being able to lift the barrel off in a second (ever tried to take the barrel off of a Sten?), and having a double-ended striker in case one breaks. . . . “Am I going to let the extra weight make a difference? It’s my crotchet, I’m indifferent to weight, or I wouldn’t have brought the girl back out, would I.”

  “I am not your responsibility.” A statue in wine-colored façonné velvet from neck to wrists and insteps, and how long, gentlemen, has she been watching from the shadows?

  “Oh,” Pirate turning sheepish, “you are, you know.”

  “The happy couple!” Osbie roars suddenly, taking another pinch of nutmeg like snuff, eyeballs rolling white as the miniature mountain. Sneezing now loudly about the kitchen, it strikes him as incredible that he has both these people inside the same field of vision. Pirate’s face darkening with embarrassment, Katje’s unchanging, half struck by light from the next room, half in slate shadows.

  “Should I have left you, then?” and when she only compresses her mouth, impatient, “or do you think someone over here owed it to you to bring you out?”

  “No.” That reached her. Pirate only asked because he’s begun to suspect, darkly, any number of Someones Over Here. But to Katje a debt is for wiping out. Her old, intractable vice—she wants to cross seas, to connect countries between whom there is no possible rate of exchange. Her ancestors sang, in Middle Dutch,

  ic heb u liever dan ên everswîn,

  al waert van finen goude ghewracht,

  love incommensurate with gold, golden calf, even in this case golden swine. But by the middle of the 17th century there were no more pigs of gold, only of flesh mortal as that of Frans Van der Groov, another ancestor, who went off to Mauritius with a boatload of these live hogs and lost thirteen years toting his haakbus through the ebony forests, wandering the swamps and lava flows, systematically killing off the native dodoes for reasons he could not explain. The Dutch pigs took care of eggs and younger birds. Frans carefully drew beads on the parents at 10 or 20 meters, the piece propped on its hook, slowly squeezing the trigger, eye focused on the molting ugliness while closer in the slow-match, soaked in wine, held in the jaws of the serpentine, came blooming redly downward, its heat on his cheek like my own small luminary, he wrote home to Hendrik the older brother, the ruler of my Sign . . . uncovering the priming-powder he’d been keeping shielded with his other hand—sudden flash in the pan, through the touchhole, and the loud report echoing off the steep rocks, recoil smashing the butt up along his shoulder (the skin there at first raw, blistered, then callused over, after the first summer). And the stupid, awkward bird, never intended to fly or run at any speed—what were they good for?—unable now even to locate his murderer, ruptured, splashing blood, raucously dying. . . .

  At home, the brother skimmed the letters, some crisp, some sea-stained or faded, spanning years, delivered all at once—understanding very little of it, only anxious to spend the day, as usual, in the gardens and greenhouse with his tulips (a reigning madness of the time), especially one new variety named for his current mistress: blood-red, finely tattooed in purple. . . . “Recent arrivals all carrying the new snaphaan . . . but I stick to my clumsy old matchlock . . . don’t I deserve a clumsy weapon for such a clumsy prey?” But Frans got no closer to telling what kept him out among the winter cyclones, stuffing pieces of old uniform down after the lead balls, sunburned, bearded and filthy—unless it rained or he was in the uplands where the craters of old volcanoes cupped rainfall blue as the sky in upward offering.

  He left the dodoes to rot, he couldn’t endure to eat their flesh. Usually, he hunted alone. But often, after months of it, the isolation would begin to change him, change his very perceptions—the jagged mountains in full daylight flaring as he watched into freak saffrons, streaming indigos, the sky his glass house, all the island his tulipomania. The voices—he insomniac, southern stars too thick for constellations teeming in faces and creatures of fable less likely than the dodo—spoke the words of sleepers, singly, coupled, in chorus. The rhythms and timbres were Dutch, but made no waking sense. Except that he thought they were warning him . . . scolding, angry that he couldn’t understand. Once he sat all day staring at a single white dodo’s egg in a grass hummock. The place was too remote for any foraging pig to’ve found. He waited for scratching, a first crack reaching to net the chalk surface: an emergence. Hemp gripped in the teeth of the steel snake, ready to be lit, ready to descend, sun to black-powder sea, and destroy the infant, egg of light into egg of darkness,
within its first minute of amazed vision, of wet down stirred cool by these south-east trades. . . . Each hour he sighted down the barrel. It was then, if ever, he might have seen how the weapon made an axis potent as Earth’s own between himself and this victim, still one, inside the egg, with the ancestral chain, not to be broken out for more than its blink of world’s light. There they were, the silent egg and the crazy Dutchman, and the hookgun that linked them forever, framed, brilliantly motionless as any Vermeer. Only the sun moved: from zenith down at last behind the snaggleteeth of mountains to Indian ocean, to tarry night. The egg, without a quiver, still unhatched. He should have blasted it then where it lay: he understood that the bird would hatch before dawn. But a cycle was finished. He got to his feet, knee and hip joints in agony, head gonging with instructions from his sleeptalkers droning by, overlapping, urgent, and only limped away, piece at right shoulder arms.

  When loneliness began to drive him into situations like this, he often returned to a settlement and joined a hunting party. A drunken, university hysteria would take hold of them all, out on night-rampages where they’d be presently firing at anything, treetops, clouds, leather demon bats screaming up beyond hearing. Tradewinds moving up-slope to chill their nights’ sweating, sky lit half crimson by a volcano, rumblings under their feet as deep as the bats’ voices were high, all these men were caught in the spectrum between, trapped among frequencies of their own voices and words.