Authors: Thomas Pynchon
All around them the others splashed, made love, carried on comic monologues, perhaps
they were friends of his—yes wasn’t that Siggi frog-kicking by, we called him “the
Troll,” he hasn’t grown a centimeter since then . . . since we ran home along the
canal, tripped and fell on the hardest cobblestones in the world, and woke in the
mornings to see snow on the spokes of the wagon wheels, steam out the old horse’s
nose. . . . “Leni. Leni.” Richard’s hair pushed all the way back, his body golden,
leaning to lift her from the cloudy bath, to sit beside him.
“You’re supposed to be. . .” she’s flustered, doesn’t know how to put this. “Someone
told me you hadn’t come back from France. . . .” She stares at her knees.
“Not even the French girls could have kept me in France.” He’s still there: she feels
him trying to look in her eyes: and he speaks so simply, he’s so alive, sure that
French girls must be more coercive than English machine guns . . . she knows, filled
with crying for his innocence, that he can’t have been with anyone there, that French
girls still are to him beautiful and remote agents of Love. . . .
In Leni, now, nothing of her long employment shows, nothing. She is the child he looked
at across park pathways, or met trudging home down the gassen in the crust-brown light,
her face, rather broad then, angled down, fair eyebrows troubled, bookpack on her
back, hands in apron pockets . . . some of the stones in the walls were white as paste . . .
she may have seen him coming the other way, but he was older, always with friends. . . .
Now they all grow less raucous around them, more deferent, even shy, happy for Richard
and Leni. “Better late than never!” pipes Siggi in his speeded-up midget’s voice,
reaching on tiptoe to pour May wine in all their glasses. Leni goes to get her hair
restyled and lightened a shade, and Rebecca comes with her. They talk, for the first
time, of plans and futures. Without touching, Richard and she have fallen in love,
as they should have then. It’s understood he’ll take her away with him. . . .
Old Gymnasium friends have been showing up in recent days, bringing exotic food and
wine, new drugs, much ease and honesty in sexual matters. No one bothers to dress.
They show one another their naked bodies. No one feels anxious, or threatened about
the size of her breasts or his penis. . . . It is all beautifully relaxing for everyone.
Leni practices her new name, “Leni Hirsch,” even sometimes when she’s sitting with
Richard at a café table in the morning: “Leni Hirsch,” and he actually smiles, embarrassed,
tries to look away but can’t escape her eyes and finally he turns full into her own
look, laughs out loud, a laugh of pure joy, and reaches his hand, the palm of his
dear hand, to hold her face. . . .
On a multi-leveled early evening of balconies, terraces, audiences grouped at the
different levels, all looking downward, in toward a common center, galleries of young
women with green leaves at their waists, tall evergreen trees, lawns, flowing water
and national solemnity, the President, in the middle of asking the Bundestag, with
his familiar clogged and nasal voice, for a giant war appropriation, breaks down suddenly:
“Oh, fuck it . . .”
Fickt es
, the soon-to-be-immortal phrase, rings in the sky, rings over the land,
Ja, fickt es!
“I’m sending all the soldiers home. We’ll close down the weapon factories, we’ll
dump all the weapons in the sea. I’m sick of war. I’m sick of waking up every morning
afraid I’m going to die.” It is suddenly impossible to hate him any more: he’s as
human, as mortal now, as any of the people. There will be new elections. The Left
will run a woman whose name is never given, but everyone understands it is Rosa Luxemburg.
The other candidates will be chosen so inept or colorless that no one will vote for
them. There will be a chance for the Revolution. The President has promised.
Incredible joy at the baths, among the friends. True joy: events in a dialectical
process cannot bring this explosion of the heart. Everyone is in love. . . .
AN ARMY OF LOVERS CAN BE BEATEN.
Rudi and Vanya have fallen to arguing street tactics. Somewhere water is dripping.
The street reaches in, makes itself felt everywhere. Leni knows it, hates it. The
impossibility of any rest . . . needing to trust strangers who may be working for
the police, if not right now then a little later, when the street has grown for them
more desolate than they can bear . . . She wishes she knew of ways to keep it from
her child, but already that may be too late. Franz—Franz was never much in the street.
Always some excuse. Worried about security, being caught on a stray frame by one of
the leather-coated photographers, who will be always at the fringes of the action.
Or it was, “What’ll we do with Ilse? What if there’s violence?” If there’s violence,
what’ll we do with Franz?
She tried to explain to him about the level you reach, with both feet in, when you
lose your fear, you lose it all, you’ve penetrated the moment, slipping perfectly
into its grooves, metal-gray but soft as latex, and now the figures are dancing, each
pre-choreographed exactly where it is, the flash of knees under pearl-colored frock
as the girl in the babushka stoops to pick up a cobble, the man in the black suitcoat
and brown sleeveless sweater grabbed by policemen one on either arm, trying to keep
his head up, showing his teeth, the older liberal in the dirty beige overcoat, stepping
back to avoid a careening demonstrator, looking back across his lapel how-dare-you
or look-out-not-
me
, his eyeglasses filled with the glare of the winter sky. There is the moment, and
its possibilities.
She even tried, from what little calculus she’d picked up, to explain it to Franz
as Δt approaching zero, eternally approaching, the slices of time growing thinner
and thinner, a succession of rooms each with walls more silver, transparent, as the
pure light of the zero comes nearer. . . .
But he shook his head. “Not the same, Leni. The important thing is taking a function
to its limit. Δt is just a convenience, so that it can happen.”
He has, had, this way of removing all the excitement from things with a few words.
Not even well-chosen words: he’s that way by instinct. When they went to movies he
would fall asleep. He fell asleep during
Nibelungen.
He missed Attila the Hun roaring in from the East to wipe out the Burgundians. Franz
loved films but this was how he watched them, nodding in and out of sleep. “You’re
the cause-and-effect man,” she cried. How did he connect together the fragments he
saw while his eyes were open?
He was the cause-and-effect man: he kept at her astrology without mercy, telling her
what she was supposed to believe, then denying it. “Tides, radio interference, damned
little else. There is no way for changes out there to produce changes here.”
“Not produce,” she tried, “not cause. It all goes along together. Parallel, not series.
Metaphor. Signs and symptoms. Mapping on to different coordinate systems, I don’t
know . . .” She didn’t know, all she was trying to do was reach.
But he said: “Try to design anything that way and have it work.”
They saw
Die Frau im Mond.
Franz was amused, condescending. He picked at technical points. He knew some of the
people who’d worked on the special effects. Leni saw a dream of flight. One of many
possible. Real flight and dreams of flight go together. Both are part of the same
movement. Not A before B, but all together. . . .
Could anything with him ever have lasted? If the Jewish wolf Pflaumbaum had not set
the torch to his own paint factory by the canal, Franz might have labored out their
days dedicated to the Jew’s impossible scheme of developing patterned paint, dissolving
crystal after patient crystal, controlling the temperatures with obsessive care so
that on cooling the amorphous swirl might, this time might, suddenly shift, lock into
stripes, polka-dots, plaid, stars of David—instead of finding one early morning a
blackened waste, paint cans exploded in great bursts of crimson and bottle-green,
smells of charred wood and naphtha, Pflaumbaum wringing his hands oy, oy, oy, the
sneaking hypocrite. All for the insurance.
So Franz and Leni were very hungry for a time, with Ilse growing in her belly each
day. What jobs came along were menial and paid hardly enough to matter. It was breaking
him. Then he met his old friend from the T.H. Munich one night out in the swampy suburbs.
He’d been out all day, the proletarian husband, out pasting up bills to advertise
some happy Max Schlepzig film fantasy, while Leni lay pregnant, forced to turn when
the pain in her back got too bad, inside their furnished dustbin in the last of the
tenement’s Hinterhöfe. It was well after dark and bitter cold by the time his paste
bucket was empty and the ads all put up to be pissed on, torn down, swastikaed over.
(It may have been a quota film. There may have been a misprint. But when he arrived
at the theatre on the date printed on the bill, he found the place dark, chips of
plaster littering the floor of the lobby, and a terrible smashing far back inside
the theatre, the sound of a demolition crew except that there were no voices, nor
even any light that he could see back there . . . he called, but the wrecking only
went on, a loud creaking in the bowels behind the electric marquee, which he noticed
now was blank. . . . ) He had wandered, bone-tired, miles northward into Reinickendorf,
a quarter of small factories, rusted sheeting on the roofs, brothels, sheds, expansions
of brick into night and disuse, repair shops where the water in the vats for cooling
the work lay stagnant and scummed over. Only a sprinkling of lights. Vacancy, weeds
in the lots, no one in the streets: a neighborhood where glass breaks every night.
It must have been the wind that was carrying him down a dirt road, past the old army
garrison the local police had taken over, among the shacks and tool cribs to a wire
fence with a gate. He found the gate open, and pushed through. He’d become aware of
a sound, somewhere ahead. One summer before the World War, he’d gone to Schaffhausen
on holiday with his parents, and they’d taken the electric tram to the Rhine Falls.
They went down a stairway and out on to a little wood pavilion with a pointed roof—all
around them were clouds, rainbows, drops of fire. And the roar of the waterfall. He
held on to both their hands, suspended in the cold spray-cloud with Mutti and Papi,
barely able to see above to the trees that clung to the fall’s brim in a green wet
smudge, or the little tour boats below that came up nearly to where the cataract crashed
into the Rhine. But now, in the winter heart of Reinickendorf, he was alone, hands
empty, stumbling over frozen mud through an old ammunition dump grown over with birch
and willow, swelling in the darkness to hills, sinking to swamp. Concrete barracks
and earthworks 40 feet high towered in the middle distance as the sound beyond them,
the sound of a waterfall, grew louder, calling from his memory. These were the kinds
of revenants that found Franz, not persons but forms of energy, abstractions. . . .
Through a gap in the breastwork he saw then a tiny silver egg, with a flame, pure
and steady, issuing from beneath, lighting the forms of men in suits, sweaters, overcoats,
watching from bunkers or trenches. It was a rocket, in its stand: a static test.
The sound began to change, to break now and then. It didn’t sound ominous to Franz
in his wonder, only different. But the light grew brighter, and the watching figures
suddenly started dropping for cover as the rocket now gave a sputtering roar, a long
burst, voices screaming
get down
and he hit the dirt just as the silver thing blew apart, a terrific blast, metal
whining through the air where he’d stood, Franz hugging the ground, ears ringing,
no feeling even for the cold, no way for the moment of knowing if he was still inside
his body. . . .
Feet approached running. He looked up and saw Kurt Mondaugen. The wind all night,
perhaps all year, had brought them together. This is what he came to believe, that
it was the wind. Most of the schoolboy fat was replaced now by muscle, his hair was
thinning, his complexion darker than anything Franz had seen in the street that winter,
dark even in the concrete folds of shadow and the flames from the scattered rocket
fuel, but it was Mondaugen sure enough, seven or eight years gone but they knew each
other in the instant. They’d lived in the same drafty mansarde in the Liebigstrasse
in Munich. (Franz had seen the address then as a lucky omen, for Justus von Liebig
had been one of his heroes, a hero of chemistry. Later, as confirmation, his course
in polymer theory was taught by Professor-Doctor Laszlo Jamf, who was latest in the
true succession, Liebig to August Wilhelm von Hofmann, to Herbert Ganister to Laszlo
Jamf, a direct chain, cause-and-effect.) They’d ridden the same rattling Schnellbahnwagen
with its three contact arms frail as insect legs squeaking along the wires overhead
to the T.H.: Mondaugen had been in electrical engineering. On graduating he’d gone
off to South-West Africa, on some kind of radio research project. They had written
for a while, then stopped.
Their reunion went on till very late, in a Reinickendorf beer hall, undergraduate
hollering among the working-class drinkers, a jubilant and grandiose post-mortem on
the rocket test—scrawling on soggy paper napkins, all talking at once around the glass-cluttered
table, arguing through the smoke and noise heat flux, specific impulse, propellant
flow. . . .
“It was a failure,” Franz weaving under their electric bulb at three or four in the
morning, a loose grin on his face, “it failed, Leni, but they talk only of success!
Twenty kilograms of thrust and only for a few seconds, but
no one’s ever done it before.
I couldn’t believe it Leni I saw something that, that no one ever did before. . . .”
He meant to accuse her, she imagined, of conditioning him to despair. But she only
wanted him to grow up. What kind of Wandervögel idiocy is it to run around all night
in a marsh calling yourselves the Society for Space Navigation?