Authors: Thomas Pynchon
Leni grew up in Lübeck, in a row of kleinbürger houses beside the Trave. Smooth trees,
spaced evenly all along the riverward edge of her cobbled street, arched their long
boughs over the water. From her bedroom window she could see the twin spires of the
Dom rising above the housetops. Her fetid back-court existence in Berlin was only
a decompression lock
—must
be. Her way out of that fussy Biedermeier strangulation, her dues payable against
better times, after the Revolution.
Franz, in play, often called her “Lenin.” There was never doubt about who was active,
who passive—still she had hoped he’d grow beyond it. She has talked to psychiatrists,
she knows about the German male at puberty. On their backs in the meadows and mountains,
watching the sky, masturbating, yearning. Destiny waits, a darkness latent in the
texture of the summer wind. Destiny will betray you, crush your ideals, deliver you
into the same detestable Bürgerlichkeit as your father, sucking at his pipe on Sunday
strolls after church past the row houses by the river—dress you in the gray uniform
of another family man, and without a whimper you will serve out your time, fly from
pain to duty, from joy to work, from commitment to neutrality. Destiny does all this
to you.
Franz loved her neurotically, masochistically, he belonged to her and believed that
she would carry him on her back, away to a place where Destiny couldn’t reach. As
if it were gravity. He had half-awakened one night burrowing his face into her armpit
mumbling, “Your wings . . . oh, Leni, your wings . . .”
But her wings can only carry her own weight, and she hopes Ilse’s, for a while. Franz
is a dead weight. Let him look for flight out at the Raketenflugplatz, where he goes
to be used by the military and the cartels. Let him fly to the dead moon if he wants
to. . . .
Ilse is awake, and crying. No food all day. They ought to try Peter’s after all. He’ll
have milk. Rebecca holds out what’s left of the end crust she’s been eating. “Would
she like this?”
Not much of the Jew in her. Why are half the Leftists she knows Jewish? She immediately
reminds herself that Marx was one. A racial affinity for the books, the theory, a
rabbinical love of loud argument . . . She gives the crust to her child, picks her
up.
“If he comes here, tell him you haven’t seen me.”
They arrive at Peter Sachsa’s well after dark. She finds a séance just about to begin.
She is immediately aware of her drab coat and cotton dress (hemline too high), her
scuffed and city-dusted shoes, her lack of jewelry. More middle-class reflexes . . .
vestiges, she hopes. But most of the women are old. The others are
too
dazzling. Hmm. The men look more affluent than usual. Leni spots a silver lapel-swastika
here and there. Wines on the tables are the great ’20s and ’21s. Schloss Vollrads,
Zeltinger, Piesporter—it is an Occasion.
The objective tonight is to get in touch with the late foreign minister Walter Rathenau.
At the Gymnasium, Leni sang with the other children the charming anti-Semitic street
refrain of the time:
Knallt ab den Juden Rathenau,
Die gottverdammte Judensau . . .
After he was assassinated she sang nothing for weeks, certain that, if the singing
hadn’t brought it about, at least it had been a prophecy, a spell. . . .
There are specific messages tonight. Questions for the former minister. A gentle sorting-out
process is under way. Reasons of security. Only certain guests are allowed to go on
into Peter’s sitting room. The preterite stay outside, gossiping, showing their gums
out of tension, moving their hands. . . . The big scandal around IG Farben this week
is the unlucky subsidiary Spottbilligfilm AG, whose entire management are about to
be purged for sending to OKW weapons procurement a design proposal for a new airborne
ray which could turn whole populations, inside a ten-kilometer radius, stone blind.
An IG review board caught the scheme in time. Poor Spottbilligfilm. It had slipped
their collective mind what such a weapon would do to the dye market after the next
war. The Götterdämmerung mentality again. The weapon had been known as L-5227, L standing
for light, another comical German euphemism, like the A in rocket designations which
stands for aggregate, or IG itself, Interessengemeinschaft, a fellowship of interests . . .
and what about the case of catalyst poisoning in Prague—was it true that the VI b
Group Staffs at the Chemical Instrumentality for the Abnormal have been flown east
on emergency status, and that it’s a complex poisoning, both selenium and tellurium . . .
the names of the poisons sober the conversation, like a mention of cancer. . . .
The elite who will sit tonight are from the corporate Nazi crowd, among whom Leni
recognizes who but Generaldirektor Smaragd, of an IG branch that was interested, for
a time, in her husband. But then abruptly there’d been no more contact. It would have
been mysterious, a little sinister, except that everything in those days could reasonably
be blamed on the economy. . . .
In the crowd her eyes meet Peter’s. “I’ve left him,” she whispers, nodding, as he
shakes hands.
“You can put Ilse to sleep in one of the bedrooms. Can we talk later?” There is to
his eyes tonight a definite faunish slant. Will he accept that she is not
his
, any more than she belonged to Franz?
“Yes, of course. What’s going on?”
He snorts, meaning
they haven’t told me.
They are using him—have been, various theys, for ten years. But he never knows how,
except by rare accident, an allusion, an interception of smiles. A distorting and
forever clouded mirror, the smiles of clients. . . .
Why do they want Rathenau tonight? What did Caesar really whisper to his protégé as
he fell? Et tu, Brute, the official lie, is about what you’d expect to get from them—it
says exactly nothing. The moment of assassination is the moment when power and the
ignorance of power come together, with Death as validator. When one speaks to the
other then it is not to pass the time of day with et-tu-Brutes. What passes is a truth
so terrible that history—at best a conspiracy, not always among gentlemen, to defraud—will
never admit it. The truth will be repressed or in ages of particular elegance be disguised
as something else. What will Rathenau, past the moment, years into a new otherside
existence, have to say about the old dispensation? Probably nothing as incredible
as what he might have said just as the shock flashed his mortal nerves, as the Angel
swooped in. . . .
But they will see. Rathenau—according to the histories—was prophet and architect of
the cartelized state. From what began as a tiny bureau at the War Office in Berlin,
he had coordinated Germany’s economy during the World War, controlling supplies, quotas
and prices, cutting across and demolishing the barriers of secrecy and property that
separated firm from firm—a corporate Bismarck, before whose power no account book
was too privileged, no agreement too clandestine. His father Emil Rathenau had founded
AEG, the German General Electric Company, but young Walter was more than another industrial
heir—he was a philosopher with a vision of the postwar State. He saw the war in progress
as a world revolution, out of which would rise neither Red communism nor an unhindered
Right, but a rational structure in which business would be the true, the rightful
authority—a structure based, not surprisingly, on the one he’d engineered in Germany
for fighting the World War.
Thus the official version. Grandiose enough. But Generaldirektor Smaragd and colleagues
are not here to be told what even the masses believe. It might almost—if one were
paranoid enough—seem to be a collaboration here, between both sides of the Wall, matter
and spirit. What
is
it they know that the powerless do not? What terrible structure behind the appearances
of diversity and enterprise?
Gallows humor. A damned parlor game. Smaragd cannot really believe in any of this,
Smaragd the technician and manager. He may only want signs, omens, confirmations of
what’s already in being, something to giggle over among the Herrenklub—“We even have
the Jew’s blessing!” Whatever comes through the medium tonight they will warp, they
will edit, into a blessing. It is contempt of a rare order.
Leni finds a couch in a quiet corner of a room full of Chinese ivory and silk hangings,
lies on it, one calf dangling, and tries to relax. Franz now will be home from the
rocket-field, blinking under the bulb as Frau Silberschlag next door delivers Leni’s
last message. Messages tonight, borne on the lights of Berlin . . . neon, incandescent,
stellar . . . messages weave into a net of information that no one can escape. . . .
“The path is clear,” a voice moving Sachsa’s lips and rigid white throat. “You are
constrained, over there, to follow it in time, one step after another. But here it’s
possible to see the whole shape at once—not for me, I’m not that far along—but many
know it as a clear presence . . . ‘shape’ isn’t really the right word. . . . Let me
be honest with you. I’m finding it harder to put myself in your shoes. Problems you
may be having, even those of global implication, seem to many of us here only trivial
side-trips. You are off on a winding and difficult road, which you conceive to be
wide and straight, an Autobahn you can travel at your ease. Is it any use for me to
tell you that all you believe real is illusion? I don’t know whether you’ll listen,
or ignore it. You only want to know about your path, your Autobahn.
“All right. Mauve: that’s in the pattern. The invention of mauve, the coming to your
level of the color mauve. Are you listening, Generaldirektor?”
“I am listening, Herr Rathenau,” replies Smaragd of IG Farben.
“Tyrian purple, alizarin and indigo, other coal-tar dyes are here, but the important
one is mauve. William Perkin discovered it in England, but he was trained by Hofmann,
who was trained by Liebig. There is a succession involved. If it is karmic it’s only
in a very limited sense . . . another Englishman, Herbert Ganister, and the generation
of chemists he trained. . . . Then the discovery of Oneirine. Ask your man Wimpe.
He is the expert on cyclized benzylisoquinilines. Look into the clinical effects of
the drug. I don’t know. It seems that you might look in that direction. It converges
with the mauve-Perkin-Canister line. But all I have is the molecule, the sketch . . .
Methoneirine, as the sulfate. Not in Germany, but in the United States. There is a
link to the United States. A link to Russia. Why do you think von Maltzan and I saw
the Rapallo treaty through? It was necessary to move to the east. Wimpe can tell you.
Wimpe, the V-Mann, was always there. Why do you think we wanted Krupp to sell them
agricultural machinery so badly? It was also part of the process. At the time I didn’t
understand it as clearly as I do now. But I knew what I had to do.
“Consider coal and steel. There is a place where they meet. The interface between
coal and steel is coal-tar. Imagine coal, down in the earth, dead black, no light,
the very substance of death. Death ancient, prehistoric, species
we will never see again.
Growing older, blacker, deeper, in layers of perpetual night. Above ground, the steel
rolls out fiery, bright. But to make steel, the coal tars, darker and heavier, must
be taken from the original coal. Earth’s excrement, purged out for the ennoblement
of shining steel. Passed over.
“We thought of this as an industrial process. It was more. We passed over the coal-tars.
A thousand different molecules waited in the preterite dung. This is the sign of revealing.
Of unfolding. This is one meaning of mauve, the first new color on Earth, leaping
to Earth’s light from its grave miles and aeons below. There is the other meaning . . .
the succession . . . I can’t see that far yet. . . .
“But this is all the impersonation of life. The real movement is not from death to
any rebirth. It is from death to death-transfigured. The best you can do is to polymerize
a few dead molecules. But polymerizing is not resurrection. I mean your IG, Generaldirektor.”
“Our
IG, I should have thought,” replies Smaragd with more than the usual ice and stiffness.
“That’s for you to work out. If you prefer to call this a liaison, do. I am here for
as long as you need me. You don’t have to listen. You think you’d rather hear about
what you call ‘life’: the growing, organic Kartell. But it’s only another illusion.
A very clever robot. The more dynamic it seems to you, the more deep and dead, in
reality, it grows. Look at the smokestacks, how they proliferate, fanning the wastes
of original waste over greater and greater masses of city. Structurally, they are
strongest in compression. A smokestack can survive any explosion—even the shock wave
from one of the new cosmic bombs”—a bit of a murmur around the table at this—“as you
all must know. The persistence, then, of structures favoring death. Death converted
into more death. Perfecting its reign, just as the buried coal grows denser, and overlaid
with more strata—epoch on top of epoch, city on top of ruined city. This is the sign
of Death the impersonator.
“These signs are real. They are also symptoms of a process. The process follows the
same form, the same structure. To apprehend it you will follow the signs. All talk
of cause and effect is secular history, and secular history is a diversionary tactic.
Useful to you, gentlemen, but no longer so to us here. If you want the truth—I know
I presume—you must look into the technology of these matters. Even into the hearts
of certain molecules—it is they after all which dictate temperatures, pressures, rates
of flow, costs, profits, the shapes of towers. . . .
“You must ask two questions. First, what is the real nature of synthesis? And then:
what is the real nature of control?
“You think you know, you cling to your beliefs. But sooner or later you will have
to let them go. . . .”