Authors: Thomas Pynchon
So, between these two, even routine greeting does not pass without some payload of
meaningfulness and the hope of Blitzing the other’s mind. Enzian knows that he is
being used for his name. The name has some magic. But he has been so unable to touch,
so neutral for so long . . . everything has flowed away but the name, Enzian, a sound
for chanting. He hopes it will be magic enough for one thing, one good thing when
the time comes, however short of the Center. . . . What are these persistences among
a people, these traditions and offices, but traps? the sexual fetishes Christianity
knows how to flash, to lure us in, meant to remind us of earliest infant love. . . .
Can his name, can “Enzian” break
their
power? Can his
name
prevail?
The Erdschweinhöhle is in one of the worst traps of all, a dialectic of word made
flesh, flesh moving toward something else. . . . Enzian sees the trap clearly, but
not the way out. . . . Sitting now between a pair of candles just lit, his gray field-jacket
open at the neck, beard feathering down his dark throat to shorter, sparser glossy
black hairs that go running in a whirl, iron filings about the south pole of his Adam’s
apple . . . pole . . . axis . . . axle-tree. . . . Tree . . . Omumborombanga . . .
Mukuru . . . first ancestor . . . Adam . . . still sweating, hands from the working
day gone graceless and numb, he has a minute to drift and remember this time of day
back in Südwest, above ground, participating in the sunset, out watching the mist
gather, part fog, part dust from the cattle returning to the kraals to milking and
sleep . . . his tribe believed long ago that each sunset is a battle. In the north,
where the sun sets, live the one-armed warriors, the one-legged and one-eyed, who
fight the sun each evening, who spear it to death until its blood runs out over the
horizon and sky. But under the earth, in the night, the sun is born again, to come
back each dawn, new and the same. But we, Zone-Hereros, under the earth, how long
will we wait in this north, this locus of death? Is it to be reborn? or have we really
been buried for the last time, buried facing north like all the rest of our dead,
and like all the holy cattle ever sacrificed to the ancestors? North is death’s region.
There may be no gods, but there is a pattern: names by themselves may have no magic,
but the
act
of naming, the physical utterance, obeys the pattern. Nordhausen means dwellings
in the north. The Rocket had to be produced out of a place called Nordhausen. The
town adjoining was named Bleicheröde as a validation, a bit of redundancy so that
the message would not be lost. The history of the old Hereros is one of lost messages.
It began in mythical times, when the sly hare who nests in the Moon brought death
among men, instead of the Moon’s true message. The true message has never come. Perhaps
the Rocket is meant to take us there someday, and then Moon will tell us its truth
at last. There are those down in the Erdschweinhöhle, younger ones who’ve only known
white autumn-prone Europe, who believe Moon is their destiny. But older ones can remember
that Moon, like Ndjambi Karunga, is both the bringer of evil and its avenger. . . .
And Enzian’s found the name Bleicheröde close enough to “Blicker,” the nickname the
early Germans gave to Death. They saw him white: bleaching and blankness. The name
was later Latinized to “Dominus Blicero.” Weissmann, enchanted, took it as his SS
code name. Enzian was in Germany by then. Weissmann brought the new name home to his
pet, not showing it off so much as indicating to Enzian yet another step to be taken
toward the Rocket, toward a destiny he still cannot see past this sinister cryptography
of naming, a sparse pattern but one that harshly will not be denied, that cries and
nags him on stumbling as badly as 20 years ago. . . .
Once he could not imagine a life without return. Before his conscious memories began,
something took him, in and out of his mother’s circular village far out in the Kakau
Veld, at the borders of the land of death, a departure and a return. . . . He was
told about it years later. Shortly after he was born, his mother brought him back
to her village, back from Swakopmund. In ordinary times she would have been banished.
She’d had the child out of wedlock, by a Russian sailor whose name she couldn’t pronounce.
But under the German invasion, protocol was less important than helping one another.
Though the murderers in blue came down again and again, each time, somehow, Enzian
was passed over. It is a Herod myth his admirers still like to bring up, to his annoyance.
He had been walking only for a few months when his mother took him with her to join
Samuel Maherero’s great trek across the Kalahari.
Of the stories told about these years, this is the most tragic. The refugees had been
on the desert for days. Khama, king of the Bechuanas, sent guides, oxen, wagons and
water to help them. Those who arrived first were warned to take water only little
by little. But by the time the stragglers arrived, everyone else was asleep. No one
to warn them. Another lost message. They drank till they died, hundreds of souls.
Enzian’s mother was among them. He had fallen asleep under a cowhide, exhausted from
hunger and thirst. He woke among the dead. It is said that he was found there by a
band of Ovatjimba, taken and cared for. They left him back at the edge of his mother’s
village, to walk in alone. They were nomads, they could have taken any other direction
in that waste country, but they brought him back to the place he’d left. He found
hardly anyone remaining there. Many had gone on the trek, some had been taken away
to the coast and herded into kraals, or to work on the railroad the Germans were building
through the desert. Many others had died eating cattle dead of rinderpest.
No return. Sixty per cent of the Herero people had been exterminated. The rest were
being used like animals. Enzian grew up into a white-occupied world. Captivity, sudden
death, one-way departures were the ordinary things of every day. By the time the question
occurred to him, he could find no way to account for his own survival. He could not
believe in any process of selection. Ndjambi Karunga and the Christian God were too
far away. There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations
of pure chance. Weissmann, the European whose protégé he became, always believed he’d
seduced Enzian away from religion. But the gods had gone away themselves: the gods
had left the people. . . . He let Weissmann think what he wanted to. The man’s thirst
for guilt was insatiable as the desert’s for water.
It’s been a long time now since the two men have seen each other. Last time they spoke
was during the move from Peenemünde down here to the Mittelwerke. Weissmann is probably
dead by now. Even in Südwest, 20 years ago, before Enzian could even speak his language,
he’d seen
that:
a love for the last explosion—the lifting and the scream that peaks past fear. . . .
Why should Weissmann want to survive the war? Surely he’d have found something splendid
enough to match his thirst. It could not have ended for him rationalized and meek
as his hundred glass bureaus about the SS circuit—located in time and space always
just to miss grandeur, only to be in its vacuum, to be tugged slightly along by its
slipstream but finally left to lie still again in a few tarnished sequins of wake.
Bürgerlichkeit played to Wagner, the brasses faint and mocking, the voices of the
strings drifting in and out of phase. . . .
At night down here, very often lately, Enzian will wake for no reason. Was it really
Him, pierced Jesus, who came to lean over you? The white faggot’s-dream body, the
slender legs and soft gold European eyes . . . did you catch a glimpse of olive cock
under the ragged loincloth, did you want to reach to lick at the sweat of his rough,
his wooden bondage? Where is he, what part of our Zone tonight, damn him to the knob
of that nervous imperial staff. . . .
There are few such islands of down and velvet for him to lie and dream on, not in
these marble passages of power. Enzian has grown cold: not so much a fire dying away
as a positive coming on of cold, a bitter taste growing across the palate of love’s
first hopes. . . . It began when Weissmann brought him to Europe: a discovery that
love, among these men, once past the simple feel and orgasming of it, had to do with
masculine technologies, with contracts, with winning and losing. Demanded, in his
own case, that he enter the service of the Rocket. . . . Beyond simple steel erection,
the Rocket was an entire system
won
, away from the feminine darkness, held against the entropies of lovable but scatterbrained
Mother Nature: that was the first thing he was obliged by Weissmann to learn, his
first step toward citizenship in the Zone. He was led to believe that by understanding
the Rocket, he would come to understand truly his manhood. . . .
“I used to imagine, in some naïve way I have lost now, that all the excitement of
those days was being put on for me, somehow, as a gift from Weissmann. He had carried
me over his threshold and into his house, and this was the life he meant to bring
me to, these manly pursuits, devotion to the Leader, political intrigue, secret re-arming
in naughty defiance of the aging plutocracies all around us . . . they were growing
impotent, but we were young and strong . . . to be
that
young and strong, at such a time in the life of a nation! I could not believe so
many fair young men, the way the sweat and dust lay on their bodies as they lengthened
the Autobahns day into ringing day: we drove among trumpeters, silk banners impeccably
tailored as suits of clothes . . . the women seemed to move all docile, without color . . .
I thought of them in ranks, down on all fours, having their breasts milked into pails
of shining steel. . . .”
“Was he ever jealous of the other young men—the way you felt about them?”
“Oh. It was still very physical for me then. But he had already moved past that part
of it. No. No, I don’t think he minded. . . . I loved him then. I could not see into
him, or the things he believed in, but I wanted to. If the Rocket was his life, then
I would belong to the Rocket.”
“And you never doubted him? He certainly hadn’t the most ordered personality—”
“Listen—I don’t know how to say this . . . have you ever been a Christian?”
“Well . . . at one time.”
“Did you ever, in the street, see a man that you knew, in the instant,
must
be Jesus Christ—not hoped he was, or caught some resemblance—but
knew.
The Deliverer, returned and walking among the people, just the way the old stories
promised . . . as you approached you grew more and more certain—you could see nothing
at all to contradict that first amazement . . . you drew near and passed, terrified
that he would speak to you . . . your eyes grappled . . . it was confirmed. And most
terrible of all,
he knew.
He saw into your soul: all your make-believe ceased to matter. . . .”
“Then . . . what’s happened, since your first days in Europe, could be described,
in Max Weber’s phrase, almost as a ‘routinization of charisma.’”
“Outase,” sez Enzian, which is one of many Herero words for shit, in this case a large,
newly laid cow turd.
Andreas Orukambe sits in front of an army-green, wrinkle-finished transmitter/receiver
rig, off in a rock alcove of the room. A pair of rubber headphones covers his ears.
The Schwarzkommando use the 50 cm band—the one the Rocket’s Hawaii II guidance operated
on. Who but rocket-maniacs would listen in at 53 cm? Schwarzkommando can be sure,
at least, that they’re being monitored by every competitor in the Zone. Transmissions
from the Erdschweinhöhle begin around 0300 and run till dawn. Other Schwarzkommando
stations broadcast on their own schedules. Traffic is in Herero, with a German loan-word
now and then (which is too bad, since these are usually technical words, and valuable
clues for whoever’s listening).
Andreas is on the second dog watch, now, copying mostly, answering when he has to.
Keying any transmitter is an invitation to instant paranoia. There springs into being
an antenna pattern, thousands of square kilometers full of enemies out in their own
night encampments in the Zone, faceless, monitoring. Though they are in contact with
one another—the Schwarzkommando try to listen in to as much as they can—though there
can be no illusion about their plans for the Schwarzkommando, still they are holding
off, waiting for the optimum time to move in and destroy without a trace. . . . Enzian
believes they will wait for the first African rocket to be fully assembled and ready
for firing: it will look better if they move against a real threat, real hardware.
Meantime Enzian tries to keep security tight. Here at the home base it’s no problem:
penetration by less than a regiment would be impossible. But farther out in the Zone,
rocket-towns like Celle, Enschede, Hachenburg—they can pick us off out there one by
one, first a campaign of attrition, then a coordinated raid . . . leaving then only
this metropolis, under siege, to strangle. . . .
Perhaps it’s theater, but they
seem
no longer to be Allies . . . though the history they have invented for themselves
conditions us to
expect
“postwar rivalries,” when in fact it may all be a giant cartel including winners
and losers both, in an amiable agreement to share what is there to be shared. . . .
Still, Enzian has played them off, the quarreling scavengers, one against the other . . .
it
looks
genuine enough. . . . Marvy must be together with the Russians by now, and with General
Electric too—throwing him off the train the other night bought us—what? a day or two,
and how well have we used the time?
It comes down to this day-to-day knitting and unraveling, minor successes, minor defeats.
Thousands of details, any one of which carries the chance of a fatal mistake. Enzian
would like to be more out of the process than he is—to be able to see where it’s going,
to know, in real time, at each splitting of the pathway of decision, which would have
been right and which wrong. But it is
their
time,
their
space, and he still expects, naïvely, outcomes the white continuum grew past hoping
for centuries ago. The details—valves, special tools that may or may not exist, Erdschweinhöhle
jealousies and plots, lost operating manuals, technicians on the run from both East
and West, food shortages, sick children—swirl like fog, each particle with its own
array of forces and directions . . . he can’t handle them all at the same time, if
he stays too much with any he’s in danger of losing others. . . . But it’s not only
the details. He has the odd feeling, in moments of reverie or honest despair, that
he is speaking lines prepared somewhere far away (not far away in space, but in levels
of power), and that his decisions are not his own at all, but the flummeries of an
actor impersonating a leader. He has dreamed of being held in the pitiless emprise
of something from which he cannot wake . . . he is often aboard a ship on a broad
river, leading a rebellion which must fail. For reasons of policy, the rebellion is
being allowed to go on for a bit. He is being hunted, his days are full of narrow
escapes which he finds exciting, physically graceful . . . and the Plot itself! it
has a stern, an intense beauty, it is music, a symphony of the North, of an Arctic
voyage, past headlands of very green ice, to the feet of icebergs, kneeling in the
grip of this incredible music, washed in seas blue as blue dye, an endless North,
vast country settled by people whose old culture and history are walled off by a great
silence from the rest of the world . . . the names of their peninsulas and seas, their
long and powerful rivers are unknown down in the temperate world . . . it is a return,
this voyage: he has grown old inside his name, the sweeping music of the voyage is
music he wrote himself, so long ago that he has forgotten it completely . . . but
now it is finding him again. . . .