Authors: Thomas Pynchon
“Trouble in Hamburg—” Andreas is scribbling away, lifting one earpiece back
smock
damp with sweat so that he can be on both ends of the link at once. “Sounds like
it might be the DPs again. Got a bad signal. Keeps fading—”
Since the surrender there have been these constant skirmishes between the German civilians
and foreign prisoners freed from the camps. Towns in the north have been taken over
by displaced Poles, Czechs, Russians who’ve looted the arsenals and granaries and
mean to hold what they’ve taken. But nobody knows how to feel about the local Schwarzkommando.
Some see only the ragged pieces of SS uniform, and respond to that one way or another—others
take them for Moroccans or Indians drifted somehow over the mountains from Italy.
Germans still remember the occupation of the Rhineland 20 years ago by French colonial
units, and the posters screaming
SCHWARZE
BESATZUNG
AM
RHEIN
! Another stress in the pattern. Last week in Hamburg, two Schwarzkommando were shot.
Others were badly beaten. The British military government sent in some troops, but
only after the killing was over. Their main interest seemed to be in enforcing a curfew.
“It’s Onguruve.” Andreas hands over the earphones and swivels to roll out of Enzian’s
way.
“. . . can’t tell if it’s us they want, or the oil refinery . . .” the voice goes
crackling in and out, “. . . hundred, maybe two hundred . . . so many . . .—fles,
clubs, handguns—”
Bl-bleep and a burst of hissing, then in laps a familiar voice. “I can bring a dozen
men.”
“Hannover’s answering,” Enzian murmurs, trying to sound amused.
“You mean Josef Ombindi.” Andreas is not amused.
Now Onguruve, calling for help, is neutral on the Empty Ones Question, or tries to
be. But if Ombindi can bring a relief force to Hamburg, he may decide to stay. Hannover,
even with the Volkswagen plant there, is only a stepping-stone for him. Hamburg would
give the Empty Ones a stronger power base, and this could be the opportunity. The
north ought to be their native element, anyway . . .
“I’ll have to go,” handing the phones back to Andreas. “What’s wrong?”
“Could be the Russians, trying to draw you out.”
“It’s all right. Stop worrying about Tchitcherine. I don’t think he’s up there.”
“But your European said—”
“Him? I don’t know how far to trust him. Remember, I did hear him talking with Marvy
on the train. Now he’s with Tchitcherine’s girl in Nordhausen. I mean, would you trust
him?”
“But if Marvy’s chasing him now, it might mean he’s worth something.”
“If he is, we’re sure to see him again.”
Enzian grabs his kit, swallows two Pervitins for the road, reminds Andreas of a business
detail or two for tomorrow, and climbs the long salt and stone ramps to the surface.
Outside, he breathes the evergreen air of the Harz. In the old villages, it would
be the time of evening for the milking. The first star is out, okanumaihi, the little
drinker of sweet milk. . . .
But this must be a different star, a northern star. There is no comfort. What has
happened to us? If choices have never been our own, if the Zone-Hereros are meant
to live in the bosom of the Angel who tried to destroy us in Südwest . . . then: have
we been passed over, or have we been chosen for something even more terrible?
Enzian has to be in Hamburg before another spearing of the sun. Security on the trains
is troublesome, but the sentries know him. The long freights are rolling out from
the Mittelwerke day and night, carrying A4 hardware west to the Americans, north to
the English . . . and soon, when the new map of the occupation goes into effect, east
to the Russians too. . . . Nordhausen will be under Russian administration and we
should have some action then . . . will it give him a chance at Tchitcherine? Enzian
has never seen the man, but they are meant to come together. Enzian is his half-brother.
They are the same flesh.
His sciatic nerve is throbbing now. Too much sitting. He goes limping, alone, head
still down for the low clearances back down in the Erdschweinhöhle—who knows what
waits out here for the head held too high? Down the road to the railway overpass,
tall and gray in the growing starlight, Enzian is heading into the North. . . .
• • • • • • •
Just before dawn. A hundred feet below flows a pallid sheet of cloud, stretching west
as far as they can see. Here are Slothrop and the apprentice witch Geli Tripping,
standing up on top of the Brocken, the very plexus of German evil, twenty miles north
by northwest of the Mittelwerke, waiting for the sun to rise. Though May Day Eve’s
come and gone and this frolicking twosome are nearly a month late, relics of the latest
Black Sabbath still remain: Kriegsbier empties, lace undergarments, spent rifle cartridges,
Swastika-banners of ripped red satin, tattooing-needles and splashes of blue ink—
“What the heck was
that
for?” Slothrop wondered.
“For the devil’s kiss, of course,” Geli snuggling oh-you-old-silly up to his armpit
there, and Slothrop feeling a little icky and square for not knowing. But then he
knows next to nothing about witches, even though there was, in his ancestry, one genuine
Salem Witch, one of the last to join the sus. per coll. crowd dangling, several of
them back through the centuries’ couplings, off of the Slothrop family tree. Her name
was Amy Sprue, a family renegade turned Antinomian at age 23 and running mad over
the Berkshire countryside, ahead of Crazy Sue Dunham by 200 years, stealing babies,
riding cows in the twilight, sacrificing chickens up on Snodd’s Mountain. Lot of ill
will about those chickens, as you can imagine. The cows and babies always, somehow,
came back all right. Amy Sprue was not, like young skipping Dorothy’s antagonist,
a mean witch.
She headed for Rhode Island, seeking some of that asylum,
And she thought she’d stop by Salem on her way,
But they didn’t like her style, and they didn’t like her smile,
So she never saw that Narragansett Bay. . . .
They busted her for witchery and she got death. Another of Slothrop’s crazy kinfolks.
When she was mentioned aloud at all it was with a shrug, too far away really to be
a Family Disgrace—more of a curiosity. Slothrop grew up not quite knowing what to
think about her. Witches were certainly not getting a fair shake in the thirties.
They were depicted as hags who called you dearie, not exactly a wholesome lot. The
movies had not prepared him for this Teutonic version here. Your kraut witch, for
example, has six toes on each foot and no hair at all on her cunt. That is how the
witches look, anyhow, in the stairway murals inside the one-time Nazi transmitter
tower up on the Brocken here, and government murals are hardly places to go looking
for irresponsible fantasy, right? But Geli thinks the hairless cunt derives from the
women von Bayros drew. “Aw, you just don’t wanna shave
yours
,” crows Slothrop. “Ha! Ha! Some witch!”
“I’ll show
you
something,” she sez, which is why they are now awake at this ungodly hour, side by
side, holding hands, very still as the sun begins to clear the horizon. “Now watch,”
Geli whispers: “out there.”
As the sunlight strikes their backs, coming in nearly flat on, it begins developing
on the pearl cloudbank: two gigantic shadows, thrown miles overland, past Clausthal-Zelterfeld,
past Seesen and Goslar, across where the river Leine would be, and reaching toward
Weser. . . . “By golly,” Slothrop a little bit nervous, “it’s the Specter.” You got
it up around Greylock in the Berkshires too. Around these parts it is known as the
Brockengespenst.
God-shadows. Slothrop raises an arm. His fingers are cities, his biceps is a province—of
course he raises an arm. Isn’t it expected of him? The arm-shadow trails rainbows
behind as it moves reaching eastward for a grab at Göttingen. Not ordinary shadows,
either—
three-dimensional
ones, cast out on the German dawn, yes and Titans
had
to live in these mountains, or under them. . . . Impossibly out of scale. Never to
be carried by a river. Never to look to a horizon and think that it might go on forever.
No trees to climb, no long journeys to take . . . only their deep images are left,
haloed shells lying prone above the fogs men move in. . . .
Geli kicks a leg out straight as a dancer, and tilts her head to the side. Slothrop
raises his middle finger to the west, the headlong finger darkening three miles of
cloud per second. Geli grabs for Slothrop’s cock. Slothrop leans to bite Geli’s tit.
They are enormous, dancing the floor of the whole visible sky. He reaches underneath
her dress. She twines a leg around one of his. The spectra wash red to indigo, tidal,
immense, at all their edges. Under the clouds out there it’s as still, and lost, as
Atlantis.
But the Brockengespenstphänomen is confined to dawn’s slender interface, and soon
the shadows have come shrinking back to their owners.
“Say, did that Tchitcherine ever—”
“Tchitcherine’s too busy for this.”
“Oh, and I’m some kind of a drone or something.”
“You’re different.”
“We-e-e-ll . . . he
ought
to see it.”
She looks at him curiously, but doesn’t ask why—her teeth halt on her lower lip, and
the
warum
(varoom, a Plasticman sound) hovers trapped in her mouth. Just as well. Slothrop
doesn’t
know
why. He’s no help to anybody who’s fixing to interrogate. Last night he and Geli
blundered onto a Schwarzkommando picket outside one of the old mine entrances. The
Hereros threw questions at him for an hour. Oh, just wandering about you know, looking
for a bit of the odd, what we call “human interest,” fascinating of course, we’re
always interested in what you chaps are up to. . . . Geli snickering in the darkness.
They must have known her. They didn’t ask
her
anything.
When he brought it up later, she wasn’t sure just what this is between Tchitcherine
and the Africans, but whatever it is it’s being carried on with high passion.
“It’s hate, all right,” she said. “Stupid, stupid. The war’s over. It isn’t politics
or fuck-your-buddy, it’s old-time, pure, personal hate.”
“Enzian?”
“I think so.”
They found the Brocken occupied both by American and by Russian troops. The mountain
lay on what was to be the border of the Soviet zone of occupation. The brick and stucco
ruins of the radio transmitter and a tourist hotel loomed up just outside the firelight.
Only a couple of platoons here. Nobody higher than noncoms. The officers were all
down in Bad Harzburg, Halberstadt, someplace comfortable, getting drunk or laid. There
is a certain air of resentment up on the Brocken all right, but the boys like Geli
and tolerate Slothrop, and luckiest of all, nobody seems to be connected with that
Ordnance.
It’s only a moment’s safety, though. Major Marvy is gnashing about the Harz, sending
thousands of canaries into cardiac episodes, dropping in yellow droves belly-up out
of the trees as he marauds on by hollering
Git
that limey ’sucker I don’t care how many men it takes I want a fucking
division
you hear me boy? Only a matter of time before he picks up the trail again. He’s out
of his mind. Slothrop’s a little daffy, but not like this—this is really unhealthy,
this Marvy persecution. Is it possible . . . yup, the thought has certainly occurred
to him—that Marvy’s in tight with those Rolls Roycers who were after him in Zürich?
There may be no limit to their connections. Marvy is buddies with GE, that’s Morgan
money, there’s Morgan money in Harvard, and surely an interlock someplace with Lyle
Bland . . . who
are
they, hey? why do they want Slothrop? He knows now for sure that Zwitter the mad
Nazi scientist is one of them. And that kindly old Professor Glimpf was only waiting
down in the Mittelwerke to pick up Slothrop if he showed. Jesus. If Slothrop hadn’t
snuck out after dark back down into Nordhausen to Geli’s place, they’d have him locked
up by now for sure, maybe beaten up, maybe dead.
Before they head back down the mountain, they manage to chisel six cigarettes and
some K-rations off of the sentries. Geli knows a friend of a friend who stays out
on a farm in the Goldene Aue, a ballooning enthusiast named Schnorp, who is heading
toward Berlin.
“But I don’t want to go to Berlin.”
“You want to go where Marvy isn’t, Liebchen.”
Schnorp is beaming, eager enough for company, just back from a local PX with an armload
of flat white boxes: merchandise he plans to move in Berlin. “No trouble,” he tells
Slothrop, “don’t worry. I’ve done this trip hundreds of times. Nobody bothers a balloon.”
He takes Slothrop out in back of the house, and here in the middle of a sloping green
field is a wicker gondola beside a great heap of bright yellow and scarlet silk.
“Real unobtrusive getaway,” Slothrop mutters. A gang of kids have appeared running
out of an apple orchard to help them carry tin jerricans of grain alcohol out to the
gondola. All shadows are being thrown uphill by the afternoon sun. Wind blows from
the west. Slothrop gives Schnorp a light from his Zippo to get the burner going while
kids straighten out the folds in the gasbag. Schnorp turns up the flame till it’s
shooting sideways and with a steady roar into the opening of the great silk bag. Children
visible through the gap break up into wiggly heat waves. Slowly the balloon begins
to expand. “Remember me,” Geli calls above the rumbling of the burner. “Till I see
you again . . .” Slothrop climbs in the gondola with Schnorp. The balloon rises a
little off the ground and is caught by the wind. They start to move. Geli and the
kids have taken hold of the gondola all around its gunwales, the bag still not all
the way up but gathering speed, dragging them all as fast as their feet can move,
giggling and cheering, uphill. Slothrop keeps as much out of the way as he can, letting
Schnorp see that the flame’s pointed into the bag and that lines to the basket are
clear. At last the bag swings vertical, across the sun, the inside of it going a riotous
wreathing of yellow and scarlet heat. One by one the ground crew fall away, waving
good-by. The last to go is Geli in her white dress, hair brushed back over her ears
into pigtails, her soft chin and mouth and big serious eyes looking into Slothrop’s
for as long as she can before she has to let go. She kneels in the grass, blows a
kiss. Slothrop feels his heart, out of control, inflate with love and rise quick as
a balloon. It is taking him longer, the longer he’s in the Zone, to remember to say
aw quit being a sap.
What is this place doing to his brain?