Gravity's Rainbow (61 page)

“My ‘employer’ is the Soviet State.”

“Yes?” Wimpe did say “
is
the model,” not “will be.” Surprising they could have got this far, if indeed they
did—being of such different persuasions and all. Wimpe, however, being far more cynical,
would have been able to admit more of the truth before starting to feel uncomfortable.
His patience with Tchitcherine’s Red Army version of economics may have been wide
enough. They did part amiably. Wimpe was reassigned to the United States (Chemnyco
of New York) shortly after Hitler became Chancellor. Tchitcherine’s connection, according
to the garrison gossip, ceased then, forever.

But these are rumors. Their chronology can’t be trusted. Contradictions creep in.
Perfect for passing a winter in Central Asia, if you happen not to be Tchitcherine.
If you
are
Tchitcherine, though, well, that puts you in more of a peculiar position. Doesn’t
it. You have to get through the winter on nothing but paranoid suspicions about why
you’re here. . . .

It’s because of Enzian, it’s got to be damned Enzian. Tchitcherine has been to the
Krasnyy Arkhiv, has seen the records, the diaries and logs from the epical, doomed
voyage of Admiral Rozhdestvenski, some still classified even after 20 years. And now
he knows. And if it’s all in the archives, then They know, too. Nubile young ladies
and German dope salesmen are reason enough to send a man east in any period of history.
But They would not be who or where They are without a touch of Dante to Their notions
of reprisal. Simple talion may be fine for wartime, but politics between wars demands
symmetry and a more elegant idea of justice, even to the point of masquerading, a
bit decadently, as mercy. It is more complicated than mass execution, more difficult
and less satisfying, but there are arrangements Tchitcherine can’t see, wide as Europe,
perhaps as the world, that can’t be disturbed very much, between wars. . . .

It seems that in December, 1904, Admiral Rozhdestvenski, commanding a fleet of 42
Russian men-o’-war, steamed into the South-West African port of Lüderitzbucht. This
was at the height of the Russo-Japanese War. Rozhdestvenski was on route to the Pacific,
to relieve the other Russian fleet, which had been bottled up for months in Port Arthur
by the Japanese. Out of the Baltic, around Europe and Africa, bound across the whole
Indian Ocean and then north along the final coast of Asia, it was to be among the
most spectacular sea voyages of history: seven months and 18,000 miles to an early
summer day in the waters between Japan and Korea, where one Admiral Togo, who’d been
lying in wait, would come sailing out from behind the island of Tsushima and before
nightfall hand Rozhdestvenski’s ass to him. Only four Russian ships would make it
in to Vladivostok—nearly all the rest would be sunk by the wily Jap.

Tchitcherine’s father was a gunner on the Admiral’s flagship, the
Suvorov.
The fleet paused in Lüderitzbucht for a week, trying to take on coal. Storms lashed
through the crowded little harbor. The
Suvorov
kept smashing up against her colliers, tearing holes in the sides, wrecking many
of her own 12-pound guns. Squalls blew in, clammy coal dust swirled and stuck to everything,
human and steel. Sailors worked around the clock, with searchlights set up on deck
at night, hauling coal sacks, half blind in the glare, shoveling, sweating, coughing,
bitching. Some went crazy, a few tried suicide. Old Tchitcherine, after two days of
it, went AWOL, and stayed away till it was over. He found a Herero girl who’d lost
her husband in the uprising against the Germans. It was nothing he had planned or
even dreamed about before going ashore. What did he know of Africa? He had a wife
back in Saint Petersburg, and a child hardly able to roll over. Up till then Kronstadt
was the farthest he’d been from home. He only wanted a rest from the working parties,
and from the way it looked . . . from what the black and white of coal and arc-light
were about to say . . . no color, and the unreality to go with it—but a
familiar
unreality, that warns This Is All Being Staged To See What I’ll Do So I Mustn’t Make
One Wrong Move . . . on the last day of his life, with Japanese iron whistling down
on him from ships that are too far off in the haze for him even to see, he will think
of the slowly carbonizing faces of men he thought he knew, men turning to coal, ancient
coal that glistened, each crystal, in the hoarse sputter of the Jablochkov candles,
each flake struck perfect. . . a conspiracy of carbon, though he never phrased it
as “carbon,” it was power he walked away from, the feeling of too much meaningless
power, flowing wrong . . . he could smell Death in it. So he waited till the master-at-arms
turned to light a cigarette, and then just walked away—they were all too black, artificially
black, for it to be easily noticed—and found ashore the honest blackness of the solemn
Herero girl, which seemed to him a breath of life after long confinement, and stayed
with her at the edge of the flat sorrowful little town, near the railroad, in a one-room
house built of saplings, packing-cases, reeds, mud. The rain blew. The trains cried
and puffed. The man and woman stayed in bed and drank kari, which is brewed from potatoes,
peas, and sugar, and in Herero means “the drink of death.” It was nearly Christmas,
and he gave her a medal he had won in some gunnery exercise long ago on the Baltic.
By the time he left, they had learned each other’s names and a few words in the respective
languages—afraid, happy, sleep, love . . . the beginnings of a new tongue, a pidgin
which they were perhaps the only two speakers of in the world.

But he went back. His future was with the Baltic fleet, it was something neither he
nor the girl questioned. The storm blew out, fog covered the sea. Tchitcherine steamed
away, shut back down in a dark and stinking compartment below the
Suvorov
’s waterline, drinking his Christmas vodka and yarning about his good times in a space
that didn’t rock, back at the edge of the dry veld with something warm and kind around
his penis besides his lonely fist. He was already describing her as a sultry native
wench. It is the oldest sea story. As he told it he was no longer Tchitcherine, but
a single-faced crowd before and after, all lost but not all unlucky. The girl may
have stood on some promontory watching the gray ironclads dissolve one by one in the
South Atlantic mist, but even if you’d like a few bars of
Madame Butterfly
about here, she was more probably out hustling, or asleep. She was not going to have
an easy time. Tchitcherine had left her with a child, born a few months after the
gunner went down in sight of the steep cliffs and green forests of Tsushima, early
in the evening of 27 May.

The Germans recorded the birth and the father’s name (he had written it down for her,
as sailors do—he had given her his name) in their central files at Windhoek. A travel
pass was issued for mother and child to return to her tribal village, shortly after.
A census by the colonial government to see how many natives they’d killed, taken just
after Enzian was returned by Bushmen to the same village, lists the mother as deceased,
but her name is in the records. A visa dated December 1926 for Enzian to enter Germany,
and later an application for German citizenship, are both on file in Berlin.

It took no small amount of legwork to assemble all these pieces of paper. Tchitcherine
had nothing to start with but a brief word or two in the Admiralty papers. But this
was in the era of Feodora Alexandrevna, she of the kidskin underwear, and the access
situation was a little better for Tchitcherine than it is now. The Rapallo Treaty
was also in force, so there were any number of lines open to Berlin. That weird piece
of paper . . . in his moments of sickest personal grandeur it is quite clear to him
how his own namesake and the murdered Jew put together an elaborate piece of theatre
at Rapallo, and that the real and only purpose was to reveal to Vaslav Tchitcherine
the existence of Enzian . . . the garrison life out east, like certain drugs, makes
these things amazingly clear. . . .

But alas, seems like the obsessive is his own undoing. The dossier that Tchitcherine
put together on Enzian (he’d even got to see what Soviet intelligence had on then
Lieutenant Weissmann and his political adventures in Südwest) was reproduced by some
eager apparatchik and stashed in Tchitcherine’s
own
dossier. And so it transpired, no more than a month or two later, that somebody equally
anonymous had cut Tchitcherine’s orders for Baku, and he was grimly off to attend
the first plenary session of the VTsK NTA (Vsesoynznyy Tsentral’nyy Komitet Novogo
Tyurkskogo Alfavita), where he was promptly assigned to the
Committee.

seems to be a kind of G, a voiced uvular plosive. The distinction between it and
your ordinary G is one Tchitcherine will never learn to appreciate. Come to find out,
all the Weird Letter Assignments have been reserved for ne’er-do-wells like himself.
Shatsk, the notorious Leningrad nose-fetishist, who carries a black satin handkerchief
to Party congresses and yes, more than once has been unable to refrain from reaching
out and actually
stroking
the noses of powerful officials, is here—banished to the θ Committee, where he keeps
forgetting that θ, in the NTA, is
Œ
, not Russian F, thus retarding progress and sowing confusion at every working session.
Most of his time is taken up with trying to hustle himself a transfer to the
Committee, “Or actually,” sidling closer, breathing heavily, “just a plain, N, or
even an M, will, do. . . .” The impetuous and unstable practical joker Radnichny has
pulled the
Committee,
being a schwa or neutral
uh
, where he has set out on a megalomaniac project to replace every spoken vowel in
Central Asia—and why stop there, why not even a consonant or two? with these schwas
here . . . not unusual considering his record of impersonations and dummy resolutions,
and a brilliant but doomed conspiracy to hit Stalin in the face with a grape chiffon
pie, in which he was implicated only enough to get him Baku instead of worse.