Gravity's Rainbow (63 page)

And the face of God is a presence

Behind the mask of the sky—

At the tall black rock in the desert,

In the time of the final days.

If the place were not so distant,

If words were known, and spoken,

Then the God might be a gold ikon,

Or a page in a paper book.

But It comes as the Kirghiz Light—

There is no other way to know It.

The roar of Its voice is deafness,

The flash of Its light is blindness.

The floor of the desert rumbles,

And Its face cannot be borne.

And a man cannot be the same,

After seeing the Kirghiz Light.

For I tell you that I have seen It

In a place which is older than darkness,

Where even Allah cannot reach.

As you see, my beard is an ice-field,

I walk with a stick to support me,

But this light must change us to children.

And now I cannot walk far,

For a baby must learn to walk.

And my words are reaching your ears

As the meaningless sounds of a baby.

For the Kirghiz Light took my eyes,

Now I sense all Earth like a baby.

It is north, for a six-day ride,

Through the steep and death-gray canyons,

Then across the stony desert

To the mountain whose peak is a white džurt.

And if you have passed without danger,

The place of the black rock will find you.

But if you would not be born,

Then stay with your warm red fire,

And stay with your wife, in your tent,

And the Light will never find you,

And your heart will grow heavy with age,

And your eyes will shut only to sleep.

“Got it,” sez Tchitcherine. “Let’s ride, comrade.” Off again, the fires dying at their
backs, the sounds of string music, of village carousing, presently swallowed behind
the wind.

And on into the canyons. Far away to the north, a white mountain-top winks in the
last sunlight. Down here, it is already shadowed evening.

Tchitcherine will reach the Kirghiz Light, but not his birth. He is no aqyn, and his
heart was never ready. He will see It just before dawn. He will spend 12 hours then,
face-up on the desert, a prehistoric city greater than Babylon lying in stifled mineral
sleep a kilometer below his back, as the shadow of the tall rock, rising to a point,
dances west to east and Džaqyp Qulan tends him, anxious as child and doll, and drying
foam laces the necks of the two horses. But someday, like the mountains, like the
young exiled women in their certain love, in their innocence of him, like the morning
earthquakes and the cloud-driving wind, a purge, a war, and millions after millions
of souls gone behind him, he will hardly be able to remember It.

But in the Zone, hidden inside the summer Zone, the Rocket is waiting. He will be
drawn the same way again. . . .

• • • • • • •

Last week, in the British sector someplace, Slothrop, having been asshole enough to
drink out of an ornamental pond in the Tiergarten, took sick. Any Berliner these days
knows enough to boil water before drinking, though some then proceed to brew it with
various things for tea, such as tulip bulbs, which is not good. Word is out that the
center of the bulb is deadly poison. But they keep doing it. Once Slothrop—or Rocketman,
as he is soon to be known—thought he might warn them about things like tulip bulbs.
Bring in a little American enlightenment. But he gets so desperate with them, moving
behind their scrims of European pain: he keeps pushing aside gauze after wavy gauze
but there’s always still the one, the impenetrable. . . .

So there he is, under the trees in summer leaf, in flower, many of them blasted horizontal
or into chips and splinters—fine dust from the bridle paths rising in the sunrays
by itself, ghosts of horses still taking their early-morning turns through the peacetime
park. Up all night and thirsty, Slothrop lies on his stomach and slurps up water,
just an old saddle tramp at the water hole here. . . . Fool. Vomiting, cramps, diarrhea,
and who’s he to lecture about tulip bulbs? He manages to crawl as far as an empty
cellar, across the street from a wrecked church, curls up and spends the next days
feverish, shivering, oozing shit that burns like acid—lost, alone with that sovereign
Nazi movie-villain fist clamping in his bowels ja—you vill
shit
now, ja? Wondering if he’ll ever see Berkshire again. Mommy, Mommy! The War’s over,
why can’t I go home now? Nalline, the reflection from her Gold Star brightening her
chins like a buttercup, smirks by the window and won’t answer. . . .

A terrible time. Hallucinating Rolls Royces and bootheels in the night, coming to
get him. Out in the street women in babushkas are lackadaisically digging trenches
for the black iron water pipe that’s stacked along the curbside. All day long they
talk, shift after shift, into evening. Slothrop lies in the space where sunlight visits
his cellar for half an hour before going on to others with mean puddles of warmth—sorry,
got to go now, schedule to keep, see you tomorrow if it doesn’t rain, heh heh. . . .

Once Slothrop wakes to the sound of an American work detail marching down the street,
cadence being counted by a Negro voice—
yo
lep,
yo
lep,
yo
lep O right O lep . . . kind of little German folk tune with some sliding up-scale
on the word “right”—Slothrop can imagine his mannered jog of arm and head to the left
as he comes down hard on that heel, the way they teach it in Basic . . . can see the
man’s smile. For a minute he has the truly unbalanced idea of running out in the street
and asking them to take him back, requesting political asylum in America. But he’s
too weak. In his stomach, in his heart. He lies, listening the tramping and the voice
out of earshot, the sound of his country fading away. . . . Fading like the WASP ghosts,
the old-time DPs trailing rootless now down the roads out of his memory, crowding
the rooftops of the freights of forgetfulness, knapsacks and poor refugee pockets
stuffed with tracts nobody’d read, looking for another host: given up for good on
Rocketman here. Somewhere between the burning in his head and the burning in his asshole,
if the two can be conveniently separated, and paced to that dying cadence, he elaborates
a fantasy in which Enzian, the African, finds him again—comes to offer him a way out.

Because it seems a while back that they did meet again, by the reedy edge of a marsh
south of the capital. Unshaven, sweating, stinking Rocketman restlessly tripping out
to the suburbs, among his people: there is haze over the sun, and a rotting swamp
odor worse than Slothrop’s own. Only two or three hours’ sleep in the last couple
of days. He stumbles on the Schwarzkommando, busy dredging for pieces of rocket. Formations
of dark birds are cruising in the sky. The Africans have a partisan look: pieces here
and there of old Wehrmacht and SS uniform, tattered civilian clothes, only one insigne
in common, worn wherever it will show, a painted steel device in red, white and blue,
thus:

Adapted from insignia the German troopers wore in South-West Africa when they came
in 1904 to crush the Herero Rebellion—it was used to pin up half the brim of a wide-awake
hat. For the Zone-Hereros it has become something deep, Slothrop gathers, maybe a
little mystical. Though he recognizes the letters—Klar, Entlüftung, Zündung, Vorstufe,
Hauptstufe, the five positions of the launching switch in the A4 control car—he doesn’t
let on to Enzian.

They sit on a hillside eating bread and sausages. Children from the town move by in
every direction. Someone has set up an army tent, someone has brought beer in kegs.
A scratch band, a dozen brasses in tasseled, frayed gold and red uniforms play selections
from
Der Meistersinger.
Fat-smoke drifts in the air. Choruses of drinkers in the distance break from time
to time into laughter or a song. It’s a Rocket-raising: a festival new to this country.
Soon it will come to the folk-attention how close Wernher von Braun’s birthday is
to the Spring Equinox, and the same German impulse that once rolled flower-boats through
the towns and staged mock battles between young Spring and deathwhite old Winter will
be erecting strange floral towers out in the clearings and meadows, and the young
scientist-surrogate will be going round and round with old Gravity or some such buffoon,
and the children will be tickled, and laugh. . . .

Schwarzkommando struggle knee-deep in mud, engaged entirely with the salvage, with
the moment. The A4 they’re about to uncover was used in the last desperate battle
for Berlin—an abortive firing, a warhead that didn’t explode. Around its grave they’re
driving in planks for shoring, sending back mud in buckets and wood casks along a
human chain to be dumped on shore, near where their rifles and kits are stacked.

“So Marvy was right. They didn’t disarm you guys.”

“They didn’t know where to find us. We were a surprise. There are even now powerful
factions in Paris who don’t believe we exist. And most of the time I’m not so sure
myself.”

“How’s that?”

“Well, I think we’re here, but only in a statistical way. Something like that rock
over there is just about 100% certain—it knows it’s there, so does everybody else.
But our own chances of being right here right now are only a little better than even—the
slightest shift in the probabilities and we’re gone—schnapp! like that.”

“Peculiar talk, Oberst.”

“Not if you’ve been where we have. Forty years ago, in Südwest, we were nearly exterminated.
There was no reason. Can you understand that?
No reason.
We couldn’t even find comfort in the Will of God Theory. These were Germans with
names and service records, men in blue uniforms who killed clumsily and not without
guilt. Search-and-destroy missions, every day. It went on for two years. The orders
came down from a human being, a scrupulous butcher named von Trotha. The thumb of
mercy never touched his scales.

“We have a word that we whisper, a mantra for times that threaten to be bad. Mba-kayere.
You may find that it will work for you. Mba-kayere. It means ‘I am passed over.’ To
those of us who survived von Trotha, it also means that we have learned to stand outside
our history and watch it, without feeling too much. A little schizoid. A sense for
the statistics of our being. One reason we grew so close to the Rocket, I think, was
this sharp awareness of how contingent, like ourselves, the Aggregat 4 could be—how
at the mercy of small things . . . dust that gets in a timer and breaks electrical
contact . . . a film of grease you can’t even see, oil from a touch of human fingers,
left inside a liquid-oxygen valve, flaring up soon as the stuff hits and setting the
whole thing off—I’ve seen that happen . . . rain that swells the bushings in the servos
or leaks into a switch: corrosion, a short, a signal grounded out, Brennschluss too
soon, and what was alive is only an Aggregat again, an Aggregat of pieces of dead
matter, no longer anything that can move, or that has a Destiny with a shape—stop
doing that with your eyebrows, Scuffling. I may have gone a bit native out here, that’s
all. Stay in the Zone long enough and you’ll start getting ideas about Destiny yourself.”

A cry from down in the marsh. Birds swirl upward, round and black, grains of coarse-cut
pepper on this bouillabaisse sky. Little kids come skidding to a halt, and the brass
band fall silent in mid-bar. Enzian is on his feet and loping down to where the others
are gathering.

“Was ist los, meinen Sumpfmenschen?” The others, laughing, scoop up fistfuls of mud
and start throwing them at their Nguarorerue, who ducks, dodges, grabs him some of
that mud and starts flinging it back. The Germans on shore stand blinking, politely
aghast at this lack of discipline.

Down in the plank enclosure, a couple of muddy trim-tabs poke up now out of the marsh,
with twelve feet of mud between them. Enzian, spattered and dripping, his white grin
preceding him by several meters, vaults over the shoring and into the hole, and grabs
a shovel. The moment has become roughly ceremonial: Andreas and Christian have moved
up to either side to help him scrape and dig till about a foot of one fin-surface
is exposed. The Determination of the Number. The Nguarorerue crouches and brushes
away mud, revealing part of a slashmark, a white 2, and a 7.

“Outase.” And glum faces on the others.

Slothrop’s got a hunch. “You expected der Fünffachnullpunkt,” he proposes to Enzian
a little later, “the quintuple zero, right? Haa-
aaah!
” Gotcha, gotcha—

Throwing up his hands, “It’s insane. I don’t believe there is one.”

“Zero probability?”

“I think it will depend on the number of searchers. Are your people after it?”

“I don’t know. I only heard by accident. I don’t have any people.”

“Schwarzgerät, Schwarzkommando. Scuffling: suppose somewhere there were an alphabetical
list, someone’s list, an input to some intelligence arm, say. Some country, doesn’t
matter. But suppose that on this list, the two names, Blackinstrument, Blackcommand,
just happened to be there, juxtaposed. That’s all, an alphabetical coincidence. We
wouldn’t have to be real, and neither would it, correct?”