Authors: Thomas Pynchon
The marshes streak away, patched with light under the milk overcast. Negative shadows
flicker white behind the edges of everything. “Well, this is all creepy enough here,
Oberst,” sez Slothrop. “You’re not helping.”
Enzian is staring into Slothrop’s face, with something like a smile under his beard.
“O.K. Who
is
after it, then?” Being enigmatic, won’t answer—is this bird
looking
to be needled? “That Major Marvy,” opines Slothrop, “a-and that Tchitcherine, too!”
Ha! That did it. Like a salute, a boot-click, Enzian’s face snaps into perfect neutrality.
“You would oblige me,” he begins, then settles for changing the subject. “You were
down in the Mittelwerke. How did Marvy’s people seem to be getting along with the
Russians?”
“Ace buddies, seemed like.”
“I have the feeling that the occupying Powers have just about reached agreement on
a popular front against the Schwarzkommando. I don’t know who you are, or how your
lines are drawn. But they’re trying to shut us down. I’m just back from Hamburg. We
had trouble. It was made to look like a DP raid, but the British military government
was behind it, and they had Russian cooperation.”
“I’m sorry. Can I help?”
“Don’t be reckless. Let’s all wait and see. All anyone knows about you is that you
keep showing up.”
Toward dusk, the black birds descend, millions of them, to sit in the branches of
trees nearby. The trees grow heavy with black birds, branches like dendrites of the
Nervous System fattening, deep in twittering nerve-dusk, in preparation for some important
message. . . .
Later in Berlin, down in the cellar among fever-dreams with shit leaking out of him
at gallons per hour, too weak to aim more than token kicks at the rats running by
with eyes fixed earnestly noplace, trying to make believe they don’t have a newer
and dearer status among the Berliners, at minimum points on his mental health chart,
when the sun is gone so totally it might as well be for good, Slothrop’s dumb idling
heart sez: The Schwarzgerät is no Grail, Ace, that’s not what the G in Imipolex G
stands for. And you are no knightly hero. The best you can compare with is Tannhäuser,
the Singing Nincompoop—you’ve been under one mountain at Nordhausen, been known to
sing a song or two with uke accompaniment, and don’tcha feel you’re in a sucking marshland
of sin out here, Slothrop? maybe not the same thing William Slothrop, vomiting a good
part of 1630 away over the side of that
Arbella
, meant when he said “sin.” . . . But what you’ve done is put yourself on somebody
else’s voyage—some Frau Holda, some Venus in some mountain—playing her, its, game . . .
you know that in some irreducible way it’s an evil game. You play because you have
nothing better to do, but that doesn’t make it right. And where is the Pope whose
staff’s gonna bloom for you?
As a matter of fact, he is also just about to run into his Lisaura: someone he will
be with for a while and then leave again. The Minnesinger abandoned his poor woman
to suicide. What Slothrop will be leaving Greta Erdmann to is not so clear. Along
the Havel in Neubabelsberg she waits, less than the images of herself that survive
in an indeterminate number of release prints here and there about the Zone, and even
across the sea. . . . Every kind technician who ever threw a magenta gel across her
key light for her has gone to war or death, and she is left nothing but God’s indifferent
sunlight in all its bleaching and terror. . . . Eyebrows plucked to pen-strokes, long
hair streaked with gray, hands heavy with rings of all colors, opacities and uglinesses,
wearing her dark prewar Chanel suits, no hat, scarves, always a flower, she is haunted
by Central European night-whispers that blow, like the skin curtains of Berlin, more
ghostly around her fattening, wrecked beauty the closer she and Slothrop draw. . . .
This is how they meet. One night Slothrop is out raiding a vegetable garden in the
park. Thousands of people living in the open. He skirts their fires, stealthy— All
he wants is a handful of greens here, a carrot or mangel-wurzel there, just to keep
him going. When they see him they throw rocks, lumber, once not long ago an old hand-grenade
that didn’t go off but made him shit where he stood.
This evening he is orbiting someplace near the Grosser Stern. It is long after curfew.
Odors of woodsmoke and decay hang over the city. Among pulverized heads of stone margraves
and electors, reconnoitering a likely-looking cabbage patch, all of a sudden Slothrop
picks up the scent of an unmistakable no it can’t be yes it is it’s a REEFER! A-and
it’s burning someplace close by. Goldshot green of the Rif’s slant fields here, vapor-blossoms
resinous and summery, charm his snoot on through bushes and matted grass, under the
blasted trees and whatever sits in their branches.
Sure enough, in the hollow of an upended trunk, long roots fringing the scene like
a leprechaun outpost, Slothrop finds one Emil (“Säure”) Bummer, once the Weimar Republic’s
most notorious cat burglar and doper, flanked by two beautiful girls, handing around
a cheerful little orange star. The depraved old man. Slothrop’s on top of them before
they notice. Bummer smiles, reaches up an arm, offering the remainder of what they’ve
been smoking to Slothrop, who receives it in long dirty fingernails. Oboy. He hunkers
down.
“Was ist los?” sez Säure. “We’ve had a windfall of kif. Allah has smiled on us, well
actually he was smiling at everybody, we just happened to be in his direct line of
sight. . . .” His nickname, which means “acid” in German, developed back in the twenties,
when he was carrying around a little bottle of schnapps which, if he got in a tight
spot, he would bluff people into thinking was fuming nitric acid. He comes out now
with another fat Moroccan reefer. They light up off of Slothrop’s faithful Zippo.
Trudi, the blonde, and Magda, the sultry Bavarian, have spent the day looting a stash
of Wagnerian opera costumes. There is a pointed helmet with horns, a full cape of
green velvet, a pair of buckskin trousers.
“Saaaay,” sez Slothrop, “
that
rig looks pretty
sharp!
”
“They’re for you,” Magda smiles.
“Aw . . . no. You’d get a better deal at the Tauschzentrale. . . .”
But Säure insists. “Haven’t you ever noticed, when you’re this Blitzed and you want
somebody to show up, they always do?”
The girls are moving the coal of the reefer about, watching its reflection in the
shiny helmet changing shapes, depths, grades of color . . . hmm. It occurs to Slothrop
here that without those horns on it, why this helmet would look just like the nose
assembly of the Rocket. And if he could find a few triangular scraps of leather, figure
a way to sew them on to Tchitcherine’s boots . . . yeah, a-and on the back of the
cape put a big, scarlet, capital R— It is as pregnant a moment as when Tonto, after
the legendary ambush, attempts to—
“Raketemensch!” screams Säure, grabbing the helmet and unscrewing the horns off of
it. Names by themselves may be empty, but the
act of naming
. . . .
“You had the same idea?” Oh, strange. Säure carefully reaches up and places the helmet
on Slothrop’s head. Ceremonially the girls drape the cape around his shoulders. Troll
scouting parties have already sent runners back to inform their people.
“Good. Now listen, Rocketman, I’m in a bit of trouble.”
“Hah?” Slothrop has been imagining a full-scale Rocketman Hype, in which the people
bring him food, wine and maidens in a four-color dispensation in which there is a
lot of skipping and singing “La, la, la, la,” and beefsteaks blossoming from these
strafed lindens, and roast turkeys thudding down like soft hail on Berlin, sweet potatoes
a-and melted marshmallows, bubbling up out of the ground. . . .
“Do you have any armies?” Trudi wants to know. Slothrop, or Rocketman, hands over
half a withered pack.
The reefer keeps coming around: darts and stabs through this root shelter. Everybody
forgets what it is they’ve been talking about. There’s the smell of earth. Bugs rush
through, aerating. Magda has lit one of Slothrop’s cigarettes for him and he tastes
raspberry lipstick. Lipstick? Who’s got lipstick these days? What are all these people
here
into
, anyway?
Berlin is dark enough for stars, the accustomed stars but never so clearly arranged.
It is possible also to make up your own constellations. “Oh,” Säure recalls, “I had
this problem . . .”
“I’m really hungry,” it occurs to Slothrop.
Trudi is telling Magda about her boy friend Gustav, who wants to live inside the piano.
“All you could see was his feet sticking out, he kept saying, ‘You all hate me, you
hate this piano!’” They’re giggling now.
“Plucking on the strings,” sez Magda, “right? He’s so
paranoid.
”
Trudi has these big, blonde Prussian legs. Tiny blonde hairs dance up and down in
the starlight, up under her skirt and back, all through the shadows of her knees,
around under the hollows behind them, this starry jittering. . . . The stump towers
above and cups them all, a giant nerve cell, dendrites extended into the city, the
night. Signals coming in from all directions, and from back in time too, probably,
if not indeed forward. . . .
Säure, who is never able entirely to lay off business, rolls, flows to his feet, clutching
on to a root till his head decides where it is going to come to rest. Magda, her ear
at its entrance, is banging on Rocketman’s helmet with a stick. It gongs in chords.
The separate notes aren’t right on pitch, either: they sound
very odd
together. . . .
“I don’t know what time it is,” Säure Bummer gazing around. “Weren’t we supposed to
be at the Chicago Bar? Or was that last night?”
“I forget,” Trudi giggles.
“Listen, Kerl, I really have to talk to that American.”
“Dear Emil,” Trudi whispers, “don’t worry. He’ll be at the Chicago.”
They decide on an intricate system of disguise. Säure gives Slothrop his jacket. Trudi
wears the green cape. Magda puts on Slothrop’s boots, and he goes in his socks, carrying
her own tiny shoes in his pockets. They spend some time gathering plausible items,
kindling and greens, to fill the helmet with, and Säure carries that. Magda and Trudi
help stuff Slothrop into the buckskin pants, both girls down on pretty knees, hands
caressing his legs and ass. Like the ballroom in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, there is
none in these trousers here, and Slothrop’s hardon, enlarging, aches like thunder.
“Fine for you folks.” The girls are laughing. Grandiose Slothrop limps along after
everybody, a network of clear interweaving ripples now like rain all through his vision,
hands turning to stone, out of the Tiergarten, past shellstruck lime and chestnut
trees, into the streets, or what is serving for them. Patrols of all nations keep
coming by, and this mindless quartet have to hit the dirt often, trying not to laugh
too much. Slothrop’s sox are sodden with dew. Tanks manoeuvre in the street, chewing
parallel ridges of asphalt and stonedust. Trolls and dryads play in the open spaces.
They were blasted back in May out of bridges, out of trees into liberation, and are
now long citified. “Oh, that drip,” say the subdeb trolls about those who are not
as hep, “he just isn’t out-of-the-tree about
anything
.” Mutilated statues lie under mineral sedation: frock-coated marble torsos of bureaucrats
fallen pale in the gutters. Yes, hmm, here we are in the heart of downtown Berlin,
really, uh, a little, Jesus Christ what’s
that—
“Better watch it,” advises Säure, “it’s kind of rubbery through here.”
“What
is
that?”
Well, what it is—is? what’s “is”?—is that King Kong, or some creature closely allied,
squatting down, evidently just, taking a shit, right in the street! and everything!
a-and being ignored, by truckload after truckload of Russian enlisted men in pisscutter
caps and dazed smiles, grinding right on by—“Hey!” Slothrop wants to shout, “hey lookit
that giant
ape!
or whatever it is. You guys? Hey . . .” But he doesn’t, luckily. On closer inspection,
the crouching monster turns out to be the Reichstag building, shelled out, airbrushed,
fire-brushed powdery black on all blastward curves and projections, chalked over its
hard-echoing carbon insides with Cyrillic initials, and many names of comrades killed
in May.
Berlin proves to be full of these tricks. There’s a big chromo of Stalin that Slothrop
could swear is a girl he used to date at Harvard, the mustache and hair only incidental
as makeup,
damn
if that isn’t what’s her name . . . but before he can quite hear the gibbering score
of little voices—hurry, hurry, get it in place, he’s almost around the corner—here,
laid side by side on the pavement, are these enormous loaves of bread dough left to
rise under clean white cloths—boy, is everybody hungry: the same thought hits them
all at once, wow!
Raw dough!
loaves of bread for that
monster
back there . . . oh, no that’s right, that was a building, the Reichstag, so these
aren’t bread . . . by now it’s clear that they’re human bodies, dug from beneath today’s
rubble, each inside its carefully tagged GI fartsack. But it was more than an optical
mistake. They are rising, they are transubstantiated, and who knows, with summer over
and hungry winter coming down, what we’ll be feeding on by Xmas?
What the notorious Femina is to cigarette-jobbing circles in Berlin, the Chicago is
to dopers. But while dealing at the Femina usually gets under way around noon, the
Chicago here only starts jiving after the 10:00 curfew. Slothrop, Säure, Trudi and
Magda come in a back entrance, out of a great massif of ruins and darkness lit only
here and there, like the open country. Inside, M.O.s and corpsmen run hither and thither
clutching bottles of fluffy white crystalline substances, small pink pills, clear
ampoules the size of pureys. Occupation and Reichsmarks ruffle and flap across the
room. Some dealers are all chemical enthusiasm, others all business. Oversize photos
of John Dillinger, alone or posed with his mother, his pals, his tommygun, decorate
the walls. Lights and arguing are kept low, should the military police happen by.