Authors: Thomas Pynchon
Well, the man is a puzzle. When Geli Tripping first sent word of his presence in the
Zone, Tchitcherine was only interested enough to keep a routine eye on him, along
with the scores of others. The only strange item, which grew stranger as surveillance
developed, was that he seemed to be alone. To date Slothrop has still not recorded,
tagged, discovered, or liberated a single scrap of A4 hardware or intelligence. He
reports neither to SPOG, CIOS, BAFO, TI, nor any American counterpart—indeed, to no
known Allied office. Yet he is one of the Faithful: the scavengers now following industriously
the fallback routes of A4 batteries from the Hook of Holland all across Lower Saxony.
Pilgrims along the roads of miracle, every bit and piece a sacred relic, every scrap
of manual a verse of Scripture.
But the ordinary hardware doesn’t interest Slothrop. He is holding out, saving himself
for something absolutely unique. Is it the Blackrocket? Is it the 00000? Enzian is
looking for it, and for the mysterious Schwarzgerät. There is a very good chance that
Slothrop, driven by his Blackphenomenon, responding to its needs though they be hidden
from him, will keep returning, cycle after cycle, to Enzian, until the mission is
resolved, the parties secured, the hardware found. It’s a strong hunch: nothing Tchitcherine
will ever put into writing. Operationally he’s alone as Slothrop is out here—reporting,
if and when, direct to Malenkov’s special committee under the Council of People’s
Commissars (the TsAGI assignment being more or less a cover). But Slothrop is his
boy. He’ll be followed, all right. If they lose him why they’ll find him again. Too
bad he can’t be motivated personally to go get Enzian. But Tchitcherine is hardly
fool enough to think that all Americans are as easy to exploit as Major Marvy, with
his
reflexes about blackness. . . .
It’s a shame. Tchitcherine and Slothrop could have smoked hashish together, compared
notes on Geli and other girls of the ruins. He could have sung to the American songs
his mother taught him, Kiev lullabies, starlight, lovers, white blossoms, nightingales. . . .
“Next time we run across that Englishman,” Džabajev looking curiously at his hands
on the steering-wheel, “or American, or whatever he is, find out, will you, where
he
got
this shit?”
“Make a note of that,” orders Tchitcherine. They both start cackling insanely there,
under the tree.
• • • • • • •
Slothrop comes to in episodes that fade in and out of sleep, measured and serene exchanges
in Russian, hands at his pulse, the broad green back of someone just leaving the room. . . .
It’s a white room, a perfect cube, though for a while he can’t recognize cubes, walls,
lying horizontal, anything too spatial. Only the certainty that he’s been shot up
yet again with that Sodium Amytal.
That
feeling he knows.
He’s on a cot, still in Rocketman garb, helmet on the floor down next to the ditty
bag of hash—
oh-oh.
Though it requires superhuman courage in the face of doubts about whether or not
he can really even move, he manages to flop over and check out that dope. One of the
tinfoil packages looks smaller. He spends an anxious hour or two undoing the top to
reveal, sure enough, a fresh cut, raw green against the muddy brown of the great chunk.
Footsteps ring down metal stairs outside, and a heavy door slides to below. Shit.
He lies in the white cube, feeling groggy, feet crossed hands behind head, doesn’t
care especially to go anyplace. . . . He dozes off and dreams about birds, a close
flock of snow buntings, blown in a falling-leaf of birds, among the thickly falling
snow. It’s back in Berkshire. Slothrop is little, and holding his father’s hand. The
raft of birds swings, buffeted, up, sideways through the storm, down again, looking
for food. “Poor little guys,” sez Slothrop, and feels his father squeeze his hand
through its wool mitten. Broderick smiles. “They’re all right. Their hearts beat very,
very fast. Their blood and their feathers keep them warm. Don’t worry, son. Don’t
worry. . . .” Slothrop wakes again to the white room. The quiet. Raises his ass and
does a few feeble bicycle exercises, then lies slapping on new flab that must’ve collected
on his stomach while he was out. There is an invisible kingdom of flab, a million
cells-at-large, and they all know who he is—soon as he’s unconscious, they start up,
every one, piping in high horrible little Mickey Mouse voices, hey fellas! hey c’mon,
let’s all go over to Slothrop’s, the big sap ain’t doing anything but laying on his
ass, c’mon, oboy! “Take that,” Slothrop mutters, “a-and that!”
Arms and legs apparently working, he gets up groaning, puts his helmet on his head,
grabs the ditty bag and leaves by the door, which shudders all over, along with the
walls, when he opens it. Aha! Canvas flats. It’s a movie set. Slothrop finds himself
in a dilapidated old studio, dark except where yellow sunlight comes through small
holes in the overhead. Rusted catwalks, creaking under his weight, black burned-out
klieg lights, the fine netting of spider webs struck to graphwork by the thin beams
of sun. . . . Dust has drifted into corners, and over the remains of other sets: phony-gemütlich
love nests, slant-walled and palm-crowded nightclubs, papier-mâché Wagnerian battlements,
tenement courtyards in stark Expressionist white/black, built to no human scale, all
tapered away in perspective for the rigid lenses that stared here once. Highlights
are painted on to the sets, which is disturbing to Slothrop, who keeps finding these
feeble yellow streaks, looking up sharply, then all around, for sources of light that
were never there, getting more agitated as he prowls the old shell, the girders 50
feet overhead almost lost in shadows, tripping over his own echoes, sneezing from
the dust he stirs. The Russians have pulled out all right, but Slothrop isn’t alone
in here. He comes down a metal staircase through shredded webs, angry spiders and
their dried prey, rust crunching under his soles, and at the bottom feels a sudden
tug at his cape. Being still a little foggy from that injection, he only flinches
violently. He is held by a gloved hand, the shiny kid stretched over precise little
knuckles. A woman in a black Parisian frock, with a purple-and-yellow iris at her
breast. Even damped by the velvet, Slothrop can feel the shaking of her hand. He stares
into eyes rimmed soft as black ash, separate grains of powder on her face clear as
pores the powder missed or was taken from by tears. This is how he comes to meet Margherita
Erdmann, his lightless summer hearth, his safe-passage into memories of the Inflationszeit
stained with dread—his child and his helpless Lisaura.
She’s passing through: another of the million rootless. Looking for her daughter,
Bianca, bound east for Swinemünde, if the Russians and Poles will let her. She’s in
Neubabelsberg on a sentimental side-trip—hasn’t seen the old studios in years. Through
the twenties and thirties she worked as a movie actress, at Templehof and Staaken
too, but this place was always her favorite. Here she was directed by the great Gerhardt
von Göll through dozens of vaguely pornographic horror movies. “I knew he was a genius
from the beginning. I was only his creature.” Never star material, she admits freely,
no Dietrich, nor vamp à la Brigitte Helm. A touch of whatever it was they wanted,
though—they (Slothrop: “They?” Erdmann: “I don’t know. . . . “) nicknamed her the
Anti-Dietrich: not destroyer of men but doll—languid, exhausted. . . . “I watched
all our films,” she recalls, “some of them six or seven times. I never seemed to
move.
Not even my face. Ach, those long, long gauze close-ups . . . it could have been
the same frame, over and over. Even running away—I always had to be chased, by monsters,
madmen, criminals—still I was so—” bracelets flashing—“stolid, so . . . monumental.
When I wasn’t running I was usually strapped or chained to something. Come. I’ll show
you.” Leading Slothrop now to what’s left of a torture chamber, wooden teeth snapped
from its rack wheel, plaster masonry peeling and chipped, dust rising, dead torches
cold and lopsided in their sconces. She lets wood chains, most of the silver paint
worn away now, slither clattering through her kid fingers. “This was a set for
Alpdrücken.
Gerhardt in those days was still all for exaggerated lighting.” Silver-gray collects
in the fine wrinkles of her gloves as she dusts off the rack, and lies down on it.
“Like this,” raising her arms, insisting he fasten the tin manacles to her wrists
and ankles. “The light came from above and below at the same time, so that everyone
had two shadows: Cain’s and Abel’s, Gerhardt told us. It was at the height of his
symbolist period. Later on he began to use more natural light, to shoot more on location.”
They went to Paris, Vienna. To Herrenchiemsee, in the Bavarian Alps. Von Göll had
dreamed of making a film about Ludwig II. It nearly got him blacklisted. The rage
then was all for Frederick. It was considered unpatriotic to say that a German ruler
could also be a madman. But the gold, the mirrors, the miles of Baroque ornament drove
von Göll himself a little daft. Especially those
long corridors. . . .
“Corridor metaphysics,” is what the French call this condition. Oldtime corridor hepcats
will chuckle fondly at descriptions of von Göll, long after running out of film, still
dollying with a boobish smile on his face down the golden vistas. Even on orthochromatic
stock, the warmth of it survived in black and white, though the film was never released,
of course.
Das Wütend Reich
, how could they sit still for that? Endless negotiating, natty little men with Nazi
lapel pins trooping through, interrupting the shooting, walking facefirst into the
glass walls. They would have accepted anything for “Reich,” even “Königreich,” but
von Göll stood fast. He walked a tightrope. To compensate he started immediately on
Good Society
, which it’s said delighted Goebbels so much he saw it three times, giggling and punching
in the arm the fellow sitting next to him, who may have been Adolf Hitler. Margherita
played the lesbian in the café, “the one with the monocle, who’s whipped to death
at the end by the transvestite, remember?” Heavy legs in silk stockings shining now
with a hard, machined look, slick knees sliding against each other as the memory moves
in, exciting her. Slothrop too. She smiles up at his tautening deerskin crotch. “He
was beautiful. Both ways, it didn’t matter. You remind me of him a little. Especially . . .
those boots. . . .
Good Society
was our second film, but this one,”
this one?
“
Alpdrücken
, was our first. I think Bianca is his child. She was conceived while we were filming
this. He played the Grand Inquisitor who tortured me. Ah, we were the Reich’s Sweethearts—Greta
Erdmann and Max Schlepzig, Wonderfully Together—”
“Max Schlepzig,” repeats Slothrop, goggling, “quit fooling.
Max Schlepzig?
”
“It wasn’t his real name. Erdmann wasn’t mine. But anything with Earth in it was politically
safe—Earth, Soil, Folk . . . a code. Which they, staring, knew how to decipher. . . .
Max had a very Jewish name, Something-sky, and Gerhardt thought it more prudent to
give him a new one.”
“Greta, somebody also thought it prudent to name
me
Max Schlepzig.” He shows her the pass he got from Säure Bummer.
She gazes at it, then at Slothrop briefly. She’s begun to tremble again. Some mixture
of desire and fear. “I knew it.”
“Knew what?”
Looking away, submissive. “Knew he was dead. He disappeared in ’38. They’ve been busy,
haven’t They?”
Slothrop has picked up, in the Zone, enough about European passport-psychoses to want
to comfort her. “This is forged. The name’s just a random alias. The guy who made
it probably remembered Schlepzig from one of his movies.”
“Random.” A tragic, actressy smile, beginnings of a double chin, one knee drawn up
as far as these leg irons will let her. “Another fairytale word. The signature on
your card is Max’s. Somewhere in Stefania’s house on the Vistula I have a steel box
full of his letters. Don’t you think I know that Latin
z
, crossed engineer-style, the flower he made out of the
g
at the end? You could hunt all the Zone for your ‘forger.’ They wouldn’t let you
find him. They want you right here, right now.”
Well. What happens when paranoid meets paranoid? A crossing of solipsisms. Clearly.
The two patterns create a third: a moiré, a new world of flowing shadows, interferences. . . .
“‘Want me here’? What for?”
“For me.” Whispering out of scarlet lips, open, wet. . . . Hmm. Well, there’s this
hardon, here. He sits on the rack, leans, kisses her, presently unlacing his trousers
and peeling them down far enough to release his cock bounding up with a slight wobble
into the cool studio. “Put your helmet on.”
“O.K.”
“Are you very cruel?”
“Don’t know.”
“Could you be? Please. Find something to whip me with. Just a little. Just for the
warmth.” Nostalgia. The pain of a return home. He rummages around through inquisitional
props, gyves, thumbscrews, leather harness, before coming up with a miniature cat-o’-nine-tails,
a Black Forest elves’ whip, its lacquered black handle carved in a bas-relief orgy,
the lashes padded with velvet to hurt but not to draw blood. “Yes, that’s perfect.
Now on the insides of my thighs. . . .”
But somebody has already educated him. Something . . . that dreams Prussian and wintering
among their meadows, in whatever cursive lashmarks wait across the flesh of their
sky so bleak, so incapable of any sheltering, wait to be summoned. . . . No. No—he
still says “their,” but he knows better. His meadows now, his sky . . . his own cruelty.
All Margherita’s chains and fetters are chiming, black skirt furled back to her waist,
stockings pulled up tight in classic cusps by the suspenders of the boned black rig
she’s wearing underneath. How the penises of Western men have leapt, for a century,
to the sight of this singular point at the top of a lady’s stocking, this transition
from silk to bare skin and suspender! It’s easy for non-fetishists to sneer about
Pavlovian conditioning and let it go at that, but any underwear enthusiast worth his
unwholesome giggle can tell you there is much more here—there is a cosmology: of nodes
and cusps and points of osculation, mathematical kisses . . .
singularities!
Consider cathedral spires, holy minarets, the crunch of trainwheels over the points
as you watch peeling away the track you didn’t take . . . mountain peaks rising sharply
to heaven, such as those to be noted at scenic Berchtesgaden . . . the edges of steel
razors, always holding potent mystery . . . rose thorns that prick us by surprise . . .
even, according to the Russian mathematician Friedmann, the infinitely dense point
from which the present Universe expanded. . . . In each case, the change from point
to no-point carries a luminosity and enigma at which something in us must leap and
sing, or withdraw in fright. Watching the A4 pointed at the sky—just before the last
firing-switch closes—watching that singular point at the very top of the Rocket, where
the fuze is. . . . Do all these points imply, like the Rocket’s, an annihilation?
What is that, detonating in the sky above the cathedral? beneath the edge of the razor,
under the rose?