Authors: Thomas Pynchon
And what’s waiting for Slothrop, what unpleasant surprise, past the tops of Greta’s
stockings here? laddering suddenly, the pallid streak flowing downthigh, over intricacies
of knee and out of sight. . . . What waits past this whine and crack of velvet lashes
against her skin, long red stripes on the white ground, her moans, the bruise-colored
flower that cries at her breast, the jingling of the hardware holding her down? He
tries not to tear his victim’s stockings, or whip too close to her stretched vulva,
which shivers, unprotected, between thighs agape and straining, amid movements of
muscle erotic, subdued, “monumental” as any silver memory of her body on film. She
comes once, then perhaps again before Slothrop puts the whip down and climbs on top,
covering her with the wings of his cape, her Schlepzig-surrogate, his latest reminder
of Katje . . . and they commence fucking, the old phony rack groaning beneath them,
Margherita whispering
God how you hurt me
and
Ah, Max . . .
and just as Slothrop’s about to come, the name of her child: strained through her
perfect teeth, a clear extrusion of pain that is not in play, she cries,
Bianca. . . .
• • • • • • •
. . . yes, bitch—yes, little bitch—poor helpless
bitch
you’re coming can’t stop yourself now I’ll whip you again whip till you
bleed. . . .
Thus Pökler’s whole front surface, eyes to knees: flooded with tonight’s image of
the delicious victim bound on her dungeon rack, filling the movie screen—close-ups
of her twisting face, nipples under the silk gown amazingly erect, making lies of
her announcements of pain—
bitch!
she loves it . . . and Leni no longer solemn wife, embittered source of strength,
but Margherita Erdmann underneath him, on the bottom for a change, as Pökler drives
in again, into her again, yes, bitch, yes. . . .
Only later did he try to pin down the time. Perverse curiosity. Two weeks since her
last period. He had come out of the Ufa theatre on the Friedrichstrasse that night
with an erection, thinking like everybody else only about getting home, fucking somebody,
fucking her into some submission. . . . God, Erdmann was beautiful. How many other
men, shuffling out again into depression Berlin, carried the same image back from
Alpdrücken
to some drab fat excuse for a bride? How many shadow-children would be fathered on
Erdmann that night?
It was never a real possibility for Pökler that Leni might get pregnant. But looking
back, he knew that had to be the night,
Alpdrücken
night, that Ilse was conceived. They fucked so seldom any more. It was not hard to
pinpoint.
That’s how it happened. A film. How else? Isn’t that what they made of my child, a
film?
He sits tonight by his driftwood fire in the cellar of the onion-topped Nikolaikirche,
listening to the sea. Stars hang among the spaces of the great Wheel, precarious to
him as candles and goodnight cigarettes. Cold gathers along the strand. Child phantoms—white
whistling, tears never to come, range the wind behind the wall. Twists of faded crepe
paper blow along the ground, scuttling over his old shoes. Dust, under a moon newly
calved, twinkles like snow, and the Baltic crawls like its mother-glacier. His heart
shrugs in its scarlet net, elastic, full of expectation. He’s waiting for Ilse, for
his movie-child, to return to Zwölfkinder, as she has every summer at this time.
Storks are asleep among two- and three-legged horses, rusted gearwork and splintered
roof of the carousel, their heads jittering with air currents and yellow Africa, dainty
black snakes a hundred feet below meandering in the sunlight across the rocks and
dry pans. Oversize crystals of salt lie graying, drifted in the cracks of the pavement,
in the wrinkles of the dog with saucer eyes in front of the town hall, the beard of
the goat on the bridge, the mouth of the troll below. Frieda the pig hunts a new place
to nestle and snooze out of the wind. The plaster witch, wire mesh visible at her
breasts and haunches, leans near the oven, her poke at corroded Hansel in perpetual
arrest. Gretel’s eyes lock wide open, never a blink, crystal-heavy lashes batting
at the landings of guerrilla winds from the sea.
If there is music for this it’s windy strings and reed sections standing in bright
shirt fronts and black ties all along the beach, a robed organist by the breakwater—itself
broken, crusted with tides—whose languets and flues gather and shape the resonant
spooks here, the candleflame memories, all trace, particle and wave, of the sixty
thousand who passed, already listed for taking, once or twice this way. Did you ever
go on holiday to Zwölfkinder? Did you hold your father’s hand as you rode the train
up from Lübeck, gaze at your knees or at the other children like you braided, ironed,
smelling of bleach, boot-wax, caramel? Did small-change jingle in your purse as you
swung around the Wheel, did you hide your face in his wool lapels or did you kneel
up in the seat, looking over the water, trying to see Denmark? Were you frightened
when the dwarf tried to hug you, was your frock scratchy in the warming afternoon,
what did you say, what did you feel when boys ran by snatching each other’s caps and
too busy for you?
She must have always been a child on somebody’s list. He only avoided thinking about
it. But all the time she was carrying her disappearance in her drawn face, her reluctant
walk, and if he hadn’t needed her protection so much he might have seen in time how
little she could protect anything, even their mean nest. He couldn’t talk to her—it
was arguing with his own ghost from ten years ago, the same idealism, the adolescent
fury—items that had charmed him once—a woman with spirit!—but which he came to see
as evidence of her single-mindedness, even, he could swear, some desire to be actually
destroyed. . . .
She went out to her street-theatre each time expecting not to come back, but he never
really knew that. Leftists and Jews in the streets, all right, noisy, unpleasant to
look at, but the police will keep them channeled, she’s in no danger unless she wants
to be. . . . Later, after she left, he got a little drunk one forenoon, a little sentimental,
and went out at last, his first and last time, hoping that somehow the pressures of
Fate or crowd hydrodynamics might bring them together again. He found a street full
of tan and green uniforms, truncheons, leather, placards fluttering unstable in all
modes but longitudinal, scores of panicked civilians. A policeman aimed a blow at
him, but Pökler dodged, and it hit an old man instead, some bearded old unreconstructed
geezer of a Trotskyite . . . he saw the strands of steel cable under black rubber
skin, a finicky smile on the policeman’s face as he swung, his free hand grasping
his opposite lapel in some feminine way, the leather glove of the hand with the truncheon
unbuttoned at the wrist, and his eyes flinching at the last possible moment, as if
the truncheon shared his nerves and might get hurt against the old man’s skull. Pökler
made it to a doorway, sick with fear. Other police came running as some dancers run,
elbows close to sides, forearms thrusting out at an angle. They used firehoses to
break up the crowd, finally. Women slid like dolls along the slick cobbles and on
tram rails, the thick gush catching them by belly and head, its brute white vector
dominating them. Any of them might have been Leni. Pökler shivered in his doorway
and watched it. He couldn’t go out in the street. Later he thought about its texture,
the network of grooves between the paving stones. The only safety there was ant-scaled,
down and running the streets of Ant City, bootsoles crashing overhead like black thunder,
you and your crawling neighbors in traffic all silent, jostling, heading down the
gray darkening streets. . . . Pökler knew how to find safety among the indoor abscissas
and ordinates of graphs: finding the points he needed not by running the curve itself,
not up on high stone and vulnerability, but instead tracing patiently the
x
s and
y
s, P (atü), W (m/sec), T
i
(° K), moving always by safe right angles along the faint lines. . . .
When he began to dream about the Rocket with some frequency, it would sometimes not
be a literal rocket at all, but a street he knew was in a certain district of the
city, a street in a certain small area of the grid that held something he thought
he needed. The coordinates were clear in his mind, but the street eluded him. Over
the years, as the Rocket neared its fullness, about to go operational, the coordinates
switched from the Cartesian x and y of the laboratory to the polar azimuth and range
of the weapon as deployed: once he knelt on the lavatory floor of his old rooming
house in Munich, understanding that if he faced exactly along a certain compass-bearing
his prayer would be heard: he’d be safe. He wore a robe of gold and orange brocade.
It was the only light in the room. Afterward he ventured out into the house, knowing
people slept in all the rooms, but feeling a sense of desertion. He went to switch
on a light—but in the act of throwing the switch he knew the room had really been
lit to begin with, and he had just turned everything out,
everything. . . .
The A4 operational-at-last hadn’t crept up on him. Its coming true was no climax.
That hadn’t ever been the point.
“They’re using you to kill people,” Leni told him, as clearly as she could. “That’s
their only job, and you’re helping them.”
“We’ll all use
it
, someday, to leave the earth. To transcend.”
She laughed. “Transcend,” from Pökler?
“Someday,” honestly trying, “they won’t have to kill. Borders won’t mean anything.
We’ll have all outer space. . . .”
“
Oh
you’re blind,” spitting it as she spat his blindness at him every day, that and “Kadavergehorsamkeit,”
a beautiful word he can no longer imagine in any voice but hers. . . .
But really he did not obey like a corpse. He
was
political, up to a point—there was politics enough out at the rocket field. The Army
Weapons Department was showing an ever-quickening interest in the amateur rocketeers
of the Verein für Raumschiffahrt, and the VfR had recently begun making available
to the Army records of their experiments. The corporations and the universities—the
Army said—didn’t want to risk capital or manpower on developing anything as fantastic
as a rocket. The Army had nowhere to turn but to private inventors and clubs like
the VfR.
“Shit,” said Leni. “They’re all in on it together. You really can’t see that, can
you.”
Wthin the Society, the lines were drawn clear enough. Without money the VfR was suffocating—the
Army had the money, and was already financing them in roundabout ways. The choice
was between building what the Army wanted—practical hardware—or pushing on in chronic
poverty, dreaming of expeditions to Venus.
“Where do you think the Army’s getting the money?” Leni asked.
“What does it matter? Money is money.”
“No!”
Major Weissmann was one of several gray eminences around the rocket field, able to
talk, with every appearance of sympathy and reason, to organized thinker and maniac
idealist alike. All things to all men, a brand-new military type, part salesman, part
scientist. Pökler, the all-seeing, the unmoving, must have known that what went on
in the VfR committee meetings was the same game being played in Leni’s violent and
shelterless street. All his training had encouraged an eye for analogies—in equations,
in theoretical models—yet he persisted in thinking the VfR was special, preserved
against the time. And he also knew at first hand what happens to dreams with no money
to support them. So, presently, Pökler found that by refusing to take sides, he’d
become Weissmann’s best ally. The major’s eyes always changed when he looked at Pökler:
his slightly prissy face to relax into what Pökler had noticed, in random mirrors
and display windows, on his own face when he was with Leni. The blank look of one
who is taking another for granted. Weissmann was as sure of Pökler’s role as Pökler
was of Leni’s. But Leni left at last. Pökler might not have had the will.
He thought of himself as a practical man. At the rocket field they talked continents,
encirclements—seeing years before the General Staff the need for a weapon to break
ententes, to leap like a chess knight over Panzers, infantry, even the Luftwaffe.
Plutocratic nations to the west, communists to the east. Spaces, models, game-strategies.
Not much passion or ideology. Practical men. While the military wallowed in victories
not yet won, the rocket engineers had to think non-fanatically, about German reverses,
German defeat—the attrition of the Luftwaffe and its decline in power, the withdrawals
of fronts, the need for weapons with longer ranges. . . . But others had the money,
others gave the orders—trying to superimpose their lusts and bickerings on something
that had its own vitality, on a
technologique
they’d never begin to understand. As long as the Rocket was in research and development,
there was no need for them to believe in it. Later, as the A4 was going operational,
as they found themselves with a real rocket-in-being, the struggles for power would
begin in earnest. Pökler could see that. They were athletic, brainless men without
vision, without imagination. But they had power, and it was hard for him not to think
of them as superior, even while holding them in a certain contempt.
But Leni was wrong: no one was using him. Pökler was an extension of the Rocket, long
before it was ever built. She’d seen to that. When she left him, he fell apart. Pieces
spilled into the Hinterhof, down the drains, away in the wind. He couldn’t even go
to the movies. Only rarely did he go out after work and try to fish lumps of coal
from the Spree. He drank beer and sat in the cold room, autumn light reaching him
after impoverishments and fadings, from gray clouds, off courtyard walls and drainpipes,
through grease-darkened curtains, bled of all hope by the time it reached where he
sat shivering and crying. He cried every day, some hour of the day, for a month, till
a sinus got infected. He went to bed and sweated the fever out. Then he moved to Kummersdorf,
outside Berlin, to help his friend Mondaugen at the rocket field.