Authors: Thomas Pynchon
“Herr Pökler? I am your—”
“Ilse. Ilse. . . .”
He must have picked her up, kissed her, drawn the curtain. Some reflex. She was wearing
in her hair a ribbon of brown velvet. He remembered her hair as lighter, shorter—but
then it does grow, and darken. He looked slantwise into her face, all his emptiness
echoing. The vacuum of his life threatened to be broken in one strong inrush of love.
He tried to maintain it with seals of suspicion, looking for resemblances to the face
he’d last seen years ago over her mother’s shoulder, eyes still puffy from sleep angled
down across Leni’s rain-coated back, going out a door he’d thought closed for good—pretending
not to find resemblances. Perhaps pretending.
Was
it really the same face? he’d lost so much of it over the years, that fat, featureless
child’s face. . . . He was afraid now even to hold her, afraid his heart would burst.
He said, “How long have you been waiting?”
“Since lunchtime.” She’d eaten in the canteen. Major Weissmann had brought her up
on the train from Stettin, and they had played chess. Major Weissmann was a slow player,
and they hadn’t finished the game. Major Weissmann had bought her sweets, and had
asked her to say hello and sorry he couldn’t stay long enough to see Pökler—
Weissmann? What was this? A blinking, tentative fury grew in Pökler. They must have
known everything—all this time. His life was secretless as this mean cubicle, with
its bed, commode and reading-light.
So, to stand between him and this impossible return, he had his anger—to preserve
him from love he couldn’t really risk. He could settle for interrogating his daughter.
The shame he felt was acceptable, the shame and coldness. But she must have picked
it up, for she sat now very still, except for nervous feet, her voice so subdued he
missed parts of her answers.
They had sent her here from a place in the mountains, where it was chilly even in
summer—surrounded by barbed wire and bright hooded lights that burned all night long.
There were no boys—only girls, mothers, old ladies living in barracks, stacked up
in bunks, often two to a pallet. Leni was well. Sometimes a man in a black uniform
came into the barracks and Mutti would go away with him, and stay away for several
days. When she came back she didn’t want to talk, or even to hug Ilse the way she
usually did. Sometimes she cried, and asked Ilse to leave her alone. Ilse would go
off and play with Johanna and Lilli underneath the barracks next door. They had scooped
a hideout there in the dirt, furnished with dolls, hats, dresses, shoes, old bottles,
magazines with pictures, all found out near the barbed wire, the treasure pile, they
called it, a huge refuse dump that always smoldered, day and night: you could see
its red glow out the window from the top bunk where she slept with Lilli, nights when
Leni was away. . . .
But Pökler was hardly listening, he had the only datum with any value: that she was
somewhere definite, with a location on the map and authorities who might be contacted.
Could he find her again? Fool. Could he somehow negotiate her release? Some man, some
Red, must have got her into this. . . .
Kurt Mondaugen was the only one he could trust, though Pökler knew before they spoke
that the role Mondaugen had chosen would keep him from helping. “They call them re-education
camps. They’re run by the SS. I could talk to Weissmann, but it might not work.”
He had known Weissmann in Südwest. They had shared the months of siege inside Foppl’s
villa: Weissmann was one of the people who had driven Mondaugen, finally, away to
live in the bush. But they had found a rapprochement here, among the rockets, either
for sun-blasted holyman reasons it was not for Pökler to understand or because of
some deeper connection which had always been there. . . .
They stood on the roof of one of the assembly buildings, the Oie across the water
six miles away clearly visible, which meant a change in the weather tomorrow. Steel
was being hammered somewhere out in the sunlight, hammered in cadences, purified as
the song of some bird. Blue Peenemünde shivered around them in all directions, a dream
of concrete and steel masses reflecting the noon heat. The air rippled like camouflage.
Behind it something else seemed to carry on in secret. At any moment the illusion
they stood on would dissolve and they would fall to earth. Pökler stared across the
marshes, feeling helpless. “I have to do something. Don’t I?”
“No. You have to wait.”
“It’s not right, Mondaugen.”
“No.”
“What about Ilse? Will she have to go back?”
“I don’t know. But she’s here now.”
So, as usual, Pökler chose silence. Had he chosen something else, back while there
was time, they all might have saved themselves. Even left the country. Now, too late,
when at last he wanted to act, there was nothing to act on.
Well, to be honest, he didn’t spend much time brooding about past neutralities. He
wasn’t that sure he’d outgrown them, anyway.
They took walks, he and Ilse, by the stormy shore—fed ducks, explored the pine forests.
They even allowed her to watch a launching. It was a message to him, but he didn’t
understand till later what it meant. It meant that there was no violation of security:
there was no one she could tell who mattered.
The noise of the Rocket ripped at them. For the first time then she moved close,
and held him. He felt that he was holding on to her. The motor cut off too soon, and
the Rocket crashed somewhere over in Peenemünde-West, in Luftwaffe territory. The
dirty pillar of smoke drew the screaming fire engines and truckloads of workers by
in a wild parade. She took in a deep breath, and squeezed his hand. “Did you make
it do that, Papi?”
“No, it wasn’t supposed to. It’s supposed to fly in a big curve,” motioning with his
hand, the parabola trailing behind encompassing testing stands, assembly buildings,
drawing them together as the crosses priests make in the air quarter and divide the
staring congregations behind them. . . .
“Where does it go?”
“Wherever we tell it to.”
“May I fly in it someday? I’d fit inside, wouldn’t I?”
She asked impossible questions. “Someday,” Pökler told her. “Perhaps someday to the
Moon.”
“The
Moon . . .”
as if he were going to tell her a story. When none followed she made up her own.
The engineer in the next cubicle had a map of the Moon tacked to his fiberboard wall,
and she spent hours studying it, deciding where she wanted to live. Passing over the
bright rays of Kepler, the rugged solitude of the Southern Highlands, the spectacular
views at Copernicus and Eratosthenes, she chose a small pretty crater in the Sea of
Tranquillity called Maskelyne B. They would build a house right on the rim, Mutti
and she and Pökler, gold mountains out one window and the wide sea out the other.
And Earth green and blue in the sky. . . .
Should he have told her what the “seas” of the Moon really were? Told her there was
nothing to breathe? His ignorance frightened him, his ineptitude as a father. . . .
Nights in the cubicle, with Ilse curled a few feet away in a canvas army cot, a little
gray squirrel under her blanket, he’d wonder if she wasn’t really better off as ward
of the Reich. He’d heard there were camps, but saw nothing sinister in it: he took
the Government at their word, “re-education.”
I’ve made such a mess of everything . . . they have qualified people there . . . trained
personnel . . . they know what a child needs
. . . staring up at the electric scatter from this part of Peenemünde mapping across
his piece of ceiling priorities, abandoned dreams, favor in the eyes of the master
fantasists in Berlin, while sometimes Ilse whispered to him bedtime stories about
the moon she would live on, till he had transferred silently to a world that wasn’t
this one after all: a map without any national borders, insecure and exhilarating,
in which flight was as natural as breathing—but I’ll fall . . . no, rising, look down,
nothing to be afraid of, this time it’s good . . . yes, firmly in flight, it’s working . . .
yes. . . .
Pökler may be only witnessing tonight—or he may really be part of it. He hasn’t been
shown which it is. Look at this. There is about to be expedited, for Friedrich August
Kekulé von Stradonitz, his dream of 1865, the great Dream that revolutionized chemistry
and made the IG possible. So that the right material may find its way to the right
dreamer, everyone, everything involved must be exactly in place in the pattern. It
was nice of Jung to give us the idea of an ancestral pool in which everybody shares
the same dream material. But how is it we are each visited as individuals, each by
exactly and only what he needs? Doesn’t that imply a switching-path of some kind?
a bureaucracy? Why shouldn’t the IG go to séances? They ought to be quite at home
with the bureaucracies of the other side. Kekulé’s dream here’s being routed now past
points which may arc through the silence, in bright reluctance to live inside the
moving moment, an imperfect, a human light, over here interfering with the solemn
binary decisions of these agents, who are now allowing the cosmic Serpent, in the
violet splendor of its scales, shining that is definitely
not
human, to pass—without feeling, without wonder (after you get a little time in—whatever
that
means over here—one of these archetypes gets to look pretty much like any other,
oh you hear some of these new hires, the seersucker crowd come in the first day, “Wow!
Hey—that’s th-th’
Tree o’ Creation!
Huh? Ain’t it! Je-eepers!” but they calm down fast enough, pick up the reflexes for
Intent to Gawk, you know self-criticism’s an amazing technique, it shouldn’t work
but it does. . . . Here, here’s the rundown on Kekulé’s problem. Started out to become
an architect, turned out instead to be one of the Atlantes of chemistry, most of the
organic wing of that useful edifice bearing down on top of his head forever—not just
under the aspect of IG, but of World, assuming that’s a distinction you observe, heh,
heh. . . . Once again it was the influence of Liebig, the great professor of chemistry
on whose name-street in Munich Pökler lived while he attended the T.H. Liebig was
at the University of Giessen when Kekulé entered as a student. He inspired the young
man to change his field. So Kekulé brought the mind’s eye of an architect over into
chemistry. It was a critical switch. Liebig himself seems to have occupied the role
of a gate, or sorting-demon such as his younger contemporary Clerk Maxwell once proposed,
helping to concentrate energy into one favored room of the Creation at the expense
of everything else (later witnesses have suggested that Clerk Maxwell intended his
Demon not so much as a convenience in discussing a thermodynamic idea as a parable
about the
actual existence
of personnel like Liebig . . . we may gain an indication of how far the repression
had grown by that time, in the degree to which Clerk Maxwell felt obliged to code
his warnings . . . indeed some theorists, usually the ones who find sinister meaning
behind even
Mrs.
Clerk Maxwell’s notorious “It is time to go home, James, you are beginning to enjoy
yourself,” have made the extreme suggestion that the Field Equations themselves contain
an ominous forewarning—they cite as evidence the disturbing intimacy of the Equations
with the behavior of the double-integrating circuit in the guidance system of the
A4 rocket, the same double-summing of current densities that led architect Etzel Ölsch
to design for architect Albert Speer an underground factory at Nordhausen with just
that symbolic shape . . .). Young ex-architect Kekulé went looking among the molecules
of the time for the hidden shapes he knew were there, shapes he did not like to think
of as real physical structures, but as “rational formulas,” showing the relationships
that went on in “metamorphoses,” his quaint 19th-century way of saying “chemical reactions.”
But he could visualize. He
saw
the four bonds of carbon, lying in a tetrahedron—he
showed
how carbon atoms could link up, one to another, into long chains. . . . But he was
stumped when he got to benzene. He knew there were six carbon atoms with a hydrogen
attached to each one—but he could not see the shape. Not until the dream: until he
was made to see it, so that others might be seduced by its physical beauty, and begin
to think of it as a blueprint, a basis for new compounds, new arrangements, so that
there would be a field of aromatic chemistry to ally itself with secular power, and
find new methods of synthesis, so there would be a German dye industry to become the
IG. . . .
Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent
which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is
to be used. The Serpent that announces, “The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant,
eternally-returning,” is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to
violate
the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that “productivity” and “earnings”
keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these
vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit:
and not only most of humanity—most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is
laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it’s only buying
time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone
or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its
addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging
with it innocent souls all along the chain of life. Living inside the System is like
riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide . . . though
he’s amiable enough, keeps cracking jokes back through the loudspeaker, “Good morning
folks, this is Heidelberg here we’re coming into now, you know the old refrain, ‘I
lost my heart in Heidelberg,’ well I have a friend who lost both his
ears
here! Don’t get me wrong, it’s really a nice town, the people are warm and wonderful—when
they’re not dueling. Seriously though, they treat you just fine, they don’t just give
you the key to the city, they give you the bung-starter!” u.s.w. On you roll, across
a countryside whose light is forever changing—castles, heaps of rock, moons of different
shapes and colors come and go. There are stops at odd hours of the mornings, for reasons
that are not announced: you get out to stretch in lime-lit courtyards where the old
men sit around the table under enormous eucalyptus trees you can smell in the night,
shuffling the ancient decks oily and worn, throwing down swords and cups and trumps
major in the tremor of light while behind them the bus is idling, waiting—
passengers will now reclaim their seats
and much as you’d like to stay, right here, learn the game, find your old age around
this quiet table, it’s no use: he is waiting beside the door of the bus in his pressed
uniform, Lord of the Night he is checking your tickets, your ID and travel papers,
and it’s the wands of enterprise that dominate tonight. . . as he nods you by, you
catch a glimpse of his face, his insane, committed eyes, and you remember then, for
a terrible few heartbeats, that of course it will end for you all in blood, in shock,
without dignity—but there is meanwhile this trip to be on . . . over your own seat,
where there ought to be an advertising plaque, is instead a quote from Rilke: “Once,
only once . . .” One of Their favorite slogans. No return, no salvation, no Cycle—that’s
not what They, nor Their brilliant employee Kekulé, have taken the Serpent to mean.
No: what the Serpent means is—how’s this—that the six carbon atoms of benzene are
in fact curled around into a closed ring,
just like that snake with its tail in its mouth
, GET IT? “The aromatic Ring we know today,” Pökler’s old prof, Laszlo Jamf, at this
point in the spiel removing from his fob a gold hexagon with the German formée cross
in the center, a medal of honor from IG Farben, joking, in his lovable-old-fart manner,
that he likes to think of the cross not as German so much as standing for the tetravalency
of carbon—“but
who
,” lifting his open hands on each beat, like a bandleader, “who, sent, the
Dream?
” It is never clear how rhetorical any of Jamf’s questions are. “Who sent this new
serpent to our ruinous garden, already too fouled, too crowded to qualify as any locus
of innocence—unless innocence be our age’s neutral, our silent passing into the machineries
of indifference—something that Kekulé’s Serpent had come to—not to destroy, but to
define to us the loss of . . . we had been given certain molecules, certain combinations
and not others . . . we used what we found in Nature, unquestioning, shamefully perhaps—but
the Serpent whispered, ‘
They can be changed
, and new molecules assembled from the debris of the given. . . .’ Can anyone tell
me what else he whispered to us? Come—who knows? You. Tell me,
Pökler
—”