Authors: Thomas Pynchon
A late summer, a late, retrospective blooming. . . . Birds flew everywhere, the sea
warmed, the sun shone on into the evenings. Random children took your shirt cuff by
mistake, and trudged along for minutes before discovering you were not their adult,
and then wandered off with backward smiles. The Glass Mountain twinkled rose and white
in the hot sun, the elf king and his queen made a royal progress every noon with a
splendid retinue of dwarves and sprites, handing out cakes, ices and candies. At each
intersection or square, bands played—marches, folk-dances, hot jazz, Hugo Wolf. Children
went streaming like confetti. At the drinking fountains, where soda water sparkled
deep inside the fanged mouths of dragons, of wild lions and tigers, the queues of
children waited, each for his moment of danger, leaning halfway into the shadow, into
the smell of wet cement and old water, into the mouth of the beast, to drink. In the
sky, the tall ferris wheel spun. From Peenemünde they had come 280 kilometers, which
was to be, coincidentally, the operational range of the A4.
Among all there was to choose from, Wheel, myths, jungle animals, clowns, Ilse found
her way to the Antarctic Panorama. Two or three boys hardly older than she wandered
through the imitation wilderness, bundled up in sealskins, constructing cairns and
planting flags in the August humidity. Watching them made Pökler sweat. A few “sled
dogs” lay suffering in the shade of the dirty papier-mâché sastrugi, on plaster snow
that had begun to crack. A hidden projector threw images of the aurora on a white
scrim. Half a dozen stuffed penguins also dotted the landscape.
“So—you want to live at the South Pole. Have you given up so easily on”—
Kot
—idiot, that was a slip—“on the Moon?” He’d been good up till then about cross-examining.
He couldn’t afford to know who she was. In the false Antarctic, in ignorance of what
had attracted her there, uneasy and dripping sweat, he waited for her answer.
She, or They, let him off. “Oh,” with a shrug, “who wants to live on the Moon?” They
never brought it up again.
Back at their hotel, they were handed the key by an eight-year-old desk clerk, rose
in a whining elevator run by a uniformed child, to a room still warm from the day’s
heat. She closed the door, took off her hat and scaled it over to her bed. Pökler
collapsed on his own bed. She came over to take off his shoes.
“Papi,” gravely unlacing, “may I sleep next to you tonight?” One of her hands had
come lightly to rest on the beginning of his bare calf. Their eyes met for half a
second. A number of uncertainties shifted then for Pökler and locked into sense. To
his shame, his first feeling was pride. He hadn’t known he was so vital to the program.
Even in this initial moment, he was seeing it from Their side—every quirk goes in
the dossier, gambler, foot-fetishist or soccer fan, it’s all important, it can all
be used. Right now we have to keep them happy, or at least neutralize the foci of
their unhappiness. You may not understand what their work really is, not at the level
of the data, but you’re an administrator after all, a leader, your job is to get results . . .
Pökler, now, has mentioned a “daughter.” Yes, yes we know it’s disgusting, one never
can tell what they have locked up in there with those equations, but we must all put
off our judgments for now, there’ll be time after the war to get back to the Pöklers
and their dirty little secrets. . . .
He hit her upside the head with his open hand, a loud and terrible blow. That took
care of his anger. Then, before she could cry or speak, he had dragged her up on the
bed next to him, her dazed little hands already at the buttons of his trousers, her
white frock already pulled above her waist. She had been wearing nothing at all underneath,
nothing all day . . .
how I’ve wanted you
, she whispered as paternal plow found its way into filial furrow . . . and after
hours of amazing incest they dressed in silence, and crept out into the leading edge
of faintest flesh dawn, everything they would ever need packed inside her flowered
bag, past sleeping children doomed to the end of summer, past monitors and railway
guards, down at last to the water and the fishing boats, to a fatherly old sea-dog
in a braided captain’s hat, who welcomed them aboard and stashed them below decks,
where she snuggled down in the bunk as they got under way and sucked him for hours
while the engine pounded, till the Captain called, “Come on up, and take a look at
your new home!” Gray and green, through the mist, it was Denmark. “Yes, they’re a
free people here. Good luck to both of you!” The three of them, there on deck, stood
hugging. . . .
No. What Pökler did was choose to believe she wanted comfort that night, wanted not
to be alone. Despite Their game, Their palpable evil, though he had no more reason
to trust “Ilse” than he trusted Them, by an act not of faith, not of courage but of
conservation, he chose to believe that. Even in peacetime, with unlimited resources,
he couldn’t have proven her identity, not beyond the knife-edge of zero tolerance
his precision eye needed. The years Ilse would have spent between Berlin and Peenemünde
were so hopelessly tangled, for all of Germany, that no real chain of events could
have been established for sure, not even Pökler’s hunch that somewhere in the State’s
oversize paper brain a specific perversity had been assigned him and dutifully stored.
For every government agency, the Nazi Party set up a duplicate. Committees fissioned,
merged, generated spontaneously, disappeared. No one would show a man his dossier—
It was not, in fact, even clear to him that he had made a choice. But it was in those
humming moments in the room smelling of a summer day, whose light no one had lit yet,
with her round straw hat a frail moon on the bedspread, lights of the Wheel slowly
pouring red and green over and over outside in the dark, and a group of schoolboys
singing in the street a refrain from before their time, their sold-out and cruelly
handled time—Juch-heierasas-sa! o tempo-tempo-ra!—that board and pieces and patterns
at least all did come clear for him, and Pökler knew that while he played, this would
have to be Ilse—truly his child, truly as he could make her. It was the real moment
of conception, in which, years too late, he became her father.
Through the rest of the furlough, they strolled about Zwölfkinder, always hand in
hand. Lanterns swaying from the trunks of elephants’ heads on top of tall pillars
lit their way . . . over spidery bridges looking down at snow-leopards, apes, hyenas . . .
along the miniature railway, between the corrugated pipe legs of steel-mesh dinosaurs,
down to the patch of African desert where every two hours exactly the treacherous
natives attacked an encampment of General von Trotha’s brave men in blue, all the
parts played by exuberant boys, and a great patriotic favorite with children of all
ages . . . up on the giant Wheel so naked, so void of grace, there for only the clear
mission: to lift and to frighten. . . .
On their last night—though he didn’t know it, for they would take her as abruptly
and invisibly as before—they stood looking in again at stuffed penguins and false
snow, and around them the artificial aurora flickered.
“Next year,” squeezing her hand, “we’ll come back here, if you like.”
“Oh yes. Every year, Papi.”
Next day she was gone, taken back into the coming war, leaving Pökler alone in a country
of children, to go back to Peenemünde after all, alone. . . .
So it has gone for the six years since. A daughter a year, each one about a year older,
each time taking up nearly from scratch. The only continuity has been her name, and
Zwölfkinder, and Pokler’s love—love something like the persistence of vision, for
They have used it to create for him the moving image of a daughter, flashing him only
these summertime frames of her, leaving it to him to build the illusion of a single
child . . . what would the time scale matter, a 24th of a second or a year (no more,
the engineer thought, than in a wind-tunnel, or an oscillograph whose turning drum
you could speed or slow at will . . .)?
Outside the Peenemünde wind-tunnel, Pökler has come to stand at night, next to the
great sphere, 40 feet high, listening to the laboring pumps as they evacuate the air
from the white sphere, five minutes of growing void—then one terrific gasp: 20 seconds
of supersonic flow . . . then the fall of the shutter, and the pumps starting up again . . .
he has listened, and taken it to imply his own cycle of shuttered love, growing empty
over the year for two weeks in August, engineered with the same care. He has smiled,
and drunk toasts, and traded barracks humor with Major Weissmann, while all the time,
behind the music and the giggling, he could hear the flesh of pieces moved in darkness
and winter across the marshes and mountain chains of the board . . . watched run after
run the Halbmodelle results out of the wind tunnel, showing how the net normal force
would be distributed over the Rocket’s length, for hundreds of different Mach numbers—seen
the true profile of the Rocket warped and travestied, a rocket of wax, humped like
a dolphin at around caliber 2, necking down toward the tail which was then stretched
up, impossibly, in a high point with a lower shoulder aft of it—and seen how his own
face might be plotted, not in light but in net forces acting upon it from the flow
of Reich and coercion and love it moved through . . . and known that it must suffer
the same degradation, as death will warp face to skull. . . .
In ’43, because he was away at Zwölfkinder, Pökler missed the British air raid on
Peenemünde. Returning to the station, as soon as he came in sight of the “foreign
workers’” quarters at Trassenheide razed and smashed, bodies still being dug from
the wreckage, a terrible suspicion began, and would not be put down. Weissmann was
saving
him for something: some unique destiny. Somehow the man had known the British would
bomb that night, known even in ’39, and so arranged the tradition of an August furlough,
year after year but all toward protecting Pökler from the one bad night. Not quite
balanced . . . a bit paranoid, yes, yes . . . but the thought purred on in his brain,
and he felt himself turning to stone.
Smoke seeped from the earth, charred trees fell, as he watched, at no more than a
breath from the direction of the sea. Powdered dust rose up at every footfall, turning
clothes white, faces to masks of dust. The farther up the peninsula, the less damage.
A strange gradient of death and wreckage, south to north, in which the poorest and
most helpless got it worst—as, indeed, the gradient was to run east to west, in London
a year later when the rockets began to fall. Most of the casualties had been among
“foreign workers,” a euphemism for civilian prisoners brought in from countries under
German occupation. The wind tunnel and the measuring house were untouched, the pre-production
works only slightly damaged. Pökler’s colleagues were outside Scientist Housing, which
had been hit—phantoms moving in morning fog still not burned off, washing up in buckets
of beer because the water was still out. They stared at Pökler, failing, enough of
them, to keep accusation out of their faces.
“I wish I could have missed this.”
“Dr. Thiel is dead.”
“How was fairyland, Pökler?”
“I’m sorry,” he said. It wasn’t his fault. The others were silent: some watching,
some still in shock from the night.
Mondaugen showed up then. “We’re exhausted. Could you come with me to Pre-production?
A lot has to be sorted out, we need a hand.” They shuffled along, each in his own
dust-cloud. “It was terrible,” Mondaugen said. “All of us have been under some strain.”
“They sounded like
I’d
done it.”
“You feeling guilty because you weren’t here?”
“I’m wondering why I wasn’t here. That’s all.”
“Because you were in Zwölfkinder,” replied the enlightened one. “Don’t invent complications.”
He tried not to. That was Weissmann’s job, wasn’t it, Weissmann was the sadist, he
had responsibility for coming up with new game-variations, building toward a maximum
cruelty in which Pökler would be unlaid to nerves vessels and tendons, every last
convolution of brain flattened out in the radiance of the black candles, nowhere to
shelter, entirely his master’s possession . . . the moment in which he is defined
to himself at last. . . . This is what Pökler could feel waiting now, a room he’d
never seen, a ceremony he couldn’t memorize in advance. . . .
There were false alarms. Pökler was almost sure once during the winter, during the
test series at Blizna. They had moved east into Poland, to fire over land. The shots
from Peenemünde were all out to sea, and there’d been no way to observe the re-entry
of the A4. Blizna was almost exclusively an SS project: part of Maj.-Gen. Kammler’s
empire-building. The Rocket at that point was plagued by an airburst problem in its
terminal phase—the vehicle blew apart before reaching the target. Everyone had an
idea. It might be an overpressure in the liquid-oxygen tank. Perhaps, because the
Rocket coming down was lighter by 10 tons of fuel and oxidizer, the shift in the center
of gravity was making it unstable. Or perhaps the insulation on the alcohol tank was
at fault, somehow allowing residual fuel to be burned on re-entry. This was Pökler’s
reason for being there. By then he was no longer in the propulsion group, or even
working as a designer—he was in the Materials office, expediting the procurement of
various plastics for insulation, shock absorption, gasketry—exciting stuff. The orders
to Blizna were strange enough to be Weissmann’s work: the day Pökler went out to sit
in the Polish meadows at the exact spot where the Rocket was supposed to come down,
he was certain.
Green rye and low hills for miles all around: Pökler was by a small trench, in the
Sarnaki target area, pointing his binoculars south toward Blizna like everybody else:
waiting. Erwartung in the crosshairs, with the just-sprung rye blowing, its gentler
nap being brushed up by the wind . . . look down at this countryside, down through
Rocket-miles of morning space: the many shades of forest green, Polish farmhouses
white and brown, dark eels of rivers catching the sun at their curves . . . and at
the very center down there, in the holy X, Pökler, crucified, invisible at first look,
but in a moment . . .
now
beginning to resolve as the fall gathers momentum—