Authors: Thomas Pynchon
But how can he believe in its reality up there? Insects whine, the sun is almost warm,
he can gaze off at the red earth and millions of blowing stalks, and fall nearly into
a light trance: in shirtsleeves, with his bony knees pointing up, the gray suit jacket
wrinkled years beyond last pressing bundled under his ass to soak up the dew. The
others he came out with are dotted here about Ground Zero, blithe Nazi buttercups—binoculars
sway from slate-colored horsehide straps around their necks, the Askania crew fuss
with their equipment, and one of the SS liaison men (Weissmann isn’t here) keeps looking
at his watch, then at the sky, then the watch, the crystal becoming, in brief flashes
on/off, a nacreous circle binding together the hour and the fleecy sky.
Pökler scratches at a graying 48-hour beard, bites at lips very chapped, as if he
has spent most of the late winter outside: he has a winter look. Around his eyes,
over the years, has grown a ruinous system of burst capillaries, shadows, folds, crowsfeet,
a ground that by now has gathered in the simple, direct eyes of his younger and poorer
days . . . no. Something was in them, even then, something others saw and knew they
could use, and found how to. Something Pökler missed. He’s spent enough of his life
looking into mirrors. He really ought to remember. . . .
The airburst, if it happens, will be in visual range. Abstractions, math, models are
fine, but when you’re down to it and everybody’s hollering for a fix, this is what
you do: you go and sit exactly on the target with indifferent shallow trenches for
shelter, and you watch it in the silent fire-bloom of its last few seconds, and see
what you will see. Chances are astronomically against a perfect hit, of course, that
is why one is safest at the center of the target area. Rockets are supposed to be
like artillery shells, they disperse about the aiming point in a giant ellipse—the
Ellipse of Uncertainty. But Pökler, though trusting as much as any scientist in uncertainty,
is not feeling too secure here. It is after all his own personal ass whose quivering
sphincter is centered right on Ground Zero. And there is more to this than ballistics.
There is Weissmann. Any number of chemists and materials people know as much about
insulation as Pökler . . . why should he have been picked, unless . . . somewhere
in his brain now two foci sweep together and become one . . . zero ellipse . . . a
single point. . . a live warhead, secretly loaded, special bunkers for everyone else . . .
yes that’s what he wants . . . all tolerances in the guidance cooperating toward a
perfect shot, right on top of Pökler . . . ah, Weissmann, your end game lacks finesse—but
there were never spectators and judges not in all this time, and who ever said the
end could not be this brutal? Paranoia has rushed Pökler, drowned him to the temples
and scalp. He may have shit, he can’t tell. His pulse thuds in his neck. His hands
and feet ache. The black-suited blond enforcers look on. Their metal insignia twinkle.
Low hillsides lie under early sun. All the field glasses stare south. The Aggregat
is on route, nothing can be changed. No one else here cares for the penetralia of
the moment, or last mysteries: there have been too many rational years. The paper
has piled too thick and far. Pökler cannot reconcile, not really, his dream of the
perfectly victimized with the need bred into him to take care of business—nor see
how these may be one and the same. The A4 must, after all, go out in the field very
soon, this failure rate
must
be brought down, and so those who’ve come are here, and if there is a massive failure
of vision this morning in the Polish meadow, if no one, not even the most paranoid,
can see anything at all beyond the stated Requirements, certainly it’s not unique
to this time, this place, where the eyes cupped against the black binoculars are looking
only for the day’s “reluctant virgin”—as the witty rocketeers have dubbed their problem
rockets—to announce herself. . . to note where, forward to aft, the trouble may be,
the shape of a vapor trail, the sound of the burst, anything that might help. . . .
At Sarnaki, as the records tell it, the rocket came down that day with the usual double-blast,
a streak of white condensation in the blue sky: another premature airburst. Steel
fragments fell, a hundred feet away from the Zero point, slashing into the rye like
hail. Pökler saw the explosion, no more than anyone else. He was never sent out again.
The SS people watched him get to his feet, and stretch, and slowly move off with the
others. Weissmann would get his report. New varieties of torture would be coming.
But inside Pökler’s life, on no record but his soul, his poor harassed German soul,
the time base has lengthened, and slowed: the Perfect Rocket is still up there, still
descending. He still waits—even now, alone at Zwölfkinder waiting for “Ilse,” for
this summer’s return, and with it an explosion that will take him by surprise. . . .
In the spring, when the winds at Peenemünde had shifted around to the southwest, and
the first birds were back, Pökler was transferred to the underground factory at Nordhausen,
in the Harz. Work at Peenemünde, after the British raid, had begun to fall off. The
plan—again Kammler’s—was now to disperse testing and production around Germany, to
prevent another and possibly fatal Allied attack. Pökler’s duties at the Mittelwerke
were routine: materials, procurement. He slept in a bunk next to a wall of dynamited
stone painted white, with a bulb over his head burning all night long. He dreamed
that the bulb was a representative of Weissmann, a creature whose bright filament
was its soul. They held long dream-dialogues whose substance Pökler could never remember.
The bulb was explaining the plot to him in detail—it was more grand and sweeping than
Pökler could ever have imagined, it seemed many nights to be purely music, his consciousness
moving through the soundscape at bay, observing, compliant, still precariously safe,
but not for long.
At the time there were rumors of an estrangement growing between Weissmann and his
“monster,” Enzian. The Schwarzkommando by then had grown away from the SS structure,
much as the SS itself had from the German Army. Their power now lay not in absolute
weaponry but in information and expertise. Pökler was happy to hear that Weissmann
was having his troubles, but at a loss how to use it to any advantage. When his orders
to Nordhausen had come through, he’d had a flash of despair. Was the game adjourned
then? He might never see Ilse again. But a memo had come, telling him to report to
Weissmann in his office.
The hair at Weissmann’s temples was graying and disarranged. Pökler saw that one earpiece
of his glasses was held on with a paper clip. His desk was a litter of documents,
reports, reference books. It was a surprise to see him looking less diabolical than
harassed as any civil servant under pressure. His eyes were aimed in Pökler’s direction,
but the lenses distorted them.
“You understand that this transfer to Nordhausen is voluntary.”
Pökler understood, with relief and two seconds of actual love for his protector, that
the game was still on. “It will be something new.”
“Yes?” Partly a challenge, but partly interested too.
“Production. We’ve been so involved here with the research-and-development end. It’s
not a weapon for us so much as a ‘flying laboratory,’ as Dr. Thiel said once—”
“Do you miss Dr. Thiel?”
“Yes. He wasn’t in my section. I didn’t know him well.”
“A shame he got caught in the raid. We all move in an Ellipse of Uncertainty, don’t
we?”
Pökler allowed himself a look at the cluttered desk, quick enough to be taken either
for nervousness or as a comeback—Weissmann, looks like you have your own Ellipse all
right—“Oh, I don’t have the time usually to worry. At least the Mittelwerke is underground.”
“The tactical sites won’t be.”
“Do you think I might be sent—”
Weissmann shrugged and favored Pökler with a big fake smile. “My dear Pökler, how
can anyone predict where you’ll go? We’ll see how it all develops.”
Later, in the Zone, with his guilt become a sensual thing, prickling at his eyes and
membranes like an allergy, it would seem to Pökler that he could not, even by that
day in Weissmann’s office, have been ignorant of the truth. That he had known the
truth with his senses, but allowed all the evidence to be misfiled where it wouldn’t
upset him. Known everything, but refrained from the only act that could have redeemed
him. He should have throttled Weissmann where he sat, corrugations of skinny throat
and Adam’s apple sliding under Pökler’s palms, thick eyeglasses sliding off as the
weak little eyes go blearing helplessly after their final darkener. . . .
Pökler helped with his own blindness. He knew about Nordhausen, and the Dora camp:
he could
see
—the starved bodies, the eyes of the foreign prisoners being marched to work at four
in the morning in the freezing cold and darkness, the shuffling thousands in their
striped uniforms. He had known too, all along, that Ilse was living in a re-education
camp. But it wasn’t till August, when the furlough arrived as usual in its blank kraft
envelope, and Pökler rode northward through the gray kilometers of a Germany he no
longer recognized, bombed and burned, the wartime villages and rainy purple heath,
and found her at last waiting in the hotel lobby at Zwölfkinder with the same darkness
in her eyes (how had he missed it till now? such swimming orbits of pain) that he
could finally put the two data together. For months, while her father across the wire
or walls did his dutiful hackwork, she had been prisoner only a few meters away from
him, beaten, perhaps violated. . . . If he must curse Weissmann, then he must also
curse himself. Weissmann’s cruelty was no less resourceful than Pökler’s own engineering
skill, the gift of Daedalus that allowed him to put as much labyrinth as required
between himself and the inconveniences of caring. They had sold him convenience, so
much of it, all on credit, and now They were collecting.
Trying, a bit late for it, to open himself to the pain he should have been feeling,
he questioned her now. Did she know the name of her camp? Yes, Ilse confirmed—or was
told to answer—that it was Dora. The night before she left to come here she’d seen
a hanging. Evening was the hour for the hangings. Did he want to hear about it? Did
he want to hear about it. . . .
She was very hungry. They spent the first few days eating, whatever Zwölfkinder had
to sell. There was less than the year before, and it was much more expensive. But
the enclave of innocence still enjoyed a high priority, so there was something.
Not so many children this year, though. The engineer and girl had the place practically
to themselves. The Wheel and most of the other rides stood motionless. Petrol shortage,
a child guard informed them. Luftwaffe flights roared overhead. Nearly every night
the sirens cried out, and they watched the searchlights come on in Wismar and in Lübeck,
and sometimes heard the bombs. What was Pökler doing in this dream world, this lie?
His country waited to be crushed between invaders from east and west: back at Nordhausen
the hysteria had risen to epic scale, as the first rockets were about to go out into
the field, about to fulfill engineering prophecies old as peacetime. Why, at this
critical moment, had they let Pökler off? Who else these days was getting furloughs?
And what was “Ilse” doing here, wasn’t she supposed to be too old by now for fairy
tales? her new breasts so visible now beneath her frock, her eyes so nearly empty
drifting without real interest toward random boys destined for the Volkssturm, older
boys, no more interested in her. They dreamed of their orders, of colossal explosions
and death—if they even saw her it was sidewise, sly . . .
her Father will tame her . . . her teeth will bite the pole
. . . someday I will have a herd of them for myself . . . but first I must find my
Captain . . . somewhere out in the War . . . first they must deliver me from this
little place. . . .
Who was that, going by just then—who was the slender boy who flickered across her
path, so blond, so white he was nearly invisible in the hot haze that had come to
settle over Zwölfkinder? Did she see him, and did she know him for her own second
shadow? She was conceived because her father saw a movie called
Alpdrücken
one night and got a hardon. Pökler in his horny staring had missed the Director’s
clever Gnostic symbolism in the lighting scheme of the two shadows, Cain’s and Abel’s.
But Ilse, some Ilse, has persisted beyond her cinema mother, beyond film’s end, and
so have the shadows of shadows. In the Zone, all will be moving under the Old Dispensation,
inside the Cainists’ light and space: not out of any precious Göllerei, but because
the Double Light was always there, outside all film, and that shucking and jiving
moviemaker was the only one around at the time who happened to notice it and use it,
although in deep ignorance, then and now, of what he was showing the nation of starers. . . .
So that summer Ilse passed herself by, too fixed at some shadowless interior noon
to mark the intersection, or to care.
She and Pökler hardly talked this time: it was their mutest holiday together. She
walked broodful, her head down, her hair hooding her face, brown legs kicking at refuse
the undermanned garbage detail hadn’t picked up. Was it her time of life, or did she
resent being under orders to spend time with a dull and aging engineer at a place
she’d outgrown years ago?
“You don’t really want to be here, do you?” They sat by a polluted stream, throwing
bread to ducks. Pökler’s stomach was upset from ersatz coffee and tainted meat. His
head ached.
“It’s here or the camp,” her face stubbornly aside. “I don’t really want to be anywhere.
I don’t care.”
“Ilse.”
“Do you like it here? Do you want to be back under your mountain? Do you talk to the
elves, Franz?”