Authors: Thomas Pynchon
It takes an hour to find Säure’s cellar. But it’s dark, and it’s empty. Slothrop goes
in, lights the light. Looks like either a bust or a gang war: printing press vanished,
clothes tossed all around, and some very strange clothes at that, there is, for example,
a wickerware suit, a
yellow
wickerware suit actually, articulating along armpit, elbow, knee and groinlines . . .
oh, hmm, well, Slothrop runs a quick search of his own here, looking inside shoes,
not really shoes, some of them, but foot-gloves with individual
toes
, not, however, sewn but
cast
from some unpleasant variegated resin such as bowling balls are made of . . . behind
the peeling scraps of wallpaper, up in the rolled-up windowshade, among the hatchings
of one or two phony Reichsmarks let spill by the looters—fifteen minutes of this,
finding nothing . . . and the white object on the table watching him out of its staring
shadows the whole time. He feels its stare before he spots it finally: a chesspiece
two inches high. A white knight, molded out of plastic—a-and wait’ll Slothrop finds
out what
kind
of plastic, boy!
It’s a horse’s skull: the eye-sockets are hollow far down into the base. Inside one
of them is a tightly rolled cigarette paper with a message from Säure. “Raketemensch!
Der Springer asks me to give you this, his symbol. Keep it—by it shall he know you.
I am at Jacobistrasse 12, 3
er
Hof, number 7. As B/4, Me. I?” Now “As B/4” was John Dillinger’s old signoff. Everybody
in the Zone this summer is using it. It indicates to people how you feel about certain
things. . . .
Säure has included a map showing how to get to where he is. It’s clear back in the
British sector. Groaning, Slothrop pushes on back out in the mud and early morning.
Around the Brandenburg Gate, a slight drizzle starts up again. Chunks of the Gate
still lie around in the street—leaning shell-spalled up in the rainy sky, its silence
is colossal, haggard as he pads by flanking it, the Chariot gleaming like coal, driven
and still, it is the 30th century and swashbuckling Rocketman has just landed here
to tour the ruins, the high-desert traces of an ancient European order. . . .
The Jacobistrasse and most of its quarter, slums, survived the street-fighting intact,
along with its interior darkness, a masonry of shadows that will persist whether the
sun is up or down. Number 12 is an entire block of tenements dating from before the
Inflation, five or six stories and a mansarde, five or six Hinterhöfe nested one inside
the other—boxes of a practical joker’s gift, nothing in the center but a last hollow
courtyard smelling of the same cooking and garbage and piss decades old. Ha, ha!
Slothrop moseys toward the first archway. Streetlight throws his caped shadow forward
into a succession of these arches, each labeled with a faded paint name, Erster-Hof,
Zweiter-Hof, Dritter-Hof u.s.w., shaped like the entrance to the Mittelwerke, parabolic,
but more like an open mouth and gullet, joints of cartilage receding waiting, waiting
to swallow . . . above the mouth two squared eyes, organdy whites, irises pitch black,
stare him down . . . it laughs as it has for years without stopping, a blubbery and
percussive laugh, like heavy china rolling or bumping under the water in the sink.
A brainless giggle, just big old geometric me, nothin’ t’ be nervous about, c’mon
in. . . . But the pain, the twenty, twentyfive years of pain paralyzed back in that
long throat . . . old outcast, passive, addicted to survival now, waiting the years
out, waiting for vulnerable saps like Slothrop here to expose itself to, laughing
and crying and all in silence . . . paint peels from the Face, burned, diseased, long
time dying and how can Slothrop just walk down into such a schizoid throat? Why, because
it is what the guardian and potent Studio wants from him, natürlich: Slothrop is the
character juvenile tonight: what’s kept him moving the whole night, him and the others,
the solitary Berliners who come out only in these evacuated hours, belonging and going
noplace, is Their unexplained need to keep some marginal population in these wan and
preterite places, certainly for economic though, who knows, maybe emotional reasons
too. . . .
Säure’s on the move too, though inside, prowling his dreams. It looks like one big
room, dark, full of tobacco and kif smoke, crumbled ridges of plaster where walls
have been knocked out, straw pallets all over the floor, a couple on one sharing a
late, quiet cigarette, somebody snoring on another . . . glossy Bosendorfer Imperial
concert grand piano over which Trudi, wearing only an army shirt, leans, a desperate
muse, bare legs long and stretching, “
Please
come to bed Gustav, it’ll be light soon.” The only answer is a peevish strumming
among the lower strings. Säure is on his side, quite still, a shrunken child, face
long worked at by leaps from second-story windows, “first rubdowns” under gloved and
womanish sergeants’ fists in the precinct stations, golden light in the afternoons
over the racetrack at Karlshorst, black light from the pavements of boulevards at
night finely wrinkled like leather stretched over stone, white light from satin dresses,
glasses stacked shining in front of bar mirrors, sans-serif Us at the entrances to
underground stations pointing in smooth magnetism at the sky to bring down steel angels
of exaltation, of languid surrender—a face that in sleep is awesomely old, abandoned
to its city’s history. . . .
His eyes open—for an instant Slothrop is only shadowed green folds, highlighted helmet,
light-values still to be put together. Then comes the sweet nodding smile, everything’s
O.K., ja, howdy Rocketman, was ist los? Though the unregenerate old doper is not quite
kindly enough to keep from opening the ditty bag right away and peering in, eyes like
two pissholes in a snowbank, to see what he has.
“I thought you’d be in the slam or something.”
Out with a little Moroccan pipe and Säure sets to flattening a fat crumb of that hashish,
humming the popular rumba
A little something from Moroc-co,
With just a lit-tle bit of sock-o,
“Oh. Well, Springer blew the whistle on our counterfeiting operation. Kind of a little
temporary hitch, you understand.”
“I don’t. You’re supposed to be ace buddies.”
“Not nearly. And he moves in higher orbits.” It is something very complicated having
to do with American yellow-seal scrip being discontinued in the Mediterranean theatre,
with the reluctance of Allied forces here to accept Reichsmarks. Springer has a balance-of-payments
problem too, and he’s been speculating heavily in Sterling, and . . .
“But,” sez Slothrop, “but, uh, where’s my million marks, then, Emil?”
Säure sucks yellow flame flowing over the edge of the bowl. “It is gone where the
woodbine twineth.” Exactly what Jubilee Jim Fisk told the Congressional committee
investigating his and Jay Gould’s scheme to corner gold in 1869. The words are a reminder
of Berkshire. With nothing more than that to go on, it occurs to Slothrop that Säure
can’t possibly be on the Bad Guys’ side. Whoever They are, Their game has been to
extinguish, not remind.
“Well, I can sell by the ounce from what I have,” Slothrop reckons. “For occupation
scrip. That’s stable, isn’t it?”
“You aren’t angry. You really aren’t.”
“Rocketman is above all that shit, Emil.”
“I have a surprise for you. I can get you the Schwarzgerät you asked about.”
“You?”
“Springer. I asked him for you.”
“Quit fooling. Really? Jeepers, that’s so swell of you! How can I—”
“Ten thousand pounds sterling.”
Slothrop loses a whole lungful of smoke. “Thanks Emil. . . .” He tells Säure about
the run-in with Tchitcherine, and also about how he saw that Mickey Rooney.
“Rocketman! Spaceman! Welcome to our virgin planet. We only want to be left in some
kind of peace here, O.K.? If you kill us, don’t eat us. If you eat, don’t digest.
Let us come out the other end again, like diamonds in the shit of smugglers. . . .”
“Look”—remembering now the tip that that Geli gave him long ago in Nordhausen—“did
your pal Springer mention he was hanging out in Swinemünde these days, anyplace like
that?”
“Only the price of your instrument, Rak. Half the money in front. He said it would
cost him at least that much to track it down.”
“So he doesn’t know where it is. Shit, he could have us all on the hook, bidding us
up, hoping somebody’s fool enough to front him some dough.”
“Usually he delivers. You didn’t have any trouble, did you, with that pass he forged?”
“Yaaahhh—” Oh. Oh, wow, aha, yes been meaning to ask you about this little Max Schlepzig
item here— “Now then.” But meantime Trudi has abandoned Gustav in the piano and comes
over now to sit and rub her cheeks against the nap of Slothrop’s trousers, dear naked
legs whispering together, hair spilling, shirt half unbuttoned, and Säure has at some
point rolled over and gone groaning back into sleep. Trudi and Slothrop retire to
a mattress well away from the Bosendorfer. Slothrop settles back sighing, takes his
helmet off and lets big sweet and saftig Trudi have her way with him. His joints are
aching with rain and city wandering, he’s half blitzed, Trudi is kissing him into
an amazing comfort, it’s an open house here, no favored senses or organs, all are
equally at play . . . for possibly the first time in his life Slothrop does not feel
obliged to have a hardon, which is just as well, because it does not seem to be happening
with his penis so much as with . . . oh mercy, this is embarrassing but . . . well
his
nose
actually seems to be erecting, the mucus beginning to flow yes a nasal hardon here
and Trudi has certainly noticed all right, how could she help but . . . as she slides
her lips over the throbbing snoot and sends a yard of torrid tongue up one of his
nostrils . . . he can feel each pink taste-bud as she penetrates even farther, pulling
aside the vestibule walls and nose-hair now to accommodate her head, then shoulders
and . . . well she’s halfway in, might as well—pulling up her knees, crawling using
the hair for hand and footholds she is able to stand at last inside the great red
hall which is quite pleasantly lit, no walls or ceiling she can really discern but
rather a fading to seashell and springtime grades of pink in all directions. . . .
They fall asleep in the roomful of snoring, with low-pitched twangs out of the piano,
and the rain’s million-legged scuttle in the courtyards outside. When Slothrop wakes
up it’s at the height of the Evil Hour, Trudi is in some other room with Gustav rattling
coffee cups, a tortoiseshell cat chases flies by the dirty window. Back beside the
Spree, the White Woman is waiting for Slothrop. He isn’t especially disposed to leave.
Trudi and Gustav come in with coffee and half a reefer, and everybody sits around
gabbing.
Gustav is a composer. For months he has been carrying on a raging debate with Säure
over who is better, Beethoven or Rossini. Säure is for Rossini. “I’m not so much for
Beethoven qua Beethoven,” Gustav argues, “but as he represents the German dialectic,
the incorporation of more and more notes into the scale, culminating with dodecaphonic
democracy, where all notes get an equal hearing. Beethoven was one of the architects
of musical freedom—he submitted to the demands of history, despite his deafness. While
Rossini was retiring at the age of 36, womanizing and getting fat, Beethoven was living
a life filled with tragedy and grandeur.”
“So?” is Säure’s customary answer to that one. “Which would you rather do? The point
is,” cutting off Gustav’s usually indignant scream, “a person feels
good
listening to Rossini. All you feel like listening to Beethoven is going out and invading
Poland. Ode to Joy indeed. The man didn’t even have a sense of humor. I tell you,”
shaking his skinny old fist, “there is more of the Sublime in the snare-drum part
to
La Gazza Ladra
than in the whole Ninth Symphony. With Rossini, the whole point is that lovers always
get together, isolation is overcome, and like it or not that is the one great centripetal
movement of the World. Through the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse
of power,
love occurs.
All the shit is transmuted to gold. The walls are breached, the balconies are scaled—listen!”
It was a night in early May, and the final bombardment of Berlin was in progress.
Säure had to shout his head off. “The Italian girl is in Algiers, the Barber’s in
the crockery, the magpie’s stealing everything in sight! The World is rushing together. . . .”
This rainy morning, in the quiet, it seems that Gustav’s German Dialectic has come
to its end. He has just had the word, all the way from Vienna along some musicians’
grapevine, that Anton Webern is dead. “Shot in May, by the Americans. Senseless, accidental
if you believe in accidents—some mess cook from North Carolina, some late draftee
with a .45 he hardly knew how to use, too late for WW II, but not for Webern. The
excuse for raiding the house was that Webern’s brother was in the black market. Who
isn’t? Do you know what kind of myth
that’s
going to make in a thousand years? The young barbarians coming in to murder the Last
European, standing at the far end of what’d been going on since Bach, an expansion
of music’s polymorphous perversity till all notes were truly equal at last. . . .
Where was there to go after Webern? It was the moment of maximum freedom. It all had
to come down. Another Götterdämmerung—”
“Young fool,” Säure now comes cackling in from out in Berlin, trailing a pillowcase
full of flowering tops just in from that North Africa. He’s a mess—red-drenched eyes,
fatbaby arms completely hairless, fly open and half the buttons gone, white hair and
blue shirt both streaked with some green horrible scum. “Fell in a shell-hole. Here,
quick, roll up some of this.”
“What do you mean, ‘young fool,’” inquires Gustav.