Gravity's Rainbow (81 page)

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They have set out by barge along the Spree-Oder Canal, headed at last for Swinemünde,
Slothrop to see what Geli Tripping’s clew will lead him to in the way of a Schwarzgerät,
Margherita to rendezvous with a yachtful of refugees from the Lublin regime, among
whom ought to be her daughter Bianca. Stretches of the canal are still blocked—in
the night Russian demolition crews can be heard blasting away the wrecks with TNT—but
Slothrop and Greta can summon, like dreamers, draft shallow enough to clear whatever
the War has left in their way. Off and on it rains. The sky will begin to cloud up
about noon, turning the color of wet cement—then wind, sharpening, colder, then rain
that must be often at the edge of sleet, blowing at them head-on up the canal. They
shelter under tarps, among bales and barrels, tar, wood and straw smells. When the
nights are clear, peepers-and-frogs nights, star-streaks and shadows at canalside
will set travelers’ eyes to jittering. Willows line the banks. At midnight coils of
fog rise to dim out even the glow of the bargee’s pipe, far away up, or down, the
dreaming convoy. These nights, fragrant and grained as pipesmoke, are tranquil and
good for sleep. The Berlin madness is behind, Greta seems less afraid, perhaps all
they needed was to be on the move. . . .

But one afternoon, sliding down the long mild slope of the Oder toward the Baltic
Sea, they catch sight of a little red and white resort town, wiped through in broad
smudges by the War, and she clutches to Slothrop’s arm.

“I’ve been here . . .”

“Yeah?”

“Just before the Polish invasion . . . I was here with Sigmund . . . at the spa. . . .”

On shore, behind cranes and steel railings, rise fronts of what were restaurants,
small factories, hotels, burned now, windowless, powdered with their own substance.
The name of the town is Bad Karma. Rain from earlier in the day has streaked the walls,
the pinnacles of waste and the coarse-cobbled lanes. Children and old men stand on
shore waiting to take lines and warp the barges in. Black dumplings of smoke are floating
up out of the stack of a white river steamer. Shipfitters are slamming inside its
hull. Greta stares at it. A pulse is visible in her throat. She shakes her head. “I
thought it was Bianca’s ship, but it isn’t.”

In close to the quay, they swing ashore, grabbing on to an iron ladder held in the
old stone by rusted bolts, each one staining the wall downward in a wet sienna fan.
On Margherita’s jacket a pink gardenia has begun to shake. It isn’t the wind. She
keeps saying, “I have to see. . . .”

Old men are leaning on railings, smoking pipes, watching Greta or looking out at the
river. They wear gray clothes, wide-bottom trousers, wide-brim hats with rounded crowns.
The market square is busy and neat: tram tracks gleam, there’s a smell of fresh hosing
down. In the ruins lilacs bleed their color, their surplus life out over the broken
stone and brick.

Except for a few figures in black, sitting out in the sun, the Spa itself is deserted.
Margherita by now is spooked as badly as she ever was in Berlin. Slothrop tags along,
in his Rocketman turnout, feeling burdened. The Sprudelhof is bounded on one side
by a sand-colored arcade: sand columns and brown shadows. A strip just in front is
planted to cypresses. Fountains in massive stone bowls are leaping: jets 20 feet high,
whose shadows across the smooth paving of the courtyard are thick and nervous.

But who’s that, standing so rigid by the central spring? And why has Margherita turned
to stone? The sun is out, there are others watching, but even Slothrop now is bristling
along his back and flanks, chills flung one on the fading cluster of another, up under
each side of his jaw . . . the woman is wearing a black coat, a crepe scarf covering
her hair, the flesh of thick calves showing through her black stockings as nearly
purple, she is only leaning over the waters in a very fixed way and watching them
as they try to approach . . . but the
smile
 . . . across ten meters of swept courtyard, the smile growing confident in the very
white face, all the malaise of a Europe dead and gone gathered here in the eyes black
as her clothing, black and lightless.
She knows them.
Greta has turned, and tries to hide her face in Slothrop’s shoulder. “By the well,”
is she whispering this? “at sundown, that woman in black. . . .”

“Come on. It’s all right.” Back to Berlin talk. “She’s just a patient here.” Idiot,
idiot—before he can stop her she’s pulled away, some quiet, awful cry in the back
of her throat, and turned and begun to run, a desperate tattoo of high heels across
the stone, into the shadowed arches of the Kurhaus.

“Hey,” Slothrop, feeling queasy, accosts the woman in black. “What’s the big idea,
lady?”

But her face has changed by now, it is only the face of another woman of the ruins,
one he would have ignored, passed over. She smiles, all right, but in the forced and
business way he knows. “Zigaretten, bitte?” He gives her a long stub he’s been saving,
and goes looking for Margherita.

He finds the arcade empty. All the doors of the Kurhaus are locked. Overhead passes
a skylight of yellow panes, many of them fallen out. Down the corridor, fuzzy patches
of afternoon sun stagger along, full of mortar dust. He climbs a broken flight of
steps that end in the sky. Odd chunks of stone clutter the way. From the landing at
the top, the Spa stretches to country distances: handsome trees, graveyard clouds,
the blue river. Greta is nowhere in sight. Later he will figure out where it was she
went. By then they will be well on board the
Anubis
, and it will only make him feel more helpless.

He keeps looking for her till the darkness is down and he’s come back by the river
again. He sits at an open-air café strung with yellow lights, drinking beer, eating
spaetzle and soup, waiting. When she materializes it is a shy fade-in, as Gerhardt
von Göll must have brought her on a time or two, not moving so much as Slothrop’s
own vantage swooping to her silent closeup stabilized presently across from him, finishing
his beer, bumming a cigarette. Not only does she avoid the subject of the woman by
the spring, she may have lost the memory already.

“I went up in the observatory,” is what she has to say finally, “to look down the
river. She’s coming. I saw the boat she’s on. It’s only a kilometer away.”

“The what now?”

“Bianca, my child, and my friends. I thought they’d have been in Swinemünde long ago.
But then nobody’s on timetables any more. . . .”

Sure enough, after two more bitter cups of acorn coffee and another cigarette, here
comes a cheerful array of lights, red, green, and white, down the river, with the
faint wheeze of an accordion, the thump of a string bass, and the sound of women laughing.
Slothrop and Greta walk down to the quay, and through mist now beginning to seep up
off the river they can make out an ocean-going yacht, nearly the color of the mist,
a gilded winged jackal under the bowsprit, the weather-decks crowded with chattering
affluent in evening dress. Several people have spotted Margherita. She waves, and
they point or wave back, and call her name. It is a moving village: all summer it
has been sailing these lowlands just as Viking ships did a thousand years ago, though
passively, not marauding: seeking an escape it has not yet defined clearly.

The boat comes in to the quay, the crew lower an access ladder. Smiling passengers
halfway down are already stretching out gloved and ringed hands to Margherita.

“Are you coming?”

“Uh . . . Well, should I?”

She shrugs and turns her back, steps gingerly off the landing and on board, skirt
straining and glossy a moment in the yellow light from the café. Slothrop dithers,
goes to follow her—at the last moment some joker pulls the ladder up and the boat
moves away, Slothrop screams, loses his balance and falls in the river. Head first:
the Rocketman helmet is pulling him straight down. He tugs it off and comes up, sinuses
burning and vision blurred, the white vessel sliding away, though the churning screws
are moving his direction, beginning to suck at the cape, so he has to get rid of that,
too. He backstrokes away and then cautiously around the counter, lettered in black:
ANUBIS
, trying to keep away from those screws. Down the other side he spots a piece of line
hanging, and manages to get over there and grab hold. The band up on deck is playing
polkas. Three drunken ladies in tiaras and pearl chokers are lounging at the lifelines,
watching Slothrop struggle up the rope. “Let’s cut it,” yells one of them, “and see
him fall
in
again!” “Yes, let’s!” agree her companions. Jesus Christ. One of them has produced
a huge meat cleaver, and is winding up all right, amid much vivacious laughing, at
about which point somebody grabs hold of Slothrop’s ankle. He looks down, observes
sticking out a porthole two slender wrists in silver and sapphires, lighted from inside
like ice, and the oily river rushing by underneath.

“In here.” A girl’s voice. He slides back down while she tugs on his feet, till he’s
sitting in the porthole. From above comes a heavy thump, the rope goes falling and
the ladies into hysterics. Slothrop squirms on inside, water squeegeeing off, falls
into an upper bunk next to a girl maybe 18 in a long sequined gown, with hair blonde
to the point of pure whiteness, and the first cheekbones Slothrop can recall getting
a hardon looking at. Something has definitely been happening to his brain out here,
all right. . . .

“Uh—”

“Mmm.” They look at each other while he continues to drip water all over. Her name,
it turns out, is Stefania Procalowska. Her husband Antoni is owner of the
Anubis
here.

Well, husband, all right. “Look at this,” sez Slothrop, “I’m soaking wet.”

“I noticed. Somebody’s evening clothes ought to fit you. Dry off, I’ll go see what
I can promote. You can use the head if you want, everything’s there.”

He strips off the rest of the Rocketman rig, takes a shower, using lemon verbena soap
in which he finds a couple of Stefania’s white pubic hairs, and is shaving when she
gets back with dry clothes for him.

“So you’re with Margherita.”

“Not sure about that ‘with.’ She find that kid of hers?”

“Oh indeed—they’re already deep into it with Karel. This month he’s posing as a film
producer. You know Karel. And of course
she
wants to get Bianca into the films worse than anything.”

“Uh . . .”

Stefania shrugs a lot, and every sequin dances. “Margherita wants her to have a legitimate
career. It’s guilt. She never felt her own career was anything more than a string
of dirty movies. I suppose you heard about how she got pregnant with Bianca.”

“Max Schlepzig, or something.”

“Or something, right. You never saw
Alpdrücken
? In that one scene, after the Grand Inquisitor gets through, the jackal men come
in to ravish and dismember the captive baroness. Von Göll let the cameras run right
on. The footage got cut out for the release prints of course, but found its way into
Goebbels’s private collection. I’ve seen it—it’s frightening. Every man in the scene
wears a black hood, or an animal mask . . . back at Bydgoszcz it became an amusing
party game to speculate on who the child’s father was. One has to pass the time. They’d
run the film and ask Bianca questions, and she had to answer yes or no.”

“Yup.” Slothrop goes on dousing his face with bay rum.

“Oh, Margherita had her corrupted long before she came to stay with us. I wouldn’t
be surprised if little Bianca sleeps with Karel tonight. Part of breaking into the
business, isn’t it? Of course it will have to be all business—that’s the least a mother
can do. Margherita’s problem was that she always enjoyed it too much, chained up in
those torture rooms. She couldn’t enjoy it any other way. You’ll see. She and Thanatz.
And whatever Thanatz brought in his valise.”

“Thanatz.”

“Ah, she didn’t tell you.” Laughing. “Miklos Thanatz, her husband. They get together
off and on. Toward the end of the war they had a little touring show for the boys
at the front—a lesbian couple, a dog, a trunk of leather costumes and implements,
a small band. They entertained the SS troops. Concentration camps . . . the barbed-wire
circuit, you know. And then later, in Holland, out at the rocket sites. This is the
first time since the surrender they’ve been together, so I wouldn’t actually expect
to see too much of her. . . .”

“Oh, yeah, well, I didn’t know that.” Rocket sites? The hand of Providence creeps
among the stars, giving Slothrop the finger.

“While they were away, they left Bianca with us, at Bydgoszcz. She has her bitchy
moments but she’s really a charming child. I never played the father game with her.
I doubt she had a father. It was parthenogenesis, she’s pure Margherita, if pure is
the word I want.”

The evening clothes fit perfectly. Stefania leads Slothrop up a companionway and out
on deck. The
Anubis
moves now through starlit countryside, the horizon broken now and then by silhouettes
of a windmill, haycocks, a row of pig arks, some line of trees set on a low hill for
the wind. . . . There are ships we can dream across terrible rapids, against currents . . .
our desire is wind and motor. . . .