Authors: Thomas Pynchon
Margherita collapsed by the edge of the great lightless pool. Morituri knelt beside
her while she cried. It was terrible. What had brought him there, what had understood
and moved in so automatically, fell back now to sleep. His conditioning, his verbal,
ranked and uniformed self took over again. He knelt shivering, more afraid than he’d
ever been in his life. It was she who led their way back to the Spa.
She and Sigmund left Bad Karma that night. The boy may have been too frightened, the
light too faint, Morituri himself may have had strong protectors, for God knows he
was visible enough there—but no police came. “It never occurred to me to go to them.
In my heart, I knew she had murdered. You may condemn me for it. But I saw what I’d
be handing her over to, and it came to the same thing, in official custody or not,
you see.” The next day was 1 September. There was no longer any way for children to
vanish mysteriously.
The forenoon has gone dark. Rain spits in under the awning. The bowl of porridge has
stayed after all untouched in front of Morituri. Slothrop is sweating, staring at
the bright remains of an orange. “Listen,” it has occurred to his agile brain, “what
about Bianca, then? Is she going to be safe with that Greta, do you think?”
Frisking his great mustache, “What do you mean? Are you asking, ‘Can she be saved?’”
“Oh, pip, pip, old Jap, come off it—”
“Look, what can
you
save her from?” His eyes are prying Slothrop away from his comfort. Rain is drumming
now on the awnings, spilling in clear lacework from the edges.
“But wait a minute. Oh, shit, that
woman
yesterday, in that Sprudelhof—”
“Yes. Remember Greta also saw you coming up out of the river. Now think of all the
folklore among these people about radioactivity—these travelers from spa to spa, season
after season. It’s grace. It’s the holy waters of Lourdes. This mysterious radiation
that can cure so much—might it be the
ultimate
cure?”
“Uh . . .”
“I watched her face as you came aboard. I was with her at the edge of one radioactive
night. I know what she saw this time. One of those children—preserved, nourished by
the mud, the radium, growing taller and stronger while slowly, viscous and slow, the
currents bore him along underground, year by year, until at last, grown to manhood,
he came to the river, came up out of the black radiance of herself to find her again,
Shekhinah, bride, queen, daughter. And mother. Motherly as sheltering mud and glowing
pitchblende—”
Almost directly overhead, thunder suddenly breaks in a blinding egg of sound. Somewhere
inside the blast, Slothrop has murmured, “Quit fooling.”
“Are you going to risk finding out?”
Who is this, oh
sure
it’s a Jap ensign, looking at me like this. But where are Bianca’s arms, her defenseless
mouth. . . . “Well in a day or two we’ll be in Swinemünde, right?” talking to keep
from—get up from the table then, you asshole—
“We’ll all just keep moving, that’s all. In the end it doesn’t matter.”
“Look, you’ve got kids, how can you say that? Is that all you want, just to ‘keep
moving’?”
“I want to see the war over in the Pacific so that I can go home. Since you ask. It’s
the season of the plum rains now, the Bai-u, when all the plums are ripening. I want
only to be with Michiko and our girls, and once I’m there, never to leave Hiroshima
again. I think you’d like it there. It’s a city on Honshu, on the Inland Sea, very
pretty, a perfect size, big enough for city excitement, small enough for the serenity
a man needs. But these people are not returning, they are leaving their homes you
see—”
But one of the knots securing the rain-heavy awning to its frame has given way, white
small-stuff unlacing rapidly, whipping around in the rain. The awning sags, funneling
rainwater at Slothrop and Morituri, and they flee below decks.
They get separated in a crowd of newly-risen roisterers. There is hardly a thing now
in Slothrop’s head but getting to Bianca. At the end of the passageway, across a score
of empty faces, he spots Stefania in white cardigan and slacks, beckoning. It takes
him five minutes to thread his way to her, by which time he’s picked up a brandy Alexander,
a party hat, a sign taped to his back urging whoever reads it, in Low Pomeranian,
to kick Slothrop, lipstick smudges in three shades of magenta, and a black Italian
maduro someone has thoughtfully already lit.
“You may look like the soul of conviviality,” Stefania greets him, “but it doesn’t
fool me. Under that cheerful mask is the face of a Jonah.”
“You mean, uh, the, uh—”
“I mean Margherita. She’s locked herself in the head. Hysterical. Nobody can bring
her out.”
“So you’re looking at me. How about Thanatz?”
“Thanatz has disappeared, and so has Bianca.”
“Oh, shit.”
“Margherita thinks you’ve done away with her.”
“Not me.” He gives her a quick rundown of Ensign Morituri’s tale. Some of her élan,
her resilience, go away. She bites a fingernail.
“Yes, there were rumors. Sigmund, before he vanished, leaked just enough to titillate
people, but never got specific. That was his style. Listen, Slothrop. Do you think
Bianca’s in any danger?”
“I’ll try to find out.” He is interrupted here by a swift kick in the ass.
“Unlucky you,” crows a voice behind them. “I’m the only one on board who reads Low
Pomeranian.”
“Unlucky you,” Stefania nods.
“All I wanted was a free ride to Swinemünde.”
But like Stefania sez, “There’s only one free ride. Meantime, start working off the
fare for this one. Go see Margherita.”
“You want
me
to—come on.”
“We don’t want anything to happen.”
One of the General Orders aboard this vessel. Nothing shall happen. Well, Slothrop
politely sticks the rest of his cigar between Mme. Procalowska’s teeth and leaves
her puffing on it, fists jammed in her sweater pockets.
Bianca isn’t in the engine room. He moves around in pulsing bulb-light, among asbestos-packed
masses, burning himself once or twice where insulation’s missing, looking into pale
recesses, shadows, wondering about his own insulation here. Nothing but machinery,
noise. He heads for the ladder. A scrap of red is waiting for him . . . no, only her
frock, with a damp trace of his own semen still at the hem . . . this loud humidity
has kept it there. He crouches, holding the garment, smelling her smell. I’m a child,
I know how to hide, and I can hide you. “Bianca,” he calls, “Bianca, come out.”
Gathered about the door to the head, he finds an assortment of upper-class layabouts
and drunks blocking the passageway along with a litter of bottles and glassware, and
a seated circle of cocaine habitués, crystal birds flying up into forests of nose
hair off the point of a gold and ruby dagger. Slothrop pushes through, leans on the
door and calls Margherita’s name.
“Go away.”
“You don’t have to come out. Just let me in.”
“I know who you are.”
“Please.”
“They were very clever, sending you as poor Max. But it won’t work now.”
“I’m through with Them. I swear it. I need you, Greta.” Bullshit. For what?
“They’ll kill you, then. Go away.”
“I know where Bianca is.”
“What have you done with her?”
“Just—will you let me in?” After a full minute’s silence, she does. A funseeker or
two tries to push in, but he slams the door and locks it again. Greta is wearing nothing
but a black chemise. Strokes of black hair curl high on her thighs. Her face is white,
old, strained.
“Where is she?”
“Hiding.”
“From me?”
“From Them.”
A quick look at him. Too many mirrors, razors, scissors, lights. Too white. “But
you’re
one of Them.”
“Quit it, you know I’m not.”
“You are. You came up out of the river.”
“Well, that’s cause I fell
in
, Greta.”
“Then They made you.”
He watches her playing, nervous, with strands of her hair. The
Anubis
has begun to rock some, but the sickness rising in him is for his head, not his stomach.
As she begins to talk, nausea begins to fill him: a glowing black mudslide of nausea. . . .
• • • • • • •
It was always easy for men to come and tell her who to be. Other girls of her generation
grew up asking, “Who am I?” For them it was a question full of pain and struggle.
For Gretel it was hardly even a question. She had more identities than she knew what
to do with. Some of these Gretels have been only the sketchiest of surfaces—others
are deeper. Many have incredible gifts, antigravity, dreams of prophecy . . . comatic
images surround their faces, glowing in the air: the light itself is actually crying
tears, weeping in this stylized way, as she is borne along through the mechanical
cities, the meteorite walls draped in midair, every hollow and socket empty as a bone,
and the failing shadow that shines black all around it . . . or is held in staring
postures, long gowns, fringe and alchemical symbol, veils flowing from leather skullcaps
padded concentric as a bike-racer’s helmet, with crackling-tower and obsidian helix,
with drive belts and rollers, with strange airship passages that thread underneath
arches, solemnly, past louvers and giant fins in the city mist. . . .
In
Weisse Sandwüste von Neumexiko
she played a cowgirl. First thing, they’d asked, “Can you ride?” “Of course,” she’d
answered. Never been closer than roadside ditches in time of war to any horse in her
life, but she needed the work. When the moment came to saddle up, it never occurred
to her to be afraid of the beast pressing up between her thighs. It was an American
horse named Snake. Trained or not, it could have run away with her, even killed her.
But they pranced the screen full of the Sagittarian fire, Gretel and that colt, and
her smile never drew back.
Here is one of the veils she has shed, a thin white scum, a caustic residue from one
recent night in Berlin. “While you were asleep, I left the house. I went out in the
street, without my shoes. I found a corpse. A man. A week’s gray beard and old gray
suit. . . .” It was lying still and very white behind a wall. She lay down beside
it and put her arms around it. There was frost. The body rolled toward her and the
wrinkles stayed frozen in the cloth. She felt its bristled face rub her own cheek.
The smell was no worse than cold meat from the icebox. She lay, holding it, till morning.
“Tell me how it is in your land.” What woke her? Boots in the street, an early steamshovel.
She can hardly hear her tired whispering.
Corpse answers: “We live very far beneath the black mud. Days of traveling.” Though
she couldn’t move its limbs easily as a doll’s, she could make it say and think exactly
what she wished.
For an instant too she did wonder—not quite in words—if that’s how her own soft mind
might feel, under the fingers of Those who . . .
“Mm, it’s snug down here. Now and then you can pick up something from Them—a distant
rumbling, the implied silhouette of some explosion, conducted here through the earth
overhead . . . but nothing, ever,
too close.
It’s so dark that things glow. We have flight. There’s no sex. But there are fantasies,
even many of those we used to attach to sex—that we once modulated its energy with. . . .”
As the dizzy debutante Lotte Lüstig, she found herself during a flood, disguised as
a scrubwoman, proceeding downriver in a bathtub with rich playboy Max Schlepzig. Every
girl’s dream. Name of the movie was
Jugend Herauf!
(a lighthearted pun, of course, on the then popular phrase “Juden heraus!”). Actually,
all the bathtub scenes were process shots—she never did get to go out
on the river
in the bathtub with Max, all that was done with doubles, and in the final print it
survives only as a very murky long shot. The figures are darkened and deformed, resembling
apes, and the quality of the light is peculiar, as if the whole scene were engraved
on a dark metal such as lead. Greta’s double was actually an Italian stunt man named
Blazzo in a long blonde wig. They carried on a romance for a while. But Greta wouldn’t
go to bed with him, unless he wore that
wig!
Out on the river the rain lashes: the rapids can now be heard approaching, still impossible
to see, but real, and inevitable. And the doubles both experience an odd, ticklish
fear now that perhaps they are really lost, and that there is really no camera on
shore behind the fine gray scribbling of willows . . . all the crew, sound-men, grips,
gaffers have left . . . or never even arrived . . . and what was that the currents
just brought to knock against our snow-white cockle shell? and what was that thud,
so stiffened and so mute?
Bianca is usually silver, or of no color at all: thousands of times taken, strained
through glass, warped in and out the violet-bleeding interfaces of Double and Triple
Protars, Schneider Angulons, Voigtländer Collinears, Steinheil Orthostigmats, the
Gundlach Turner-Reichs of 1895. For Greta it is her daughter’s soul each time, an
inexhaustible soul. . . . This scarf of an only child, tucked in waist-high, always
out vulnerable to the wind. To call her an extension of her mother’s ego is of course
to invite the bitterest sarcasm. But it’s possible, now and then, for Greta to see
Bianca in other children, ghostly as a double exposure . . . clearly yes very clearly
in Gottfried, the young pet and protégé of Captain Blicero.
“Pull down my straps for a moment. Is it dark enough? Look. Thanatz said they were
luminous. That he knew each one by heart. They’re very white today, aren’t they? Hmm.
Long and white, like cobwebs. They’re on my ass too. Around the insides of my thighs. . . .”
Many times, afterward, after the blood had stopped and he had put on the alcohol,
Thanatz would sit with her lying across his knees, and read the scars down her back,
as a gypsy reads a palm. Life-scar, heart-scar. Croix mystique. What fortunes and
fantasies! He was so exalted, after the whippings. So taken away by the idea that
they
would
win out, escape. He’d fall asleep before the wildness and hope had quite left him.
She loved him most at those moments, just before sleep, her own dorsal side aflame,
his little head heavy on her breast, while scar-tissue formed silently on her, cell
by cell, in the night. She felt almost safe. . . .