Authors: Thomas Pynchon
“Philosopher.” She is smiling. “You were never like that.”
“It must have come from always being in motion. I’ve never felt
this stillness. . . .”
They are touching now, without urgency, still, neither of them, quite over the surprise. . . .
“My little brother” (Pirate understands the connection she has made) “left home at
18. I liked to watch him sleeping at night. His long eyelashes . . . so innocent . . .
I watched for hours. . . . He got as far as Antwerp. Before long he was loitering
around parish churches with the rest of them. Do you know what I mean? Young, Catholic
males. Camp followers. They got to depend on alcohol, many of them, at an early age.
They would choose a particular priest, and become his faithful dog—literally wait
all night at his doorstep in order to talk to him fresh from his bed, his linen, the
intimate smells that had not yet escaped the folds of his garment . . . insane jealousies,
daily jostling for position, for the favors of this Father or that. Louis began to
attend Rexist meetings. He went out to a soccer field and heard Degrelle tell the
crowd that they must let themselves be swept away by the flood, they must act, act,
and let the rest take care of itself. Soon my brother was out in the street with his
broom, along with the other guilty sarcastic young men with their brooms in their
hands . . . and then he had joined Rex, the ‘realm of total souls,’ and the last I
heard he was in Antwerp living with an older man named Philippe. I lost track of him.
We were very close at one time. People took us for twins. When the heavy rocket attacks
began against Antwerp I knew it could not be an accident. . . .”
Yes well Pirate’s Chapel himself. “But I’ve wondered about the solidarity of your
Church . . . you kneel, and she takes care of you . . . when you are acting politically,
to have all that common momentum, taking you upward—”
“You never had that either, did you.” She’s been looking really
at him
—“none of the marvelous excuses.
We did everything ourselves.
”
No, there’s no leaving shame after all—not down here—it has to be swallowed sharp-edged
and ugly, and lived with in pain, every day.
Without considering, he is in her arms. It isn’t for comfort. But if he is to keep
dragging himself up the ratchet’s teeth one by one he does need to pause in human
touch for a bit. “What did it look like out there, Katje? I saw an organized convention.
Someone else saw it as a garden. . . .” But he knows what she’ll say.
“There was nothing out there. It was a barren place. I’d been most of the day looking
for a sign of life. Then at last I heard you all in here.” So they have wandered to
a balcony, a graceful railing, no one can see them from inside or out: and below them
in the streets, streets they have both lost now, are the People. There passes for
Pirate and Katje a brief segment of a much longer chronicle, the anonymous
How I Came to Love the People.
“Her name was Brenda, her face was the bird under the protecting grin of the car
in the rain that morning, she knelt and performed fellatio on me, and I ejaculated
on her breasts. Her name was Lily, she was 67 last August, she reads off the labels
of beer bottles to herself out loud, we coupled in the standard English position,
and she patted me on the back and whispered, ‘Good friend.’ His name was Frank, his
hair curled away from his face, his eyes were rather sharp but pleasant, he stole
from American Army depots, he bum-fucked me and when he came inside me, so did I.
Her name was Frangibella, she was black, her face was broken out, she wanted money
for dope, her openness was a viper writhing in my heart, I performed cunnilingus upon
her. His name was Allan, his buttocks were tanned, I said, where did you find the
sun, he answered, the sun is just around the corner, I held him over the pillow and
buggered him and he cried with love till I, my piston pungently greased, exploded
at last. Her name was Nancy, she was six, we went behind a wall near a crater full
of ruins, she rubbed and rubbed against me, her milky little thighs reaching in and
out of my own, her eyes were closed, her fair little nostrils moved upward, backward
forever, the slope of debris rushed down, steeply, just beside us, we teetered at
the edge, on and on, exquisitely. Her name was—” well, all these and many more pass
for our young couple here, enough to make them understand that horny Anonymous’s intentions
are nothing less than a megalomaniac master plan of sexual love with every individual
one of the People in the
World
—and that when every one, somewhat miraculously, is accounted for at last,
that
will be a rough definition of “loving the People.”
“Take that, you frauds out there in the Branches,” Pirate wants to strike a humorous
note, but doesn’t. He is holding Katje now as if, in a moment, music will start, and
they would dance.
“But the People will never love you,” she whispers, “or me. However bad and good are
arranged for them, we will
always
be bad. Do you know where that puts us?”
He does smile, crookedly as a man being theatrical about something for the very first
time. Knowing it for a move there’s to be no going back from, in the same terminal
class as reaching for a gun, he turns his face upward, and looks up through all the
faintly superimposed levels above, the milieux of every sort of criminal soul, every
unpleasant commercial color from aquamarine to beige, desolate as sunlight on a day
when you’d rather have rain, all the clanging enterprise and bustle of all those levels,
extending further than Pirate or Katje can see for the moment, he lifts his long,
his guilty, his permanently enslaved face to the illusion of sky, to the reality of
pressure and weight from overhead, the hardness and absolute cruelty of it, while
she presses her own face into the easy lowland between his shoulder and pectoral,
a look on her face of truce, of horror come to a détente with, and as a sunset proceeds,
the kind that changes the faces of buildings to light gray for a while, to an ashy
soft chaff of light bleating over their outward curves, in the strangely forgelike
glow in the west, the anxiety of pedestrians staring in the tiny storefront window
at the dim goldsmith behind his fire at his work and paying them no attention, afraid
because the light looks like it’s going to go away forever this time, and more afraid
because the failure of light is not a private thing,
everyone else in the street has seen it too . . .
as it grows darker, the orchestra inside this room does, as a matter of fact, strike
up a tune, dry and astringent . . . and candelabra have been lighted after all . . .
there is Veal Florentine ripening in the ovens tonight, there are drinks on the House,
and drunks in the hammocks,
And all the world’s busy, this twi-light!
Who knows what morning-streets, our shoes have known?
Who knows, how many friends, we’ve left, to cry alone?
We have a moment together,
We’ll hum this tune for a day . . .
Ev’ryone’s dancing, in twi-light,
Dancing the bad dream a-way. . . .
And they do dance: though Pirate never could before, very well . . . they feel quite
in touch with all the others as they move, and if they are never to be at full ease,
still it’s not parade rest any longer . . . so they dissolve now, into the race and
swarm of this dancing Preterition, and their faces, the dear, comical faces they have
put on for this ball, fade, as innocence fades, grimly flirtatious, and striving to
be kind. . . .
• • • • • • •
Fog thickens down the throats of the narrow gassen. In the air is a smell of salt
water. The cobbled streets are wet with last night’s rain. Slothrop wakes up in a
burned-out locksmith’s shop, under racks of sooty keys whose locks have all been lost.
He stumbles out, finds a pump in a courtyard between brick walls and casement windows
nobody stares out of, puts his head under the spout and pumps the pump, soaking his
head for as long as he thinks he needs to. A ginger cat, meowing for breakfast, comes
stalking him, doorway to doorway. “Sorry, Ace.” Doesn’t look like breakfast for either
of them.
He hitches up Tchitcherine’s pants and heads out of town, leaving the blunt towers,
the domes of copper corroded green swimming up in the mist, the high gables and red
tiles, gets a ride with a woman driving an empty farm wagon. The horse’s sandy forelock
bobs and blows, and the fog settles in behind.
This morning it looks like what Vikings must have seen, sailing this great water-meadow
south, clear to Byzantium, all eastern Europe their open sea: the farmland rolls gray
and green as waves . . . ponds and lakes seem to have no clear boundaries . . . the
sight of other people against this ocean sky, even the military, comes welcome as
sails after long days of passage. . . .
The Nationalities are on the move. It is a great frontierless streaming out here.
Volksdeutsch from across the Oder, moved out by the Poles and headed for the camp
at Rostock, Poles fleeing the Lublin regime, others going back home, the eyes of both
parties, when they do meet, hooded behind cheekbones, eyes much older than what’s
forced them into moving, Estonians, Letts, and Lithuanians trekking north again, all
their wintry wool in dark bundles, shoes in tatters, songs too hard to sing, talk
pointless, Sudetens and East Prussians shuttling between Berlin and the DP camps in
Mecklenburg, Czechs and Slovaks, Croats and Serbs, Tosks and Ghegs, Macedonians, Magyars,
Vlachs, Circassians, Spaniols, Bulgars stirred and streaming over the surface of the
Imperial cauldron, colliding, shearing alongside for miles, sliding away, numb, indifferent
to all momenta but the deepest, the instability too far below their itchy feet to
give a shape to, white wrists and ankles incredibly wasted poking from their striped
prison-camp pajamas, footsteps light as waterfowl’s in this inland dust, caravans
of Gypsies, axles or linchpins failing, horses dying, families leaving the vehicles
beside the roads for others to come live in a night, a day, over the white hot Autobahns,
trains full of their own hanging off the cars that lumber overhead, squeezing aside
for army convoys when they come through, White Russians sour with pain on the way
west, Kazakh ex-P/Ws marching east, Wehrmacht veterans from other parts of old Germany,
foreigners to Prussia as any Gypsies, carrying their old packs, wrapped in the army
blankets they kept, pale green farmworker triangles sewn chest-high on each blouse
bobbing, drifting, at a certain hour of the dusk, like candleflames in religious procession—supposed
to be heading today for Hannover, supposed to pick potatoes along the way, they’ve
been chasing these nonexistent potato fields now for a month—“Plundered,” a one-time
bugler limps along with a long splinter of railroad tie for a cane, his instrument,
implausibly undented and shiny, swinging from one shoulder, “stripped by the SS, Bruder,
ja, every fucking potato field, and what for? Alcohol. Not to drink, no, alcohol for
the rockets. Potatoes we could have been eating, alcohol we could have been drinking.
It’s unbelievable.” “What, the rockets?” “No! The SS, picking potatoes!” looking around
for his laugh. But there are none here to follow the brass and flourish of his less
solemn heart. They were infantrymen, and know how to snooze between footfalls—at some
hour of the morning they will fall out by the side of the road, a moment’s precipitate
out of the road chemurgy of these busy nights, while the invisible boiling goes on
by, the long strewn vortices—pinstripe suits with crosses painted on the back, ragged
navy and army uniforms, white turbans, mismatched socks or none, Tattersall dresses,
thick-knitted shawls with babies inside, women in army trousers split at the knees,
flea-bitten and barking dogs that run in packs, prams piled high with light furnishings
in scarred veneer, hand-mortised drawers that will never fit into anything again,
looted chickens alive and dead, horns and violins in weathered black cases, bedspreads,
harmoniums, grandfather clocks, kits full of tools for carpentry, watchmaking, leatherwork,
surgery, paintings of pink daughters in white frocks, of saints bleeding, of salmon
and purple sunsets over the sea, packs stuffed with beady-eyed boas, dolls smiling
out of violently red lips, Allgeyer soldiers an inch and a quarter to the man painted
cream, gold and blue, handfuls of hundred-year-old agates soaked in honey that sweetened
greatgrandfather tongues long gone to dust, then into sulfuric acid to char the sugar
in bands, brown to black, across the stone, deathless piano performances punched on
Vorsetzer rolls, ribboned black lingerie, flowered and grape-crested silverware, faceted
lead-glass decanters, tulip-shaped Jugendstil cups, strings of amber beads . . . so
the populations move, across the open meadow, limping, marching, shuffling, carried,
hauling along the detritus of an order, a European and bourgeois order they don’t
yet know is destroyed forever.
When Slothrop has cigarettes he’s an easy mark, when somebody has food they share
it—sometimes a batch of vodka if there’s an army concentration nearby, the GI cans
can be looted for all kinds of useful produce, potato peels, melon rinds, pieces of
candy bars for sugar, no telling what’s going to go into these DP stills, what you
end up drinking is the throwaway fraction of some occupying power. Slothrop drifts
in and out of dozens of these quiet, hungry, scuffling migrations, each time getting
hard Benzedrine jitters off of the faces—there aren’t any he can really ignore, is
the problem, they’re all too
strong
, like faces of a racetrack crowd, each one urging
No, me—look at me, be touched, reach for your camera, your weapon, your cock. . . .
He’s stripped all the insignia off Tchitcherine’s uniform, trying for less visibility,
but very few people seem to care much about insignia. . . .
Much of the time he’s alone. He’ll come on farmhouses, deserted in the night, and
will sleep in the hay, or if there’s a mattress (not often) in a bed. Wake to sun
glittering off some small lake surrounded by green salted with blossoms of thyme or
mustard, a salad hillside, sweeping up to pines in the mist. Sapling tomato-frames
and purple foxgloves in the yards, huge birds’ nests built up under the eaves of the
thatched roofs, bird-choruses in the morning, and soon, one day, as the summer turns
ponderously in the sky, the clang of cranes, on the move.