Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

  . . . shows good hands yes droop and wrists as far up as muscle relaxant respiratory depression . . .

  . . . same . . . same . . . my own face white in mirror three three-thirty four march of the Hours clock ticking room no can’t go in no not enough light not enough no aaahhh—

  . . . theatre nothing but Walter really look at head phony angle wants to catch light good fill-light throw a yellow gel . . .

  (A pneumatic toy frog jumps up onto a lily pad trembling: beneath the surface lies a terror . . . a late captivity . . . but he floats now over the head of what would take him back . . . his eyes cannot be read. . . . )

  . . . mba rara m’eroto ondyoze . . . mbe mu munine m’oruroto ayo u n’omuinyo . . . (further back than this is a twisting of yarns or cordage, a giant web, a wrenching of hide, of muscles in the hard grip of something that comes to wrestle when the night is deep . . . and a sense, too, of visitation by the dead, afterward a sick feeling that they are not as friendly as they seemed to be . . . he has wakened, cried, sought explanation, but no one ever told him anything he could believe. The dead have talked with him, come and sat, shared his milk, told stories of ancestors, or of spirits from other parts of the veld—for time and space on their side have no meaning, all is together).

  “There are sociologies,” Edwin Treacle, his hair going all directions, attempts to light a pipeful of wretched leftovers—autumn leaves, bits of string, fag-ends, “that we haven’t even begun to look into. The sociology of our own lot, for example. Psi Section, the S.P.R., the old ladies in Altrincham trying to summon up the Devil, all of us on this side, you see, are still only half the story.”

  “Careful with that ‘we,’” Roger Mexico distracted today by a hundred things, chi-square fittings that refuse to jibe, textbooks lost, Jessica’s absence. . . .

  “It makes no sense unless we also consider those who’ve passed over to the other side. We do transact with them, don’t we? Through specialists like Eventyr and their controls over there. But all together we form a single subculture, a psychical community, if you will.”

  “I won’t,” Mexico says dryly, “but yes I suppose someone ought to be looking into it.”

  “There are peoples—these Hereros for example—who carry on business every day with their ancestors. The dead are as real as the living. How can you understand them without treating both sides of the wall of death with the same scientific approach?”

  And yet for Eventyr it’s not the social transaction Treacle hopes it is. There’s no memory on his side: no personal record. He has to read about it in the notes of others, listen to discs. Which means he has to trust the others. That’s a complicated social setup. He must base the major part of his life on the probity of men charged with acting as interface between what he is supposed to be and himself. Eventyr knows how close he is to Sachsa on the other side, but he doesn’t remember, and he’s been brought up a Christian, a Western European, believing in the primacy of the “conscious” self and its memories, regarding all the rest as abnormal or trivial, and so he is troubled, deeply. . . .

  The transcripts are a document on Peter Sachsa as much as on the souls he puts in touch. They tell, in some detail, of his obsessive love for Leni Pökler, who was married to a young chemical engineer and also active with the K.P.D., shuttling between the 12th District and Sachsa’s sittings. Each night she came he wanted to cry at the sight of her captivity. In her smudged eyes was clear hatred of a life she would not leave: a husband she didn’t love, a child she had not learned to escape feeling guilty for not loving enough.

  The husband Franz had a connection, too vague for Sachsa to pass across, with Army Ordnance, and so there were also ideological barriers that neither one found energy enough to climb. She attended street actions, Franz reported to the rocket facility at Reinickendorf after swallowing his tea in an early-morning room full of women he thought were sullen and waiting for him to leave: bringing their bundles of leaflets, their knapsacks stuffed with books or political newspapers, filtering through the slum courtyards of Berlin at sunrise. . . .

  • • • • • • •

  They are shivering and hungry. In the Studentenheim there’s no heat, not much light, millions of roaches. A smell of cabbage, old second Reich, grandmothers’ cabbage, of lard smoke that has found, over the years, some détente with the air that seeks to break it down, smells of long illness and terminal occupation stir off the crumbling walls. One of the walls is stained yellow with waste from the broken lines upstairs. Leni sits on the floor with four or five others, passing a dark chunk of bread. In a damp nest of Die Faust Hoch, back issues no one will read, her daughter Ilse sleeps, breathing so shallow it can hardly be seen. Her eyelashes make enormous shadows on the upper curves of her cheeks.

  They have left for good this time. This room will be all right for another day, even two . . . after that Leni doesn’t know. She took one valise for both of them. Does he know what it means for a woman born under the Crab, a mother, to have all her home in a valise? She has a few marks with her, Franz has his toy rockets to the moon. It is really over.

  As she used to dream it, she’d go directly to Peter Sachsa. If he didn’t take her in, he’d at least help her to find a job. But now that she’s really broken away from Franz . . . there’s something, some nasty earth-sign belligerence that will rise up in Peter now and then. . . . Lately she isn’t sure about his moods. He’s under pressure from levels she guesses to be higher than usual, and he isn’t handling it well. . . .

  But Peter’s worst infantile rages are still better than the most tranquil evenings of her Piscean husband, swimming his seas of fantasy, death-wish, rocket-mysticism—Franz is just the type they want. They know how to use that. They know how to use nearly everybody. What will happen to the ones they can’t use?

  Rudi, Vanya, Rebecca, here we are a slice of Berlin life, another Ufa masterpiece, token La Bohème Student, token Slav, token Jewess, look at us: the Revolution. Of course there is no Revolution, not even in the Kinos, no German October, not under this “Republic.” The Revolution died—though Leni was only a young girl and not political—with Rosa Luxemburg. The best there is to believe in right now is a Revolution-in-exile-in-residence, a continuity, surviving at the bleak edge over these Weimar years, waiting its moment and its reincarnated Luxemburg. . . .

  AN ARMY OF LOVERS CAN BE BEATEN. These things appear on the walls of the Red districts in the course of the night. Nobody can track down author or painter for any of them, leading you to suspect they’re one and the same. Enough to make you believe in a folk-consciousness. They are not slogans so much as texts, revealed in order to be thought about, expanded on, translated into action by the people. . . .

  “It’s true,” Vanya now, “look at the forms of capitalist expression. Pornographies: pornographies of love, erotic love, Christian love, boy-and-his-dog, pornographies of sunsets, pornographies of killing, and pornographies of deduction—ahh, that sigh when we guess the murderer—all these novels, these films and songs they lull us with, they’re approaches, more comfortable and less so, to that Absolute Comfort.” A pause to allow Rudi a quick and sour grin. “The self-induced orgasm.”

  “‘Absolute’?” Rebecca coming forward on her bare knees to hand him the bread, damp, melting from the touch of her wet mouth, “Two people are—”

  “Two people is what you are told,” Rudi does not quite smirk. Through her attention, sadly and not for the first time around here, there passes the phrase male supremacy . . . why do they cherish their masturbating so? “but in nature it is almost unknown. Most of it’s solitary. You know that.”

  “I know there’s coming together,” is all she says. Though they have never made love she means it as a reproach. But he turns away as we do from those who have just made some embarrassing appeal to faith there’s no way to go into any further.

  Leni, from i
nside her wasted time with Franz, knows enough about coming alone. At first his passivity kept her from coming at all. Then she understood that she could make up anything at all to fill the freedom he allowed her. It got more comfortable: she could dream such tendernesses between them (presently she was dreaming also of other men)—but it became more solitary. Yet her lines will not deepen fast enough, her mouth not learn hardening past a face she keeps surprising herself with, a daydreaming child’s face, betraying her to anyone who’ll look, exactly the sort of fat-softened, unfocused weakness that causes men to read her as Dependent Little Girl—even in Peter Sachsa she’s seen the look—and the dream is the same one she went to find while Franz groaned inside his own dark pain-wishes, a dream of gentleness, light, her criminal heart redeemed, no more need to run, to struggle, a man arriving tranquil as she and strong, the street becoming a distant memory: exactly the one dream that out here she can least allow herself. She knows what she has to impersonate. Especially with Ilse watching her more. Ilse is not going to be used.

  Rebecca’s been carrying on an argument with Vanya, half flirting, Vanya trying to keep it all in intellectual code, but the Jewess reverting, time and again, to the bodily . . . so sensual: the insides of her thighs, just above the knee, smooth as oil, the tenseness of all her muscles, the alert face, the Judenschnautze feinting, pushing, the flashes of tongue against thick lips . . . what would it be like, to be taken to bed by her? To do it not just with another woman, but with a Jewess. . . . Their animal darkness . . . sweating hindquarters, pushing aggressively toward her face, black hairs darkening in fine crescent around each buttock from the crevice . . . the face turned over a shoulder smiling in coarse delight . . . all by surprise, really, during a moment’s refuge in a pale yellow room, while the men wandered the halls outside with drugged smiles . . . “No, not that hard. Be gentle. I’ll tell you when to do it harder. . . .” Leni’s fair skin, her look of innocence, and the Jewess’s darker coloring, her rawness, contrasting with Leni’s delicacy of structure and skin, pelvic bones stretching cobwebs smoothly down groins and around belly, the two women sliding, snarling, gasping . . . I know there’s coming together . . . and Leni waking alone—the Jewess out already in some other room of the place—never having known the instant at which she fell into her true infant sleep, a soft change of state that just didn’t happen with Franz. . . . So she brushed and batted with fingertips her hair to show something of how she felt about the night’s clientele and strolled down to the baths, stripped without caring what eyes were on her and slid into the body-warmth, the conventional perfume of it. . . . All at once, through a shouting and humidity that might have made it hard to concentrate, she saw, there, up on one of the ledges, looking down at her . . . Yes he was Richard Hirsch, from the Mausigstrasse, so many years ago . . . she knew immediately that her face had never looked more vulnerable—she could see it in his eyes. . . .

  All around them the others splashed, made love, carried on comic monologues, perhaps they were friends of his—yes wasn’t that Siggi frog-kicking by, we called him “the Troll,” he hasn’t grown a centimeter since then . . . since we ran home along the canal, tripped and fell on the hardest cobblestones in the world, and woke in the mornings to see snow on the spokes of the wagon wheels, steam out the old horse’s nose. . . . “Leni. Leni.” Richard’s hair pushed all the way back, his body golden, leaning to lift her from the cloudy bath, to sit beside him.

  “You’re supposed to be. . .” she’s flustered, doesn’t know how to put this. “Someone told me you hadn’t come back from France. . . .” She stares at her knees.

  “Not even the French girls could have kept me in France.” He’s still there: she feels him trying to look in her eyes: and he speaks so simply, he’s so alive, sure that French girls must be more coercive than English machine guns . . . she knows, filled with crying for his innocence, that he can’t have been with anyone there, that French girls still are to him beautiful and remote agents of Love. . . .

  In Leni, now, nothing of her long employment shows, nothing. She is the child he looked at across park pathways, or met trudging home down the gassen in the crust-brown light, her face, rather broad then, angled down, fair eyebrows troubled, bookpack on her back, hands in apron pockets . . . some of the stones in the walls were white as paste . . . she may have seen him coming the other way, but he was older, always with friends. . . .

  Now they all grow less raucous around them, more deferent, even shy, happy for Richard and Leni. “Better late than never!” pipes Siggi in his speeded-up midget’s voice, reaching on tiptoe to pour May wine in all their glasses. Leni goes to get her hair restyled and lightened a shade, and Rebecca comes with her. They talk, for the first time, of plans and futures. Without touching, Richard and she have fallen in love, as they should have then. It’s understood he’ll take her away with him. . . .

  Old Gymnasium friends have been showing up in recent days, bringing exotic food and wine, new drugs, much ease and honesty in sexual matters. No one bothers to dress. They show one another their naked bodies. No one feels anxious, or threatened about the size of her breasts or his penis. . . . It is all beautifully relaxing for everyone. Leni practices her new name, “Leni Hirsch,” even sometimes when she’s sitting with Richard at a café table in the morning: “Leni Hirsch,” and he actually smiles, embarrassed, tries to look away but can’t escape her eyes and finally he turns full into her own look, laughs out loud, a laugh of pure joy, and reaches his hand, the palm of his dear hand, to hold her face. . . .

  On a multi-leveled early evening of balconies, terraces, audiences grouped at the different levels, all looking downward, in toward a common center, galleries of young women with green leaves at their waists, tall evergreen trees, lawns, flowing water and national solemnity, the President, in the middle of asking the Bundestag, with his familiar clogged and nasal voice, for a giant war appropriation, breaks down suddenly: “Oh, fuck it . . .” Fickt es, the soon-to-be-immortal phrase, rings in the sky, rings over the land, Ja, fickt es! “I’m sending all the soldiers home. We’ll close down the weapon factories, we’ll dump all the weapons in the sea. I’m sick of war. I’m sick of waking up every morning afraid I’m going to die.” It is suddenly impossible to hate him any more: he’s as human, as mortal now, as any of the people. There will be new elections. The Left will run a woman whose name is never given, but everyone understands it is Rosa Luxemburg. The other candidates will be chosen so inept or colorless that no one will vote for them. There will be a chance for the Revolution. The President has promised.

  Incredible joy at the baths, among the friends. True joy: events in a dialectical process cannot bring this explosion of the heart. Everyone is in love. . . .

  AN ARMY OF LOVERS CAN BE BEATEN.

  Rudi and Vanya have fallen to arguing street tactics. Somewhere water is dripping. The street reaches in, makes itself felt everywhere. Leni knows it, hates it. The impossibility of any rest . . . needing to trust strangers who may be working for the police, if not right now then a little later, when the street has grown for them more desolate than they can bear . . . She wishes she knew of ways to keep it from her child, but already that may be too late. Franz—Franz was never much in the street. Always some excuse. Worried about security, being caught on a stray frame by one of the leather-coated photographers, who will be always at the fringes of the action. Or it was, “What’ll we do with Ilse? What if there’s violence?” If there’s violence, what’ll we do with Franz?

  She tried to explain to him about the level you reach, with both feet in, when you lose your fear, you lose it all, you’ve penetrated the moment, slipping perfectly into its grooves, metal-gray but soft as latex, and now the figures are dancing, each pre-choreographed exactly where it is, the flash of knees under pearl-colored frock as the girl in the babushka stoops to pick up a cobble, the man in the black suitcoat and brown sleeveless sweater grabbed by policemen one on either arm
, trying to keep his head up, showing his teeth, the older liberal in the dirty beige overcoat, stepping back to avoid a careening demonstrator, looking back across his lapel how-dare-you or look-out-not-me, his eyeglasses filled with the glare of the winter sky. There is the moment, and its possibilities.

  She even tried, from what little calculus she’d picked up, to explain it to Franz as Δt approaching zero, eternally approaching, the slices of time growing thinner and thinner, a succession of rooms each with walls more silver, transparent, as the pure light of the zero comes nearer. . . .

  But he shook his head. “Not the same, Leni. The important thing is taking a function to its limit. Δt is just a convenience, so that it can happen.”

  He has, had, this way of removing all the excitement from things with a few words. Not even well-chosen words: he’s that way by instinct. When they went to movies he would fall asleep. He fell asleep during Nibelungen. He missed Attila the Hun roaring in from the East to wipe out the Burgundians. Franz loved films but this was how he watched them, nodding in and out of sleep. “You’re the cause-and-effect man,” she cried. How did he connect together the fragments he saw while his eyes were open?

  He was the cause-and-effect man: he kept at her astrology without mercy, telling her what she was supposed to believe, then denying it. “Tides, radio interference, damned little else. There is no way for changes out there to produce changes here.”

  “Not produce,” she tried, “not cause. It all goes along together. Parallel, not series. Metaphor. Signs and symptoms. Mapping on to different coordinate systems, I don’t know . . .” She didn’t know, all she was trying to do was reach.