Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

  “But our patience,” suggests a calm voice now out of the darkness, “our patience is enormous, though perhaps not unlimited.” So saying, a tall African with a full imperial beard steps up grabs the fat American, who has time to utter one short yell before being flung bodily over the side. Slothrop and the African watch the Major bounce down the embankment behind them, arms and legs flying, out of sight. Firs crowd the hills. A crescent moon has risen over one ragged crest.

  The man introduces himself in English, as Oberst Enzian, of the Schwarzkommando. He apologizes for his show of temper, notes Slothrop’s armband, declines an interview before Slothrop can get in a word. “There’s no story. We’re DPs, like everybody else.”

  “The Major seemed worried that you’re headed for Nordhausen.”

  “Marvy is going to be an annoyance, I can tell. Still, he doesn’t pose as much of a problem as—” He peers at Slothrop. “Hmm. Are you really a war correspondent?”

  “No.”

  “A free agent, I’d guess.”

  “Don’t know about that ‘free,’ Oberst.”

  “But you are free. We all are. You’ll see. Before long.” He steps away down the spine of the freighttop, waving a beckoning German good-by. “Before long. . . .”

  Slothrop sits on the rooftop, rubbing his bare feet. A friend? A good omen? Black rocket troops? What bizarre shit?

  Well good mornin’ gang, let’s start it

  Off with a bang, so long to

  Double-u Double-u Two-o-o-o!

  Now the fightin’s over and we’re all in clover

  And I’m here ta bring sunshine to you—

  Hey there Herman the German, stop yer fussin’ and squirmin’,

  Don’tcha know you’re goin’ home ta stay—

  No, there’s never a frown, here in Rocket, Sock-it Town,

  Where ev’ry day’s a beautiful day—

  (Quit kvetchin’, Gretchen!)

  Go on and have a beautiful daa-aay!

  Nordhausen in the morning: the lea is a green salad, crisp with raindrops. Everything is fresh, washed. The Harz hump up all around, dark slopes bearded to the tops with spruce, fir and larch. High-gabled houses, sheets of water reflecting the sky, muddy streets, American and Russian GIs pouring in and out the doors of the taverns and makeshift PXs, everybody packing a sidearm. Meadows and logged-off wedges up on the mountainsides flow with mottled light as rainclouds blow away over Thuringia. Castles perch high over the town, sailing in and out of torn clouds. Old horses with smudged knobby knees, short-legged and big-chested, pull wagonloads of barrels, necks straining at twin collars chained together, heavy horseshoes sending mudflowers at each wet clop, down from the vineyards to the taverns.

  Slothrop wanders into a roofless part of town. Old people in black are bat-flittering among the walls. Shops and dwellings here are all long-looted by the slave laborers liberated from the Dora camp. Lotta those fags still around, with baskets and 175 badges out on display, staring moistly from doorways. From the glassless bay window of a dress shop, in the dimness behind a plaster dummy lying bald and sprawled, arms raised to sky, hands curved for bouquets or cocktail glasses they’ll never hold again, Slothrop hears a girl singing. Accompanying herself on a balalaika. One of those sad little Parisian-sounding tunes in 3/4:

  Love never goes away,

  Never completely dies,

  Always some souvenir

  Takes us by sad surprise.

  You went away from me,

  One rose was left behind—

  Pressed in my Book of Hours,

  That is the rose I find. . . .

  Though it’s another year,

  Though it’s another me,

  Under the rose is a drying tear,

  Under my linden tree. . . .

  Love never goes away,

  Not if it’s really true,

  It can return, by night, by day,

  Tender and green and new

  As the leaves from a linden tree, love, that I left with you.

  Her name turns out to be Geli Tripping, and the balalaika belongs to a Soviet intelligence officer named Tchitcherine. In a way, Geli does too—part-time, anyhow. Seems this Tchitcherine maintains a harem, a girl in every rocket-town in the Zone. Yup, another rocket maniac. Slothrop feels like a tourist.

  Geli talks about her young man. They sit in her roofless room drinking a pale wine known hereabouts as Nordhäuser Schattensaft. Overhead, black birds with yellow beaks lace the sky, looping in the sunlight from their nests up in the mountain castles and down in the city ruins. Far away, perhaps in the marketplace, a truck convoy is idling all its engines, the smell of exhaust washing over the maze of walls, where moss creeps, water oozes, roaches seek purchase, walls that baffle the motor sound so that it seems to come in from all directions.

  She’s thin, a bit awkward, very young. Nowhere in her eyes is there any sign of corrosion—she might have spent all her War roofed and secure, tranquil, playing with small forest animals in a rear area someplace. Her song, she admits, sighing, is mostly wishful thinking. “When he’s away, he’s away. When you came in I almost thought you were Tchitcherine.”

  “Nope. Just a hard-working newshound, is all. No rockets, no harems.”

  “It’s an arrangement,” she tells him. “It’s so unorganized out here. There have to be arrangements. You’ll find out.” Indeed he will—he’ll find thousands of arrangements, for warmth, love, food, simple movement along roads, tracks and canals. Even G-5, living its fantasy of being the only government in Germany now, is just the arrangement for being victorious, is all. No more or less real than all these others so private, silent, and lost to History. Slothrop, though he doesn’t know it yet, is as properly constituted a state as any other in the Zone these days. Not paranoia. Just how it is. Temporary alliances, knit and undone. He and Geli reach their arrangement hidden from the occupied streets by remnants of walls, in an old fourposter bed facing a dark pier glass. Out the roof that isn’t there he can see a long tree-covered mountain ascending. Wine on her breath, nests of down in the hollows of her arms, thighs with the spring of saplings in wind. He’s barely inside her before she comes, a fantasy about Tchitcherine in progress, clear and touchingly, across her face. This irritates Slothrop, but doesn’t keep him from coming himself.

  The foolishness begins immediately on detumescence, amusing questions like, what kind of word has gone out to keep everybody away from Geli but me? Or, is it that something about me reminds her of Tchitcherine, and if so, what? And, say, where’s that Tchitcherine right now? He dozes off, is roused by her lips, fingers, dewy legs sliding along his. The sun jumps across their section of sky, gets eclipsed by a breast, is reflected out of her child’s eyes . . . then clouds, rain for which she puts up a green tarp with tassels she’s sewn on, canopy style . . . rain sluices down off the tassels, cold and loud. Night. She feeds him boiled cabbage with an old heirloom of a spoon with a crest on it. They drink more of that wine. Shadows are soft verdigris. The rain has stopped. Somewhere kids go booting an empty gas can over the cobblestones.

  Something comes flapping in out of the sky: talons scrabble along the top of the canopy. “What’s that?” half awake and she’s got the covers again, c’mon Geli. . . .

  “My owl,” sez Geli. “Wernher. There’s a candy bar in the top drawer of the chiffonier, Liebchen, would you mind feeding him?”

  Liebchen indeed. Staggering off the bed, vertical for the first time all day, Slothrop removes a Baby Ruth from its wrapper, clears his throat, decides not to ask her how she came by it because he knows, and lobs the thing up on the canopy for that Wernher. Soon, lying together again, they hear peanuts crunching, and a clacking beak.

  “Candy bars,” Slothrop grouches. “What’s the matter with him?
Don’t you know he’s supposed to be out foraging, for live mice or some shit? You’ve turned him into a house owl.”

  “You’re pretty lazy yourself.” Baby fingers creeping down along his ribs.

  “Well—I bet—cut it out—I bet that Tchitcherine doesn’t have to get up and feed that owl.”

  She cools, the hand stopping where it is. “He loves Tchitcherine. He never comes to be fed, unless Tchitcherine’s here.”

  Slothrop’s turn to cool. More correctly, freeze. “Uh, but, you don’t mean that Tchitcherine is actually, uh . . .”

  “He was supposed to be,” sighing.

  “Oh. When?”

  “This morning. He’s late. It happens.”

  Slothrop’s off the bed halfway across the room with a softoff, one sock on and the other in his teeth, head through one armhole of his undershirt, fly zipper jammed, yelling shit.

  “My brave Englishman,” she drawls.

  “Why didn’t you bring this up earlier, Geli, huh?”

  “Oh, come back. It’s nighttime, he’s with a woman someplace. He can’t sleep alone.”

  “I hope you can.”

  “Hush. Come here. You can’t go out with nothing on your feet. I’ll give you a pair of his old boots and tell you all his secrets.”

  “Secrets?” Look out, Slothrop. “Why should I want to know—”

  “You’re not a war correspondent.”

  “Why does everybody keep saying that? Nobody believes me. Of course I’m a war correspondent.” Shaking the brassard at her. “Can’t you read? Sez ‘War Correspondent.’ I even have a mustache, here, don’t I? Just like that Ernest Hemingway.”

  “Oh. Then I imagine you wouldn’t be looking for Rocket Number 00000 after all. It was just a silly idea I had. I’m sorry.”

  Oh boy, am I gonna get out of here, sez Slothrop to himself, this is a badger game if I ever saw one, man. Who else would be interested in the one rocket out of 6000 that carried the Imipolex G device?

  “And you couldn’t care less about the Schwarzgerät, either,” she keeps on. She keeps on.

  “The what?”

  “They also called it S-Gerät.”

  Next higher assembly, Slothrop, remember? Wernher, up on the canopy, is hooting. A signal to that Tchitcherine, no doubt.

  Paranoids are not paranoids (Proverb 5) because they’re paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.

  “Now how on earth,” elaborately uncorking a fresh bottle of Nordhäuser Schattensaft, thoppp, best Cary Grant imitation he can summon up with bowels so echoing tight, suavely refilling glasses, handing one to her, “would a sweet, young, thing, like you, know anything, about rocket, hahd-weah?”

  “I read Vaslav’s mail,” as if it’s a dumb question, which it is.

  “You shouldn’t be blabbing to random strangers like this. If he finds out, he’ll murder you.”

  “I like you. I like intrigue. I like playing.”

  “Maybe you like to get people in trouble.”

  “All right.” Out with the lower lip.

  “O.K., O.K., tell me about it. But I don’t know if the Guardian will even be interested. My editors are a rather stuffy lot, you know.”

  Goose bumps crowd her bare little breasts. “I posed once for a rocket insignia. Perhaps you’ve seen it. A pretty young witch straddling an A4. Carrying her obsolete broom over her shoulder. I was voted the Sweetheart of 3/Art. Abt. (mot) 485.”

  “Are you a real witch?”

  “I think I have tendencies. Have you been up to the Brocken yet?”

  “Just hit town, actually.”

  “I’ve been up there every Walpurgisnacht since I had my first period. I’ll take you, if you like.”

  “Tell me about this, this ‘Schwarzgerät.’”

  “I thought you weren’t interested.”

  “How can I know if I’m interested or not if I don’t even know what I’m supposed or not supposed to be interested in?”

  “You must be a correspondent. You have a way with words.”

  Tchitcherine comes roaring through the window, a Nagant blazing in his fist. Tchitcherine lands in a parachute and fells Slothrop with one judo chop. Tchitcherine drives a Stalin tank right into the room, and blasts Slothrop with a 76 mm shell. Thanks for stalling him, Liebchen, he was a spy, well, cheerio, I’m off to Peenemünde and a nubile Polish wench with tits like vanilla ice cream, check you out later.

  “I have to go, I think,” Slothrop sez, “typewriter needs a new ribbon, gotta sharpen pencils, you know how it is—”

  “I told you, he won’t be here tonight.”

  “Why? Is he out after that Schwarzgerät, eh?”

  “No. He hasn’t heard the latest. The message came in from Stettin yesterday.”

  “In clear, of course.”

  “Why not?”

  “Couldn’t be very important.”

  “It’s for sale.”

  “The message?”

  “The S-Gerät, you pill. A man in Swinemünde can get it. Half a million Swiss francs, if you’re in the market. He waits on the Strand-Promenade, every day till noon. He’ll be wearing a white suit.”

  Oh yeah? “Blodgett Waxwing.”

  “It didn’t give the name. But I don’t think it’s Waxwing. He sticks close to the Mediterranean.”

  “You get around.”

  “Waxwing is already a legend around the Zone. So is Tchitcherine. For all I know, so are you. What was your name?”

  “Cary Grant. Ge-li, Ge-li, Ge-li. . . . Listen, Swinemünde, that’s in that Soviet zone, ain’t it.”

  “You sound like a German. Forget frontiers now. Forget subdivisions. There aren’t any.”

  “There are soldiers.”

  “That’s right.” Staring at him. “But that’s different.”

  “Oh.”

  “You’ll learn. It’s all been suspended. Vaslav calls it an ‘interregnum.’ You only have to flow along with it.”

  “Gonna flow outa here now, kid. Thanx for the info, and a tip of the Scuffling hat to ya—”

  “Please stay.” Curled on the bed, her eyes about to spill over with tears. Aw, shit, Slothrop you sucker . . . but she’s just a little kid. . . . “Come here. . . .”

  The minute he puts it in, though, she goes wicked and a little crazy, slashing at his legs, shoulders, and ass with chewed-down fingernails sharp as a saw. Considerate Slothrop is trying to hold off coming till she’s ready when all of a sudden something heavy, feathered, and many-pointed comes crashing down onto the small of his back, bounces off triggering him and as it turns out Geli too ZONNGGG! eeeeee . . . oh, gee whiz. Wings flap and Wernher—for it is he—ascends into the darkness.

  “Fucking bird,” Slothrop screams, “he tries that again I’ll give him a Baby Ruth right up his ass, boy—” it’s a plot it’s a plot it’s Pavlovian conditioning! or something, “Tchitcherine trained him to do that, right?”

  “Wrong! I trained him to do that.” She’s smiling at him so four-year-old happy and not holding a thing back, that Slothrop decides to believe everything she’s been telling him.

  “You are a witch.” Paranoid that he is, he snuggles down under the counterpane with the long-legged sorceress, lights a cigarette, and despite endless Tchitcherines vaulting in over the roofless walls with arsenals of disaster all for him, even falls asleep, presently, in her bare and open arms.

  • • • • • • •

  It’s a Sunday-funnies dawn, very blue sky with gaudy pink clouds in it. Mud across the cobblestones is so slick it reflects light, so that you walk not streets but these long streaky cuts of raw meat, hock of werewolf, gammon of Beas
t. Tchitcherine has big feet. Geli had to stuff pieces of an old chemise in the toes of his boots so they’d fit Slothrop. Dodging constantly for jeeps, ten-ton lorries, Russians on horseback, he finally hitches a ride from an 18-year-old American first lieutenant in a gray Mercedes staff car with dents all over it. Slothrop frisks mustaches, flashes his armband, feeling defensive. The sun’s already warm. There’s a smell of evergreens on the mountains. This rail driving, who’s attached to the tank company guarding the Mittelwerke, doesn’t think Slothrop should have any trouble getting inside. English SPOG have come and gone. Right now American Army Ordnance people are busy crating and shipping out parts and tools for a hundred A4s. A big hassle. “Trying to get it all out before the Russians come to take over.” Interregnum. Civilians and bureaucrats show up every day, high-level tourists, to stare and go wow. “Guess nobody’s seen ’em this big before. I don’t know what it is. Like a burlesque crowd. Not gonna do anything, just here to look. Most of them bring cameras. Notice you didn’t. We have them for rent at the main gate, if you’re interested.”

  One of many hustles. Yellow James the cook has got him a swell little sandwich wagon, you can hear him in the tunnels calling, “Come an’ get ’em! Hot ’n’ cold and drippin’ with greens!” And there’ll be grease on the glasses of half these gobbling fools in another five minutes. Nick De Profundis, the company lounge lizard, has surprised everybody by changing, inside the phone booth of factory spaces here, to an energetic businessman, selling A4 souvenirs: small items that can be worked into keychains, money clips or a scatter-pin for that special gal back home, burner cups of brass off the combustion chambers, ball bearings from the servos, and this week the hep item seems to be SA 100 acorn diodes, cute little mixing valves looted out of the Telefunken units, and the even rarer SA 102s, which of course fetch a higher price. And there’s “Micro” Graham, who’s let his sideburns grow and lurks in the Stollen where the gullible visitors stray: “Pssst.”