Only later did he try to pin down the time. Perverse curiosity. Two weeks since her last period. He had come out of the Ufa theatre on the Friedrichstrasse that night with an erection, thinking like everybody else only about getting home, fucking somebody, fucking her into some submission. . . . God, Erdmann was beautiful. How many other men, shuffling out again into depression Berlin, carried the same image back from Alpdrücken to some drab fat excuse for a bride? How many shadow-children would be fathered on Erdmann that night?
It was never a real possibility for Pökler that Leni might get pregnant. But looking back, he knew that had to be the night, Alpdrücken night, that Ilse was conceived. They fucked so seldom any more. It was not hard to pinpoint. That’s how it happened. A film. How else? Isn’t that what they made of my child, a film?
He sits tonight by his driftwood fire in the cellar of the onion-topped Nikolaikirche, listening to the sea. Stars hang among the spaces of the great Wheel, precarious to him as candles and goodnight cigarettes. Cold gathers along the strand. Child phantoms—white whistling, tears never to come, range the wind behind the wall. Twists of faded crepe paper blow along the ground, scuttling over his old shoes. Dust, under a moon newly calved, twinkles like snow, and the Baltic crawls like its mother-glacier. His heart shrugs in its scarlet net, elastic, full of expectation. He’s waiting for Ilse, for his movie-child, to return to Zwölfkinder, as she has every summer at this time.
Storks are asleep among two- and three-legged horses, rusted gearwork and splintered roof of the carousel, their heads jittering with air currents and yellow Africa, dainty black snakes a hundred feet below meandering in the sunlight across the rocks and dry pans. Oversize crystals of salt lie graying, drifted in the cracks of the pavement, in the wrinkles of the dog with saucer eyes in front of the town hall, the beard of the goat on the bridge, the mouth of the troll below. Frieda the pig hunts a new place to nestle and snooze out of the wind. The plaster witch, wire mesh visible at her breasts and haunches, leans near the oven, her poke at corroded Hansel in perpetual arrest. Gretel’s eyes lock wide open, never a blink, crystal-heavy lashes batting at the landings of guerrilla winds from the sea.
If there is music for this it’s windy strings and reed sections standing in bright shirt fronts and black ties all along the beach, a robed organist by the breakwater—itself broken, crusted with tides—whose languets and flues gather and shape the resonant spooks here, the candleflame memories, all trace, particle and wave, of the sixty thousand who passed, already listed for taking, once or twice this way. Did you ever go on holiday to Zwölfkinder? Did you hold your father’s hand as you rode the train up from Lübeck, gaze at your knees or at the other children like you braided, ironed, smelling of bleach, boot-wax, caramel? Did small-change jingle in your purse as you swung around the Wheel, did you hide your face in his wool lapels or did you kneel up in the seat, looking over the water, trying to see Denmark? Were you frightened when the dwarf tried to hug you, was your frock scratchy in the warming afternoon, what did you say, what did you feel when boys ran by snatching each other’s caps and too busy for you?
She must have always been a child on somebody’s list. He only avoided thinking about it. But all the time she was carrying her disappearance in her drawn face, her reluctant walk, and if he hadn’t needed her protection so much he might have seen in time how little she could protect anything, even their mean nest. He couldn’t talk to her—it was arguing with his own ghost from ten years ago, the same idealism, the adolescent fury—items that had charmed him once—a woman with spirit!—but which he came to see as evidence of her single-mindedness, even, he could swear, some desire to be actually destroyed. . . .
She went out to her street-theatre each time expecting not to come back, but he never really knew that. Leftists and Jews in the streets, all right, noisy, unpleasant to look at, but the police will keep them channeled, she’s in no danger unless she wants to be. . . . Later, after she left, he got a little drunk one forenoon, a little sentimental, and went out at last, his first and last time, hoping that somehow the pressures of Fate or crowd hydrodynamics might bring them together again. He found a street full of tan and green uniforms, truncheons, leather, placards fluttering unstable in all modes but longitudinal, scores of panicked civilians. A policeman aimed a blow at him, but Pökler dodged, and it hit an old man instead, some bearded old unreconstructed geezer of a Trotskyite . . . he saw the strands of steel cable under black rubber skin, a finicky smile on the policeman’s face as he swung, his free hand grasping his opposite lapel in some feminine way, the leather glove of the hand with the truncheon unbuttoned at the wrist, and his eyes flinching at the last possible moment, as if the truncheon shared his nerves and might get hurt against the old man’s skull. Pökler made it to a doorway, sick with fear. Other police came running as some dancers run, elbows close to sides, forearms thrusting out at an angle. They used firehoses to break up the crowd, finally. Women slid like dolls along the slick cobbles and on tram rails, the thick gush catching them by belly and head, its brute white vector dominating them. Any of them might have been Leni. Pökler shivered in his doorway and watched it. He couldn’t go out in the street. Later he thought about its texture, the network of grooves between the paving stones. The only safety there was ant-scaled, down and running the streets of Ant City, bootsoles crashing overhead like black thunder, you and your crawling neighbors in traffic all silent, jostling, heading down the gray darkening streets. . . . Pökler knew how to find safety among the indoor abscissas and ordinates of graphs: finding the points he needed not by running the curve itself, not up on high stone and vulnerability, but instead tracing patiently the xs and ys, P (atü), W (m/sec), Ti (° K), moving always by safe right angles along the faint lines. . . .
When he began to dream about the Rocket with some frequency, it would sometimes not be a literal rocket at all, but a street he knew was in a certain district of the city, a street in a certain small area of the grid that held something he thought he needed. The coordinates were clear in his mind, but the street eluded him. Over the years, as the Rocket neared its fullness, about to go operational, the coordinates switched from the Cartesian x and y of the laboratory to the polar azimuth and range of the weapon as deployed: once he knelt on the lavatory floor of his old rooming house in Munich, understanding that if he faced exactly along a certain compass-bearing his prayer would be heard: he’d be safe. He wore a robe of gold and orange brocade. It was the only light in the room. Afterward he ventured out into the house, knowing people slept in all the rooms, but feeling a sense of desertion. He went to switch on a light—but in the act of throwing the switch he knew the room had really been lit to begin with, and he had just turned everything out, everything. . . .
The A4 operational-at-last hadn’t crept up on him. Its coming true was no climax. That hadn’t ever been the point.
“They’re using you to kill people,” Leni told him, as clearly as she could. “That’s their only job, and you’re helping them.”
“We’ll all use it, someday, to leave the earth. To transcend.”
She laughed. “Transcend,” from Pökler?
“Someday,” honestly trying, “they won’t have to kill. Borders won’t mean anything. We’ll have all outer space. . . .”
“Oh you’re blind,” spitting it as she spat his blindness at him every day, that and “Kadavergehorsamkeit,” a beautiful word he can no longer imagine in any voice but hers. . . .
But really he did not obey like a corpse. He was political, up to a point—there was politics enough out at the rocket field. The Army Weapons Department was showing an ever-quickening interest in the amateur rocketeers of the Verein für Raumschiffahrt, and the VfR had recently begun making available to the Army records of their experiments. The corporations and the universities—the Army said—didn’t want to risk capital or manpower on developing anything as fantastic as a rocket. The Army ha
d nowhere to turn but to private inventors and clubs like the VfR.
“Shit,” said Leni. “They’re all in on it together. You really can’t see that, can you.”
Wthin the Society, the lines were drawn clear enough. Without money the VfR was suffocating—the Army had the money, and was already financing them in roundabout ways. The choice was between building what the Army wanted—practical hardware—or pushing on in chronic poverty, dreaming of expeditions to Venus.
“Where do you think the Army’s getting the money?” Leni asked.
“What does it matter? Money is money.”
“No!”
Major Weissmann was one of several gray eminences around the rocket field, able to talk, with every appearance of sympathy and reason, to organized thinker and maniac idealist alike. All things to all men, a brand-new military type, part salesman, part scientist. Pökler, the all-seeing, the unmoving, must have known that what went on in the VfR committee meetings was the same game being played in Leni’s violent and shelterless street. All his training had encouraged an eye for analogies—in equations, in theoretical models—yet he persisted in thinking the VfR was special, preserved against the time. And he also knew at first hand what happens to dreams with no money to support them. So, presently, Pökler found that by refusing to take sides, he’d become Weissmann’s best ally. The major’s eyes always changed when he looked at Pökler: his slightly prissy face to relax into what Pökler had noticed, in random mirrors and display windows, on his own face when he was with Leni. The blank look of one who is taking another for granted. Weissmann was as sure of Pökler’s role as Pökler was of Leni’s. But Leni left at last. Pökler might not have had the will.
He thought of himself as a practical man. At the rocket field they talked continents, encirclements—seeing years before the General Staff the need for a weapon to break ententes, to leap like a chess knight over Panzers, infantry, even the Luftwaffe. Plutocratic nations to the west, communists to the east. Spaces, models, game-strategies. Not much passion or ideology. Practical men. While the military wallowed in victories not yet won, the rocket engineers had to think non-fanatically, about German reverses, German defeat—the attrition of the Luftwaffe and its decline in power, the withdrawals of fronts, the need for weapons with longer ranges. . . . But others had the money, others gave the orders—trying to superimpose their lusts and bickerings on something that had its own vitality, on a technologique they’d never begin to understand. As long as the Rocket was in research and development, there was no need for them to believe in it. Later, as the A4 was going operational, as they found themselves with a real rocket-in-being, the struggles for power would begin in earnest. Pökler could see that. They were athletic, brainless men without vision, without imagination. But they had power, and it was hard for him not to think of them as superior, even while holding them in a certain contempt.
But Leni was wrong: no one was using him. Pökler was an extension of the Rocket, long before it was ever built. She’d seen to that. When she left him, he fell apart. Pieces spilled into the Hinterhof, down the drains, away in the wind. He couldn’t even go to the movies. Only rarely did he go out after work and try to fish lumps of coal from the Spree. He drank beer and sat in the cold room, autumn light reaching him after impoverishments and fadings, from gray clouds, off courtyard walls and drainpipes, through grease-darkened curtains, bled of all hope by the time it reached where he sat shivering and crying. He cried every day, some hour of the day, for a month, till a sinus got infected. He went to bed and sweated the fever out. Then he moved to Kummersdorf, outside Berlin, to help his friend Mondaugen at the rocket field.
Temperatures, velocities, pressures, fin and body configurations, stabilities and turbulences began to slip in, to replace what Leni had run away from. There were pine and fir forests out the windows in the morning, instead of a sorrowful city courtyard. Was he giving up the world, entering a monastic order?
One night he set fire to twenty pages of calculations. Integral signs weaved like charmed cobras, comical curly ds marched along like hunchbacks through the fire-edge into billows of lace ash. But that was his only relapse.
At first he helped out in the propulsion group. No one was specializing yet. That came later, when the bureaus and paranoias moved in, and the organization charts became plan-views of prison cells. Kurt Mondaugen, whose field was radio electronics, could come up with solutions to cooling problems. Pökler found himself redesigning instrumentation for measuring local pressures. That came in handy later at Peenemünde, when they often had to lead over a hundred measuring tubes from a model no more than 4 or 5 centimeters’ diameter. Pökler helped in working out the Halbmodelle solution: bisecting the model lengthwise and mounting it flat-side to the wall of the test chamber, bringing the tubes through that way to all the manometers outside. A Berlin slum-dweller, he thought, knew how to think in half-rations . . . but it was a rare moment of pride. No one could really claim credit 100% for any idea, it was a corporate intelligence at work, specialization hardly mattered, class lines even less. The social spectrum ran from von Braun, the Prussian aristocrat, down to the likes of Pökler, who would eat an apple in the street—yet they were all equally at the Rocket’s mercy: not only danger from explosions or falling hardware, but also its dumbness, its dead weight, its obstinate and palpable mystery. . . .
In those days, most of the funding and attention went to the propulsion group. Problem was just to get something off the ground without having it blow up. There were minor disasters—aluminum motor casings would burn through, some injector designs would set up resonant combustion, in which the burning motor would try to shriek itself to pieces—and then, in ’34, a major one. Dr. Wahmke decided to mix peroxide and alcohol together before injection into the thrust chamber, to see what would happen. The ignition flame backed up through the conduit into the tank. The blast demolished the test stand, killing Dr. Wahmke and two others. First blood, first sacrifice.
Kurt Mondaugen took it as a sign. One of these German mystics who grew up reading Hesse, Stefan George, and Richard Wilhelm, ready to accept Hitler on the basis of Demian-metaphysics, he seemed to look at fuel and oxidizer as paired opposites, male and female principles uniting in the mystical egg of the combustion chamber: creation and destruction, fire and water, chemical plus and chemical minus—
“Valency,” Pökler protested, “a condition of the outer shells, that’s all.”
“Think about it,” said Mondaugen.
There was also Fahringer, an aerodynamics man, who went out in the pine woods at Peenemünde with his Zen bow and roll of pressed straw to practice breathing, draw and loosing, over and over. It seemed rather rude at a time when his colleagues were being driven insane by what they called “Folgsamkeitfaktor,” a problem with getting the Rocket’s long axis to follow the tangent, at all points, to its trajectory. The Rocket for this Fahringer was a fat Japanese arrow. It was necessary in some way to become one with Rocket, trajectory, and target—“not to will it, but to surrender, to step out of the role of firer. The act is undivided. You are both aggressor and victim, rocket and parabolic path and . . .” Pökler never knew what the man was talking about. But Mondaugen understood. Mondaugen was the bodhisattva here, returned from exile in the Kalahari and whatever light had found him there, returned to the world of men and nations to carry on in a role he’d chosen deliberately, but without ever explaining why. In Südwest he had kept no journals, written no letters home. There had been an uprising by the Bondelswaartz in 1922, and general turmoil in the country. His radio experiments interrupted, he sought refuge, along with a few score other whites, in the villa of a local landowner named Foppl. The place was a stronghold, cut off on all sides by deep ravines. After a few months of siege and debauchery, “haunted by a profound disgust for everything European,” Mondaugen went out alone into the bush, ended up living with the Ovatjimba, the aardvark people, wh
o are the poorest of the Hereros. They accepted him with no questions. He thought of himself, there and here, as a radio transmitter of some kind, and believed that whatever he was broadcasting at the time was at least no threat to them. In his electro-mysticism, the triode was as basic as the cross in Christianity. Think of the ego, the self that suffers a personal history bound to time, as the grid. The deeper and true Self is the flow between cathode and plate. The constant, pure flow. Signals—sense-data, feelings, memories relocating—are put onto the grid, and modulate the flow. We live lives that are waveforms constantly changing with time, now positive, now negative. Only at moments of great serenity is it possible to find the pure, the informationless state of signal zero.
“In the name of the cathode, the anode, and the holy grid?” said Pökler.
“Yes, that’s good,” Mondaugen smiled.
Closest to the zero among them all, perhaps, was the African Enzian, the protégé of Major Weissmann. At the Versuchsanstalt, behind his back, he was known as Weissmann’s Monster, probably less out of racism than at the picture the two of them made, Enzian towering a foot over Weissmann, who was balding, scholarly, peering up at the African through eyeglass lenses thick as bottles, skipping now and then to keep up as they stalked over the asphalt and through the labs and offices, Enzian dominating every room and landscape of those early Rocket days. . . . Pökler’s clearest memory of him is his first, in the testing room at Kummersdorf, surrounded by electric colors—green nitrogen bottles, a thick tangle of red, yellow and blue plumbing, Enzian’s own copper face with the same kind of serenity that now and then drifted into Mondaugen’s—watching in one of the mirrors the image of a rocket engine beyond the safety partition: in the stale air of that room snapping with last-minute anxieties, nicotine craving, unreasonable prayer, Enzian was at peace. . . .
Pökler moved to Peenemünde in 1937, along with some 90 others. They were invading Gravity itself, and a beachhead had to be laid down. Never in his life, not even as a laborer in Berlin, did Pökler work so hard. The vanguard spent the spring and summer converting a little island, the Greifswalder Oie, into a testing station: resurfacing road, stringing cable and telephone line, putting up living quarters, latrines and storage sheds, excavating bunkers, mixing concrete, endlessly stevedoring in crates of tools, bags of cement, drums of fuel. They used an ancient ferryboat for cargo runs between the mainland and the Oie. Pökler remembers the worn red plush and scratched lacquer inside the dim cabins, the neglected brightwork, the asthmatic cry of her steam-whistle, odors of sweat, cigarette smoke and Diesel fuel, the trembling of arm and leg muscles, the tired joking, the exhaustion toward the end of each day, his own new calluses struck to gold by the late sun. . . .
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