Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, “The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning,” is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that “productivity” and “earnings” keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity—most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it’s only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life. Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide . . . though he’s amiable enough, keeps cracking jokes back through the loudspeaker, “Good morning folks, this is Heidelberg here we’re coming into now, you know the old refrain, ‘I lost my heart in Heidelberg,’ well I have a friend who lost both his ears here! Don’t get me wrong, it’s really a nice town, the people are warm and wonderful—when they’re not dueling. Seriously though, they treat you just fine, they don’t just give you the key to the city, they give you the bung-starter!” u.s.w. On you roll, across a countryside whose light is forever changing—castles, heaps of rock, moons of different shapes and colors come and go. There are stops at odd hours of the mornings, for reasons that are not announced: you get out to stretch in lime-lit courtyards where the old men sit around the table under enormous eucalyptus trees you can smell in the night, shuffling the ancient decks oily and worn, throwing down swords and cups and trumps major in the tremor of light while behind them the bus is idling, waiting—passengers will now reclaim their seats and much as you’d like to stay, right here, learn the game, find your old age around this quiet table, it’s no use: he is waiting beside the door of the bus in his pressed uniform, Lord of the Night he is checking your tickets, your ID and travel papers, and it’s the wands of enterprise that dominate tonight. . . as he nods you by, you catch a glimpse of his face, his insane, committed eyes, and you remember then, for a terrible few heartbeats, that of course it will end for you all in blood, in shock, without dignity—but there is meanwhile this trip to be on . . . over your own seat, where there ought to be an advertising plaque, is instead a quote from Rilke: “Once, only once . . .” One of Their favorite slogans. No return, no salvation, no Cycle—that’s not what They, nor Their brilliant employee Kekulé, have taken the Serpent to mean. No: what the Serpent means is—how’s this—that the six carbon atoms of benzene are in fact curled around into a closed ring, just like that snake with its tail in its mouth, GET IT? “The aromatic Ring we know today,” Pökler’s old prof, Laszlo Jamf, at this point in the spiel removing from his fob a gold hexagon with the German formée cross in the center, a medal of honor from IG Farben, joking, in his lovable-old-fart manner, that he likes to think of the cross not as German so much as standing for the tetravalency of carbon—“but who,” lifting his open hands on each beat, like a bandleader, “who, sent, the Dream?” It is never clear how rhetorical any of Jamf’s questions are. “Who sent this new serpent to our ruinous garden, already too fouled, too crowded to qualify as any locus of innocence—unless innocence be our age’s neutral, our silent passing into the machineries of indifference—something that Kekulé’s Serpent had come to—not to destroy, but to define to us the loss of . . . we had been given certain molecules, certain combinations and not others . . . we used what we found in Nature, unquestioning, shamefully perhaps—but the Serpent whispered, ‘They can be changed, and new molecules assembled from the debris of the given. . . .’ Can anyone tell me what else he whispered to us? Come—who knows? You. Tell me, Pökler—”
His name fell on him like a thunderclap, and of course it wasn’t Prof.-Dr. Jamf after all, but a colleague from down the hall who had pulled reveille duty that morning. Ilse was brushing her hair, and smiling at him.
His daytime work had started to go better. Others were not so distant, and more apt to look in his eyes. They’d met Ilse, and been charmed. If he saw anything else in their faces, he ignored it.
Then one evening he returned from the Oie, a little drunk, a little anxious-elated over a firing the next day, and found his cubicle empty. Ilse, her flowered bag, the clothing she usually left strewn on the cot, had all vanished. Nothing left but a wretched sheet of log paper (which Pökler found so useful for taming the terror of exponential curves into the linear, the safe), the same kind she’d drawn pictures of her Moonhouse on. “Papi, they want me back. Maybe they’ll let me see you again. I hope so. I love you. Ilse.”
Kurt Mondaugen found Pökler lying on her cot breathing what he imagined were odors of her hair on the pillow. For a while then he went a little insane, talked of killing Weissmann, sabotaging the rocket program, quitting his job and seeking asylum in England. . . . Mondaugen sat, and listened to all of it, touched Pökler once or twice, smoked his pipe, till at last, at two or three in the morning, Pökler had talked through a number of unreal options, cried, cursed, punched a hole into his neighbor’s cubicle, through which he heard the man snoring on oblivious. Cooled by then to a vexed engineer-elitism—“They are fools, they don’t even know what sine and cosine are and they’re trying to tell me”—he agreed that yes, he must wait, and let them do what they would do. . . .
“If I set up a meeting with Weissmann,” Mondaugen did suggest, “could you be graceful? calm?”
“No. Not with him. . . . Not yet.”
“When you think you are ready, let me know. When you’re ready, you’ll know how to handle it.” Had he allowed himself a tone of command? He must have seen how much Pökler needed to be at someone’s command. Leni had learned to subdue her husband with her face, knew what cruel lines he expected of her mouth, what tones of voice he needed . . . when she left him she left an unemployed servant who’d go with the first master that called, just a
VICTIM IN A VACUUM!
Nur . . . ein . . . Op-fer!
Sehr ins Vakuum,
(“Won’t somebody take advantage of me?”)
Wird niemand ausnut-zen mich, auch?
(“Just a slave with nobody to slave for,”)
Nur ein Sklave, ohne Her-rin, (ya-ta ta-ta)
(“A-and who th’ heck wants ta be, free?”)
Wer zum Teufel die Freiheit, braucht?
(All together now, all you masochists out there, specially those of you don’t have a partner tonight, alone with those fantasies that don’t look like they’ll ever come true—want you just to join in here with your brothers and sisters, let each other know you’re alive and sincere, try to break through the silences, try to reach through and connect. . . . )
Aw, the sodium lights-aren’t, so bright in Berlin,
I go to the bars dear, but nobody’s in!
Oh, I’d much rather bee
In a Greek trage-dee,
Than be a VICTIM IN A VACUUM to-nite!
Days passed, much like one another to Pökler. Identical morning plunges into a routine dreary as winter now. He learned to keep an outward calm, at least. Learned to feel the gathering, the moving toward war that is unique to weapons programs. At first it simulates depression or non-specific anxiety. There may be esophagal spasms and unrecoverable dreams. You find you are writing notes to yourself, first thing in the morning: calm, reasoned assurances to the screaming mental case inside—1. It is a combination. 1.1 It is a scalar quantity. 1.2. Its negative aspects are distributed isotropically. 2. It is not a conspiracy. 2.1 It is not a vector. 2.11 It
is not aimed at anybody. 2.12 It is not aimed at me . . . u.s.w. The coffee begins to taste more and more metallic. Each deadline is now a crisis, each is more intense than the last. Behind this job-like-any-other-job seems to lie something void, something terminal, something growing closer, each day, to manifestation. . . . (“The new planet Pluto,” she had whispered long ago, lying in the smelly dark, her long Asta Nielsen upper lip gibbous that night as the moon that ruled her, “Pluto is in my sign now, held tight in its claws. It moves slowly, so slowly and so far away . . . but it will burst out. It is the grim phoenix which creates its own holocaust . . . deliberate resurrection. Staged. Under control. No grace, no interventions by God. Some are calling it the planet of National Socialism, Brunhübner and that crowd, all trying to suck up to Hitler now. They don’t know they are telling the literal truth. . . . Are you awake? Franz. . . . “)
As war drew closer, the game of priorities and politicking grew more earnest, Army vs. Luftwaffe, the Weapons Department vs. the Ministry of Munitions, the SS, given their aspirations, vs. everybody else, and even a simmering discontent that was to grow over the next few years into a palace revolt against von Braun, because of his youth and a number of test failures—though heaven knew, there were always enough of those, they were the raw material of all testing-station politics. . . . In general, though, the test results grew more and more hopeful. It was impossible not to think of the Rocket without thinking of Schicksal, of growing toward a shape predestined and perhaps a little otherworldly. The crews launched an uncontrolled series of A5s, bringing some of them down by parachute, reaching a height of five miles and nearly to the speed of sound. Though the guidance people had still a long way to go, they had by this point switched over to vanes made of graphite, brought the yaw oscillations down to five degrees or so, and grown measurably happier about the Rocket’s stability.
At some point during the winter, Pökler came to feel that he could handle a meeting with Weissmann. He found the SS man on guard behind eyeglasses like Wagnerian shields, ready for unacceptable maxima—anger, accusation, a moment of office-violence. It was like meeting a stranger. They had not spoken since the days at Kummersdorf, at the old Raketenflugplatz. In this quarter-hour at Peenemünde, Pökler smiled more than he had in the year previous: spoke of his admiration for Poehlmann’s work in devising a cooling system for the propulsion.
“What about the hot spots?” Weissmann asked. It was a reasonable question, but also an intimacy.
It came to Pökler that the man didn’t give a damn about heating problems. This was a game, as Mondaugen had warned—ritualized as jiu-jitsu. “We’ve got heat-flow densities,” Pökler feeling as he usually did when he sang, “on the order of three million kcal/m2h °C. Regenerative cooling is the best interim solution right now, but Poehlmann has a new approach”—showing him with chalk and slate, trying for the professional manner—“he feels that if we use a film of alcohol on the inside of the chamber, we can reduce the heat transfer by a considerable amount.”
“You’ll be injecting it.”
“Correct.”
“How much fuel is that going to reroute? How’s it going to affect the engine efficiency?”
Pökler had the figures. “Right now injection is a plumber’s nightmare, but with the delivery schedules as they are—”
“What about the two-stage combustion process?”
“Gives us more volume, better turbulence, but there’s also a non-isotropic pressure drop, which cuts into our efficiency. . . . We’re trying any number of approaches. If we could depend on better funding—”
“Ah. Not my department. We could do with a more generous budget ourselves.” They both laughed then, gentleman scientists under a stingy bureaucracy, suffering together.
Pökler understood that he had been negotiating for his child and for Leni: that the questions and answers were not exactly code for something else, but in the way of an evaluation of Pökler personally. He was expected to behave a certain way—not just to play a role, but to live it. Any deviations into jealousy, metaphysics, vagueness would be picked up immediately: he would either be corrected back on course, or allowed to fall. Through winter and spring the sessions with Weissmann became routine. Pökler grew into his new disguise—Prematurely Aged Adolescent Whiz—often finding that it could indeed take him over, keeping him longer at reference books and firing data, speaking lines for him he could never have planned in advance: gentle, scholarly, rocket-obsessed language that surprised him.
In late August he had his second visit. It should have been “Ilse returned,” but Pökler wasn’t sure. As before, she showed up alone, unannounced—ran to him, kissed him, called him Papi. But . . .
But her hair, for one thing, was definitely dark brown, and cut differently. Her eyes were longer, set differently, her complexion less fair. It seemed she’d grown a foot taller. But at that age, they shoot up overnight, don’t they? If it was “that age. . . .” Even as Pökler embraced her, the perverse whispering began. Is it the same one? Have they sent you a different child? Why didn’t you look closer last time, Pökler?
This time he asked how long they were going to let her stay.
“They’ll tell me. And I’ll try to let you know.” And would there be time for him to recalibrate from his little squirrel who dreamed of living on the Moon to this dark, long-legged, Southern creature, whose awkwardness and need of a father were so touching, so clear even to Pökler, at this their second (or was it first, or third?) meeting?
Hardly any news of Leni. They had been separated, Ilse said, during the winter. She’d heard a rumor that her mother had been moved to a different camp. So, so. Present a pawn, withdraw the queen: Weissmann, waiting to see how Pökler would react. This time he had gone too far: Pökler laced up his shoes and calmly enough went out looking for the SS man, cornered him in his office, denounced him before a panel of kindly, dim governmental figures, the speech eloquently climaxing as he threw chessboard and pieces all into Weissmann’s arrogantly blinking face. . . . Pökler’s impetuous, yes, a rebel—but Generaldirektor it’s his kind of fire and honesty we need—
The child had suddenly come into his arms, to kiss him again. For free. Pökler forgot his troubles and held her to his heart for a long time, without speaking. . . .
But that night in the cubicle, only breathing—no moon-wishes this year—from her cot, he was awake wondering, one daughter one impostor? same daughter twice? two impostors? Beginning to work out the combinations for a third visit, a fourth. . . . Weissmann, those behind him, had thousands of these children available. As the years passed, as they grew more nubile, would Pökler even come to fall in love with one—would she reach the king’s row that way and become a queen-substitute for lost, for forgotten Leni? The Opponent knew that Pökler’s suspicion would always be stronger than any fears about real incest. . . . They could make up new rules, to complicate the game indefinitely. How could any man as empty as Pökler felt that night ever be flexible enough for that?
Kot—it was ridiculous—hadn’t he seen her go by from every angle in their old city rooms? Carried, asleep, crying, crawling, laughing, hungry. Often he had come home too tired to make it to the bed, and had lain on the floor with his head under the one wood table, curled, beaten, wondering if he could even sleep. The first time Ilse noticed, she crawled over and sat staring at him for a long time. She had never seen him still, horizontal, with his eyes shut. . . . He drifted toward sleep. Ilse leaned over and bit him in the leg, as she bit crusts of bread, cigarettes, shoes, anything that might be food.—I’m your father.—You’re inert and edible. Pökler screamed and rolled out of the way. Ilse began to cry. He was too tired to want to think about discipline. It was Leni finally who calmed her down.
He knew all Ilse’s cryings, her first attempts at words, the colors of her shit, the sounds and shapes that brought her tranquillity. He ought to know if this
child was his own or not. But he didn’t. Too much had happened between. Too much history and dream. . . .
Next morning his group leader handed Pökler a furlough chit, and a paycheck with a vacation bonus. No travel restrictions, but a time limit of two weeks. Translation: Will you come back? He packed some things, and they got on the train for Stettin. The sheds and assembly buildings, the concrete monoliths and steel gantries that were the map of his life flared backward, shadowing into great purplish chunks, isolated across the marshland one from another, in parallax away. Would he dare not to come back? Could he think so far ahead?
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