Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

  “No, Fahringer.”

  “The Rocket creating its own great wind . . . no wind without both, Rocket and atmosphere . . . but inside the venturi, breath—furious and blazing breath—always flows at the same unchanging speed . . . can’t you really see?”

  Gibberish. Or else a koan that Achtfaden isn’t equipped to master, a transcendent puzzle that could lead him to some moment of light . . . almost as good as:

  —What is it that flies?

  —Los!

  Rising from the Wasserkuppe, rivers Ullster and Haune tilting around into map-shapes, green valleys and mountains, the four he has left below gathering up the white shock cords, only one looking up, shading his eyes—Bert Fibel? but what does the name matter, from this vantage? Achtfaden goes looking for the thunderstorm—under, through the thunder playing to a martial tune inside his head—crowding soon in gray cliffs to the right, the strokes of lightning banging all the mountains blue, the cockpit briefly filled with the light . . . right at the edge. Right here, at the interface, the air will be rising. You follow the edge of the storm, with another sense—the flight-sense, located nowhere, filling all your nerves . . . as long as you stay always right at the edge between fair lowlands and the madness of Donar it does not fail you, whatever it is that flies, this carrying drive toward—is it freedom? Does no one recognize what enslavement gravity is till he reaches the interface of the thunder?

  No time to work out puzzles. Here come the Schwarzkommando. Achtfaden has wasted too much time with luscious Gerda, with memories. Here they come clattering down the ladders, fast oogabooga talk he can’t even guess at, it’s a linguistic wilderness here, and he’s afraid. What do they want? Why won’t they leave him in peace—they have their victory, what do they want with poor Achtfaden?

  They want the Schwarzgerät. When Enzian actually pronounces the word aloud, it’s already redundant. It was there in his bearing, the line of his mouth. The others back him, rifles slung, half a dozen African faces, mobbing the mirrors with their darkness, their vein-heavy red-white-and-blue eyes.

  “I only was assigned to part of it. It was trivial. Really.”

  “Aerodynamics isn’t trivial,” Enzian calm, unsmiling.

  “There were others from Gessner’s section. Mechanical design. I always worked out of Prof.-Dr. Kurzweg’s shop.”

  “Who were the others?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “So.”

  “Don’t hit me. Why should I hide anything? It’s the truth. They kept us cut off. I didn’t know anybody at Nordhausen. Just a few in my own work section. I swear it. The S-Gerät people were all strangers to me. Until that first day we all met with Major Weissmann, I’d never seen any of them. No one used real names. We were given code-names. Characters from a movie, somebody said. The other aerodynamics people were ‘Spörri’ and ‘Hawasch.’ I was called ‘Wenk.’”

  “What was your job?”

  “Weight control. All they wanted from me was the shift in CG for a device of a given weight. The weight was classified top secret. Forty-something kilos. 45? 46?”

  “Station numbers,” raps Andreas from over Enzian’s shoulder.

  “I can’t remember. It was in the tail section. I do remember the load was asymmetrical about the longitudinal axis. Toward Vane III. That was the vane used for yaw control—”

  “We know that.”

  “You’d have to talk to ‘Spörri’ or ‘Hawasch.’ They’d be the ones who worked that problem out. Talk to Guidance.” Why did I say—

  “Why did you say that?”

  “No, no, it wasn’t my job, that’s all, guidance, warhead, propulsion . . . ask them. Ask the others.”

  “You meant something else. Who worked on guidance?”

  “I told you, I didn’t know any of their names.” The dust-covered cafeteria in the last days. The machinery in the adjoining halls, that once battered eardrums pitiless as a cold-chisel day and night, is silenced. The Roman numerals on the time clocks stare from the walls of the bays, among the glass windowpanes. Telephone jacks on black rubber cords dangle from brackets overhead, each connection hanging over its own desk, all the desks perfectly empty, covered with salt-dust sifted from the ceiling, no phones to plug in, no more words to be said. . . . The face of his friend across the table, the drawn and sleepless face now too pointed, too lipless, that once vomited beer on Achtfaden’s hiking boots, whispering now, “I couldn’t go with von Braun . . . not to the Americans, it would only just keep on the same way . . . I want it really to be over, that’s all . . . good-by, ‘Wenk.’”

  “Stuff him down the waste lines,” Andreas suggests. They are all so black, so sure. . . .

  I must be the last one . . . somebody’s sure to have him by now . . . what can these Africans do with a name . . . they could have got it from anybody. . . .

  “He was a friend. We knew each other before the war, at Darmstadt.”

  “We’re not going to hurt him. We’re not going to hurt you. We want the S-Gerät.”

  “Närrisch. Klaus Närrisch.” A new parameter for his self-coefficient now: betrayal.

  As he leaves the Rücksichtslos, Achtfaden can hear behind him, metallic, broadcasting from another world, ripped by static, a radio voice. “Oberst Enzian. M’okamanga. M’okamanga. M’okamanga.” There is urgency and gravity in the word. He stands by the canalside, among steel wreckage and old men in the dusk, waiting for a direction to go. But where is the electric voice now that will ever call for him?

  • • • • • • •

  They have set out by barge along the Spree-Oder Canal, headed at last for Swinemünde, Slothrop to see what Geli Tripping’s clew will lead him to in the way of a Schwarzgerät, Margherita to rendezvous with a yachtful of refugees from the Lublin regime, among whom ought to be her daughter Bianca. Stretches of the canal are still blocked—in the night Russian demolition crews can be heard blasting away the wrecks with TNT—but Slothrop and Greta can summon, like dreamers, draft shallow enough to clear whatever the War has left in their way. Off and on it rains. The sky will begin to cloud up about noon, turning the color of wet cement—then wind, sharpening, colder, then rain that must be often at the edge of sleet, blowing at them head-on up the canal. They shelter under tarps, among bales and barrels, tar, wood and straw smells. When the nights are clear, peepers-and-frogs nights, star-streaks and shadows at canalside will set travelers’ eyes to jittering. Willows line the banks. At midnight coils of fog rise to dim out even the glow of the bargee’s pipe, far away up, or down, the dreaming convoy. These nights, fragrant and grained as pipesmoke, are tranquil and good for sleep. The Berlin madness is behind, Greta seems less afraid, perhaps all they needed was to be on the move. . . .

  But one afternoon, sliding down the long mild slope of the Oder toward the Baltic Sea, they catch sight of a little red and white resort town, wiped through in broad smudges by the War, and she clutches to Slothrop’s arm.

  “I’ve been here . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  “Just before the Polish invasion . . . I was here with Sigmund . . . at the spa. . . .”

  On shore, behind cranes and steel railings, rise fronts of what were restaurants, small factories, hotels, burned now, windowless, powdered with their own substance. The name of the town is Bad Karma. Rain from earlier in the day has streaked the walls, the pinnacles of waste and the coarse-cobbled lanes. Children and old men stand on shore waiting to take lines and warp the barges in. Black dumplings of smoke are floating up out of the stack of a white river steamer. Shipfitters are slamming inside its hull. Greta stares at it. A pulse is visible in her throat. She shakes her head. “I thought it was Bianca’s ship, but it isn’t.”

  In close to the quay, they swing ashore, grabbing on to an iron ladder held in the old stone by rusted bolts, each
one staining the wall downward in a wet sienna fan. On Margherita’s jacket a pink gardenia has begun to shake. It isn’t the wind. She keeps saying, “I have to see. . . .”

  Old men are leaning on railings, smoking pipes, watching Greta or looking out at the river. They wear gray clothes, wide-bottom trousers, wide-brim hats with rounded crowns. The market square is busy and neat: tram tracks gleam, there’s a smell of fresh hosing down. In the ruins lilacs bleed their color, their surplus life out over the broken stone and brick.

  Except for a few figures in black, sitting out in the sun, the Spa itself is deserted. Margherita by now is spooked as badly as she ever was in Berlin. Slothrop tags along, in his Rocketman turnout, feeling burdened. The Sprudelhof is bounded on one side by a sand-colored arcade: sand columns and brown shadows. A strip just in front is planted to cypresses. Fountains in massive stone bowls are leaping: jets 20 feet high, whose shadows across the smooth paving of the courtyard are thick and nervous.

  But who’s that, standing so rigid by the central spring? And why has Margherita turned to stone? The sun is out, there are others watching, but even Slothrop now is bristling along his back and flanks, chills flung one on the fading cluster of another, up under each side of his jaw . . . the woman is wearing a black coat, a crepe scarf covering her hair, the flesh of thick calves showing through her black stockings as nearly purple, she is only leaning over the waters in a very fixed way and watching them as they try to approach . . . but the smile . . . across ten meters of swept courtyard, the smile growing confident in the very white face, all the malaise of a Europe dead and gone gathered here in the eyes black as her clothing, black and lightless. She knows them. Greta has turned, and tries to hide her face in Slothrop’s shoulder. “By the well,” is she whispering this? “at sundown, that woman in black. . . .”

  “Come on. It’s all right.” Back to Berlin talk. “She’s just a patient here.” Idiot, idiot—before he can stop her she’s pulled away, some quiet, awful cry in the back of her throat, and turned and begun to run, a desperate tattoo of high heels across the stone, into the shadowed arches of the Kurhaus.

  “Hey,” Slothrop, feeling queasy, accosts the woman in black. “What’s the big idea, lady?”

  But her face has changed by now, it is only the face of another woman of the ruins, one he would have ignored, passed over. She smiles, all right, but in the forced and business way he knows. “Zigaretten, bitte?” He gives her a long stub he’s been saving, and goes looking for Margherita.

  He finds the arcade empty. All the doors of the Kurhaus are locked. Overhead passes a skylight of yellow panes, many of them fallen out. Down the corridor, fuzzy patches of afternoon sun stagger along, full of mortar dust. He climbs a broken flight of steps that end in the sky. Odd chunks of stone clutter the way. From the landing at the top, the Spa stretches to country distances: handsome trees, graveyard clouds, the blue river. Greta is nowhere in sight. Later he will figure out where it was she went. By then they will be well on board the Anubis, and it will only make him feel more helpless.

  He keeps looking for her till the darkness is down and he’s come back by the river again. He sits at an open-air café strung with yellow lights, drinking beer, eating spaetzle and soup, waiting. When she materializes it is a shy fade-in, as Gerhardt von Göll must have brought her on a time or two, not moving so much as Slothrop’s own vantage swooping to her silent closeup stabilized presently across from him, finishing his beer, bumming a cigarette. Not only does she avoid the subject of the woman by the spring, she may have lost the memory already.

  “I went up in the observatory,” is what she has to say finally, “to look down the river. She’s coming. I saw the boat she’s on. It’s only a kilometer away.”

  “The what now?”

  “Bianca, my child, and my friends. I thought they’d have been in Swinemünde long ago. But then nobody’s on timetables any more. . . .”

  Sure enough, after two more bitter cups of acorn coffee and another cigarette, here comes a cheerful array of lights, red, green, and white, down the river, with the faint wheeze of an accordion, the thump of a string bass, and the sound of women laughing. Slothrop and Greta walk down to the quay, and through mist now beginning to seep up off the river they can make out an ocean-going yacht, nearly the color of the mist, a gilded winged jackal under the bowsprit, the weather-decks crowded with chattering affluent in evening dress. Several people have spotted Margherita. She waves, and they point or wave back, and call her name. It is a moving village: all summer it has been sailing these lowlands just as Viking ships did a thousand years ago, though passively, not marauding: seeking an escape it has not yet defined clearly.

  The boat comes in to the quay, the crew lower an access ladder. Smiling passengers halfway down are already stretching out gloved and ringed hands to Margherita.

  “Are you coming?”

  “Uh . . . Well, should I?”

  She shrugs and turns her back, steps gingerly off the landing and on board, skirt straining and glossy a moment in the yellow light from the café. Slothrop dithers, goes to follow her—at the last moment some joker pulls the ladder up and the boat moves away, Slothrop screams, loses his balance and falls in the river. Head first: the Rocketman helmet is pulling him straight down. He tugs it off and comes up, sinuses burning and vision blurred, the white vessel sliding away, though the churning screws are moving his direction, beginning to suck at the cape, so he has to get rid of that, too. He backstrokes away and then cautiously around the counter, lettered in black: ANUBIS , trying to keep away from those screws. Down the other side he spots a piece of line hanging, and manages to get over there and grab hold. The band up on deck is playing polkas. Three drunken ladies in tiaras and pearl chokers are lounging at the lifelines, watching Slothrop struggle up the rope. “Let’s cut it,” yells one of them, “and see him fall in again!” “Yes, let’s!” agree her companions. Jesus Christ. One of them has produced a huge meat cleaver, and is winding up all right, amid much vivacious laughing, at about which point somebody grabs hold of Slothrop’s ankle. He looks down, observes sticking out a porthole two slender wrists in silver and sapphires, lighted from inside like ice, and the oily river rushing by underneath.

  “In here.” A girl’s voice. He slides back down while she tugs on his feet, till he’s sitting in the porthole. From above comes a heavy thump, the rope goes falling and the ladies into hysterics. Slothrop squirms on inside, water squeegeeing off, falls into an upper bunk next to a girl maybe 18 in a long sequined gown, with hair blonde to the point of pure whiteness, and the first cheekbones Slothrop can recall getting a hardon looking at. Something has definitely been happening to his brain out here, all right. . . .

  “Uh—”

  “Mmm.” They look at each other while he continues to drip water all over. Her name, it turns out, is Stefania Procalowska. Her husband Antoni is owner of the Anubis here.

  Well, husband, all right. “Look at this,” sez Slothrop, “I’m soaking wet.”

  “I noticed. Somebody’s evening clothes ought to fit you. Dry off, I’ll go see what I can promote. You can use the head if you want, everything’s there.”

  He strips off the rest of the Rocketman rig, takes a shower, using lemon verbena soap in which he finds a couple of Stefania’s white pubic hairs, and is shaving when she gets back with dry clothes for him.

  “So you’re with Margherita.”

  “Not sure about that ‘with.’ She find that kid of hers?”

  “Oh indeed—they’re already deep into it with Karel. This month he’s posing as a film producer. You know Karel. And of course she wants to get Bianca into the films worse than anything.”

  “Uh . . .”

  Stefania shrugs a lot, and every sequin dances. “Margherita wants her to have a legitimate career. It’s guilt. She never felt her own career was anything more than
a string of dirty movies. I suppose you heard about how she got pregnant with Bianca.”

  “Max Schlepzig, or something.”

  “Or something, right. You never saw Alpdrücken? In that one scene, after the Grand Inquisitor gets through, the jackal men come in to ravish and dismember the captive baroness. Von Göll let the cameras run right on. The footage got cut out for the release prints of course, but found its way into Goebbels’s private collection. I’ve seen it—it’s frightening. Every man in the scene wears a black hood, or an animal mask . . . back at Bydgoszcz it became an amusing party game to speculate on who the child’s father was. One has to pass the time. They’d run the film and ask Bianca questions, and she had to answer yes or no.”

  “Yup.” Slothrop goes on dousing his face with bay rum.

  “Oh, Margherita had her corrupted long before she came to stay with us. I wouldn’t be surprised if little Bianca sleeps with Karel tonight. Part of breaking into the business, isn’t it? Of course it will have to be all business—that’s the least a mother can do. Margherita’s problem was that she always enjoyed it too much, chained up in those torture rooms. She couldn’t enjoy it any other way. You’ll see. She and Thanatz. And whatever Thanatz brought in his valise.”

  “Thanatz.”

  “Ah, she didn’t tell you.” Laughing. “Miklos Thanatz, her husband. They get together off and on. Toward the end of the war they had a little touring show for the boys at the front—a lesbian couple, a dog, a trunk of leather costumes and implements, a small band. They entertained the SS troops. Concentration camps . . . the barbed-wire circuit, you know. And then later, in Holland, out at the rocket sites. This is the first time since the surrender they’ve been together, so I wouldn’t actually expect to see too much of her. . . .”

  “Oh, yeah, well, I didn’t know that.” Rocket sites? The hand of Providence creeps among the stars, giving Slothrop the finger.