Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

  Slothrop gives him the mandala. He hopes it will work like the mantra that Enzian told him once, mba-kayere (I am passed over), mba-kayere . . . a spell against Marvy tonight, against Tchitcherine. A mezuzah. Safe passage through a bad night. . . .

  • • • • • • •

  The Schwarzkommando have got to Achtfaden, but Tchitcherine has been to Närrisch. It cost him Der Springer and three enlisted men in sick bay with deep bites. One severed artery. Närrisch trying to go out Audie Murphy style. A knight for a bishop—Närrisch under narco-hypnosis raved about the Holy Circle and the Rocketfin Cross. But the blacks don’t know what else Närrisch knew:

  (a) there was a radio link from the ground to the S-Gerät but not the other way round,

  (b) there was an interference problem between a servo-actuator and a special oxygen line running aft to the device from the main tank,

  (c) Weissmann not only coordinated the S-Gerät project at Nordhausen, but also commanded the battery that fired Rocket 00000.

  Total espionage. Bit by bit this mosaic is growing. Tchitcherine, bureauless, carries it around in his brain. Every chip and scrap belongs. More precious than Ravenna, something goes erecting against this starch-colored sky. . . .

  Radio link + oxygen = afterburner of some kind. Ordinarily it would. But Närrisch also spoke of an asymmetry, a load inside near vane 3 that complicated roll and yaw control almost impossibly.

  Now wouldn’t an afterburner there also give an asymmetrical burning pattern, and heat fluxes greater than the structure could take? Damn, why hasn’t he picked up any of the propulsion people? Do the Americans have them all?

  Major Marvy, bowie knife in his teeth and two Thompsons propped on either hip, as dumbfounded in the clearing as the rest of the attack party, is in no mood to talk. Instead he is sulking, and drinking vodka out of Džabajev’s bottomless canteen. But had any propulsion engineers assigned to the S-Gerät showed up at Garmisch, Marvy would have let him know. That’s the arrangement. Western intelligence, Russian trigger-fingers.

  Oh, he smells Enzian . . . even now the black may be looking in out of the night. Tchitcherine lights a cigarette, greenbluelavender flare settling to yellow . . . he holds the flame longer than necessary, thinking let him. He won’t. I wouldn’t. Well . . . maybe I would. . . .

  But it’s come a quantum-jump closer tonight. They are going to meet. It will be over the S-Gerät, real or fantasized, working or wasted—they will meet face to face. Then . . .

  Meantime, who’s the mysterious Soviet intelligence agent that Marvy talked to? Paranoia for you here, Tchitcherine. Maybe Moscow’s been tipped to your vendetta. If they are gathering evidence for a court-martial, it won’t be any Central Asia this time. It’ll be Last Secretary to the embassy in Atlantis. You can negotiate narcotics arrests for all the drowned Russian sailors, expedite your own father’s visas to far Lemuria, to the sun-resorts of Sargasso where the bones come up to lie and bleach and mock the passing ships. And just before he rides out on the noon current, brochures tucked between ribs, traveler’s checks wadded in a skull-socket, tell him of his black son—tell him about the day with Enzian in the creeping edge of autumn, cold as the mortal cold of an orange kept under shaved ice on the terrace of the hotel in Barcelona, si me quieres escribir you already know where I’ll be staying . . . cold at the tip of your peeling-thumb, terminally-approaching cold. . . .

  “Listen,” Marvy by now a little drunk and peevish, “when we gonna git those ’suckers?”

  “It’s coming, you can be sure.”

  “Butchyew don’t know the kinda pressure I’m gettin’ f’m Paris! F’m headquarters! It’s fantastic! There’s people in high places wanna wipe thim ’suckers out, now. All’s they got to do’s mash on a button ’n’ I never git to see no Mexican whores again’s long’s I live. Now you can see what these coons’re try’n’ t’do, somebody got to stop them ’fore they do, shit—”

  “This intelligence man you saw—both our governments easily could have the same policy—”

  “You ain’t got General Electric breathin’ over your shoulder, fella. Dillon, Reed . . . Standard Awl . . . shit. . . .”

  “But that’s just what you folks need,” Bloody Chiclitz interjects. “Get some business people in there to run it right, instead of having the government run everything. Your left hand doesn’t know what your right hand’s doing! You know that?”

  What’s this? A political debate now? Not enough humiliation missing the Schwarzkommando, no, you didn’t think you were going to get off that easy. . . .

  “A-and what about Herbert Hoover?” Chiclitz is screaming. “He came over and fed you people, when you were starving! They love Hoover over here—”

  “Yes—” Tchitcherine breaks in: “what is General Electric doing out here, by the way?”

  A friendly wink from Major Marvy. “Mister Swope was ace buddies with old FDR, you see. Electric Charlie’s in there now, but Swope, he was one-thim Brain Trusters. Jews, most of’m. But Swope’s O.K. Now GE has connections with Siemens over here, they worked on the V-2 guidance, remember—”

  “Swope’s a Jew,” sez Chiclitz.

  “Naahh—Bloody, yew don’ know whatcher talkin’ about—”

  “I’m telling you—” They fall into a drawling juicers’ argument over the ethnic background of the ex-chairman of GE, full of poison and sluggish hate. Tchitcherine listens with only one ear. An episode of vertigo is creeping on him. Didn’t Närrisch, under the drug, mention a Siemens representative at the S-Gerät meetings in Nordhausen? yes. And an IG man, too. Didn’t Carl Schmitz of the IG sit on Siemens’s board of directors?

  No use asking Marvy. He is too drunk by now to stay on any subject. “Ya know I was purty ignorant whin Uh come out here. Sheeit, I used t’think I. G. Farben was somebody’s name, you know, a fella—hello, this I. G. Farben? No, this is his wife, Mizzus Farben! Yaaah-ha-ha-ha!”

  Bloody Chiclitz is off on his Eleanor Roosevelt routine. “The othuh day, my son Idiot—uh, Elliot—and I, were baking cookies. Cookies to send to the boys overseas. When the boys received the cookies we sent them, they would bake cookies, and send some back to us. That way, everybody gets his cookies!”

  Oh, Wimpe. Old V-Mann, were you right? Is your IG to be the very model of nations?

  So it comes to Tchitcherine here in the clearing with these two fools on either side of him, among the debris of some numberless battery’s last stand, cables paralyzed where winch-operators levered them to stillness, beer bottles lying exactly where they were thrown by the last men on the last night, everything testifying so purely to the shape of defeat, of operational death.

  “Say, there.” It appears to be a very large white Finger, addressing him. Its Fingernail is beautifully manicured: as it rotates for him, it slowly reveals a Fingerprint that might well be an aerial view of the City Dactylic, that city of the future where every soul is known, and there is noplace to hide. Right now, joints moving with soft, hydraulic sounds, the Finger is calling Tchitcherine’s attention to—

  A Rocket-cartel. A structure cutting across every agency human and paper that ever touched it. Even to Russia . . . Russia bought from Krupp, didn’t she, from Siemens, the IG. . . .

  Are there arrangements Stalin won’t admit . . . doesn’t even know about? Oh, a State begins to take form in the stateless German night, a State that spans oceans and surface politics, sovereign as the International or the Church of Rome, and the Rocket is its soul. IG Raketen. Circus-bright, poster reds and yellows, rings beyond counting, all going at once. The stately Finger twirls among them all. Tchitcherine is certain. Not so much on outward evidence he has found moving through the Zone as out of a personal doom he carries with him—always to be held at the edges of revelations. It happened first with the Kirghiz Light, and his only illumination then was that fear would alw
ays keep him from going all the way in. He will never get further than the edge of this meta-cartel which has made itself known tonight, this Rocketstate whose borders he cannot cross. . . .

  He will miss the Light, but not the Finger. Sadly, most sadly, everyone else seems to be in on it. Every scavenger out here is in IG Raketen’s employ. All except for himself, and Enzian. His brother, Enzian. No wonder They’re after the Schwarzkommando . . . and. . . .

  And when They find out I’m not what They think . . . and why is Marvy looking at me like this now, his eyes bulging . . . oh, don’t panic, don’t feed his insanity, he’s just this side of . . . of . . .

  • • • • • • •

  To Cuxhaven, the summer in deceleration, floating on to Cuxhaven. The meadows hum. Rain clatters in crescent swoops through the reeds. Sheep, and rarely a few dark northern deer, will come down to browse for seaweed at the shore which is never quite sea nor quite sand, but held in misty ambivalence by the sun. . . . So Slothrop is borne, afloat on the water-leas. Like signals set out for lost travelers, shapes keep repeating for him, Zonal shapes he will allow to enter but won’t interpret, not any more. Just as well, probably. The most persistent of these, which seem to show up at the least real times of day, are the stairstep gables that front so many of these ancient north-German buildings, rising, backlit, a strangely wet gray as if risen out of the sea, over these straight and very low horizons. They hold shape, they endure, like monuments to Analysis. Three hundred years ago mathematicians were learning to break the cannonball’s rise and fall into stairsteps of range and height, Δx and Δy, allowing them to grow smaller and smaller, approaching zero as armies of eternally shrinking midgets galloped upstairs and down again, the patter of their diminishing feet growing finer, smoothing out into continuous sound. This analytic legacy has been handed down intact—it brought the technicians at Peenemünde to peer at the Askania films of Rocket flights, frame by frame, Δx by Δy, flightless themselves . . . film and calculus, both pornographies of flight. Reminders of impotence and abstraction, the stone Treppengiebel shapes, whole and shattered, appear now over the green plains, and last a while, and go away: in their shadows children with hair like hay are playing Himmel and Hölle, jumping village pavements from heaven to hell to heaven by increments, sometimes letting Slothrop have a turn, sometimes vanishing back into their dark gassen where elder houses, many-windowed and sorrowing, bow perpetually to the neighbor across the way, nearly touching overhead, only a thin lead of milk sky between.

  At nightfall the children roam the streets carrying round paper lanterns, singing Laterne, Laterne, Sonne, Mond und Sterne . . . spheres in country evenings, pale as souls, singing good-by to another summer. In a coastal town, near Wismar, as he’s falling to sleep in a little park, they surround Slothrop and tell him the story of Plechazunga, the Pig-Hero who, sometime back in the 10th century, routed a Viking invasion, appearing suddenly out of a thunderbolt and chasing a score of screaming Norsemen back into the sea. Every summer since then, a Thursday has been set aside to celebrate the town’s deliverance—Thursday being named after Donar or Thor, the thunder-god, who sent down the giant pig. The old gods, even by the 10th century, still had some pull with the people. Donar hadn’t quite been tamed into Saint Peter or Roland, though the ceremony did come to be held at the town’s Roland-statue near the Peterskirche.

  This year, though, it’s in jeopardy. Schraub the shoemaker, who has taken the role of Plechazunga for the past 30 years, got drafted last winter into the Volksgrenadier and never came back. Now the white lanterns come crowding around Tyrone Slothrop, bobbing in the dark. Tiny fingers prod his stomach.

  “You’re the fattest man in the world.”

  “He’s fatter than anyone in the village.”

  “Would you? Would you?”

  “I’m not that fat—”

  “Told you somebody would come.”

  “And taller, too.”

  “—waitaminute, would I what?”

  “Be Plechazunga tomorrow.”

  “Please.”

  Being a soft touch these days, Slothrop gives in. They roust him up out of his grass bed and down to the city hall. In the basement are costumes and props for the Schweinheldfest—shields, spears, horned helmets, shaggy animal skins, wooden Thor’s hammers and ten-foot lightning bolts covered with gold leaf. The pig costume is a little startling—pink, blue, yellow, bright sour colors, a German Expressionist pig, plush outside, padded with straw inside. It seems to fit perfectly. Hmm.

  The crowd next morning is sparse and placid: old people and children, and a few silent veterans. The Viking invaders are all kids, helmets sloping down over their eyes, capes dragging the ground, shields as big as they are and weaponry twice as high. Giant Plechazunga images with white stock and red and blue cornflowers woven onto the wiremesh frames, line the square. Slothrop waits hidden behind the Roland, a particularly humorless, goggle-eyed, curly-headed, pinch-waisted specimen. With Slothrop is an arsenal of fireworks and his assistant Fritz, who’s about 8, and a Wilhelm Busch original. Slothrop is a little nervous, unaccustomed as he is to pigherofestivals. But Fritz is an old hand, and has thoughtfully brought along a glazed jug of some liquid brain damage flavored with dill and coriander and distilled, unless Haferschleim means something else, from oatmeal.

  “Haferschleim, Fritz?” He takes another belt, sorry he asked.

  “Haferschleim, ja.”

  “Well, Haferschleim is better than none, ho, ho. . . .” Whatever it is, it seems to work swiftly on the nerve centers. By the time all the Vikings, to a solemn brass chorale from the local band, have puffed and struggled up to the statue, formed ranks, and demanded the town’s surrender, Slothrop finds his brain working with less than the usual keenness. At which point Fritz strikes his match, and all hell breaks loose, rockets, Roman candles, pinwheels and—PLECCCH-HAZUNNGGA! an enormous charge of black powder blasts him out in the open, singeing his ass, taking the curl right out of his tail. “Oh, yes, that’s right, uh . . .” Wobbling, grinning hugely, Slothrop hollers his line: “I am the wrath of Donar—and this day you shall be my anvil!” Away they all go in a good roaring chase through the streets, in a shower of white blossoms, little kids squealing, down to the water, where everybody starts splashing and ducking everybody else. Townspeople break out beer, wine, bread, Quark, sausages. Gold-brown Kartoffelpuffer are lifted dripping hot from oil smoking in black skillets over little peat fires. Girls commence stroking Slothrop’s snout and velvet flanks. The town is saved for another year.

  A peaceful, drunken day, full of music, the smell of salt water, marsh, flowers, frying onions, spilled beer and fresh fish, overhead little frost-colored clouds blowing along the blue sky. The breeze is cool enough to keep Slothrop from sweating inside this pig suit. All along the shoreline, blue-gray woods breathe and shimmer. White sails move out in the sea.

  Slothrop returns from the brown back room of a pipesmoke-and-cabbage café, and an hour’s game of hammer-and-forge with—every boy’s dream—TWO healthy young ladies in summer dresses and woodsoled shoes to find the crowd begun to coagulate into clumps of three and four. Oh, shit. Not now, come on. . . . Tight aching across his asshole, head and stomach inflated with oat mash and summer beer, Slothrop sits on a pile of nets and tries, fat chance, to will himself alert.

  These little vortices appearing in a crowd out here usually mean black market. Weeds of paranoia begin to bloom, army-green, among the garden and midday tranquillities. Last of his line, and how far-fallen—no other Slothrop ever felt such fear in the presence of Commerce. Newspapers already lie spread out on the cobbles for buyers to dump out cans of coffee on, make sure it’s all Bohnenkaffee, and not just a thin layer on top of ersatz. Gold watches and rings appear abruptly sunlit out of dusty pockets. Cigarettes go flashing hand to hand among the limp and filthy and soundless Reichsmarks. Kids play underfoot while the g
rownups deal, in Polish, Russian, north-Baltic, Plattdeutsch. Some of the DP style here, a little impersonal, just passing through, dealing on route, in motion, almost as an afterthought . . . where’d they all come from, these gray hustlers, what shadows in the Gemütlichkeit of the day were harboring them?

  Materializing from their own weird office silence, the coppers show up now, two black ’n’ white charabancs full of bluegreen uniforms, white armbands, little bucket hats with starburst insignia, truncheons already unsheathed, black dildos in nervous hands, wobbling, ready for action. The eddies in the crowd break up fast, jewelry ringing to the pavement, cigarettes scattered and squashed under the feet of stampeding civilians, among the instant litter of watches, war medals, silkstuffs, rolls of bills, pinkskinned potatoes all their eyes staring in alarm, elbow-length kid gloves twisted up fingers clutching at sky, smashed light bulbs, Parisian slippers, gold picture-frames around still-lifes of cobbles, rings, brooches, nobody gonna claim any of it, everybody scared now.

  No wonder. The cops go at busting these proceedings the way they must’ve handled anti-Nazi street actions before the War, moving in, mmm ja, with these flexible clubs, eyes tuned to the finest possibilities of threat, smelling of leather, of the wool-armpit rankness of their own fear, jumping little kids three-on-one, shaking down girls, old people, making them take off and shake out even boots and underwear, jabbing and battering in with tireless truncheonwork among the crying kids and screaming women. Beneath the efficiency and glee is nostalgia for the old days. The War must’ve been lean times for crowd control, murder and mopery was the best you could do, one suspect at a time. But now, with the White Market to be protected, here again are whole streets full of bodies eager for that erste Abreibung, and you can bet the heat are happy with it.

  Presently they have Russian reinforcements, three truckloads of young Asiatics in fatigues who don’t seem to know where they are exactly, just shipped in from someplace very cold and far to the east. Out of their slatsided rigs like soccer players coming on field, they form a line and start to clear the street by compressing the crowd toward the water. Slothrop is right in the middle of all this, shoved stumbling backward, pig mask cutting off half his vision, trying to shield whom he can—a few kids, an old lady who was busy earlier moving cotton yardage. The first billy-clubs catch him in the straw padding over his stomach, and don’t feel like much. Civilians are going down right and left, but Plechazunga’s holding his own. Has the morning been only a dress rehearsal? Is Slothrop expected to repel real foreign invaders now? A tiny girl is clutching to his leg, crying the Schweinheld’s name in a confident voice. A grizzled old cop, years of home-front high living and bribes in his face, comes swinging a club at Slothrop’s head. The Swine-hero dodges and kicks with his free leg. As the cop doubles over, half a dozen yelling civilians jump on, relieving him of hat and truncheon. Tears, caught by the sun, leak out of his withered eyes. Then gunfire has started somewhere, panicking everybody, carrying Slothrop half off his feet, the kid around his leg torn loose and lost in the rush forever.