Penguin books

On the last day, Pokier walked out the south end of the main tunnels. Lorries were everywhere, all engines idling, farewell in the spring air, tall trees sunlit green on the mountainsides. The Obersturmbann-führer was not at his post when Pokier went into Dora. He was not looking for Use, or not exactly. He may have felt that he ought to look, finally. He was not prepared. He did not know. Had the data, yes, but did not know, with senses or heart. . . .

The odors of shit, death, sweat, sickness, mildew, piss, the breathing of Dora, wrapped him as he crept in staring at the naked corpses being carried out now that America was so close, to be stacked in front of the crematoriums, the men's penises hanging, their toes clustering white and round as pearls . . . each face so perfect, so individual, the

lips stretched back into death-grins, a whole silent audience caught at the punch line of the joke . . . and the living, stacked ten to a straw mattress, the weakly crying, coughing, losers. . . . All his vacuums, his labyrinths, had been the other side of this. While he lived, and drew marks on paper, this invisible kingdom had kept on, in the darkness outside ... all this time.. . . Pokier vomited. He cried some. The walls did not dissolve—no prison wall ever did, not from tears, not at this finding, on every pallet, in every cell, that the faces are ones he knows after all, and holds dear as himself, and cannot, then, let them return to that silence. . . . But what can he ever do about it? How can he ever keep them? Impotence, mirror-rotation of sorrow, works him terribly as runaway heartbeating, and with hardly any chances left him for good rage, or for turning. . . .

Where it was darkest and smelled the worst, Pokier found a woman lying, a random woman. He sat for half an hour holding her bone hand. She was breathing. Before he left, he took off his gold wedding ring and put it on the woman's thin finger, curling her hand to keep it from sliding off. If she lived, the ring would be good for a few meals, or a blanket, or a night indoors, or a ride home. . . .

D D D D D D D

Back to Berlin, with a terrific thunderstorm blowing over the city. Margherita has brought Slothrop to a rickety wood house near the Spree, in the Russian sector. A burned-out Königstiger tank guards the entrance, its paint scorched, treads mangled and blasted off of the drive sprocket, its dead monster 88 angled down to point at the gray river, hissing and spiculed with the rain.

Inside are bats nesting in the rafters, remains of beds with a moldy smell, broken glass and bat shit on the bare wood floor, windows boarded up except where the stove is vented through because the chimney's down. On a rocking chair lies a moleskin coat, a taupe cloud. Paint from some long-ago artist is still visible over the floor in wrinkled splashes of aged magenta, saffron, steel blue, reverse deformations of paintings whose whereabouts are unknown. Back in a corner hangs a tarnished mirror, birds and flowers painted in white all around its frame, reflecting Margherita and Slothrop and the rain out the open door. Part of the ceiling, blown away when the King Tiger died, is covered now with soggy and stained cardboard posters all of

the same cloaked figure in the broad-brimmed hat, with its legend DER FEIND HÖRT ZU. Water drips through in half a dozen places.

Greta lights a kerosene lamp. It warms the rainlight with a handful of yellow. Slothrop builds a fire in the stove while Margherita ducks down under the house, where it turns out there's a great stash of potatoes. Jeepers, Slothrop hasn't seen a potato for months. There's onions in a sack too, and even wine. She cooks, and they both sit there just pigging on those spuds. Later, without paraphernalia or talk, they fuck each other to sleep. But a few hours later Slothrop wakes up, and lies there wondering where he's going.

Well, to find that Säure Bummer, soon as this rain lets up, give the man his hashish. But what then? Slothrop and the S-Gerät and the Jamf/Imipolex mystery have grown to be strangers. He hasn't really thought about them for a while. Hmm, when was that? The day he sat with Säure in the cafe, smoking that reefer . . . oh, that was day before yesterday, wasn't it? Rain drips, soaking into the floor, and Slothrop perceives that he is losing his mind. If there is something comforting—religious, if you want—about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long. Well right now Slothrop feels himself sliding onto the anti-paranoid part of his cycle, feels the whole city around him going back roofless, vulnerable, uncentered as he is, and only pasteboard images now of the Listening Enemy left between him and the wet sky.

Either They have put him here for a reason, or he's just here. He isn't sure that he wouldn't, actually, rather have that reason. . . .

The rain lets up at midnight. He leaves Margherita to creep out in the cold city with his five kilos, having kept for himself the one Tchitcherine plundered from. Russian troops are singing in their billets. The salt ache of accordion music cries on in back of them. Drunks materialize, merry and pissing in the center grooves of cobbled alleys. Mud occupies some streets like flesh. Shell craters brim with rainwater, gleaming in the lights of midwatch work crews clearing debris. Shattered Biedermeier chair, mateless boot, steel eyeglass frame, dog collar (eyes at the edges of the twisting trail watching for sign, for blazing), wine cork, splintered broom, bicycle with one wheel missing, discarded copies of Tägliche Rundschau, chalcedony doorknob dyed blue long ago with ferrous ferrocyanide, scattered piano keys (all white, an octave on B to be exact—or H, in the German nomenclature—the notes of the rejected Locrian mode), the black and amber

eye from some stuffed animal. . . . The strewn night. Dogs, spooked and shivering, run behind walls whose tops are broken like fever charts. Somewhere a gas leak warps for a minute into the death and after-rain smells. Ranks of blackened window-sockets run high up the sides of gutted apartment buildings. Chunks of concrete are held aloft by iron reinforcing rod that curls like black spaghetti, whole enormous heaps wiggling ominously overhead at your least passing brush by. . . . The smooth-faced Custodian of the Night hovers behind neutral eyes and smile, coiled and pale over the city, humming its hoarse lullabies. Young men spent the Inflation like this, alone in the street, no place to go into out of the black winters. Girls stayed up late on stoops or sitting on benches in lamplight by the rivers, waiting for business, but the young men had to walk by, ignored, hunching overpadded shoulders, money with no relation to anything it could buy, swelling, paper cancer in their billfolds. . . .

The Chicago Bar is being guarded outside by two of their descendants, kids in George Raft suits, many sizes too big, too many ever to grow into. One keeps coughing, in uncontrolled dying spasms. The other licks his lips and stares at Slothrop. Gunsels. When he mentions Säure Bummer's name, they move together in front of the door, shaking their heads. "Look, I'm supposed to deliver him a package."

"Don't know him."

"Can I leave a message?"

"He's not here." The cougher makes a lunge. Slothrop sweeps aside, gives him a quick veronica with his cape, sticks his foot out and trips the kid, who lies on the ground cursing, all tangled up in his long keychain, while his pardner goes pawing inside of his flapping suitcoat for what Slothrop surmises to be a sidearm, so him Slothrop kicks in the balls, and screaming "Fickt nicht mit dem Raketemensch!" so they'll remember, kind of a hiyo Silver here, he flees into shadows, among the heaps of lumber, stone and earth.

He takes a trail he thinks Säure led them along the other night— keeps losing it, wandering into windowless mazes, tangles of barbed wire holidayed by the deathstorms of last May, then into a strafed and pitted lorry-park he can't find his way out of for half an hour, a rolling acre of rubber, grease, steel, and spilled petrol, pieces of vehicles pointing at sky or earth no differently than in a peacetime American junkyard, fused into odd, brown Saturday Evening Post faces, except that they are not folksy so much as downright sinister . . . yes it's really the Saturday Evening Post, all right: they are the faces of the tricorned messengers coming in from out of the long pikes, down past the elms,

Berkshire legends, travelers lost at the edge of the Evening. Come with a message. They unwrinkle, though, if you keep looking. They smooth out into timeless masks that speak their entire meaning, all of it right out on the surface.

It takes an hour to find Säure's cellar. But it's dark, and it's empty. Slothrop goes in, lights the light. Looks like either a bust or a gang war: printing press vanished, clothes tossed all around, and some very strange clothes at that, there is, for example, a wickerware suit, a yellow wickerware suit actually, articulating along armpit, elbow, knee and groinlines . . . oh, hmm, well, Slothrop runs a quick search of his own here, looking inside shoes, not really shoes, some of them, but foot-gloves with individual toes, not, however, sewn but cast from some unpleasant variegated resin such as bowling balls are made of... behind the peeling scraps of wallpaper, up in the rolled-up windowshade, among the hatchings of one or two phony Reichsmarks let spill by the looters—fifteen minutes of this, finding nothing . . . and the white object on the table watching him out of its staring shadows the whole time. He feels its stare before he spots it finally: a chesspiece two inches high. A white knight, molded out of plastic—a-and wait'll Slothrop finds out what kind of plastic, boy!

It's a horse's skull: the eye-sockets are hollow far down into the base. Inside one of them is a tightly rolled cigarette paper with a message from Säure. "Raketemensch! Der Springer asks me to give you this, his symbol. Keep it—by it shall he know you. I am at Jacobi-strasse 12, 3^er Hof, number 7. As B/4, Me. I?" Now "As B/4" was John Dillinger's old signoff. Everybody in the Zone this summer is using it. It indicates to people how you feel about certain things. . . .

Säure has included a map showing how to get to where he is. It's clear back in the British sector. Groaning, Slothrop pushes on back out in the mud and early morning. Around the Brandenburg Gate, a slight drizzle starts up again. Chunks of the Gate still lie around in the street—leaning shell-spalled up in the rainy sky, its silence is colossal, haggard as he pads by flanking it, the Chariot gleaming like coal, driven and still, it is the 30th century and swashbuckling Rocketman has just landed here to tour the ruins, the high-desert traces of an ancient European order. . . .

The Jacobistrasse and most of its quarter, slums, survived the street-fighting intact, along with its interior darkness, a masonry of shadows that will persist whether the sun is up or down. Number 12 is an entire block of tenements dating from before the Inflation, five or six stories and a mansarde, five or six Hinterhöfe nested one inside the

other—boxes of a practical joker's gift, nothing in the center but a last hollow courtyard smelling of the same cooking and garbage and piss decades old. Ha, ha!

Slothrop moseys toward the first archway. Streetlight throws his caped shadow forward into a succession of these arches, each labeled with a faded paint name, Erster-Hof, Zweiter-Hof, Dritter-Hof u.s.w., shaped like the entrance to the Mittelwerke, parabolic, but more like an open mouth and gullet, joints of cartilage receding waiting, waiting to swallow . . . above the mouth two squared eyes, organdy whites, irises pitch black, stare him down ... it laughs as it has for years without stopping, a blubbery and percussive laugh, like heavy china rolling or bumping under the water in the sink. A brainless giggle, just big old geometric me, nothin' t' be nervous about, c'mon in. ... But the pain, the twenty, twentyfive years of pain paralyzed back in that long throat ... old outcast, passive, addicted to survival now, waiting the years out, waiting for vulnerable saps like Slothrop here to expose itself to, laughing and crying and all in silence . . . paint peels from the Face, burned, diseased, long time dying and how can Slothrop just walk down into such a schizoid throat? Why, because it is what the guardian and potent Studio wants from him, natürlich: Slothrop is the character juvenile tonight: what's kept him moving the whole night, him and the others, the solitary Berliners who come out only in these evacuated hours, belonging and going noplace, is Their unexplained need to keep some marginal population in these wan and preterite places, certainly for economic though, who knows, maybe emotional reasons too. . . .

Säure's on the move too, though inside, prowling his dreams. It looks like one big room, dark, full of tobacco and kif smoke, crumbled ridges of plaster where walls have been knocked out, straw pallets all over the floor, a couple on one sharing a late, quiet cigarette, somebody snoring on another . . . glossy Bosendorfer Imperial concert grand piano over which Trudi, wearing only an army shirt, leans, a desperate muse, bare legs long and stretching, "Please come to bed Gustav, it'll be light soon." The only answer is a peevish strumming among the lower strings. Säure is on his side, quite still, a shrunken child, face long worked at by leaps from second-story windows, "first rubdowns" under gloved and womanish sergeants' fists in the precinct stations, golden light in the afternoons over the racetrack at Karls-horst, black light from the pavements of boulevards at night finely wrinkled like leather stretched over stone, white light from satin dresses, glasses stacked shining in front of bar mirrors, sans-serif Us at

the entrances to underground stations pointing in smooth magnetism at the sky to bring down steel angels of exaltation, of languid surrender—a face that in sleep is awesomely old, abandoned to its city's history. . . .

His eyes open—for an instant Slothrop is only shadowed green folds, highlighted helmet, light-values still to be put together. Then comes the sweet nodding smile, everything's O.K., ja, howdy Rocket-man, was ist los? Though the unregenerate old doper is not quite kindly enough to keep from opening the ditty bag right away and peering in, eyes like two pissholes in a snowbank, to see what he has.

"I thought you'd be in the slam or something."

Out with a little Moroccan pipe and Säure sets to flattening a fat crumb of that hashish, humming the popular rumba

A little something from Moroc-co, With just a lit-tle bit of sock-o,

"Oh. Well, Springer blew the whistle on our counterfeiting operation. Kind of a little temporary hitch, you understand."

"I don't. You're supposed to be ace buddies."

"Not nearly. And he moves in higher orbits." It is something very complicated having to do with American yellow-seal scrip being discontinued in the Mediterranean theatre, with the reluctance of Allied forces here to accept Reichsmarks. Springer has a balance-of-payments problem too, and he's been speculating heavily in Sterling, and . . .

"But," sez Slothrop, "but, uh, where's my million marks, then, Emu?"

Säure sucks yellow flame flowing over the edge of the bowl. "It is gone where the woodbine twineth." Exactly what Jubilee Jim Fisk told the Congressional committee investigating his and Jay Gould's scheme to corner gold in 1869. The words are a reminder of Berkshire. With nothing more than that to go on, it occurs to Slothrop that Säure can't possibly be on the Bad Guys' side. Whoever They are, Their game has been to extinguish, not remind.

"Well, I can sell by the ounce from what I have," Slothrop reckons. "For occupation scrip. That's stable, isn't it?"

"You aren't angry. You really aren't."

"Rocketman is above all that shit, Emil."

"I have a surprise for you. I can get you the Schwarzgerät you asked about."

"You?"

"Springer. I asked him for you."

"Quit fooling. Really? Jeepers, that's so swell of you! How can I—"

"Ten thousand pounds sterling."

Slothrop loses a whole lungful of smoke. "Thanks Emil. . . ." He tells Säure about the run-in with Tchitcherine, and also about how he saw that Mickey Rooney.

"Rocketman! Spaceman! Welcome to our virgin planet. We only want to be left in some kind of peace here, O.K.? If you kill us, don't eat us. If you eat, don't digest. Let us come out the other end again, like diamonds in the shit of smugglers. ..."

"Look"—remembering now the tip that that Geli gave him long ago in Nordhausen—"did your pal Springer mention he was hanging out in Swinemünde these days, anyplace like that?"

"Only the price of your instrument, Rak. Half the money in front. He said it would cost him at least that much to track it down."

"So he doesn't know where it is. Shit, he could have us all on the hook, bidding us up, hoping somebody's fool enough to front him some dough."

"Usually he delivers. You didn't have any trouble, did you, with that pass he forged?"

"Yaaahhh—" Oh. Oh, wow, aha, yes been meaning to ask you about this little Max Schlepzig item here— "Now then." But meantime Trudi has abandoned Gustav in the piano and comes over now to sit and rub her cheeks against the nap of Slothrop's trousers, dear naked legs whispering together, hair spilling, shirt half unbuttoned, and Säure has at some point rolled over and gone groaning back into sleep. Trudi and Slothrop retire to a mattress well away from the Bosendorfer. Slothrop settles back sighing, takes his helmet off and lets big sweet and saftig Trudi have her way with him. His joints are aching with rain and city wandering, he's half blitzed, Trudi is kissing him into an amazing comfort, it's an open house here, no favored senses or organs, all are equally at play ... for possibly the first time in his life Slothrop does not feel obliged to have a hardon, which is just as well, because it does not seem to be happening with his penis so much as with ... oh mercy, this is embarrassing but. . . well his nose actually seems to be erecting, the mucus beginning to flow yes a nasal hardon here and Trudi has certainly noticed all right, how could she help but... as she slides her lips over the throbbing snoot and sends a yard of torrid tongue up one of his nostrils ... he can feel each pink taste-bud as she penetrates even farther, pulling aside the vestibule walls and nose-hair now to accommodate her head, then shoulders and

... well she's halfway in, might as well—pulling up her knees, crawling using the hair for hand and footholds she is able to stand at last inside the great red hall which is quite pleasantly lit, no walls or ceiling she can really discern but rather a fading to seashell and springtime grades of pink in all directions. . . .

They fall asleep in the roomful of snoring, with low-pitched twangs out of the piano, and the rain's million-legged scuttle in the courtyards outside. When Slothrop wakes up it's at the height of the Evil Hour, Trudi is in some other room with Gustav rattling coffee cups, a tortoiseshell cat chases flies by the dirty window. Back beside the Spree, the White Woman is waiting for Slothrop. He isn't especially disposed to leave. Trudi and Gustav come in with coffee and half a reefer, and everybody sits around gabbing.

Gustav is a composer. For months he has been carrying on a raging debate with Säure over who is better, Beethoven or Rossini. Säure is for Rossini. "I'm not so much for Beethoven qua Beethoven," Gustav argues, "but as he represents the German dialectic, the incorporation of more and more notes into the scale, culminating with dodecaphonic democracy, where all notes get an equal hearing. Beethoven was one of the architects of musical freedom—he submitted to the demands of history, despite his deafness. While Rossini was retiring at the age of 36, womanizing and getting fat, Beethoven was living a life filled with tragedy and grandeur."

"So?" is Säure's customary answer to that one. "Which would you rather do? The point is," cutting off Gustav's usually indignant scream, "a person feels good listening to Rossini. All you feel like listening to Beethoven is going out and invading Poland. Ode to Joy indeed. The man didn't even have a sense of humor. I tell you," shaking his skinny old fist, "there is more of the Sublime in the snare-drum part to La Gazza Ladra than in the whole Ninth Symphony. With Rossini, the whole point is that lovers always get together, isolation is overcome, and like it or not that is the one great centripetal movement of the World. Through the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs. All the shit is transmuted to gold. The walls are breached, the balconies are scaled—listen!" It was a night in early May, and the final bombardment of Berlin was in progress. Säure had to shout his head off. "The Italian girl is in Algiers, the Barber's in the crockery, the magpie's stealing everything in sight! The World is rushing together. ..."

This rainy morning, in the quiet, it seems that Gustav's German Dialectic has come to its end. He has just had the word, all the way

from Vienna along some musicians' grapevine, that Anton Webern is dead. "Shot in May, by the Americans. Senseless, accidental if you believe in accidents—some mess cook from North Carolina, some late draftee with a .45 he hardly knew how to use, too late for WWII, but not for Webern. The excuse for raiding the house was that Webern's brother was in the black market. Who isn't? Do you know what kind of myth that's going to make in a thousand years? The young barbarians coming in to murder the Last European, standing at the far end of what'd been going on since Bach, an expansion of music's polymorphous perversity till all notes were truly equal at last. . . . Where was there to go after Webern? It was the moment of maximum freedom. It all had to come down. Another Götterdämmerung—"

"Young fool," Säure now comes cackling in from out in Berlin, trailing a pillowcase full of flowering tops just in from that North Africa. He's a mess—red-drenched eyes, fatbaby arms completely hairless, fly open and half the buttons gone, white hair and blue shirt both streaked with some green horrible scum. "Fell in a shell-hole. Here, quick, roll up some of this."

"What do you mean, 'young fool,' " inquires Gustav.

"I mean you and your musical mainstreams," cries Säure. "Is it finally over? Or do we have to start da capo with Carl Orff ?"

"I never thought of that," sez Gustav, and for a moment it is clear that Säure has heard about Webern too, and trying in his underhanded way to cheer Gustav up.

"What's wrong with Rossini?" hollers Säure, lighting up. "Eh?"

"Ugh," screams Gustav, "ugh, ugh, Rossini," and they're at it again, "you wretched antique. Why doesn't anybody go to concerts any more? You think it's because of the war? Oh no, /'// tell you why, old man—because the halls are full of people like you! Stuffed full! Half asleep, nodding and smiling, farting through their dentures, hawking and spitting into paper bags, dreaming up ever more ingenious plots against their children—not just their own, but other people's children too! just sitting around, at the concert with all these other snow-topped old rascals, just a nice background murmur of wheezing, belching, intestinal gurgles, scratching, sucking, croaking, an entire opera house crammed full of them right up to standing room, they're doddering in the aisles, hanging off the tops of the highest balconies, and you know what they're all listening to, Säure? eh? They're all listening to Rossini! Sitting there drooling away to some medley of predictable little tunes, leaning forward elbows on knees muttering, 'C'mon, c'mon then Rossini, let's get all this pretentious fanfare stuff