Penguin books

out of the way, let's get on to the real good tunes!' Behavior as shameless as eating a whole jar of peanut butter at one sitting. On comes the sprightly Tancredi tarantella, and they stamp their feet in delight, they pop their teeth and pound their canes—'Ah, ah! that's more like it!"

"It's a great tune," yells Säure back. "Smoke another one of these and I'll just play it for you here on the Bosendorfer."

To the accompaniment of this tarantella, which really is a good tune, Magda has come in out of the morning rain, and is now rolling reefers for everybody. She hands Säure one to light. He stops playing and peers at it for a long time. Nodding now and then, smiling or frowning.

Gustav tends to sneer, but Säure really turns out to be an adept at the difficult art of papyromancy, the ability to prophesy through contemplating the way people roll reefers—the shape, the licking pattern, the wrinkles and folds or absence thereof in the paper. "You will soon be in love," sez Säure, "see, this line here."

"It's long, isn't it? Does that mean—"

"Length is usually intensity. Not time."

"Short but sweet," Magda sighs. "Fabelhaft, was?" Trudi comes over to hug her. They are a Mutt and Jeíf routine, Trudi in heels is a foot or so taller. They know how it looks, and travel around in the city together whenever they can, by way of intervening, if only for a minute, in people's minds.

"How do you like this shit?" sez Säure.

"Hübsch," allows Gustav. "A trifle stahlig, and perhaps the infinitesimal hint of a Bodengeschmack behind its Körper, which is admittedly süffig."

"I would rather have said spritztg," Säure disagrees, if that indeed is what it is. "Generally more bukettreich than last year's harvests, wouldn't you say?"

"Oh, for an Haut Atlas herbage it does have its Art. Certainly it can be described as kernig, even—as can often be said of that sauber quality prevailing in the Oued Nfis region—authentically pikant."

"Actually I would tend to suspect an origin somewhere along the southern slope of Jebel Sarho," Säure sez—"note the Spiel, rather glatt and blumig, even the suggestion of a Fülle in its würzig audacity—"

"No no no, Fülle is overstating it, the El Abid Emerald we had last month had Fülle. But this is obviously more zart than that."

The truth is they are both so blitzed that neither one knows what he's talking about, which is just as well, for at this point comes a godawful hammering at the door and a lot of achtungs from the other

side. Slothrop screams and heads for the window, out onto the roof and over, scrambling down a galvanized pipe to the next streetward courtyard. Back in Säure's room the heat come busting in. Berlin police supported by American MPs in an adviser status.

"You will show me your papers!" hollers the leader of the raid.

Säure smiles and holds up a pack of Zig-Zags, just in from Paris.

Twenty minutes later, somewhere in the American sector, Slothrop is ambling past a cabaret where blank-faced snowdrops are lounging in front and inside, and a radio or phonograph somewhere is playing an Irving Berlin medley. Slothrop goes hunching paranoiacally along the street, here's "God Bless America," a-and "This Is the Army, Mister Jones," and they are his country's versions of the Horst Wessel Song, although it is Gustav back at the Jacobistrasse who raves (nobody gonna pull an Anton Webern on him) to a blinking American lieutenant-colonel, "A parabola! A trap! You were never immune over there from the simple-minded German symphonic arc, tonic to dominant, back again to tonic. Grandeur! Gesellschaft!"

"Teutonic?" sez the colonel. "Dominant? The war's over, fella. What kind of talk is that?"

In from the soggy fields of the Mark comes a cold drizzle blowing. Russian cavalry are crossing the Kurfürstendamm, driving a herd of cows to slaughter lowing and muddy, eyelashes beaded with the fine rain. In the Soviet sector, girls with rifles slung across bouncing wool-covered breasts are waving the traffic around with bright orange pennants. Bulldozers growling, trucks straining push over teetering walls, and little kids cheer at each wet crash. Silver tea-services ring on fronded terraces where water drips, waiters in lean black coats wheel and tilt their heads. An open victoria splashes by, two Russian officers covered with medals sitting with their ladies in silk frocks and great floppy-brimmed hats trailing ribbons in the breeze. On the river, ducks with green heads glittering drift among shock-waves of one another's passage. Woodsmoke scatters out the dented pipe of Mar-gherita's house. Inside the door, the first thing Slothrop sees is a high-heeled shoe come flying straight at his head. He twitches out of the way in time. Margherita is kneeling on the bed, breathing rapidly, staring. "You left me."

"Had some chores." He rummages in covered cans on a shelf over the stove, finds dried clover tops for tea.

"But you left me alone." Her hair blows in a gray-black cloud around her face. She is prey to interior winds he never felt.

"Only for a little while. Do you want tea?" Starting outside with an empty can.

"What's a little while? For God's sake, haven't you been alone?"

"Sure." Dipping up water from a rain barrel outside the door. She lies, shaking, her face working, helpless.

Slothrop puts the can on to boil. "You were sleeping pretty soundly. Isn't it safe here? Is that what you mean?"

"Safe." A terrible laughter. He wishes she wouldn't. The water has begun to creak. "Do you know what they were doing to me? What they were piling on my breasts? The names they were calling me?"

"Who, Greta?"

"When you left I woke up. I called to you but you didn't come back. When they were sure you'd left, they came in. . . ."

"Why didn't you try to stay awake?"

"/ was awake!" Sunlight, switched on, breaks through. At the harsh lighting she turns her face away.

While he makes tea, she sits on the bed, cursing him in German and Italian, in a voice always just at the edge of falling apart. He hands her a cup. She knocks it out of his hand.

"Look, take it easy, all right?" He sits down next to her and blows on his tea. The cup she refused stays on its side where it is. The dark stain steams into the wood planks. Faraway clover rises, disperses: a ghost. . . . After a while she takes his hand.

"I'm sorry I left you alone."

She starts to cry.

And cries all day. Slothrop falls asleep, keeps drifting up to her sobs, and to feel her, always in touch, some part of her, some part of him. ... In a dream from this time, his father has come to find him. Slothrop has been wandering at sundown by the Mungahannock, near a rotting old paper mill, abandoned back in the nineties. A heron rises in silhouette against luminous and dying orange. "Son," a falling tower of words tumbling over and over themselves, "the president died three months ago." Slothrop stands and curses him. "Why didn't you tell me? Pop, I loved him. You only wanted to sell me to the IG. You sold me out." The old man's eyes fill with tears. "Oh son ..." trying to take his hand. But the sky is dark, the heron gone, the empty skeleton of the mill and the dark increase of the river saying it is time to go . . . then his father is gone too, no time to say good-by, though his face stays, Broderick who sold him out, long after waking, and the sadness Slothrop brought into it, fool loudmouth kid. Margherita is lean-

ing over him, brushing tears from his face with the tips of her nails. The nails are very sharp, and pause often when they approach his eyes.

"I'm afraid," she whispers. "Everything. My face in the mirror— when I was a child, they said not to look in the mirror too often or I'd see the Devil behind the glass . . . and ..." glancing back at the white-flowered mirror behind them, "we have to cover it, please, can't we cover it... that's where they . . . especially at night—"

"Easy." He moves to put as much of their bodies in touch as he can. He holds her. The tremor is strong, and maybe uncalmable: after a while Slothrop has started to tremble too, in phase. "Please, take it easy." Whatever possesses her needs touch, to drink touch insatiably.

The depth of this frightens him. He feels responsible for her safety, and often trapped. At first they stay together days at a clip, till he has to go out dealing, or foraging. He doesn't sleep much. He finds himself by reflex telling lies—"It's all right," "There's nothing to worry about." Sometimes he manages to be alone out by the river, fishing with a piece of string and one of her hairpins. They manage a fish a day, on lucky days two. They are goofy fish, anything swimming in Berlin waters these days has to be everybody's last choice. When Greta cries in her sleep for longer than he can listen to, he has to wake her. They will try to talk, or to screw, though he's less and less often in the mood, and that makes her worse because she feels he's rejecting her, which indeed he is. Whippings seem to comfort her, and they let him off the hook. Sometimes he's too tired even for that. She keeps provoking him. One night he puts in front of her a broiled fish, an unwholesome yellow loach with brain damage. She can't eat it, she'll get sick.

"You have to eat."

She moves her head aside, first one side, then the other.

"Oh boy, what a sad story, listen cunt, you ain't the only one's ever suffered—you been out there lately?"

"Of course. I keep forgetting how you must have suffered."

"Shit you Germans are crazy, you all think the world's against you."

"I'm not German," just remembering, "I'm a Lombard."

"Close enough, sweetheart."

With a hiss, nostrils wide, she grabs the little table and wrenches it away, plates, silverware, fish flying splot against the wall where it commences to drip down toward the woodwork, still, even in death, getting all the lousy breaks. They sit in their two straight chairs, a meter and a half of perilously empty space between. It is the warm, romantic summer of'45, and surrender or not, the culture of death still prevails: what Grandmother called "a crime of passion" has become, in the absence of much passion over anything today, the technique of preference in resolving interpersonal disputes.

"Clean it up."

She flicks a pale bitten thumbnail from one of her top teeth and laughs, that delightful Erdmann laugh. Slothrop, shaking, is about to say, "You don't know how close you are—" Then, by chance, he happens to get a look at her face. Of course she knows how close she is. "O.K., O.K." He throws her underwear around the room till he finds the black girdle he's looking for. The metal clips of the suspenders raise dark little curved welts over fading earlier bruises on her buttocks and thighs. He has to draw blood before she cleans up the fish. When she's finished she kneels and kisses his boots. Not exactly the scenario she wanted but close enough, sweetheart.

Getting closer every day, and he's afraid. He's never seen anything like it. When he goes out to the city she begs to be tied with her stockings, star-fashion, to the bedposts. Sometimes she'll leave the house, and stay away for days, coming home with stories about Negro MPs beating her with nightsticks, screwing her in the asshole, how much she loved it, hoping to trigger some race/sex reaction, something a little bizarre, a little different. . . .

Whatever it is with her, he's catching it. Out in the ruins he sees darkness now at the edges of all the broken shapes, showing from behind them. Light nests in Margherita's hair like black doves. He will look at his chalk hands, and along the borders of each finger, darkness will gutter and leap. In the sky over the Alexanderplatz he has seen Oberst Enzian's KEZVH mandala, and the face of Tchitcherine on more than one random snowdrop. Across the facade of the Titania-palast, in red neon through a mist one night he saw DIE, SLOTHROP. One Sunday out at Wannsee, an armada of sails all bent the same way, patiently, dreamlike into the wind, passing forever against the other shore, a crowd of little kids in soldier hats folded from old army maps plotted to drown and sacrifice him. He escaped only by murmuring Hauptstufe three times.

The house by the river is an enclosure that acts as a spring-suspension for the day and the weather, allowing only mild cycling of light and heat, down into evening, up again into morning to the midday peak but all damped to a gentle sway from the earthquake of the day outside.

When Greta hears shots out in the increasingly distant streets, she will think of the sound stages of her early career, and will take the ex-

plosions as cue calls for the titanic sets of her dreams to be smoothly clogged with a thousand extras: meek, herded by rifle shots, ascending and descending, arranged into patterns that will suit the Director's ideas of the picturesque—a river of faces, made up yellow and white-lipped for the limitations of the film stock of the time, sweating yellow migrations taken over and over again, fleeing nothing, escaping nowhere. . . .

It's early morning now. Slothrop's breath is white on the air. He is just up from a dream. Part I of a poem, with woodcuts accompanying the text—a woman is attending a dog show which is also, in some way, a stud service. She has brought her Pekingese, a female with a sicken-ingly cute name, Mimsy or Goo-Goo or something, here to be serviced. She is passing the time in a garden setting, with some other middle-class ladies like herself, when from some enclosure nearby she hears the sound of her bitch, coming. The sound goes on and on for much longer than seems appropriate, and she suddenly realizes that the sound is her own voice, this interminable cry of dog-pleasure. The others, politely, are pretending not to notice. She feels shame, but is helpless, driven now by a need to go out and find other animal species to fuck. She sucks the penis of a multicolored mongrel who has tried to mount her in the street. Out in a barren field near a barbed-wire fence, winter fires across the clouds, a tall horse compels her to kneel, passively, and kiss his hooves. Cats and minks, hyenas and rabbits, fuck her inside automobiles, lost at night in the forests, out beside a water-hole in the desert.

As Part II begins, she has discovered she's pregnant. Her husband, a dumb, easygoing screen door salesman, makes an agreement with her: her own promise is never stated, but in return, nine months from now, he will take her where she wants to go. So it is that close to the end of her term he is out on the river, an American river, in a rowboat, hauling on the oars, carrying her on a journey. The key color in this section is violet.

Part III finds her at the bottom of the river. She has drowned. But all forms of life fill her womb. "Using her as mermaid" (line 7), they transport her down through these green river-depths. "It was down, and out again./ Old Squalidozzi, ploughman of the deep,/ At the end of his day's sowing/ Sees her verdigris belly among the weeds" (lines 10-13), and brings her back up. He is a classically-bearded Neptune figure with an old serene face. From out of her body streams a flood now of different creatures, octopuses, reindeer, kangaroos, "Who can say all the life/ That left her womb that day?" Squalidozzi can only

catch a glimpse of the amazing spill as he bears her back toward the surface. Above, it is a mild and sunlit green lake or pond, grassy at the banks, shaded by willows. Insects whine and hover. The key color now is green. "And there as it broke to sun/ Her corpse found sleep in the water/ And in the summer depths/ The creatures took their way/ Each to its proper love/ In the height of afternoon/ As the peaceful river went. ..."

This dream will not leave him. He baits his hook, hunkers by the bank, drops his line into the Spree. Presently he lights up an army cigarette, and stays still then for a long while, as the fog moves white through the riverbank houses, and up above the warplanes go droning somewhere invisible, and the dogs run barking in the back-streets.

D D D D D D D

When emptied of people, the interior is steel gray. When crowded, it's green, a comfortable acid green. Sunlight comes in through portholes in the higher of the bulkheads (the Rücksichtslos here lists at a permanent angle of 23° 27'), and steel washbowls line the lower bulkheads. At the end of each sub-latrine are coffee messes and hand-cranked peep shows. You'll find all the older, less glamorous, un-Teutonic-looking women in the enlisted men's machines. The real stacked and more racially golden tomatoes go to the officers, natürlich. This is some of that Nazi fanaticism.

The Rücksichtslos itself is the issue of another kind of fanaticism: that of the specialist. This vessel here is a Toiletship, a triumph of the German mania for subdividing. "If the house is organic," argued the crafty early Toiletship advocates, "family lives in the house, family's organic, house is outward-and-visible sign, you see," behind their smoked glasses and under their gray crewcuts not believing a word of it, Machiavellian and youthful, not quite ripe yet for paranoia, "and if the bathroom's part of the house—house-is-organic! ha-hah," singing, chiding, pointing out the broad blond-faced engineer, hair parted in the middle and slicked back, actually blushing and looking at his knees among the good-natured smiling teeth of his fellow technologists because he'd been about to forget that point (Albert Speer, himself, in a gray suit with a smudge of chalk on the sleeve, all the way in the back leaning akimbo the wall and looking remarkably like American cowboy actor Henry Fonda, has already forgotten about the house being

organic, and nobody points at him, RHIP). "Then the Toiletship is to the Kriegsmarine as the bathroom is to the house. Because the Navy is organic, we all know that, ha-hah!" [General, or maybe Admiral, laughter.] The Rücksichtslos was intended to be the flagship of a whole Geschwader of Toiletships. But the steel quotas were diverted clear out of the Navy over to the A4 rocket program. Yes, that does seem unusual, but Degenkolb was heading up the Rocket Committee by then, remember, and had both power and will to cut across all branches of the service. So the Rücksichtslos is one-of-a-kind, old warship collectors, and if you're in the market you better hurry 'cause GE's already been by to have a look. Lucky the Bolshies didn't get it, huh, Charles? Charles, meantime, is making on his clipboard what look like studious notes, but are really observations of the passing scene such as They are all looking at me, or Lieutenant Rinso is plotting to murder me, and of course the ever-reliable He's one of them too and I'm going to get him some night, well by now Charles's colleague here, Steve, has forgotten about the Russians, and discontinued his inspection of a flushing valve to take a really close look at that Charles, you can't pick your search team, not if you're just out of school and here I am, in the asshole of nowhere, not much more than a gofer to this—what-is he, a fag? What am I? What does GE want me to be? Is this some obscure form of company punishment, even, good God, permanent exile? I'm a career man, they can keep me out here 20 years if they want, 'n' no-body'll ever know, they'll just keep writing it off to overhead. Sheila! How'm I gonna tell Sheila? We're engaged. This is her picture (hair waved like choppy seas falling down Rita Hayworth style, eyes that if it were a color snap would have yellow lids with pink rims, and a mouth like a hot dog bun on a billboard). Took her out to Buf-falo Bayou,

Lookin' for a little fun— Big old bayou mosquito, oh my you Shoulda seen what he done! Poked his head up, under her dress, Give a little grin and, well I guess, Things got rough on Buf-falo Bayou, Skeeter turn yer meter, down, All—right—now!

Ya ta, ta-ta, ya-ta-ta, ta-ta Lookin'for a little fun, Ev-rybody!

Oh ya know, when you're young and wholesome ["Ev'ry-body," in this case a Toiletshipload of bright hornrimmed shoe-pac'd young fellas from Schenectady, are singin' along behind this recitative here] and a good church-goin' kid, it's sure a mournful thing to get suddenly ganged by a pack of those Texas mosquitoes, it can set you back 20 years. Why, there's boys just like you wanderin' around, you may've seen one in the street today and never known it, with the mind of a infant, just because those mosquitoes got to him and did their unspeakable thing. And we've laid down insecticides, a-and bombed the bayous with citronella, and it's no good, folks. They breed faster'n we can kill 'em, and are we just gonna tuck tail and let them be there out in Buffalo Bayou where my gal Sheila had to look at the loathsome behavior of those—things, we gonna allow them even to exist?

—And,

Things got rough on, Buf-falo Bayou,

Skeeter turn yer meter, down,

Hubba hubba— Skeeter turn yer meter, down!

Well, you can't help but wonder who's really the more paranoid of the two here. Steve's sure got a lot of gall badmouthing Charles that way. Among the hilarious graffiti of visiting mathematicians,

that sort of thing, they go poking away down the narrow sausage-shaped latrine now, two young/old men, their feet fade and cease to ring on the sloping steel deck, their forms grow more transparent with distance until it's impossible to see them any more. Only the empty compartment here, the S-curved spokes on the peep-show machines, the rows of mirrors directly facing, reflecting each other, frame after frame, back in a curve of very great radius. Out to the end of this segment of curve is considered part of the space of the Rücksichtslos. Making it a rather fat ship. Carrying its right-of-way along with it. "Crew morale," whispered the foxes at the Ministry meetings, "sailors' superstitions. Mirrors at high midnight. We know, don't we?"

The officers' latrines, by contrast, are done in red velvet. The

decor is 1930s Safety Manual. That is, all over the walls, photograffiti, are pictures of Horrible Disasters in German Naval History. Collisions, magazine explosions, U-boat sinkings, just the thing if you're an officer trying to take a shit. The Foxes have been busy. Commanding officers get whole suites, private shower or sunken bathtub, manicurist (BDM volunteers, mostly), steam room, massage table. To compensate though, all the bulkheads, and the overhead, are occupied by enormous photographs of Hitler at various forms of play. The toilet paper! The toilet paper is covered square after square with caricatures of Churchill, Eisenhower, Roosevelt, Chiang Kai-shek, there was even a Staff Caricaturist always on duty to custom-illustrate blank paper for those connoisseurs who are ever in search of the unusual. Wagner and Hugo Wolf were patched into speakers from up in the radio shack. Cigarettes were free. It was a good life on board the Toiletship Rück-sichtslos, as it plied its way from Swinemünde to Helgoland, anyplace it was needed, camouflaged in shades of gray, turn-of-the-century style with sharp-shadowed prows coming at you from midships so you couldn't tell which way she was headed. Ship's company actually lived each man inside his stall, each with his own key and locker, pin-ups and library shelves decorating the partitions . . . and there were even one-way mirrors so you could sit at your ease, penis dangling toward the ice-cold seawater in your bowl, listen to your VE-301 People's Receiver, and watch the afternoon rush, the busy ringing of feet and talk, card games inside the group toilets, dealers enthroned on real porcelain receiving visitors, some of them lined up back outside the compartment (quiet queues, all business, something like the queues in banks), toilet-lawyers dispensing advice, all kinds of visitor coming and going, the U-boat crews hunching in, twitching eyes nervously every second or two at the overhead, destroyer sailors larking at the troughs (gigantic troughs! running the whole beam of the ship, even, legend has it, off into mirror-space, big enough to seat 40 or 50 aching assholes side by side, while a constant river of salt flushing water roared by underneath), lighting wads of toilet paper, is what they especially liked to do, setting them flaming yellow in the water upstream and cackling with glee as one by one down the line the sitters leaped off the holes screaming and clutching their blistered asses and inhaling the smell of singed pubic hair. Not that the crew of the Toiletship itself were above a practical joke now and then. Who can ever forget the time shipfitters Höpmann and Kreuss, at the height of the Ptomaine Epidemic of 1943, routed those waste lines into the ventilation system of the executive officer's stateroom? The exec, being an old Toiletship hand, laughed good-naturedly at the clever prank and transferred Höpmann and Kreuss to icebreaker duty, where the two Scatotechnic Snipes went on to erect vaguely turd-shaped monoliths of ice and snow all across the Arctic. Now and then one shows up on an ice floe drifting south in ghostly grandeur, exciting the admiration of all.

A good ship, a good crew, Merry Xmas and turn to. Horst Acht-faden, late of the Elektromechanische Werke, Karlshagen (another cover name for the testing station at Peenemünde), has really no time for naval nostalgia. With the technical spies of three or four nations after him, he has had the disastrous luck to've been picked up by the Schwarzkommando, who for all he knows now constitute a nation of their own. They have interned him in the Chiefs' Head. He has watched voluptuous Gerda and her Fur Boa go through the same number 178 times (he has jimmied the coin box and figured a way to override it) since they put him in here, and the thrill is gone. What do they want? Why are they occupying a derelict in the middle of the Kiel Canal? Why don't the British do something about this?