Penguin books

"Take that, you frauds out there in the Branches," Pirate wants to strike a humorous note, but doesn't. He is holding Katje now as if, in a moment, music will start, and they would dance.

"But the People will never love you," she whispers, "or me. However bad and good are arranged for them, we will always be bad. Do you know where that puts us?"

He does smile, crookedly as a man being theatrical about something for the very first time. Knowing it for a move there's to be no going back from, in the same terminal class as reaching for a gun, he turns his face upward, and looks up through all the faintly superimposed levels above, the milieux of every sort of criminal soul, every unpleasant commercial color from aquamarine to beige, desolate as sunlight on a day when you'd rather have rain, all the clanging enterprise and bustle of all those levels, extending further than Pirate or Katje can see for the moment, he lifts his long, his guilty, his permanently enslaved face to the illusion of sky, to the reality of pressure and weight from overhead, the hardness and absolute cruelty of it, while she presses her own face into the easy lowland between his shoulder and pectoral, a look on her face of truce, of horror come to a detente with, and as a sunset proceeds, the kind that changes the faces of buildings to light gray for a while, to an ashy soft chaff of light bleating over their outward curves, in the strangely forgelike glow in the west, the anxiety of pedestrians staring in the tiny storefront window at the dim goldsmith behind his fire at his work and paying them no attention, afraid because the light looks like it's going to go away forever this time, and more afraid because the failure of light is not a private thing, everyone else in the street has seen it too . . . as it grows darker, the orchestra inside this room does, as a matter of fact, strike up a tune, dry and astringent. . . and candelabra have been lighted after all . . . there is Veal Florentine ripening in the ovens tonight, there are drinks on the House, and drunks in the hammocks,

And all the world's busy, this twi-light!

Who knows what morning-streets, our shoes have known?

Who knows, how many friends, we've left, to cry alone?

We have a moment together,

We'll hum this tune for a day ...

Ev'ryone's dancing, in twi-light,

Dancing the bad dream a-way. . . .

And they do dance: though Pirate never could before, very well. . . they feel quite in touch with all the others as they move, and if they are never to be at full ease, still it's not parade rest any longer ... so they dissolve now, into the race and swarm of this dancing Preterition, and their faces, the dear, comical faces they have put on for this ball, fade, as innocence fades, grimly flirtatious, and striving to be kind. . . .

D D D D D D D

Fog thickens down the throats of the narrow gassen. In the air is a smell of salt water. The cobbled streets are wet with last night's rain. Slothrop wakes up in a burned-out locksmith's shop, under racks of sooty keys whose locks have all been lost. He stumbles out, finds a pump in a courtyard between brick walls and casement windows nobody stares out of, puts his head under the spout and pumps the pump, soaking his head for as long as he thinks he needs to. A ginger cat, meowing for breakfast, comes stalking him, doorway to doorway. "Sorry, Ace." Doesn't look like breakfast for either of them.

He hitches up Tchitcherine's pants and heads out of town, leaving the blunt towers, the domes of copper corroded green swimming up in the mist, the high gables and red tiles, gets a ride with a woman driving an empty farm wagon. The horse's sandy forelock bobs and blows, and the fog settles in behind.

This morning it looks like what Vikings must have seen, sailing this great water-meadow south, clear to Byzantium, all eastern Europe their open sea: the farmland rolls gray and green as waves . . . ponds and lakes seem to have no clear boundaries . . . the sight of other people against this ocean sky, even the military, comes welcome as sails after long days of passage. . . .

The Nationalities are on the move. It is a great frontierless streaming out here. Volksdeutsch from across the Oder, moved out by the Poles and headed for the camp at Rostock, Poles fleeing the Lublin

regime, others going back home, the eyes of both parties, when they do meet, hooded behind cheekbones, eyes much older than what's forced them into moving, Estonians, Letts, and Lithuanians trekking north again, all their wintry wool in dark bundles, shoes in tatters, songs too hard to sing, talk pointless, Sudetens and East Prussians shuttling between Berlin and the DP camps in Mecklenburg, Czechs and Slovaks, Croats and Serbs, Tosks and Ghegs, Macedonians, Magyars, Vlachs, Circassians, Spaniols, Bulgars stirred and streaming over the surface of the Imperial cauldron, colliding, shearing alongside for miles, sliding away, numb, indifferent to all momenta but the deepest, the instability too far below their itchy feet to give a shape to, white wrists and ankles incredibly wasted poking from their striped prison-camp pajamas, footsteps light as waterfowl's in this inland dust, caravans of Gypsies, axles or linchpins failing, horses dying, families leaving the vehicles beside the roads for others to come live in a night, a day, over the white hot Autobahns, trains full of their own hanging off the cars that lumber overhead, squeezing aside for army convoys when they come through, White Russians sour with pain on the way west, Kazakh ex-P/Ws marching east, Wehrmacht veterans from other parts of old Germany, foreigners to Prussia as any Gypsies, carrying their old packs, wrapped in the army blankets they kept, pale green farmworker triangles sewn chest-high on each blouse bobbing, drifting, at a certain hour of the dusk, like candleflames in religious procession—supposed to be heading today for Hannover, supposed to pick potatoes along the way, they've been chasing these nonexistent potato fields now for a month—"Plundered," a one-time bugler limps along with a long splinter of railroad tie for a cane, his instrument, implausibly undented and shiny, swinging from one shoulder, "stripped by the SS, Bruder, ja, every fucking potato field, and what for? Alcohol. Not to drink, no, alcohol for the rockets. Potatoes we could have been eating, alcohol we could have been drinking. It's unbelievable." "What, the rockets?" "No! The SS, picking potatoes!" looking around for his laugh. But there are none here to follow the brass and flourish of his less solemn heart. They were infantrymen, and know how to snooze between footfalls—at some hour of the morning they will fall out by the side of the road, a moment's precipitate out of the road chemurgy of these busy nights, while the invisible boiling goes on by, the long strewn vortices—pinstripe suits with crosses painted on the back, ragged navy and army uniforms, white turbans, mismatched socks or none, Tattersall dresses, thick-knitted shawls with babies inside, women in army trousers split at the knees, flea-bitten and bark-

ing dogs that run in packs, prams piled high with light furnishings in scarred veneer, hand-mortised drawers that will never fit into anything again, looted chickens alive and dead, horns and violins in weathered black cases, bedspreads, harmoniums, grandfather clocks, kits full of tools for carpentry, watchmaking, leatherwork, surgery, paintings of pink daughters in white frocks, of saints bleeding, of salmon and purple sunsets over the sea, packs stuffed with beady-eyed boas, dolls smiling out of violently red lips, Allgeyer soldiers an inch and a quarter to the man painted cream, gold and blue, handfuls of hundred-year-old agates soaked in honey that sweetened greatgrandfather tongues long gone to dust, then into sulfuric acid to char the sugar in bands, brown to black, across the stone, deathless piano performances punched on Vorsetzer rolls, ribboned black lingerie, flowered and grape-crested silverware, faceted lead-glass decanters, tulip-shaped Jugendstil cups, strings of amber beads ... so the populations move, across the open meadow, limping, marching, shuffling, carried, hauling along the detritus of an order, a European and bourgeois order they don't yet know is destroyed forever.

When Slothrop has cigarettes he's an easy mark, when somebody has food they share it—sometimes a batch of vodka if there's an army concentration nearby, the GI cans can be looted for all kinds of useful produce, potato peels, melon rinds, pieces of candy bars for sugar, no telling what's going to go into these DP stills, what you end up drinking is the throwaway fraction of some occupying power. Slothrop drifts in and out of dozens of these quiet, hungry, scuffling migrations, each time getting hard Benzedrine jitters off of the faces—there aren't any he can really ignore, is the. problem, they're all too strong, like faces of a racetrack crowd, each one urging No, me—look at me, be touched, reach for your camera, your weapon, your cock. . . . He's stripped all the insignia off Tchitcherine's uniform, trying for less visibility, but very few people seem to care much about insignia. . . .

Much of the time he's alone. He'll come on farmhouses, deserted in the night, and will sleep in the hay, or if there's a mattress (not often) in a bed. Wake to sun glittering off some small lake surrounded by green salted with blossoms of thyme or mustard, a salad hillside, sweeping up to pines in the mist. Sapling tomato-frames and purple foxgloves in the yards, huge birds' nests built up under the eaves of the thatched roofs, bird-choruses in the morning, and soon, one day, as the summer turns ponderously in the sky, the clang of cranes, on the move.

At a farmhouse in a river valley far south of Rostock, he comes in

to shelter out of the midday rain, falls asleep in a rocking-chair on the porch, and dreams about Tantivy Mucker-Maffick, his friend from long ago. He has come back, after all and against the odds. It's somewhere out in the country, English country, quilted in darkened green and amazingly bright straw-yellow, of very old standing rocks on high places, of early indenture to death and taxes, of country girls who walk out at night to stand naked on the tor and sing. Members of Tantivy's family and many friends have come, all in a mood of quiet celebrating, because of Tantivy's return. Everybody understands it's only a visit: that he will be "here" only in a conditional way. At some point it will fall apart, from thinking about it too much. There is a space of lawn cleared for dancing, with a village band and many of the women dressed in white. After a spell of confusion about the day's schedule of events, the meeting takes place—it seems to be underground, not exactly a grave or crypt, nothing sinister, crowded with relatives and friends around Tantivy who looks so real, so untouched by time, very clear and full of color . . . "Why, Slothrop." "Oh—where've you been, gate?"

"'Here.'"

"'"Here"'?"

"Yes, like that, you've got it—once or twice removed like that, but I walked in the same streets as you, read the same news, was narrowed to the same spectrum of colors. ..." "Then didn't you—"

"I didn't do anything. There was a change."

The colors in here—stone facing, flowers worn by guests, the strange chalices on the tables— carry an underbreath of blood spilled and turned black, of gentle carbonizing in the blank parts of the cities at four o'clock on Sunday afternoon ... it makes crisper the outlines of Tantivy's suit, rather a gigolo suit of unspeakably foreign cut, certainly nothing he ever would have thought of wearing. . . .

"I guess we don't have much time ... I know this is shitty, and really selfish but I'm so alone now, and ... I heard that just after it happens, sometimes, you'll sort of hang around for a while, sort of look after a friend who's 'here.' . . ."

"Sometimes." He is smiling: but his serenity and distance are the stretch of an impotent cry past Slothrop's reach. "Are you looking after me?"

"No, Slothrop. Not you...."

Slothrop sits in the old weathered rocker looking out at a rolling

line of hills and the sun just come down out of the last of the rain-clouds, turning the wet fields and the haycocks to gold. Who passed by and saw him sleeping, his face white and troubled nodded on the breast of his muddy uniform?

As he moves on he finds these farms haunted, but amiably. The oakwork creaks in the night, honest and wooden. Unmilked cows low painfully in distant fields, others come in and get drunk on fermented silage, barging around into the fences and piles of hay where Slothrop dreams, uttering moos with drunken umlauts on them. Up on the rooftops the black and white storks, long throats curved to the sky, heads upside down and looking backwards, clatter their beaks in greeting and love. Rabbits come scurrying at night to eat whatever's good in the yards. Trees, now—Slothrop's intensely alert to trees, finally. When he comes in among trees he will spend time touching them, studying them, sitting very quietly near them and understanding that each tree is a creature, carrying on its individual life, aware of what's happening around it, not just some hunk of wood to be cut down. Slothrop's family actually made its money killing trees, amputating them from their roots, chopping them up, grinding them to pulp, bleaching that to paper and getting paid for this with more paper. "That's really insane." He shakes his head. "There's insanity in my family." He looks up. The trees are still. They know he's there. They probably also know what he's thinking. "I'm sorry," he tells them. "I can't do anything about those people, they're all out of my reach. What can I do?" A medium-size pine nearby nods its top and suggests, "Next time you come across a logging operation out here, find one of their tractors that isn't being guarded, and take its oil filter with you. That's what you can do."

Partial List of Wishes on Evening Stars for This Period:

Let me find that chicken coop the old lady told me about. Let Tantivy really be alive. Let this fucking zit on my back go away.

Let me go to Hollywood when this is over so that Rita Hayworth can see me and fall in love with me.

Let the peace of this day be here tomorrow when I wake up. Let that discharge be waiting for me in Cuxhaven. Let Bianca be all right, a-and— Let me be able to take a shit soon. Let that only be a meteor falling.

Let these boots hold out at least to Lübeck.

Let that Ludwig find his lemming and be happy and leave me in peace.

Well, Ludwig. Slothrop finds him one morning by the shore of some blue anonymous lake, a surprisingly fat kid of eight or nine, gazing into the water, crying, shuddering all over in rippling fat-waves. His lemming's name is Ursula, and she has run away from home. Lud-wig's been chasing her all the way north from Pritzwalk. He's pretty sure she's heading for the Baltic, but he's afraid she'll mistake one of these inland lakes for the sea, and jump into that instead—

"One lemming, kid?"

"I've had her for two years," he sobs, "she's been fine, she's never tried to—I don't know. Something just came over her."

"Quit fooling. Lemmings never do anything alone. They need a crowd. It gets contagious. You see, Ludwig, they overbreed, it goes in cycles, when there are too many of them they panic and run off looking for food. I learned that in college, so I know what I'm talking about. Harvard. Maybe that Ursula's just out after a boy friend or something."

"She would have let me know."

"I'm sorry."

"Russians aren't sorry about anything.

"I'm not a Russian."

"Is that why you took off all your insignia?"

They look at each other. "Uh, well, you need a hand finding that lemming?"

This Ludwig, now, may not be completely Right in the Head. He is apt to drag Slothrop up out of sleep in the middle of the night, waking half the DP encampment, spooking the dogs and babies, absolutely sure that Ursula is out there, just beyond the circle of the fire, looking in at him, seeing him but not the way she used to. He leads Slothrop into detachments of Soviet tankers, into heaps of ruins high-crested as the sea, that collapse around and, given a chance, on top of you the minute you step in, also into sucking marshes where the reeds pull away in your fingers when you try to grab them, and the smell is of protein disaster. This is either maniac faith, or something a little darker: it does dawn on Slothrop at last that if there's any impulse to suicide around here it ain't Ursula's, it's that Ludwig's—why, the lemming may not even exist!

Still . . . hasn't Slothrop, once or twice, seen something? scooting along ahead down gray narrow streets lined with token saplings in one or another of these Prussian garrison-towns, places whose whole industry and meaning was soldiering, their barracks and stone walls deserted now—or-or crouching by the edge of some little lake, watching clouds, white sails of gaff-riggers against the other shore so green, foggy, and far away, getting secret instruction from waters whose movements in lemming-time are oceanic, irresistible, and slow enough, solid-looking enough at least to walk out on safely. . . .

"That's what Jesus meant," whispers the ghost of Slothrop's first American ancestor William, "venturing out on the Sea of Galilee. He saw it from the lemming point of view. Without the millions who had plunged and drowned, there could have been no miracle. The successful loner was only the other part of it: the last piece to the jigsaw puzzle, whose shape had already been created by the Preterite, like the last blank space on the table."

"Wait a minute. You people didn't have jigsaw puzzles."

"Aw, shit."

William Slothrop was a peculiar bird. He took off from Boston, heading west in true Imperial style, in 1634 or -5, sick and tired of the Winthrop machine, convinced he could preach as well as anybody in the hierarchy even if he hadn't been officially ordained. The ramparts of the Berkshires stopped everybody else at the time, but not William. He just started climbing. He was one of the very first Europeans in. After they settled in Berkshire, he and his son John got a pig operation going—used to drive hogs right back down the great escarpment, back over the long pike to Boston, drive them just like sheep or cows. By the time they got to market those hogs were so skinny it was hardly worth it, but William wasn't really in it so much for the money as just for the trip itself. He enjoyed the road, the mobility, the chance encounters of the day—Indians, trappers, wenches, hill people—and most of all just being with those pigs. They were good company. Despite the folklore and the injunctions in his own Bible, William came to love their nobility and personal freedom, their gift for finding comfort in the mud on a hot day—pigs out on the road, in company together, were everything Boston wasn't, and you can imagine what the end of the journey, the weighing, slaughter and dreary pigless return back up into the hills must've been like for William. Of course he took it as a parable—knew that the squealing bloody horror at the end of the pike was in exact balance to all their happy sounds, their untrou-

bled pink eyelashes and kind eyes, their smiles, their grace in crosscountry movement. It was a little early for Isaac Newton, but feelings about action and reaction were in the air. William must've been waiting for the one pig that wouldn't die, that would validate all the ones who'd had to, all his Gadarene swine who'd rushed into extinction like lemmings, possessed not by demons but by trust for men, which the men kept betraying . . . possessed by innocence they couldn't lose . . . by faith in William as another variety of pig, at home with the Earth, sharing the same gift of life. . . .

He wrote a long tract about it presently, called On Preterition. It had to be published in England, and is among the first books to've been not only banned but also ceremonially burned in Boston. Nobody wanted to hear about all the Preterite, the many God passes over when he chooses a few for salvation. William argued holiness for these "second Sheep," without whom there'd be no elect. You can bet the Elect in Boston were pissed off about that. And it got worse. William felt that what Jesus was for the elect, Judas Iscariot was for the Preterite. Everything in the Creation has its equal and opposite counterpart. How can Jesus be an exception? could we feel for him anything but horror in the face of the unnatural, the extracreational? Well, if he is the son of man, and if what we feel is not horror but love, then we have to love Judas too. Right? How William avoided being burned for heresy, nobody knows. He must've had connections. They did finally 86 him out of Massachusetts Bay Colony—he thought about Rhode Island for a while but decided he wasn't that keen on an-tinomians either. So finally he sailed back to Old England, not in disgrace so much as despondency, and that's where he died, among memories of the blue hills, green maizefields, get-togethers over hemp and tobacco with the Indians, young women in upper rooms with their aprons lifted, pretty faces, hair spilling on the wood floors while underneath in the stables horses kicked and drunks hollered, the starts in the very early mornings when the backs of his herd glowed like pearl, the long, stony and surprising road to Boston, the rain on the Connecticut River, the snuffling good-nights of a hundred pigs among the new stars and long grass still warm from the sun, settling down to sleep. . . .

Could he have been the fork in the road America never took, the singular point she jumped the wrong way from? Suppose the Slothrop-ite heresy had had the time to consolidate and prosper? Might there have been fewer crimes in the name of Jesus, and more mercy in the

name of Judas Iscariot? It seems to Tyrone Slothrop that there might be a route back—maybe that anarchist he met in Zurich was right, maybe for a little while all the fences are down, one road as good as another, the whole space of the Zone cleared, depolarized, and somewhere inside the waste of it a single set of coordinates from which to proceed, without elect, without preterite, without even nationality to fuck it up. . . . Such are the vistas of thought that open up in Slothrop's head as he tags along after Ludwig. Is he drifting, or being led? The only control in the picture right now is the damned lemming. If she exists. The kid shows Slothrop photos he's packing in his wallet: Ursula, eyes bright and shy, peeking out from under a pile of cabbage leaves . . . Ursula in a cage decked with a giant ribbon and swastika'd seal, first prize in a Hitler Youth pet show . . . Ursula and the family cat, watching each other carefully across a tiled stretch of floor ... Ursula, front paws dangling and eyes drowsy, hanging out the pocket of Ludwig's Nazi cub-scout uniform. Some part of her is always blurred, too quick for the shutter. Even knowing when she was a baby what they'd be in for someday, still Ludwig has always loved her. He may be thinking that love can stop it from happening.

Slothrop will never find out. He loses the fat young lunatic in a village near the sea. Girls in full skirts and flowered kerchiefs are out in the woods gathering mushrooms, and red squirrels flash through the beeches. Streets curve on into town, foreshortening too fast—it's wideangle, smalltown space here. Lamps are clustered up on the poles. Street cobbles are heavy and sand-colored. Drayhorses stand in the sun flourishing their tails.

Down an alleyway near the Michaeliskirche, a little girl comes tottering under an enormous pile of contraband fur coats, only her brown legs visible. Ludwig lets out a scream, pointing at the coat on top. Something small and gray is worked into its collar. Artificial yellow eyes gleam unwholesomely. Ludwig runs hollering Ursula, Ursula, grabbing for the coat. The little girl lets out a flurry of curses.