Penguin books

It's a dangerous game Cherrycoke's playing here. Often he thinks the sheer volume of information pouring in through his fingers will saturate, burn him out . . . she seems determined to overwhelm him with her history and its pain, and the edge of it, always fresh from the stone, cutting at his hopes, at all their hopes. He does respect her: he knows that very little of this is female theatricals, really. She has turned her face, more than once, to the Outer Radiance and simply seen nothing there. And so each time has taken a little more of the Zero into herself. It comes down to courage, at worst an amount of self-deluding that's vanishingly small: he has to admire it, even if he can't accept her glassy wastes, her appeals to a day not of wrath but of final indifference. . . . Any more than she can accept the truth he knows about himself. He does receive emanations, impressions . . . the cry inside the stone ... excremental kisses stitched unseen across the yoke of an old shirt... a betrayal, an informer whose guilt will sicken one day to throat cancer, chiming like daylight through the fourchettes and quirks of a tattered Italian glove . . . Basher St. Blaise's angel, miles beyond designating, rising over Lübeck that Palm Sunday with the poison-green domes underneath its feet, an obsessive crossflow of red tiles rushing up and down a thousand peaked roofs as the bombers banked and dived, the Baltic already lost in a pall of incendiary smoke behind, here was the Angel: ice crystals swept hissing away from the back edges of wings perilously deep, opening as they were moved into new white abyss. . . . For half a minute radio silence broke apart. The traffic being:

St. Biaise: Freakshow Two, did you see that, over.

Wingman: This is Freakshow Two—affirmative.

St. Biaise: Good.

No one else on the mission seemed to've had radio communication. After the raid, St. Biaise checked over the equipment of those who got back to base and found nothing wrong: all the crystals on frequency, the power supplies rippleless as could be expected—but others remembered how, for the few moments the visitation lasted, even static vanished from the earphones. Some may have heard a high singing, like wind among masts, shrouds, bedspring or dish antennas of winter

fleets down in the dockyards . . . but only Basher and his wingman saw it, droning across in front of the fiery leagues of face, the eyes, which went towering for miles, shifting to follow their flight, the irises red as embers fairing through yellow to white, as they jettisoned all their bombs in no particular pattern, the fussy Norden device, sweat drops in the air all around its rolling eyepiece, bewildered at their unannounced need to climb, to give up a strike at earth for a strike at heaven... .

Group Captain St. Biaise did not include an account of this angel in his official debriefing, the W.A.A.E officer who interrogated him being known around the base as the worst sort of literal-minded dragon (she had reported Blowitt to psychiatric for his rainbowed Valkyrie over Peenemünde, and Creepham for the bright blue gremlins scattering like spiders off of his Typhoon's wings and falling gently to the woods of The Hague in little parachutes of the same color). But damn it, this was not a cloud. Unofficially, in the fortnight between the fire-raising at Lübeck and Hitler's order for "terror attacks of a retaliatory nature"—meaning the V-weapons—word of the Angel got around. Although the Group Captain seemed reluctant, Ronald Cher-rycoke was allowed to probe certain objects along on the flight. Thus the Angel was revealed.

Carroll Eventyr attempted then to reach across to Terence Overbaby, St. Blaise's wingman. Jumped by a skyful of MEs and no way out. The inputs were confusing. Peter Sachsa intimated that there were in fact many versions of the Angel which might apply. Overbaby's was not as available as certain others. There are problems with levels, and with Judgment, in the Tarot sense. . . . This is part of the storm that sweeps now among them all, both sides of Death. It is unpleasant. On his side, Eventyr tends to feel wholly victimized, even a bit resentful. Peter Sachsa, on his, falls amazingly out of character and into nostalgia for life, the old peace, the Weimar decadence that kept him fed and moving. Taken forcibly over in 1930 by a blow from a police truncheon during a street action in Neukölln, he recalls now, sentimentally, evenings of rubbed darkwood, cigar smoke, ladies in chiseled jade, panne, attar of damask roses, the latest angular pastel paintings on the walls, the latest drugs inside the many little table drawers. More than any mere "Kreis," on most nights full mandalas came to bloom: all degrees of society, all quarters of the capital, palms down on that famous blood veneer, touching only at little fingers. Sachsa's table was like a deep pool in the forest. Beneath the surface things were rolling, slipping, beginning to rise. . . . Walter Asch ("Taurus") was vis-

ited one night by something so unusual it took three "Hieropons" (750 nig,) to bring him back, and even so he seemed reluctant to sleep. They all stood watching him, in ragged rows resembling athletic formations, Wimpe the IG-man who happened to be holding the Hiero-pon keying on Sargner, a civilian attached to General Staff, flanked by Lieutent Weissmann, recently back from South-West Africa, and the Herero aide he'd brought with him, staring, staring at them all, at everying . . . while behind diem ladies moved in a sibilant weave, sequins and high-albedo stockings aflash, black-and-white make-up in daintily nasal alarm, eyes wide going oh. . . . Each face that watched Walter Asch was a puppet stage: each a separate routine.

. . . shows good hands yes droop and wrists as far up as muscle relaxant respiratory depression . . .

. . . same . . . same . . . my own face white in mirror three three-thirty four march of the Hours clock ticking room no can't go in no not enough light not enough no aaahhh—

. . . theatre nothing but Walter really look at head phony angle wants to catch light good fill-light throw a yellow gel. . .

(A pneumatic toy frog jumps up onto a lily pad trembling: beneath the surface lies a terror ... a late captivity . . . but he floats now over the head of what would take him back ... his eyes cannot be read. . . .)

. . . mba rara m'eroto ondyoze . . . mbe mu munine m'oruroto ayo u n'omuinyo . . . (further back than this is a twisting of yarns or cordage, a giant web, a wrenching of hide, of muscles in the hard grip of something that comes to wrestle when the night is deep . . . and a sense, too, of visitation by the dead, afterward a sick feeling that they are not as friendly as they seemed to be ... he has wakened, cried, sought explanation, but no one ever told him anything he could believe. The dead have talked with him, come and sat, shared his milk, told stories of ancestors, or of spirits from other parts of the veld—for time and space on their side have no meaning, all is together).

"There are sociologies," Edwin Treacle, his hair going all directions, attempts to light a pipeful of wretched leftovers—autumn leaves, bits of string, fag-ends, "that we haven't even begun to look into. The sociology of our own lot, for example. Psi Section, the S.P.R., the old ladies in Altrincham trying to summon up the Devil, all of us on this side, you see, are still only half the story."

"Careful with that 'we,' " Roger Mexico distracted today by a hundred things, chi-square fittings that refuse to jibe, textbooks lost, Jessica's absence. . . .

"It makes no sense unless we also consider those who've passed

over to the other side. We do transact with them, don't we? Through specialists like Eventyr and their controls over there. But all together we form a single subculture, a psychical community, if you will."

"I won't," Mexico says dryly, "but yes I suppose someone ought to be looking into it."

"There are peoples—these Hereros for example—who carry on business every day with their ancestors. The dead are as real as the living. How can you understand them without treating both sides of the wall of death with the same scientific approach?"

And yet for Eventyr it's not the social transaction Treacle hopes it is. There's no memory on his side: no personal record. He has to read about it in the notes of others, listen to discs. Which means he has to trust the others. That's a complicated social setup. He must base the major part of his life on the probity of men charged with acting as interface between what he is supposed to be and himself. Eventyr knows how close he is to Sachsa on the other side, but he doesn't remember, and he's been brought up a Christian, a Western European, believing in the primacy of the "conscious" self and its memories, regarding all the rest as abnormal or trivial, and so he is troubled, deeply. . . .

The transcripts are a document on Peter Sachsa as much as on the souls he puts in touch. They tell, in some detail, of his obsessive love for Leni Pokier, who was married to a young chemical engineer and also active with the K.P.D., shuttling between the 12th District and Sachsa's sittings. Each night she came he wanted to cry at the sight of her captivity. In her smudged eyes was clear hatred of a life she would not leave: a husband she didn't love, a child she had not learned to escape feeling guilty for not loving enough.

The husband Franz had a connection, too vague for Sachsa to pass across, with Army Ordnance, and so there were also ideological barriers that neither one found energy enough to climb. She attended street actions, Franz reported to the rocket facility at Reinickendorf after swallowing his tea in an early-morning room full of women he thought were sullen and waiting for him to leave: bringing their bundles of leaflets, their knapsacks stuffed with books or political newspapers, filtering through the slum courtyards of Berlin at sunrise. . . .

D D D D D D D

They are shivering and hungry. In the Studentenheim there's no heat, not much light, millions of roaches. A smell of cabbage, old second

Reich, grandmothers' cabbage, of lard smoke that has found, over the years, some détente with the air that seeks to break it down, smells of long illness and terminal occupation stir off the crumbling walls. One of the walls is stained yellow with waste from the broken lines upstairs. Leni sits on the floor with four or five others, passing a dark chunk of bread. In a damp nest of Die Faust Hoch, back issues no one will read, her daughter Ilse sleeps, breathing so shallow it can hardly be seen. Her eyelashes make enormous shadows on the upper curves of her cheeks.

They have left for good this time. This room will be all right for another day, even two . . . after that Leni doesn't know. She took one valise for both of them. Does he know what it means for a woman born under the Crab, a mother, to have all her home in a valise? She has a few marks with her, Franz has his toy rockets to the moon. It is really over.

As she used to dream it, she'd go directly to Peter Sachsa. If he didn't take her in, he'd at least help her to find a job. But now that she's really broken away from Franz . . . there's something, some nasty earth-sign belligerence that will rise up in Peter now and then. . . . Lately she isn't sure about his moods. He's under pressure from levels she guesses to be higher than usual, and he isn't handling it well. . . .

But Peter's worst infantile rages are still better than the most tranquil evenings of her Piscean husband, swimming his seas of fantasy, death-wish, rocket-mysticism—Franz is just the type they want. They know how to use that. They know how to use nearly everybody. What will happen to the ones they can't use?

Rudi, Vanya, Rebecca, here we are a slice of Berlin life, another Ufa masterpiece, token La Bohème Student, token Slav, token Jewess, look at us: the Revolution. Of course there is no Revolution, not even in the Kinos, no German October, not under this "Republic." The Revolution died—though Leni was only a young girl and not political— with Rosa Luxemburg. The best there is to believe in right now is a Revolution-in-exile-in-residence, a continuity, surviving at the bleak edge over these Weimar years, waiting its moment and its reincarnated Luxemburg. . . .

AN ARMY OF LOVERS CAN BE BEATEN. These things appear on the walls of the Red districts in the course of the night. Nobody can track down author or painter for any of them, leading you to suspect they're one and the same. Enough to make you believe in a folk-consciousness. They are not slogans so much as texts, revealed in order to be thought about, expanded on, translated into action by the people. ...

"It's true," Vanya now, "look at the forms of capitalist expression. Pornographies: pornographies of love, erotic love, Christian love, boy-and-his-dog, pornographies of sunsets, pornographies of killing, and pornographies of deduction—ahh, that sigh when we guess the murderer—all these novels, these films and songs they lull us with, they're approaches, more comfortable and less so, to that Absolute Comfort." A pause to allow Rudi a quick and sour grin. "The self-induced orgasm."

" 'Absolute'?" Rebecca coming forward on her bare knees to hand him the bread, damp, melting from the touch of her wet mouth, "Two people are—"

"Two people is what you are told," Rudi does not quite smirk. Through her attention, sadly and not for the first time around here, there passes the phrase male supremacy . . . why do they cherish their masturbating so? "but in nature it is almost unknown. Most of it's solitary. You know that."

"I know there's coming together," is all she says. Though they have never made love she means it as a reproach. But he turns away as we do from those who have just made some embarrassing appeal to faith there's no way to go into any further.

Leni, from inside her wasted time with Franz, knows enough about coming alone. At first his passivity kept her from coming at all. Then she understood that she could make up anything at all to fill the freedom he allowed her. It got more comfortable: she could dream such tendernesses between them (presently she was dreaming also of other men) —but it became more solitary. Yet her lines will not deepen fast enough, her mouth not learn hardening past a face she keeps surprising herself with, a daydreaming child's face, betraying her to anyone who'll look, exactly the sort of fat-softened, unfocused weakness that causes men to read her as Dependent Little Girl—even in Peter Sachsa she's seen the look—and the dream is the same one she went to find while Franz groaned inside his own dark pain-wishes, a dream of gentleness, light, her criminal heart redeemed, no more need to run, to struggle, a man arriving tranquil as she and strong, the street becoming a distant memory: exactly the one dream that out here she can least allow herself. She knows what she has to impersonate. Especially with Ilse watching her more. Ilse is not going to be used.

Rebecca's been carrying on an argument with Vanya, half flirting, Vanya trying to keep it all in intellectual code, but the Jewess reverting, time and again, to the bodily ... so sensual: the insides of her thighs, just above the knee, smooth as oil, the tenseness of all her mus-

clés, the alert face, the Judenschnautze feinting, pushing, the flashes of tongue against thick lips . . . what would it be like, to be taken to bed by her? To do it not just with another woman, but with a Jewess. . . . Their animal darkness .. . sweating hindquarters, pushing aggressively toward her face, black hairs darkening in fine crescent around each buttock from the crevice . . . the face turned over a shoulder smiling in coarse delight... all by surprise, really, during a moment's refuge in a pale yellow room, while the men wandered the halls outside with drugged smiles . . . "No, not that hard. Be gentle. I'll tell you when to do it harder. ..." Leni's fair skin, her look of innocence, and the Jewess's darker coloring, her rawness, contrasting with Leni's delicacy of structure and skin, pelvic bones stretching cobwebs smoothly down groins and around belly, the two women sliding, snarling, gasping . . . / know there's coming together . . . and Leni waking alone—the Jewess out already in some other room of the place—never having known the instant at which she fell into her true infant sleep, a soft change of state that just didn't happen with Franz. ... So she brushed and batted with fingertips her hair to show something of how she felt about the night's clientele and strolled down to the baths, stripped without caring what eyes were on her and slid into the body-warmth, the conventional perfume of it. ... All at once, through a shouting and humidity that might have made it hard to concentrate, she saw, there, up on one of the ledges, looking down at her . . . Yes he was Richard Hirsch, from the Mausigstrasse, so many years ago . . . she knew immediately that her face had never looked more vulnerable—she could see it in his eyes. . . .

All around them the others splashed, made love, carried on comic monologues, perhaps they were friends of his—yes wasn't that Siggi frog-kicking by, we called him "the Troll," he hasn't grown a centimeter since then . . . since we ran home along the canal, tripped and fell on the hardest cobblestones in the world, and woke in the mornings to see snow on the spokes of the wagon wheels, steam out the old horse's nose. . . . "Leni. Leni." Richard's hair pushed all the way back, his body golden, leaning to lift her from the cloudy bath, to sit beside him.

"You're supposed to be . . ." she's flustered, doesn't know how to put this. "Someone told me you hadn't come back from France. . . ." She stares at her knees.

"Not even the French girls could have kept me in France." He's still there: she feels him trying to look in her eyes: and he speaks so simply, he's so alive, sure that French girls must be more coercive than

English machine guns . . . she knows, filled with crying for his innocence, that he can't have been with anyone there, that French girls still are to him beautiful and remote agents of Love. ...

In Leni, now, nothing of her long employment shows, nothing. She is the child he looked at across park pathways, or met trudging home down the gassen in the crust-brown light, her face, rather broad then, angled down, fair eyebrows troubled, bookpack on her back, hands in apron pockets . . . some of the stones in the walls were white as paste . . . she may have seen him coming the other way, but he was older, always with friends. . . .

Now they all grow less raucous around them, more deferent, even shy, happy for Richard and Leni. "Better late than never!" pipes Siggi in his speeded-up midget's voice, reaching on tiptoe to pour May wine in all their glasses. Leni goes to get her hair resryled and lightened a shade, and Rebecca comes with her. They talk, for the first time, of plans and futures. Without touching, Richard and she have fallen in love, as they should have then. It's understood he'll take her away with him. . . .

Old Gymnasium friends have been showing up in recent days, bringing exotic food and wine, new drugs, much ease and honesty in sexual matters. No one bothers to dress. They show one another their naked bodies. No one feels anxious, or threatened about the size of her breasts or his penis. ... It is all beautifully relaxing for everyone. Leni practices her new name, "Leni Hirsch," even sometimes when she's sitting with Richard at a café table in the morning: "Leni Hirsch," and he actually smiles, embarrassed, tries to look away but can't escape her eyes and finally he turns full into her own look, laughs out loud, a laugh of pure joy, and reaches his hand, the palm of his dear hand, to hold her face. . . .

On a multi-leveled early evening of balconies, terraces, audiences grouped at the different levels, all looking downward, in toward a common center, galleries of young women with green leaves at their waists, tall evergreen trees, lawns, flowing water and national solemnity, the President, in the middle of asking the Bundestag, with his familiar clogged and nasal voice, for a giant war appropriation, breaks down suddenly: "Oh, fuck it . . ." Ficht es, the soon-to-be-immortal phrase, rings in the sky, rings over the land, Ja, fickt es! "I'm sending all the soldiers home. We'll close down the weapon factories, we'll dump all the weapons in the sea. I'm sick of war. I'm sick of waking up every morning afraid I'm going to die." It is suddenly impossible to hate him any more: he's as human, as mortal now, as any of the people. There

will be new elections. The Left will run a woman whose name is never given, but everyone understands it is Rosa Luxemburg. The other candidates will be chosen so inept or colorless that no one will vote for them. There will be a chance for the Revolution. The President has promised.

Incredible joy at the baths, among the friends. True joy: events in a dialectical process cannot bring this explosion of the heart. Everyone is in love. ...

AN ARMY OF LOVERS CAN BE BEATEN.

Rudi and Vanya have fallen to arguing street tactics. Somewhere water is dripping. The street reaches in, makes itself felt everywhere. Leni knows it, hates it. The impossibility of any rest . . . needing to trust strangers who may be working for the police, if not right now then a little later, when the street has grown for them more desolate than they can bear . .. She wishes she knew of ways to keep it from her child, but already that may be too late. Franz—Franz was never much in the street. Always some excuse. Worried about security, being caught on a stray frame by one of the leather-coated photographers, who will be always at the fringes of the action. Or it was, "What'll we do with Use? What if there's violence?" If there's violence, what'll we do with Franz?

She tried to explain to him about the level you reach, with both feet in, when you lose your fear, you lose it all, you've penetrated the moment, slipping perfectly into its grooves, metal-gray but soft as latex, and now the figures are dancing, each pre-choreographed exactly where it is, the flash of knees under pearl-colored frock as the girl in the babushka stoops to pick up a cobble, the man in the black suitcoat and brown sleeveless sweater grabbed by policemen one on either arm, trying to keep his head up, showing his teeth, the older liberal in the dirty beige overcoat, stepping back to avoid a careening demonstrator, looking back across his lapel how-dare-you or look-out-not-me, his eyeglasses filled with the glare of the winter sky. There is the moment, and its possibilities.

She even tried, from what little calculus she'd picked up, to explain it to Franz as At approaching zero, eternally approaching, the slices of time growing thinner and thinner, a succession of rooms each with walls more silver, transparent, as the pure light of the zero comes nearer. . . .

But he shook his head. "Not the same, Leni. The important thing is taking a function to its limit. At is just a convenience, so that it can happen."

He has, had, this way of removing all the excitement from things with a few words. Not even well-chosen words: he's that way by instinct. When they went to movies he would fall asleep. He fell asleep during Nibelungen. He missed Attila the Hun roaring in from the East to wipe out the Burgundians. Franz loved films but this was how he watched them, nodding in and out of sleep. "You're the cause-and-effect man," she cried. How did he connect together the fragments he saw while his eyes were open?

He was the cause-and-effect man: he kept at her astrology without mercy, telling her what she was supposed to believe, then denying it. "Tides, radio interference, damned little else. There is no way for changes out there to produce changes here."

"Not produce," she tried, "not cause. It all goes along together. Parallel, not series. Metaphor. Signs and symptoms. Mapping on to different coordinate systems, I don't know ..." She didn't know, all she was trying to do was reach.

But he said: "Try to design anything that way and have it work."

They saw Die Frau im Mond. Franz was amused, condescending. He picked at technical points. He knew some of the people who'd worked on the special effects. Leni saw a dream of flight. One of many possible. Real flight and dreams of flight go together. Both are part of the same movement. Not A before B, but all together. . . .

Could anything with him ever have lasted? If the Jewish wolf Pflaumbaum had not set the torch to his own paint factory by the canal, Franz might have labored out their days dedicated to the Jew's impossible scheme of developing patterned paint, dissolving crystal after patient crystal, controlling tie temperatures with obsessive care so that on cooling the amorphous swirl might, this time might, suddenly shift, lock into stripes, polka-dots, plaid, stars of David—instead of finding one early morning a blackened waste, paint cans exploded in great bursts of crimson and bottle-green, smells of charred wood and naphtha, Pflaumbaum wringing his hands oy, oy, oy, the sneaking hypocrite. All for the insurance.

So Franz and Leni were very hungry for a time, with Ilse growing in her belly each day. What jobs came along were menial and paid hardly enough to matter. It was breaking him. Then he met his old friend from the T.H. Munich one night out in the swampy suburbs.

He'd been out all day, the proletarian husband, out pasting up bills to advertise some happy Max Schlepzig film fantasy, while Leni lay pregnant, forced to turn when the pain in her back got too bad, inside their furnished dustbin in the last of the tenement's Hinterhöfe. It was

well after dark and bitter cold by the time his paste bucket was empty and the ads all put up to be pissed on, torn down, swastikaed over. (It may have been a quota film. There may have been a misprint. But when he arrived at the theatre on the date printed on the bill, he found the place dark, chips of plaster littering the floor of the lobby, and a terrible smashing far back inside the theatre, the sound of a demolition crew except that there were no voices, nor even any light that he could see back there ... he called, but the wrecking only went on, a loud creaking in the bowels behind the electric marquee, which he noticed now was blank. . . .) He had wandered, bone-tired, miles northward into Reinickendorf, a quarter of small factories, rusted sheeting on the roofs, brothels, sheds, expansions of brick into night and disuse, repair shops where the water in the vats for cooling the work lay stagnant and scummed over. Only a sprinkling of lights. Vacancy, weeds in the lots, no one in the streets: a neighborhood where glass breaks every night. It must have been the wind that was carrying him down a dirt road, past the old army garrison the local police had taken over, among the shacks and tool cribs to a wire fence with a gate. He found the gate open, and pushed through. He'd become aware of a sound, somewhere ahead. One summer before the World War, he'd gone to Schaffhausen on holiday with his parents, and they'd taken the electric tram to the Rhine Falls. They went down a stairway and out on to a little wood pavilion with a pointed roof—all around them were clouds, rainbows, drops of fire. And the roar of the waterfall. He held on to both their hands, suspended in the cold spray-cloud with Mutti and Papi, barely able to see above to the trees that clung to the fall's brim in a green wet smudge, or the little tour boats below that came up nearly to where the cataract crashed into the Rhine. But now, in the winter heart of Reinickendorf, he was alone, hands empty, stumbling over frozen mud through an old ammunition dump grown over with birch and willow, swelling in the darkness to hills, sinking to swamp. Concrete barracks and earthworks 40 feet high towered in the middle distance as the sound beyond them, the sound of a waterfall, grew louder, calling from his memory. These were the kinds of revenants that found Franz, not persons but forms of energy, abstractions. . . .

Through a gap in the breastwork he saw then a tiny silver egg, with a flame, pure and steady, issuing from beneath, lighting the forms of men in suits, sweaters, overcoats, watching from bunkers or trenches. It was a rocket, in its stand: a static test.

The sound began to change, to break now and then. It didn't sound ominous to Franz in his wonder, only different. But the light

grew brighter, and the watching figures suddenly started dropping for cover as the rocket now gave a sputtering roar, a long burst, voices screaming get down and he hit the dirt just as the silver thing blew apart, a terrific blast, metal whining through the air where he'd stood, Franz hugging the ground, ears ringing, no feeling even for the cold, no way for the moment of knowing if he was still inside his body. . . .

Feet approached running. He looked up and saw Kurt Mondau-gen. The wind all night, perhaps all year, had brought them together. This is what he came to believe, that it was the wind. Most of the schoolboy fat was replaced now by muscle, his hair was thinning, his complexion darker than anything Franz had seen in the street that winter, dark even in the concrete folds of shadow and the flames from the scattered rocket fuel, but it was Mondaugen sure enough, seven or eight years gone but they knew each other in the instant. They'd lived in the same drafty mansarde in the Liebigstrasse in Munich. (Franz had seen the address then as a lucky omen, for Justus von Liebig had been one of his heroes, a hero of chemistry. Later, as confirmation, his course in polymer theory was taught by Professor-Doctor Laszlo Jamf, who was latest in the true succession, Liebig to August Wilhelm von Hofmann, to Herbert Canister to Laszlo Jamf, a direct chain, cause-and-effect.) They'd ridden the same rattling Schnellbahnwagen with its three contact arms frail as insect legs squeaking along the wires overhead to the TH.: Mondaugen had been in electrical engineering. On graduating he'd gone off to South-West Africa, on some kind of radio research project. They had written for a while, then stopped.

Their reunion went on till very late, in a Reinickendorf beer hall, undergraduate hollering among the working-class drinkers, a jubilant and grandiose post-mortem on the rocket test—scrawling on soggy paper napkins, all talking at once around the glass-cluttered table, arguing through the smoke and noise heat flux, specific impulse, propel-lant flow. . . .

"It was a failure," Franz weaving under their electric bulb at three or four in the morning, a loose grin on his face, "it failed, Leni, but they talk only of success! Twenty kilograms of thrust and only for a few seconds, but no one's ever done it before. I couldn't believe it Leni I saw something that, that no one ever did before. ..."

He meant to accuse her, she imagined, of conditioning him to despair. But she only wanted him to grow up. What kind of Wandervögel idiocy is it to run around all night in a marsh calling yourselves the Society for Space Navigation?

Leni grew up in Lübeck, in a row of kleinbürger houses beside the Trave. Smooth trees, spaced evenly all along the riverward edge of her cobbled street, arched their long boughs over the water. From her bedroom window she could see the twin spires of the Dom rising above the housetops. Her fetid back-court existence in Berlin was only a decompression lock—must be. Her way out of that fussy Biedermeier strangulation, her dues payable against better times, after the Revolution.

Franz, in play, often called her "Lenin." There was never doubt about who was active, who passive—still she had hoped he'd grow beyond it. She has talked to psychiatrists, she knows about the German male at puberty. On their backs in the meadows and mountains, watching the sky, masturbating, yearning. Destiny waits, a darkness latent in the texture of the summer wind. Destiny will betray you, crush your ideals, deliver you into the same detestable Bürgerlichkeit as your father, sucking at his pipe on Sunday strolls after church past the row houses by the river—dress you in the gray uniform of another family man, and without a whimper you will serve out your time, fly from pain to duty, from joy to work, from commitment to neutrality. Destiny does all this to you.

Franz loved her neurotically, masochistically, he belonged to her and believed that she would carry him on her back, away to a place where Destiny couldn't reach. As if it were gravity. He had half-awakened one night burrowing his face into her armpit mumbling, "Your wings . . . oh, Leni, your wings ..."

But her wings can only carry her own weight, and she hopes Ilse's, for a while. Franz is a dead weight. Let him look for flight out at the Raketenflugplatz, where he goes to be used by the military and the cartels. Let him fly to the dead moon if he wants to. ...

Ilse is awake, and crying. No food all day. They ought to try Peter's after all. He'll have milk. Rebecca holds out what's left of the end crust she's been eating. "Would she like this?"

Not much of the Jew in her. Why are half the Leftists she knows Jewish? She immediately reminds herself that Marx was one. A racial affinity for the books, the theory, a rabbinical love of loud argument. . . She gives the crust to her child, picks her up.

"If he comes here, tell him you haven't seen me."

They arrive at Peter Sachsa's well after dark. She finds a séance just about to begin. She is immediately aware of her drab coat and cotton dress (hemline too high), her scuffed and city-dusted shoes, her lack of jewelry. More middle-class reflexes . . . vestiges, she hopes. But most

of the women are old. The others are too dazzling. Hmm. The men look more affluent than usual. Leni spots a silver lapel-swastika here and there. Wines on the tables are the great '20s and '21s. Schloss Vollrads, Zeltinger, Piesporter—it is an Occasion.

The objective tonight is to get in touch with the late foreign minister Walter Rathenau. At the Gymnasium, Leni sang with the other children the charming anti-Semitic street refrain of the time:

Knallt ab den Juden Rathenau, Die gottverdammte Judensau ...

After he was assassinated she sang nothing for weeks, certain that, if the singing hadn't brought it about, at least it had been a prophecy, a spell. . . .

There are specific messages tonight. Questions for the former minister. A gentle sorting-out process is under way. Reasons of security. Only certain guests are allowed to go on into Peter's sitting room. The preterite stay outside, gossiping, showing their gums out of tension, moving their hands. . . . The big scandal around IG Farben this week is the unlucky subsidiary Spottbilligfilm AG, whose entire management are about to be purged for sending to OKW weapons procurement a design proposal for a new airborne ray which could turn whole populations, inside a ten-kilometer radius, stone blind. An IG review board caught the scheme in time. Poor Spottbilligfilm. It had slipped their collective mind what such a weapon would do to the dye market after the next war. The Götterdämmerung mentality again. The weapon had been known as L-5227, L standing for light, another comical German euphemism, like the A in rocket designations which stands for aggregate, or IG itself, Interessengemeinschaft, a fellowship of interests . . . and what about the case of catalyst poisoning in Prague—was it true that the VI b Group Staffs at the Chemical Instrumentality for the Abnormal have been flown east on emergency status, and that it's a complex poisoning, both selenium and tellurium . . . the names of the poisons sober the conversation, like a mention of cancer. . . .

The elite who will sit tonight are from the corporate Nazi crowd, among whom Leni recognizes who but Generaldirektor Smaragd, of an IG branch that was interested, for a time, in her husband. But then abruptly there'd been no more contact. It would have been mysterious, a little sinister, except that everything in those days could reasonably be blamed on the economy. . . .

In the crowd her eyes meet Peter's. "I've left him," she whispers, nodding, as he shakes hands.

"You can put Ilse to sleep in one of the bedrooms. Can we talk later?" There is to his eyes tonight a definite faunish slant. Will he accept that she is not his, any more than she belonged to Franz?

"Yes, of course. What's going on?"

He snorts, meaning they haven't told me. They are using him—have been, various theys, for ten years. But he never knows how, except by rare accident, an allusion, an interception of smiles. A distorting and forever clouded mirror, the smiles of clients. . . .

Why do they want Rathenau tonight? What did Caesar really whisper to his protégé as he fell? Et tu, Brute, the official lie, is about what you'd expect to get from them—it says exactly nothing. The moment of assassination is the moment when power and the ignorance of power come together, with Death as validator. When one speaks to the other then it is not to pass the time of day with et-tu-Brutes. What passes is a truth so terrible that history—at best a conspiracy, not always among gentlemen, to defraud—will never admit it. The truth will be repressed or in ages of particular elegance be disguised as something else. What will Rathenau, past the moment, years into a new otherside existence, have to say about the old dispensation? Probably nothing as incredible as what he might have said just as the shock flashed his mortal nerves, as the Angel swooped in. ...

But they will see. Rathenau—according to the histories—was prophet and architect of the cartelized state. From what began as a tiny bureau at the War Office in Berlin, he had coordinated Germany's economy during the World War, controlling supplies, quotas and prices, cutting across and demolishing the barriers of secrecy and property that separated firm from firm—a corporate Bismarck, before whose power no account book was too privileged, no agreement too clandestine. His father Emil Rathenau had founded AEG, the German General Electric Company, but young Walter was more than another industrial heir—he was a philosopher with a vision of the postwar State. He saw the war in progress as a world revolution, out of which would rise neither Red communism nor an unhindered Right, but a rational structure in which business would be the true, the rightful authority—a structure based, not surprisingly, on the one he'd engineered in Germany for fighting the World War.

Thus the official version. Grandiose enough. But Generaldirektor Smaragd and colleagues are not here to be told what even the masses

believe. It might almost—if one were paranoid enough—seem to be a collaboration here, between both sides of the Wall, matter and spirit. What is it they know that the powerless do not? What terrible structure behind the appearances of diversity and enterprise?

Gallows humor. A damned parlor game. Smaragd cannot really believe in any of this, Smaragd the technician and manager. He may only want signs, omens, confirmations of what's already in being, something to giggle over among the Herrenklub—"We even have the Jew's blessing!" Whatever comes through the medium tonight they will warp, they will edit, into a blessing. It is contempt of a rare order.

Leni finds a couch in a quiet corner of a room full of Chinese ivory and silk hangings, lies on it, one calf dangling, and tries to relax. Franz now will be home from the rocket-field, blinking under the bulb as Frau Silberschlag next door delivers Leni's last message. Messages tonight, borne on the lights of Berlin . . . neon, incandescent, stellar . . . messages weave into a net of information that no one can escape. . . .

"The path is clear," a voice moving Sachsa's lips and rigid white throat. "You are constrained, over there, to follow it in time, one step after another. But here it's possible to see the whole shape at once— not for me, I'm not that far along—but many know it as a clear presence . . . 'shape' isn't really the right word. . . . Let me be honest with you. I'm finding it harder to put myself in your shoes. Problems you may be having, even those of global implication, seem to many of us here only trivial side-trips. You are off on a winding and difficult road, which you conceive to be wide and straight, an Autobahn you can travel at your ease. Is it any use for me to tell you that all you believe real is illusion? I don't know whether you'll listen, or ignore it. You only want to know about your path, your Autobahn.

"All right. Mauve: that's in the pattern. The invention of mauve, the coming to your level of the color mauve. Are you listening, Generaldirektor?"

"I am listening, Herr Rathenau," replies Smaragd of IG Farben.

"Tyrian purple, alizarin and indigo, other coal-tar dyes are here, but the important one is mauve. William Perkin discovered it in England, but he was trained by Hofmann, who was trained by Liebig. There is a succession involved. If it is karmic it's only in a very limited sense . . . another Englishman, Herbert Canister, and the generation of chemists he trained. . . . Then the discovery of Oneirine. Ask your man Wimpe. He is the expert on cyclized benzylisoquinilines. Look into the clinical effects of the drug. I don't know. It seems that you might look in that direction. It converges with the mauve-Perkin-Canister line. But all I have is the molecule, the sketch . . . Methoneirine, as the sulfate. Not in Germany, but in the United States. There is a link to the United States. A link to Russia. Why do you think von Maltzan and I saw the Rapallo treaty through? It was necessary to move to the east. Wimpe can tell you. Wimpe, the V-Mann, was always there. Why do you think we wanted Krupp to sell them agricultural machinery so badly? It was also part of the process. At the time I didn't understand it as clearly as I do now. But I knew what I had to do.

"Consider coal and steel. There is a place where they meet. The interface between coal and steel is coal-tar. Imagine coal, down in the earth, dead black, no light, the very substance of death. Death ancient, prehistoric, species we will never see again. Growing older, blacker, deeper, in layers of perpetual night. Above ground, the steel rolls out fiery, bright. But to make steel, the coal tars, darker and heavier, must be taken from the original coal. Earth's excrement, purged out for the ennoblement of shining steel. Passed over.

"We thought of this as an industrial process. It was more. We passed over the coal-tars. A thousand different molecules waited in the preterite dung. This is the sign of revealing. Of unfolding. This is one meaning of mauve, the first new color on Earth, leaping to Earth's light from its grave miles and aeons below. There is the other meaning . . . the succession ... I can't see that far yet. . . .

"But this is all the impersonation of life. The real movement is not from death to any rebirth. It is from death to death-transfigured. The best you can do is to polymerize a few dead molecules. But polymerizing is not resurrection. I mean your IG, Generaldirektor."

"'Our IG, I should have thought," replies Smaragd with more than the usual ice and stiffness.

"That's for you to work out. If you prefer to call this a liaison, do. I am here for as long as you need me. You don't have to listen. You think you'd rather hear about what you call 'life': the growing, organic Kartell. But it's only another illusion. A very clever robot. The more dynamic it seems to you, the more deep and dead, in reality, it grows. Look at the smokestacks, how they proliferate, fanning the wastes of original waste over greater and greater masses of city. Structurally, they are strongest in compression. A smokestack can survive any explosion—even the shock wave from one of the new cosmic bombs"— a bit of a murmur around the table at this—"as you all must know. The persistence, then, of structures favoring death. Death converted into more death. Perfecting its reign, just as the buried coal grows

denser, and overlaid with more strata—epoch on top of epoch, city on top of ruined city. This is the sign of Death the impersonator.

"These signs are real. They are also symptoms of a process. The process follows the same form, the same structure. To apprehend it you will follow the signs. All talk of cause and effect is secular history, and secular history is a diversionary tactic. Useful to you, gentlemen, but no longer so to us here. If you want the truth—I know I presume—you must look into the technology of these matters. Even into the hearts of certain molecules—it is they after all which dictate temperatures, pressures, rates of flow, costs, profits, the shapes of towers. . . .

"You must ask two questions. First, what is the real nature of synthesis? And then: what is the real nature of control?

"You think you know, you cling to your beliefs. But sooner or later you will have to let them go. ..."

A silence, which prolongs itself. There is some shifting in the seats around the table, but the sets of little fingers stay in touch.

"Herr Rathenau? Could you tell me one thing?" It is Heinz Rip-penstoss, the irrepressible Nazi wag and gadabout. The sitters begin to giggle, and Peter Sachsa to return to his room. "Is God really Jewish?"

D D D D D D D

Pumm, Easterling, Dromond, Lamplighter, Spectro are stars on the doctor's holiday tree. Shining down on this holiest of nights. Each is a cold announcement of dead ends, suns that will refuse to stand, but flee south, ever south, leaving us to north-without-end. But Kevin Spectro is brightest, most distant of all. And the crowds they swarm in Knightsbridge, and the wireless carols drone, and the Underground's a mob-scene, but Pointsman's all alone. But he's got his Xmas present, fa la la, he won't have to settle for any Spam-tin dog this year mates, he's got his own miracle and human child, grown to manhood but carrying, someplace on the Slothropian cortex now a bit of Psychology's own childhood, yes pure history, inert, encysted, unmoved by jazz, depression, war—a survival, if you will, of a piece of the late Dr. Jamf himself, past death, past the reckoning of the, the old central chamber you know. . . .

He has no one to ask, no one to tell. My heart, he feels, my heart floods now with such virility and hope. . . . News from the Riviera is

splendid. Experiments here begin to run smoothly for a change. From some dark overlap, a general appropriation or sinking fund someplace, Brigadier Pudding has even improved the funding for ARE Does he feel Pointsman's power too? Is he buying some insurance?

At odd moments of the day Pointsman, fascinated, discovers himself with an erect penis. He begins making jokes, English Pavlovian jokes, nearly all of which depend on one unhappy accident: the Latin cortex translates into English as "bark," not to mention the well-known and humorous relation between dogs and trees (these are bad enough, and most PISCES folk have the good sense to avoid them, but they are dazzling witticisms compared with jokes out of the mainstream, such as the extraordinary "What did the Cockney exclaim to the cowboy from San Antonio?"). Sometime during the annual PISCES Christmas Party, Pointsman is led by Maudie Chilkes to a closet full of belladonna, gauze, thistle tubes, and the scent of surgical rubber, where in a flash she's down on her red knees, unbuttoning his trousers, as he, confused, good God, strokes her hair, clumsily shaking much of it loose from its wine-colored ribbon—here what's this, an actual, slick and crimson, hot, squeak-stockinged slavegirl "gam" yes right among these winter-pale clinical halls, with the distant gramophone playing rumba music, basses, woodblocks, wearied blown sheets of tropic string cadences audible as everyone dances back there on the uncar-peted floors, and the old Palladian shell, conch of a thousand rooms, gives, resonates, shifting stresses along walls and joists . . . bold Maud, this is incredible, taking the pink Pavlovian cock in as far as it will go, chin to collarbone vertical as a sword-swallower, releasing him each time with some small ladylike choking sound, fumes of expensive Scotch rising flowerlike, and her hands up grabbing the loose wool seat of his pants, pleating, unpleating—it's happening so fast that Pointsman only sways, blinks a bit drunkenly you know, wondering if he's dreaming or has found the perfect mixture, try to remember, amphetamine sulphate, 5 mg q 6 h, last night amobarbital sodium 0.2 Gm. at bedtime, this morning assorted breakfast vitamin capsules, alcohol an ounce, say, per hour, over the past. . . how many cc.s is that and oh, Jesus I'm coming. Am I? yes . . . well . . . and Maud, dear Maudie, swallowing, wastes not a drop . . . smiling quietly, unplugged at last, she returns the unstiffening hawk to its cold bachelor nest but kneels still a bit longer in the closet of this moment, the drafty, white-lit moment, some piece by Ernesto Lecuona, "Siboney" perhaps, now reaching them down corridors long as the sea-lanes back to the green shoals, slime stone battlements, and palm evenings of Cuba ... a Vic-

torian pose, her cheek against his leg, his high-veined hand against her face. But no one saw them, then or ever, and in the winter ahead, here and there, her look will cross his and she'll begin to blush red as her knees, she'll come to his room off the lab once or twice perhaps, but somehow they're never to have this again, this sudden tropics in the held breath of war and English December, this moment of perfect peace. . . .

No one to tell. Maud knows something's up all right, the finances of PISCES pass through her hands, nothing escapes her. But he can't tell her ... or not everything, not the exact terms of his hope, he's never, even to himself... it lies ahead in the dark, denned inversely, by horror, by ways all hopes might yet be defeated and he find only his death, that dumb, empty joke, at the end of this Pavlovian's Progress.

Now Thomas Gwenhidwy too senses change fibrillating in the face and step of his colleague. Fat, prematurely white Santa Claus beard, a listing, rumpled showman, performing every instant, trying to speak a double language, both Welsh comic-provincial and hard diamond gone-a-begging truth, hear what you will. His singing voice is incredible, in his spare time he strolls out past the wire-mesh fighter runways looking for bigger planes—for he loves to practice the bass part to "Diadem" as the Flying Fortresses take off at full power, and even so you can hear him, bone-vibrating and pure above the bombers, all the way to Stoke Poges, you see. Once a lady even wrote in to the Times from Luton Hoo, Bedfordshire, asking who was the man with the lovely deep voice singing "Diadem^" A Mrs. Snade. Gwenhidwy likes to drink a lot, grain alcohol mostly, mixed in great strange mad-scientist concoctions with beef tea, grenadine, cough syrup, bitter belch-gathering infusions of blue scullcap, valerian root, motherwort and lady's-slipper, whatever's to hand really. His is the hale alcoholic style celebrated in national legend and song. He is descended directly from the Welshman in Henry V who ran around forcing people to eat his Leek. None of your sedentary drinkers though. Pointsman has never seen Gwenhidwy off of his feet or standing still— he fusses endlessly pitch-and-roll avast you scum down the long rows of sick or dying faces, and even Pointsman has noted rough love in the minor gestures, changes of breathing and voice. They are blacks, Indians, Ashkenazic Jews speaking dialects you never heard in Harley Street: they have been bombed out, frozen, starved, meanly sheltered, and their faces, even the children's, all possess some ancient intimacy with pain and reverse that amazes Pointsman, who is more polarized upon West End catalogues of genteel signs and symptoms, headborn anorexias and constipations the Welshman could have little patience with. On Gwenhidwy's wards some BMRs run low as ~35, ~40. The white lines go thickening across the X-ray ghosts of bones, gray scrapings from underneath tongues bloom beneath his old wrinkle-black microscope into clouds of Vincentesque invaders, nasty little fangs achop and looking to ulcerate the vitamin-poor tissue they came from. A quite different domain altogether, you see.

"I don't know, man—no, I don't," flinging a fat slow-motion arm out of his hedgehog-colored cape, back at the hospital, as they walk in the falling snow—to Pointsman a clear separation, monks here and cathedral there, soldiers and garrison—but not so to Gwenhidwy, part of whom remains behind, hostage. The streets are empty, it's Christmas day, they are tramping uphill to Gwenhidwy's rooms as the quiet snow curtains fall on and on between themselves and the pierced walls of the institution marching in stone parallax away into a white gloom. "How they persist. The poor, the black. And the Jews! The Welsh, the Welsh once upon a time were Jewish too? one of the Lost Tribes of Israel, a black tribe, who wandered overland, centuries? oh an incredible journey. Until at last they reached Wales, you see."

"Wales ..."

"Stayed on, and became the Cymri. What if we're all Jews, you see? all scattered like seeds? still flying outward from the primal fist so long ago. Man, I believe that."

"Of course you do, Gwenhidwy."

"Aren't we then? What about you?"

"I don't know. I don't feel Jewish today."

"I meant flying outward?" He means alone and forever separate: Pointsman knows what he means. So, by surprise, something in him is touched. He feels the Christmas snow now at crevices of his boots, the bitter cold trying to get in. The brown wool flank of Gwenhidwy moves at the edge of his sight, a pocket of color, a holdout against this whitening day. Flying outward. Flying . . . Gwenhidwy, a million ice-points falling at a slant across his caped immensity, looking so improbable of extinction that now, from where it's been lying, the same yawing-drunk chattering fear returns, the Curse of the Book, and here is someone he wants, truly, with all his mean heart, to see preserved . . . though he's been too shy, or proud, ever to've smiled at Gwenhidwy without some kind of speech to explain and cancel out the smile. . . .

Dogs run barking at their approach. They get the Professional Eye from Pointsman. Gwenhidwy is humming "Aberystwyth." Out comes the doorkeeper's daughter Estelle with a shivering kid or two under-

foot and a Christmas bottle of something acrid but very warming inside the breast after about the first minute it's down. Smells of coal smoke, piss, garbage, last night's bubble-and-squeak, fill the hallways. Gwenhidwy is drinking from the bottle, carrying on a running slap-and-tickle with Estelle and getting in a fast game of where'd-he-go-there-he-is with Arch her youngest around the broad mouton hipline of his mother who keeps trying to smack him but he's too fast.

Gwenhidwy breathes upon a gas meter which is frozen all through, too tight to accept coins. Terrible weather. He surrounds it, curses it, bending like a screen lover, wings of his cape reaching to enfold— Gwenhidwy, radiating like a sun. ...

Out the windows of the sitting-room are a row of bare Army-colored poplars, a canal, a snowy trainyard, and beyond it a long sawtooth pile of scrap coal, still smoldering from a V-bomb yesterday. Ragged smoke is carried askew, curling, broken and back to earth by the falling snow.

"It's the closest yet," Gwenhidwy at the kettle, the sour smell of a sulfur match in the air. After a moment, still on watch over the gas ring, "Pointsman, do you want to hear something really paranoid?"

"You too?"

"Have you consulted a map of London lately? All this great meteoric plague of V-weapons, is being dumped out here, you see. Not back on Whitehall, where it's supposed to be, but on me, and I think it is beast-ly?"

"What a damned unpatriotic thing to say."

"Oh," hawking and spitting into the washbowl, "you don't want to believe it. Why should you? Harley Street lot, my good Jesus Christ."

It's an old game with Gwenhidwy, Royal Fellow-baiting. Some unaccustomed wind or thermocline along the sky is bringing them down the deep choral hum of American bombers: Death's white Gymanfa Ganu. A switching-locomotive creeps silently across the web of tracks below.

"They're falling in a Poisson distribution," says Pointsman in a small voice, as if it was open to challenge.

"No doubt man, no doubt—an excellent point. But all over the rucking East End, you see." Arch, or someone, has drawn a brown, orange, and blue Gwenhidwy carrying a doctor's bag along a flat horizon-line past a green gasworks. The bag's full of gin bottles, Gwenhidwy is smiling, a robin is peeking out from its nest in his beard, and the sky is blue and the sun yellow. "But have you ever thought of why? Here is the City Paranoiac. All these long centuries,

growing over the country-side? like an intelligent creature. An actor, a fantastic mimic, Pointsman! Count-erfeiting all the correct forces? the eco-nomic, the demographic? oh yes even the ran-dom, you see."

"What do you mean 'I see'? I don't see." Against the window, back-lit by the white afternoon, Pointsman's face is invisible except for a tiny bright crescent glowing off each eyeball. Should he fumble behind him for the window catch? Is the woolly Welshman gone raving mad, then?

"You don't see them," steam in tight brocade starting to issue from the steel-blotched swan's mouth, "the blacks and Jews, in their darkness. You can't. You don't hear their silence. You became so used to talking, and to light."

"To barking, anyway."

"Nothing comes through my hos-pital but fail-ure, you see." Staring with a fixed, fool-alcoholic smile. "What can I cure? I can only send them back, outside again? Back to that? It might as well be Europe here, corn-bat, splint-ing and drug-ging them all into some minimum condition to get on with the kill-ing?"

"Here, don't you know there's a war on?" Thus Pointsman receives, with his cup, a terrible scowl. In truth, he is hoping with nitwit irrelevancies to discourage Gwenhidwy from going on about his City Paranoiac. Pointsman would rather talk about the rocket victims admitted today to the hospital down there. But this is exorcism man, it is the poet singing back the silence, adjuring the white riders, and Gwenhidwy knows, as Pointsman cannot, that it's part of the plan of the day to sit inside this mean room and cry into just such a deafness: that Mr. Pointsman is to play exactly himself—stylized, irritable, uncomprehending. . . .

"In some cities the rich live upon the heights, and the poor are found below. In others the rich occupy the shoreline, while the poor must live inland. Now in London, here is a gra-dient of wretchedness? increasing as the river widens to the sea. I am only ask-ing, why? Is it because of the ship-ping? Is it in the pat-terns of land use, especially those relating to the Industrial Age? Is it a case of an-cient tribal tabu, surviving down all the Eng-lish generations? No. The true reason is the Threat From The East, you see. And the South: from the mass of Eu-rope, certainly. The people out here were meant to go down first. We're expendable: those in the West End, and north of the river are not. Oh, I don't mean the Threat has this or that specific shape. Political, no. If the City Paranoiac dreams, it's not accessible to us. Perhaps the Ci-ty dreamed of another, en-emy city, float-ing across the sea to

invade the es-tuary ... or of waves of darkness . . . waves of fire. . . . Perhaps of being swallowed again, by the immense, the si-lent Mother Con-tinent? It's none of my business, city dreams. . . . But what if the Ci-ty were a growing neo-plasm, across the centuries, always changing, to meet exactly the chang-ing shape of its very worst, se-cret fears? The raggedy pawns, the disgraced bish-op and cowardly knight, all we condemned, we irreversibly lost, are left out here, exposed and wait-ing. It was known, don't deny it—known, Pointsman! that the front in Eu-rope someday must develop like this? move away east, make the rock-ets necessary, and known how, and where, the rockets would fall short. Ask your friend Mexico? look at the densities on his map? east, east, and south of the river too, where all the bugs live, that's who's getting it thick-est, my friend."

"You're right, Gwenhidwy," judicious, sipping his tea, "that is very paranoid."

"It's true." He is out with the festive bottle of Vat 69 now, and about to pour them a toast.

"To the babies." Grinning, completely mad.

"Babies, Gwenhidwy?"

"Ah. I've been keep-ing my own map? Plot-ting da-ta from the maternity wards. The ba-bies born during this Blitz are al-so fol-lowing a Poisson distribution, you see."

"Well—to the oddness of it, then. Poor little bastards."

Later, toward dusk, several enormous water bugs, a very dark reddish brown, emerge like elves from the wainscoting, and go lumbering toward the larder—pregnant mother bugs too, with baby translucent outrider bugs flowing along like a convoy escort. At night, in the very late silences between bombers, ack-ack fire and falling rockets, they can be heard, loud as mice, munching through Gwenhidwy's paper sacks, leaving streaks and footprints of shit the color of themselves behind. They don't seem to go in much for soft things, fruits, vegetables, and such, it's more the solid lentils and beans they're into, stuff they can gnaw at, paper and plaster barriers, hard interfaces to be pierced, for they are agents of unification, you see. Christmas bugs. They were deep in the straw of the manger at Bethlehem, they stumbled, climbed, fell glistening red among a golden lattice of straw that must have seemed to extend miles up and downward—an edible tenement-world, now and then gnawed through to disrupt some mysterious sheaf of vectors that would send neighbor bugs tumbling ass-OVer-antennas down past you as you held on with all legs in that constant tremble of golden stalks. A tranquil world: the temperature and hu-

midity staying nearly steady, the day's cycle damped to only a soft easy sway of light, gold to antique-gold to shadows, and back again. The crying of the infant reached you, perhaps, as bursts of energy from the invisible distance, nearly unsensed, often ignored. Your savior, you see. . . .

D D D D D D D

Inside the bowl, the two goldfish are making a Pisces sign, head-to-tail and very still. Penelope sits and peers into their world. There is a little sunken galleon, a china diver in a diving suit, pretty stones and shells she and her sisters have brought back from the sea.

Aunt Jessica and Uncle Roger are out in the kitchen, hugging and kissing. Elizabeth is teasing Claire in the hallway. Their mother is in the W.C. Sooty the cat sleeps in a chair, a black thundercloud on the way to something else, who happens right now to look like a cat. It's Boxing Day. The evening's very still. The last rocket bomb was an hour ago, somewhere south. Claire got a golliwog, Penelope a sweater, Elizabeth a frock that Penelope will grow into.

The pantomime Roger took them all to see this afternoon was Hansel and Gretel. Claire immediately took off under the seats where others were moving about by secret paths, a flash of braid or of white collar now and then among the tall attentive uncles in uniform, the coat-draped backs of seats. On stage Hansel, who was supposed to be a boy but was really a tall girl in tights and smock, cowered inside the cage. The funny old Witch foamed at the mouth and climbed the scenery. And pretty Gretel waited by the Oven for her chance. . . .

Then the Germans dropped a rocket just down the street from the theatre. A few of the little babies started crying. They were scared. Gretel, who was just winding up with her broom to hit the Witch right in the bum, stopped: put the broom down, in the gathering silence stepped to the footlights, and sang:

Oh, don't let it get you,

It will if they let you, but there's

Something I'll bet you can't see—

It's big and it's nasty and it's right over there,

It's waiting to get its sticky claws in your hair!

Oh, the greengrocer's wishing on a rainbow today,

And the dustman is tying his tie ...

And it all goes along to the same jolly song, With a peppermint face in the sky!

"Now sing along," she smiled, and actually got the audience, even Roger, to sing:

With a peppermint face in the sky-y,

And a withered old dream in your heart,

You'll get hit with a piece of the pie-ie,

With the pantomime ready to start!

Oh, the Tommy is sleeping in a snowbank tonight,

And the Jerries are learning to fly—

We can fly to the moon, we'll be higher than noon,

In our polythene home in the sky. . . .

Pretty polythene home in the sky, Pretty platinum pins in your hand— Oh your mother's a big fat machine gun, And your father's a dreary young man. . . . (Whispered and staccato):

Oh, the, man-a-ger's suck-ing on a corn-cob, pipe, And the bank-ers are, eat-ing their, wives, All the world's in a daze, while the orchestra plays, So turn your pockets and get your surprise—

Turn your pockets and get-your surpri-se,

There was nobody there af-ter all!

And the lamps up the stairway are dying,

It's the season just after the ball...

Oh the palm-trees whisper on the beach somewhere,

And the lifesaver's heaving a sigh,

And those voices you hear, Boy and Girl of the Year,

Are of children who are learning to die. ...

Penelope's father's chair, in the corner, next to the table with the lamp, is empty. It faces her now. She can see the crocheted shawl over the back, many knots of gray, tan, black, and brown, with amazing clarity. In the pattern, or in front of it, something is stirring: at first no more than refraction, as if there were a source of heat directly in front of the empty chair.

"No," she whispers out loud. "I don't want to. You're not him, I don't know who you are but you're not my father. Go away."

Its arms and legs are silent and rigid. She stares into it.

I only want to visit you.

"You want to possess me."

Demonic possessions in this house are not unknown. Is this really Keith, her father? taken when she was half her present age, and returned now as not the man she knew, but only the shell—with the soft meaty slug of soul that smiles and loves, that feels its mortality, either rotted away or been picked at by the needle mouths of death-by-government—a process by which living souls unwillingly become the demons known to the main sequence of Western magic as the Qlip-poth, Shells of the Dead. ... It is also what the present dispensation often does to decent men and women entirely on this side of the grave. In neither process is there any dignity, or any mercy. Mothers and fathers are conditioned into deliberately dying in certain preferred ways: giving themselves cancer and heart attacks, getting into motor accidents, going off to fight in the War—leaving their children alone in the forest. They'll always tell you fathers are "taken," but fathers only leave—that's what it really is. The fathers are all covering for each other, that's all. Perhaps it's even better to have this presence, rubbing the room dry as glass, slipping in and out of an old chair, than a father who still hasn't died yet, a man you love and have to watch it happening to. ...

In the kitchen, the water in the kettle shakes, creaks toward boiling, and outside the wind blows. Somewhere, in another street, a roofslate slides and falls. Roger has taken Jessica's cold hands in to warm against his breast, feeling them, icy, through his sweater and shirt, folded in against him. Yet she stands apart, trembling. He wants to warm all of her, not just comic extremities, wants beyond reasonable hope. His heart shakes like the boiling kettle.

It has begun to reveal itself: how easily she might go. For the first time he understands why this is the same as mortality, and why he will cry when she leaves. He is learning to recognize the times when nothing really holds her but his skinny, 20-pushup arms. ... If she leaves, then it ceases to matter how the rockets fall. But the coincidence of maps, girls, and rocketfalls has entered him silently, silent as ice, and Quisling molecules have shifted in latticelike ways to freeze him. If he could be with her more ... if it happened when they were together— in another time that might have sounded romantic, but in a culture of death, certain situations are just more hep to the jive than others—but they're apart so much. . . .

If the rockets don't get her there's still her lieutenant. Damned Beaver/Jeremy is the War, he is every assertion the fucking War has

ever made—that we are meant for work and government, for austerity: and these shall take priority over love, dreams, the spirit, the senses and the other second-class trivia that are found among the idle and mindless hours of the day. . . . Damn them, they are wrong. They are insane. Jeremy will take her like the Angel itself, in his joyless weasel-worded come-along, and Roger will be forgotten, an amusing maniac, but with no place in the rationalized power-ritual that will be the coming peace. She will take her husband's orders, she will become a domestic bureaucrat, a junior partner, and remember Roger, if at all, as a mistake thank God she didn't make. . . . Oh, he feels a raving fit coming on—how the bloody hell can he survive without her? She is the British warm that protects his stooping shoulders, and the wintering sparrow he holds inside his hands. She is his deepest innocence in spaces of bough and hay before wishes were given a separate name to warn that they might not come true, and his lithe Parisian daughter of joy, beneath the eternal mirror, forswearing perfumes, capeskin to the armpits, all that is too easy, for his impoverishment and more worthy love.

You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you've found life. I'm no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are "yours" and which are "mine." It's past sorting out. We're both being someone new now, someone incredible. . . .

His act of faith. In the street the children are singing:

Hark, the herald angels sing:

Mrs. Simpson's pinched our King ...

Up on the mantelpiece Sooty's son Kim, an alarmingly fat crosseyed Siamese, lurks waiting to do the only thing he enjoys these days. Beyond eating, sleeping or fucking his chief obsession is to jump, or topple, on his mother, and lie there laughing while she runs screaming around the room. Jessica's sister Nancy comes out of the loo to break up what's becoming a full-scale row between Elizabeth and Claire. Jessica steps away from Roger to blow her nose. The sound is as familiar to him as a bird's song, ip-ip-ip-ip NGUNNGG as the handkerchief comes away . . . "Oh sooper dooper," she says, "think I'm catching a cold."

You're catching the War. It's infecting you and I don't know how to keep it away. Oh, Jess. Jessica. Don't leave me. ...