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3In the ZoneToto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas any more. . . . —dorothy, arriving in Oz D D D D D D D
They found the countryside, this year, at peace by a scant few days. Already vines are beginning to grow back over dragon's teeth, fallen Stukas, burned tanks. The sun warms the hillsides, the rivers fall bright as wine. The saints have refrained. Nights have been mild. The frost didn't come. It is the spring of peace. The vintage, God granting at least a hundred days of sun, will be fine. Nordhausen puts less credence in the ice-saints than do wine regions farther south, but even here the season looks promising. Rain blows scattering out over the town as Slothrop comes in in the early morning, bare feet, blistering and reblistering, cooled here in the wet grass. There's sunlight up on the mountains. His shoes got lifted by some DP with fingers lighter than dreams, on one of the many trains since the Swiss border, someplace rolling across Bavaria fast asleep. Whoever it was left a red tulip between Slothrop's toes. He has taken it for a sign. A reminder of Katje. Signs will find him here in the Zone, and ancestors will reassert themselves. It's like going to that Darkest Africa to study the natives there, and finding their quaint superstitions taking you over. In fact, funny thing, Slothrop just the other night ran into an African, the first one he ever met in his life. Their discussion on top of the freight car in the moonlight lasted only a minute or two. Small talk for the sudden background departure of Major Duane Marvy over the side bounce-clatter down the cobbled fill into the valley—well, certainly nothing was said then of any Herero beliefs about ancestors. Yet he feels his own, stronger now as borders fall away and the Zone envelops him, his own WASPs in buckled black, who heard God clamoring to them in every turn of a leaf or cow loose among apple orchards in autumn. . . . Signs of Katje, and doubles too. One night he sat in a children's play house on an abandoned estate, feeding a fire from the hair of a blonde doll with lapis lazuli eyes. He kept those eyes. A few days later he traded them for a ride and half a boiled potato. Dogs barked far away, summerwind blew in the birches. He was on one of the main ar-terials of the spring's last dissolution and retreat. Somewhere nearby, one of Major-General Kammler's rocket units had together found corporate death, leaving in their crippled military rage pieces, modules, airframe sections, batteries rotting, paper secrets rained back into slurry. Slothrop follows. Any clue's good enough to hop a train for. . . . The doll's hair was human. The smell of it burning is horrible. Slothrop hears movement from the other side of the fire. A ratcheting noise—he grabs his blanket, ready to vault away out the empty window frame, expecting a grenade. Instead one of these little brightly painted German toys, an orangutan on wheels comes ki-ki-ki-ing into the firelight, spastic, head lolling, face in an idiot's grin, steel knuckles scraping the floor. It rolls nearly into the fire before the clockwork runs down, the wagging head coming to dead center to stare at Slothrop. He feeds the fire another tuft of golden hair. "Evening." Laughter, somewhere. A child. But old laughter. "Come on out, I'm harmless." The ape is followed by a tiny black crow with a red beak, also on wheels, hopping, cawing, flapping metal wings. "Why are you burning my doll's hair?" "Well, it's not her own hair, you know." "Father said it belonged to a Russian Jewess." "Why don't you come in to the fire?" "Hurts my eyes." Winding again. Nothing moves. But a music box begins to play. The tune is minor and precise. "Dance with me." "I can't see you." "Here." Out of the fire's pale, a tiny frost-flower. He reaches and just manages to find her hand, to grasp her little waist. They begin their stately dance. He can't even tell if he's leading. He never saw her face. She felt like voile and organdy. "Nice dress." "I wore it for my first communion." The fire died presently, leaving starlight and a faint glow over some town to the east, through windows whose panes were all gone. The music box still played, beyond the running time, it seemed, of an ordinary spring. Their feet moved over clouded, crumbled old glass, torn silks, bones of dead rabbits and kittens. The geometrical path took them among ballooning, ripped arrases, smelling of dust and an older bestiary than the one by the fire . . . unicorns, chimaeras . . . and what had he seen festooning the child-sized entranceway? Garlic bulbs? Wait—weren't they to keep away vampires? A faint garlic smell reached him exactly then, an inbreaking of Balkan blood on the air of his north, as he turned back to her to ask if she really was Katje, the lovely little Queen of Transylvania. But the music had run down. She had vaporized from his arms. Well here he is skidded out onto the Zone like a planchette on a Ouija board, and what shows up inside the empty circle in his brain might string together into a message, might not, he'll just have to see. But he can feel a sensitive's fingers, resting lightly but sure on his days, and he thinks of them as Katje's. He's still Ian Scuffling, war (peace?) correspondent, though back in British uniform these days, with plenty of time on these trains to hash over in his mind the information Mario Schweitar bootlegged for him back there in Zurich. There is a fat file on Imipolex G, and it seems to point to Nordhausen. The engineer on the customer end of the Imipolex contract was one Franz Polder. He came to Nordhausen in early '44, as the rocket was going into mass production. He was billeted in the Mittelwerke, an underground factory complex run largely by the SS. No word on where he went when the plant was evacuated in February and March. But Ian Scuffling, ace reporter, will be sure to find a clue down in the Mittelwerke. Slothrop sat in the swaying car with thirty other cold and tattered souls, eyes all pupil, lips cratered with sores. They were singing, some of them. A lot of them kids. It is a Displaced Person's song, and Slothrop will hear it often around the Zone, in the encampments, out on the road, in a dozen variations: If you see a train this evening, Far away against the sky, Lie down in your wooden blanket, Sleep, and let the train go by. Trains have called us, every midnight, From a thousand miles away, Trains that pass through empty cities, Trains that have no place to stay. No one drives the locomotive, No one tends the staring light, Trains have never needed riders, Trains belong to bitter night. Railway stations stand deserted, Rights-of-way lie clear and cold: What we left them, trains inherit, Trains go on, and we grow old. Let them cry like cheated lovers, Let their cries find only wind. Trains are meant for night and ruin. We are meant for song, and sin. Pipes are passing around. Smoke hangs from the damp wood slats, is whipped out cracks into the night slipstream. Children wheeze in their sleep, the rachitic babies cry . . . now and then the mothers exchange a word. Slothrop huddles inside his paper misfortune. The Swiss firm's dossier on L. (for Laszlo) Jamf listed all his assets at the time he came to work in Zurich. Apparently he had sat—as token scientist—on the board of directors of the Grössli Chemical Corporation as late as 1924. Among stock options and pieces of this firm and that back in Germany—pieces to be gathered in over the next year or two by the octopus IG—was the record of a transaction between Jamf and Mr. Lyle Bland, of Boston, Massachusetts. On the beam, Jackson. Lyle Bland is a name he knows, all right. And a name that also shows up often in the private records Jamf kept of his own business deals. Seems that Bland, during the early twenties, was heavily involved with the Hugo Stinnes operation in Germany. Stinnes, while he lasted, was the Wunderkind of European finance. Based out of the Ruhr, where his family had been coal barons for generations, young Stinnes built up a good-sized empire of steel, gas, electric and water power, streetcars and barge lines before he was 30. During the World War he worked closely with Walter Rathenau, who was ramrodding the whole economy then. After the war Stinnes managed to put the horizontal electrical trust of Siemens-Schuchert together with the coal and iron supplies of the Rheinelbe Union into a super-cartel that was both horizontal and vertical, and to buy into just about everything else—shipyards, steamship lines, hotels, restaurants, forests, pulp mills, newspapers—meantime also speculating in currency, buying foreign money with marks borrowed from the Reichs-bank, driving the mark down and then paying off the loans at a fraction of the original figure. More than any one financier he was blamed for the Inflation. Those were the days when you carried marks around in wheelbarrows to your daily shopping and used them for toilet paper, assuming you had anything to shit. Stinnes's foreign connections went all over the world—Brazil, the East Indies, the United States—businessmen like Lyle Bland found his growth rate irresistible. The theory going around at the time was that Stinnes was conspiring with Krupp, Thyssen, and others to ruin the mark and so get Germany out of paying her war debts. Eland's connection was vague. Jamf's records mention that he had negotiated contracts for supplying tons of private currency known as Notgeld to Stinnes and colleagues, as well as "Mefo bills" to the Weimar Republic—another of Hjalmar Schacht's many bookkeeping dodges to keep official records clear of any hint of weapons procurement banned under the terms of Versailles. Some of these banknote contracts were let to a certain Massachusetts paper mill, on whose board Lyle Bland happened to sit. The name of this contractor was the Slothrop Paper Company. He reads his name without that much surprise. It belongs here, as do the most minor details during déjà vu. Instead of any sudden incidence of light (even in the shape of a human being: golden and monitory light), as he stares at these eight ink marks, there passes a disagreeable stomach episode, a dread tangible as vomit beginning to assert itself—the same vertigo that overtook him one day long ago in the Himmler-Spielsaal. A gasbag surrounds his head, rubbery, vast, pushing in from all sides, that feeling we know, yes, but. . . He is also getting a hardon, for no immediate reason. And there's that smell again, a smell from before his conscious memory begins, a soft and chemical smell, threatening, haunting, not a smell to be found out in the world—it is the breath of the Forbidden Wing . . . essence of all the still figures waiting for him inside, daring him to enter and find a secret he cannot survive. Once something was done to him, in a room, while he lay helpless. . . . His erection hums from a certain distance, like an instrument installed, wired by Them into his body as a colonial outpost here in our raw and clamorous world, another office representing Their white Metropolis far away. . . . A sad story, all right. Slothrop, very nervous by now, reads on. Lyle Bland, eh? Well, sure, that fits. He can recall dimly once or twice having seen Uncle Lyle. The man used to come to visit his father, affable, fair-haired, a hustler in the regional Jim Fisk style. Bland was always picking young Tyrone up and swinging him around by his feet. That was O.K.—Slothrop had no special commitment at the time to right side up. From what it sez here, Bland either saw the Stinnes crash coming before most of its other victims, or was just naturally nervous. Early in '23 he began to sell off his interests in the Stinnes operations. One of these sales was made through Laszlo Jamf to the Grössli Chemical Corporation (later Psychochemie AG). One of the assets transferred in this sale was "all interest in Schwarzknabe enterprise. Seller agrees to continue surveillance duties until such time as Schwindel operative can be relieved by purchaser equivalent, acceptability to be determined by seller." Jamf's codebook happens to be in the dossier. Part of the man's personality structure, after all. "Schwindel" was his code name for Hugo Stinnes. Clever sense of humor, the old fart. Across from "Schwarzknabe," now, are the initials "T.S." Well, holy cow, Slothrop reckons, that must be me, huh. Barring the outside possibility of Tough Shit. Listed as a "Schwarzknabe" liability is the unpaid remainder of a bill to Harvard University, about $5000 worth including the interest, "as per agreement (oral) with Schwarzvater." "Schwarzvater" is the code word for "B.S." Which, barring the outside possibility of Bull Shit, seems to be Slothrop's own father, Broderick. Blackfather Slothrop. Nice way to find out your father made a deal 20 years ago with somebody to spring for your education. Come to think of it, Slothrop never could quite put the announcements, all through the Depression, of imminent family ruin, together with the comfort he enjoyed at Harvard. Well, now, what was the deal between his father and Bland? I've been sold, Jesus Christ I've been sold to IG Farben like a side of beef. Surveillance? Stinnes, like every industrial emperor, had his own company spy system. So did the IG. Does this mean Slothrop has been under their observation—m-maybe since he was born? Yaahhh ... The fear balloons again inside his brain. It will not be kept down with a simple Fuck You. ... A smell, a forbidden room, at the bottom edge of his memory. He can't see it, can't make it out. Doesn't want to. It is allied with the Worst Thing. He knows what the smell has to be: though according to these papers it would have been too early for it, though he has never come across any of the stuff among the daytime coordinates of his life, still, down here, back here in the warm dark, among early shapes where the clocks and calendars don't mean too much, he knows that what's haunting him now will prove to be the smell of Imipolex G. Then there's this recent dream he is afraid of having again. He was in his old room, back home. A summer afternoon of lilacs and bees, and warm air through an open window. Slothrop had found a very old dictionary of technical German. It fell open to a certain page prickling with black-face type. Reading down the page, he would come to JAMF. The definition would read: I. He woke begging It no—but even after waking, he was sure, he would remain sure, that It could visit him again, any time It wanted. Perhaps you know that dream too. Perhaps It has warned you never to speak Its name. If so, you know about how Slothrop'll be feeling now. What he does is lurch to his feet, over to the door of the freight car, which is going up a grade. He drags open the door, slips out—action, action—and mounts a ladder to the roof. A foot from his face, this double row of shiny bright teeth hangs in the air. Just what he needs. It is Major Marvy of U.S. Army Ordnance, leader of Marvy's Mothers, the meanest-ass technical intelligence team in this whole fuckin' Zone, mister. Slothrop can call him Duane, if he wants. "Boogie, boogie, boogie! Catch all 'em jungle bunnies back 'ere in 'at next car! Sheee-oo!" "Wait a minute," sez Slothrop, "I think I've been asleep or something." His feet are cold. This Marvy is really fat. Pants bloused into shiny combat boots, roll of fat hanging over a web belt where he keeps his sunglasses and .45, hornrims, hair slicked back, eyes like safety valves that pop out at you whenever—as now—the pressure in his head gets too high. Marvy hitched a lift on a P-47 from Paris far as Kassel, got coupled onto this train here west of Heiligenstadt. He's headed for the Mittel-werke, like Ian Scuffling. Needs to coordinate with some Project Hermes people from General Electric. Sure makes him nervous, those niggers next door. "Hey, ought to be a good story for you people. Warn the folks back home." "Are they GIs?" "Shit no. Kraut. South-West African. Something. You mean you don't know about that? Come on. Aw. Limey intelligence sure ain't too intelligent, hahah, no offense understand. I thought the whole world knew." Follows a lurid tale—which sounds like something SHAEF made up, Goebbels's less than giddy imagination reaching no further than Alpine Redoubts and such—of Hitler's scheme for setting up a Nazi empire in black Africa, which fell through after Old Blood 'n' Guts handed Rommel's ass to him in the desert. " 'Here's yer ass, General.' 'Ach du lieber! Mein Arsch! YAH—hahaha . . .' " clutching comically at the seat of his own large trousers. Well, the black cadres had no more future in Africa, stayed on in Germany as governments-in-exile without even official recognition, drifted somehow into the ordnance branch of the German Army, and pretty soon learned how to be rocket technicians. Now they were just running loose. Wild. Haven't been interned as P/Ws, far as Many knows they haven't even been disarmed. "Not enough we have to worry about Russkys, frogs, limeys—hey, beg pardon, buddy. Now we got not just niggers you see, but kraut niggers. Well, Jesus. V-E Day just about everyplace you had a rocket, you had you a nigger. Never any all-boogie batteries, understand. Even the krauts couldn't be that daffy! One battery, that's 81 men, plus all your support, your launch-control, power, propellants, your surveying—champ, that'd sure be one heap o' niggers all in one place. But are they still all scattered out, like they were? You find out, you got you a scoop, friend. Cause if they're gettin' together now, oh dat's bi-i-i-g trouble! There's at least two dozen in that car—right down there, look. A-and they're headin' for Nordhausen, pal!" a fat finger-poke in the chest with each word, "hah? Whatcha think they have in mind? You know what I think? They have a plan. Yeah. I think it's rockets. Don't ask me how, it's just something I feel here, in m'heart. A-and you know, that's awful dangerous. You can't trust them— With rockets? They're a childlike race. Brains are smaller." "But our patience," suggests a calm voice now out of the darkness, "our patience is enormous, though perhaps not unlimited." So saying, a tall African with a full imperial beard steps up grabs the fat American, who has time to utter one short yell before being flung bodily over the side. Slothrop and the African watch the Major bounce down the embankment behind them, arms and legs flying, out of sight. Firs crowd the hills. A crescent moon has risen over one ragged crest. The man introduces himself in English, as Oberst Enzian, of the Schwarzkommando. He apologizes for his show of temper, notes Slothrop's armband, declines an interview before Slothrop can get in a word. "There's no story. We're DPs, like everybody else." "The Major seemed worried that you're headed for Nordhausen." "Many is going to be an annoyance, I can tell. Still, he doesn't pose as much of a problem as—" He peers at Slothrop. "Hmm. Are you really a war correspondent?" "No." "A free agent, I'd guess." "Don't know about that'free,'Oberst." "But you are free. We all are. You'll see. Before long." He steps away down the spine of the freighttop, waving a beckoning German good-by. "Before long. ..." Slothrop sits on the rooftop, rubbing his bare feet. A friend? A good omen? Black rocket troops? What bizarre shit? Well good mornin' gang, let's start it Off with a bang, so long to Double-u Double-u Two-o-o-o! Now the fightin's over and we're all in clover And I'm here ta bring sunshine to you— Hey there Herman the German, stop yer fussin' and squirmin', Don'tcha know you're goin' home ta stay— No, there's never a frown, here in Rocket, Sock-it Town, Where ev'ry day's a beautiful day— (Quit kvetchin', Gretchen!) Go on and have a beautiful daa-aay! Nordhausen in the morning: the lea is a green salad, crisp with raindrops. Everything is fresh, washed. The Harz hump up all around, dark slopes bearded to the tops with spruce, fir and larch. High-gabled houses, sheets of water reflecting the sky, muddy streets, American and Russian GIs pouring in and out the doors of the taverns and makeshift PXs, everybody packing a sidearm. Meadows and logged-off wedges up on the mountainsides flow with mottled light as rainclouds blow away over Thuringia. Castles perch high over the town, sailing in and out of torn clouds. Old horses with smudged knobby knees, short-legged and big-chested, pull wagonloads of barrels, necks straining at twin collars chained together, heavy horseshoes sending mudflowers at each wet clop, down from the vineyards to the taverns. Slothrop wanders into a roofless part of town. Old people in black are bat-flittering among the walls. Shops and dwellings here are all long-looted by the slave laborers liberated from the Dora camp. Lotta those fags still around, with baskets and 175 badges out on display, staring moistly from doorways. From the glassless bay window of a dress shop, in the dimness behind a plaster dummy lying bald and sprawled, arms raised to sky, hands curved for bouquets or cocktail glasses they'll never hold again, Slothrop hears a girl singing. Accompanying herself on a balalaika. One of those sad little Parisian-sounding tunes in 3/4: Love never goes away, Never completely dies, Always some souvenir Takes us by sad surprise. You went away from me, One rose was left behind— Pressed in my Book of Hours, That is the rose I find. . . . Though it's another year, Though it's another me, Under the rose is a drying tear, Under my linden tree. . . . Love never goes away, Not if it's really true, It can return, by night, by day, Tender and green and new As the leaves from a linden tree, love, that I left with you. Her name turns out to be Geli Tripping, and the balalaika belongs to a Soviet intelligence officer named Tchitcherine. In a way, Geli does too—part-time, anyhow. Seems this Tchitcherine maintains a harem, a girl in every rocket-town in the Zone. Yup, another rocket maniac. Slothrop feels like a tourist. Geli talks about her young man. They sit in her roofless room drinking a pale wine known hereabouts as Nordhäuser Schattensaft. Overhead, black birds with yellow beaks lace the sky, looping in the sunlight from their nests up in the mountain castles and down in the city ruins. Far away, perhaps in the marketplace, a truck convoy is idling all its engines, the smell of exhaust washing over the maze of walls, where moss creeps, water oozes, roaches seek purchase, walls that baffle the motor sound so that it seems to come in from all directions. She's thin, a bit awkward, very young. Nowhere in her eyes is there any sign of corrosion—she might have spent all her War roofed and secure, tranquil, playing with small forest animals in a rear area someplace. Her song, she admits, sighing, is mostly wishful thinking. "When he's away, he's away. When you came in I almost thought you were Tchitcherine." "Nope. Just a hard-working newshound, is all. No rockets, no harems." Yüklə 3,05 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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