Penguin books

"For the devil's kiss, of course," Geli snuggling oh-you-old-silly up to his armpit there, and Slothrop feeling a little icky and square for not knowing. But then he knows next to nothing about witches, even though there was, in his ancestry, one genuine Salem Witch, one of the last to join the sus. per coll. crowd dangling, several of them back through the centuries' couplings, off of the Slothrop family tree. Her name was Amy Sprue, a family renegade turned Antinomian at age 23 and running mad over the Berkshire countryside, ahead of Crazy Sue Dunham by 200 years, stealing babies, riding cows in the twilight, sacrificing chickens up on Snodd's Mountain. Lot of ill will about those chickens, as you can imagine. The cows and babies always, somehow, came back all right. Amy Sprue was not, like young skipping Dorothy's antagonist, a mean witch.

She headed for Rhode Island, seeking some of that asylum, And she thought she'd stop by Salem on her way, But they didn't like her style, and they didn't like her smile, So she never saw that Narragansett Bay. ...

They busted her for witchery and she got death. Another of Slothrop's crazy kinfolks. When she was mentioned aloud at all it was with a shrug, too far away really to be a Family Disgrace—more of a curiosity. Slothrop grew up not quite knowing what to think about her. Witches were certainly not getting a fair shake in the thirties. They were depicted as hags who called you dearie, not exactly a

wholesome lot. The movies had not prepared him for this Teutonic version here. Your kraut witch, for example, has six toes on each foot and no hair at all on her cunt. That is how the witches look, anyhow, in the stairway murals inside the one-time Nazi transmitter tower up on the Brocken here, and government murals are hardly places to go looking for irresponsible fantasy, right? But Geli thinks the hairless cunt derives from the women von Bayros drew. "Aw, you just don't wanna shave yours" crows Slothrop. "Ha! Ha! Some witch!"

"I'll show you something," she sez, which is why they are now awake at this ungodly hour, side by side, holding hands, very still as the sun begins to clear the horizon. "Now watch," Geli whispers: "out there."

As the sunlight strikes their backs, coming in nearly flat on, it begins developing on the pearl cloudbank: two gigantic shadows, thrown miles overland, past Clausthal-Zelterfeld, past Seesen and Goslar, across where the river Leine would be, and reaching toward Weser. . . . "By golly," Slothrop a little bit nervous, "it's the Specter." You got it up around Greylock in the Berkshires too. Around these parts it is known as the Brockengespenst.

God-shadows. Slothrop raises an arm. His fingers are cities, his biceps is a province—of course he raises an arm. Isn't it expected of him? The arm-shadow trails rainbows behind as it moves reaching eastward for a grab at Göttingen. Not ordinary shadows, either— three-dimensional ones, cast out on the German dawn, yes and Titans had to live in these mountains, or under them. . . . Impossibly out of scale. Never to be carried by a river. Never to look to a horizon and think that it might go on forever. No trees to climb, no long journeys to take . . . only their deep images are left, haloed shells lying prone above the fogs men move in. ...

Geli kicks a leg out straight as a dancer, and tilts her head to the side. Slothrop raises his middle finger to the west, the headlong finger darkening three miles of cloud per second. Geli grabs for Slothrop's cock. Slothrop leans to bite Geli's tit. They are enormous, dancing the floor of the whole visible sky. He reaches underneath her dress. She twines a leg around one of his. The spectra wash red to indigo, tidal, immense, at all their edges. Under the clouds out there it's as still, and lost, as Atlantis.

But the Brockengespenstphänomen is confined to dawn's slender interface, and soon the shadows have come shrinking back to their owners.

"Say, did that Tchitcherine ever—"

"Tchitcherine's too busy for this."

"Oh, and I'm some kind of a drone or something."

"You're different."

"We-e-e-11 ... he ought to see it."

She looks at him curiously, but doesn't ask why—her teeth halt on her lower lip, and the ivarum (varoom, a Plasticman sound) hovers trapped in her mouth. Just as well. Slothrop doesn't know why. He's no help to anybody who's fixing to interrogate. Last night he and Geli blundered onto a Schwarzkommando picket outside one of the old mine entrances. The Hereros threw questions at him for an hour. Oh, just wandering about you know, looking for a bit of the odd, what we call "human interest," fascinating of course, we're always interested in what you chaps are up to. ... Geli snickering in the darkness. They must have known her. They didn't ask her anything.

When he brought it up later, she wasn't sure just what this is between Tchitcherine and the Africans, but whatever it is it's being carried on with high passion.

"It's hate, all right," she said. "Stupid, stupid. The war's over. It isn't politics or fuck-your-buddy, it's old-time, pure, personal hate."

"Enzian?"

"I think so."

They found the Brocken occupied both by American and by Russian troops. The mountain lay on what was to be the border of the Soviet zone of occupation. The brick and stucco ruins of the radio transmitter and a tourist hotel loomed up just outside the firelight. Only a couple of platoons here. Nobody higher than noncoms. The officers were all down in Bad Harzburg, Halberstadt, someplace comfortable, getting drunk or laid. There is a certain air of resentment up on the Brocken all right, but the boys like Geli and tolerate Slothrop, and luckiest of all, nobody seems to be connected with that Ordnance.

It's only a moment's safety, though. Major Marvy is gnashing about the Harz, sending thousands of canaries into cardiac episodes, dropping in yellow droves belly-up out of the trees as he marauds on by hollering Git that limey 'sucker I don't care how many men it takes I want a fucking division you hear me boy? Only a matter of time before he picks up the trail again. He's out of his mind. Slothrop's a little daffy, but not like this—this is really unhealthy, this Marvy persecution. Is it possible . . . yup, the thought has certainly occurred to him—that Marvy's in tight with those Rolls Roycers who were after him in Zurich? There may be no limit to their connections. Marvy is buddies with GE, that's Morgan money, there's Morgan money in

Harvard, and surely an interlock someplace with Lyle Bland . . . who are they, hey? why do they want Slothrop? He knows now for sure that Zwitter the mad Nazi scientist is one of them. And that kindly old Professor Glimpf was only waiting down in the Mittelwerke to pick up Slothrop if he showed. Jesus. If Slothrop hadn't snuck out after dark back down into Nordhausen to Geli's place, they'd have him locked up by now for sure, maybe beaten up, maybe dead.

Before they head back down the mountain, they manage to chisel six cigarettes and some K-rations off of the sentries. Geli knows a friend of a friend who stays out on a farm in the Goldene Aue, a ballooning enthusiast named Schnorp, who is heading toward Berlin.

"But I don't want to go to Berlin."

"You want to go where Marvy isn't, Liebchen."

Schnorp is beaming, eager enough for company, just back from a local PX with an armload of flat white boxes: merchandise he plans to move in Berlin. "No trouble," he tells Slothrop, "don't worry. I've done this trip hundreds of times. Nobody bothers a balloon."

He takes Slothrop out in back of the house, and here in the middle of a sloping green field is a wicker gondola beside a great heap of bright yellow and scarlet silk.

"Real unobtrusive getaway," Slothrop mutters. A gang of kids have appeared running out of an apple orchard to help them carry tin jerricans of grain alcohol out to the gondola. All shadows are being thrown uphill by the afternoon sun. Wind blows from the west. Slothrop gives Schnorp a light from his Zippo to get the burner going while kids straighten out the folds in the gasbag. Schnorp turns up the flame till it's shooting sideways and with a steady roar into the opening of the great silk bag. Children visible through the gap break up into wiggly heat waves. Slowly the balloon begins to expand. "Remember me," Geli calls above the rumbling of the burner. "Till I see you again ..." Slothrop climbs in the gondola with Schnorp. The balloon rises a little off the ground and is caught by the wind. They start to move. Geli and the kids have taken hold of the gondola all around its gunwales, the bag still not all the way up but gathering speed, dragging them all as fast as their feet can move, giggling and cheering, uphill. Slothrop keeps as much out of the way as he can, letting Schnorp see that the flame's pointed into the bag and that lines to the basket are clear. At last the bag swings vertical, across the sun, the inside of it going a ri-

otous wreathing of yellow and scarlet heat. One by one the ground

crew fall away, waving good-by. The last to go is Geli in her white dress, hair brushed back over her ears into pigtails, her soft chin and

mouth and big serious eyes looking into Slothrop's for as long as she can before she has to let go. She kneels in the grass, blows a kiss. Slothrop feels his heart, out of control, inflate with love and rise quick as a balloon. It is taking him longer, the longer he's in the Zone, to remember to say env quit being a sap. What is this place doing to his brain?

They soar up over a stand of firs. Geli and the children go dwindling to shadow-strokes on the green lawn. The hills fall away, flatten out. Soon, looking back, Slothrop can see Nordhausen: Cathedral, Rathaus, Church of St. Blasius . . . the roofless quarter where he found Geli. . . .

Schnorp nudges and points. After a while Slothrop makes out a convoy of four olive-drab vehicles dusting along toward the farm in a hurry. Marvy's Mothers, by the looks of things. And Slothrop hanging from this gaudy beach ball. Well, all right—

"I'm bad luck," Slothrop hollers over a little later. They've found a steady course now northeastward, and are huddling close to the alcohol flame, collars turned up, with a gradient of must be 50° between the wind at their backs and the warmth in front. "I should've mentioned that. You don't even know me, and here we're flying into that Russian zone."

Schnorp, his hair blown like holidays of hay, does a wistful German thing with his upper lip: "There are no zones," he sez, which is also a line of Geli's. "No zones but the Zone."

Before too long Slothrop has begun checking out these boxes here that Schnorp brought along. There are a dozen of them, and each contains a deep, golden custard pie, which will fetch a fantastic price in Berlin. "Wow," cries Slothrop, "holy shit. Surely I hallucinate," and other such eager junior sidekick talk.

"You ought to have a PX card." A sales pitch.

"Right now I can't afford a ration stamp for an ant's jockstrap," replies Slothrop, forthrightly.

"Well, I'll split this one pie here with you," Schnorp reckons after a time, "because I'm getting kind of hungry."

"Oboy, oboy."

Well, Slothrop is just chowing on that pie! enjoying himself, licking custard off of his hands, when he happens to notice off in the sky, back toward Nordhausen, this funny dark object, the size of a dot. "Uh—"

Schnorp looks around, "Kot!" comes up with a brass telescope and braces it blazing on the gunwale. "Kot, Kot—no markings."

"I wonder.

Out of air so blue you can take it between your fingers, rub, and bring them back blue, they watch the dot slowly grow into a rusty old reconnaissance plane. Presently they can hear its engine, snarling and sputtering. Then, as they watch, it banks and starts a pass.

Along the wind between them, faintly, comes the singing of Furies:

There was a young man named McGuire, Who was fond of the pitch amplifier. But a number of shorts Left him covered with warts, And set half the bedroom on fire.

Ja, ja, ja, ja! In Prussia they never eat pussy—

The plane buzzes by a yard or two away, showing its underbelly. It is a monster, about to give birth. Out of a little access opening peers a red face in leather helmet and goggles. "You limey 'sucker," going past, "we fixin' to hand your ass to you."

Without planning to, Slothrop has picked up a pie. "Fuck you." He flings it, perfect shot, the plane peeling slowly past and blop gets Marvy right in the face. Yeah. Gloved hands paw at the mess. The Major's pink tongue appears. Custard drips into the wind, yellow droplets fall in long arcs toward earth. The hatch closes as the recon plane slides away, slow-rolls, circles and heads back. Schnorp and Slothrop heft pies and wait.

"There's no cowling around that engine," Schnorp has noticed, "so we'll aim for that." Now they can see the dorsal side of the plane, its cockpit jammed to capacity with beer-sodden Americans, singing:

There once was a fellow named Ritter,

Who slept with a guidance transmitter.

It shriveled his cock,

Which fell off in his sock,

And made him exceedingly bitter.

A hundred yards and closing fast. Schnorp grabs Slothrop's arm and points off to starboard. Providence has contrived to put in their way a big white slope of cloud, and the wind is bringing them swiftly into it; the seething critter puts out white tentacles, beckoning hurry . . . hurry . . . and they are inside then, inside its wet and icy reprieve. . . .

"Now they'll wait."

"No," Schnorp cupping an ear, "they've cut the motor. They're in here with us." The swaddled silence goes on for a minute or two, but sure enough:

There once was a fellow named Schroeder, Who buggered the vane servomotor. He soon grew a prong On the end of his schlong,

And hired himself a promoter.

Schnorp is fiddling with the flame, a rose-gray nimbus, trying for less visibility, but not too much loss of altitude. They float in their own wan sphere of light, without coordinates. Outcrops of granite smash blindly upward like fists into the cloud, trying to find the balloon. The plane is somewhere, with its own course and speed. There is no action the balloon can take. Binary decisions have lost meaning in here. The cloud presses in, suffocating. It condenses in fat drops on top of the pies. Suddenly, raucous and hungover:

There was a young man from Decatur,

Who slept with a LOX generator.

His balls and his prick

Froze solid real quick,

And his asshole a little bit later.

Curtains of vapor drift back to reveal the Americans, volplaning along well inside ten meters and only a little faster than the balloon.

"Now!" Schnorp yells, heaving a pie at the exposed engine. Slothrop's misses and splatters all over the windscreen in front of the pilot. By which time Schnorp has commenced flinging ballast bags at the engine, leaving one stuck between two of the cylinders. The Americans, taken by surprise, reach in confusion for sidearms, grenades, machine guns, whatever it is your Ordnance types carry around in the way of light armament. But they have glided on past, and now the fog closes in again. There are a few shots.

"Shit, man, if they hit that bag—"

"Shh. I think we got the wire from the booster magneto." Off in the middle of the cloud can be heard the nagging whicker of an engine refusing to start. Linkage squeaks desperately.

"Oh, fuck!" A muffled scream, far away. The intermittent whining grows fainter until there is silence. Schnorp is lying on his back, slurp-

ing pie, laughing bitterly. Half of his inventory's been thrown away, and Slothrop feels a little guilty.

"No, no. Stop worrying. This is like the very earliest days of the mercantile system. We're back to that again. A second chance. Passages are long and hazardous. Loss in transit is a part of life. You have had a glimpse of the Ur-Markt."

When the clouds fall away a few minutes later, they find themselves floating quietly under the sun, shrouds dripping, gasbag still shiny with the moist cloud. No sign at all of Marvy's plane. Schnorp adjusts the flame. They begin to rise.

Toward sundown, Schnorp gets thoughtful. "Look. You can see the edge of it. At this latitude the earth's shadow races across Germany at 650 miles an hour, the speed of a jet aircraft." The cloud-sheet has broken up into little fog-banklets the color of boiled shrimp. The balloon goes drifting, over countryside whose green patchwork the twilight is now urging toward black: the thread of a little river flaming in the late sun, the intricate-angled pattern of another roofless town.

The sunset is red and yellow, like the balloon. On the horizon the mild sphere goes warping down, a peach on a china plate. "The farther south you go," Schnorp continues, "the faster the shadow sweeps, till you reach the equator: a thousand miles an hour. Fantastic. It breaks through the speed of sound somewhere over southern France— around the latitude of Carcassonne."

The wind is bundling them on, north by east. "Southern France," Slothrop remembers then. "Yeah. That's where / broke through the speed of sound. ..."

D D D D D D D

The Zone is in full summer: souls are found quiescent behind the pieces of wall, fast asleep down curled in shell-craters, out screwing under the culverts with gray shirttails hoisted, adrift dreaming in the middles of fields. Dreaming of food, oblivion, alternate histories. . . .

The silences here are retreats of sound, like the retreat of the surf before a tidal wave: sound draining away, down slopes of acoustic passage, to gather, someplace else, to a great surge of noise. Cows—big lummoxes splotched black and white, harnessed now for the plowing because German horses in the Zone are all but extinct—will drudge with straight faces right on into minefields, sown back in the winter.

The godawful blasts go drumming over the farmland, horns, hide and hamburger come showering down all over the place, and the dented bells lie quiet in the clover. Horses might have known to keep clear— but the Germans wasted their horses, squandered the race, herding them into the worst of it, the swarms of steel, the rheumatic marshes, the unblanketed winter chills of our late Fronts. A few might have found safety with the Russians, who still care for horses. You hear them often in the evenings. Their campfires send up rays for miles from behind the stands of beech, through northern-summer haze that's almost dry, only enough of it to give a knife's edge to the firelight, a dozen accordions and concertinas all going at once in shaggy chords with a reed-ringing to it, and the songs full of plaintive stvyehs and znyis with voices of the girl auxiliaries clearest of all. The horses whicker and move in the rustling grass. The men and women are kind, resourceful, fanatical—they are the most joyous of the Zone's survivors.

In and out of all the vibrant flesh moves the mad scavenger Tchitcherine, who is more metal than anything else. Steel teeth wink as he talks. Under his pompadour is a silver plate. Gold wirework threads in three-dimensional tattoo among the fine wreckage of cartilage and bone inside his right knee joint, the shape of it always felt, pain's hand-fashioned seal, and his proudest battle decoration, because it is invisible, and only he can feel it. A four-hour operation, and in the dark. It was the Eastern Front: there were no sulfa drugs, no anaesthesia. Of course he's proud.

He has marched here, with his limp as permanent as gold, out of coldness, meadows, mystery. Officially he reports to TsAGI, which is the Central Aero and Hydrodynamics Institute in Moscow. His orders mention technical intelligence. But his real mission in the Zone is private, obsessive, and not—so his superiors have let him know, in a number of delicate ways—in the people's interest. Tchitcherine guesses that this, taken literally, may be true enough. But he is not sure about the interests of those who warned him. They could have their own reasons for wanting Enzian liquidated in spite of what they say. Their differences with Tchitcherine may be over the timing, or the motives. Tchitcherine's motives are not political. The little State he is building in the German vacuum is founded on a compulsive need he has given up trying to understand, a need to annihilate the Schwarzkommando and his mythical half-brother, Enzian. He comes from Nihilist Stock; there are in his ancestry any number of bomb throwers and jubilant assassins. He is no relation at all to the Tchitcherine who dealt the Ra-

pallo Treaty with Walter Rathenau. There was a long-term operator, a Menshevik turned Bolshevik, in his exile and his return believing in a State that would outlive them all, where someone would come to sit in his seat at the table just as he had slipped into Trotsky's—sitters would come and go but the seats would remain . . . well, fine. There is that kind of State. But then again, there is this other Tchitcherine's kind, a mortal State that will persist no longer than the individuals in it. He is bound, in love and in bodily fear, to students who have died under the wheels of carriages, to eyes betrayed by nights without sleep and arms that have opened maniacally to death by absolute power. He envies their loneliness, their willingness to go it alone, outside even a military structure, often without support or love from anyone. His own faithful network of fräuleins around the Zone is a compromise: he knows there's too much comfort in it, even when the intelligence inputs are good. But the perceptible hazards of love, of attachment, are still light enough for him to accept, when balanced against what he has to do.

During the early Stalin days, Tchitcherine was stationed in a remote "bear's corner" (medvezhy ugolok), out in Seven Rivers country. In the summer, irrigation canals sweated a blurry fretwork across the green oasis. In the winter, sticky teaglasses ranked the windowsills, soldiers played preference and stepped outside only to piss, or to shoot down the street at surprised wolves with a lately retooled version of the Moisin. It was a land of drunken nostalgia for the cities, silent Kirghiz riding, endless tremors in the earth . . . because of the earthquakes, nobody built higher than one story and so the town looked like a Wild West movie: a brown dirt street, lined with grandiose two-and three-story false fronts.

He had come to give the tribesmen out here, this far out, an alphabet: it was purely speech, gesture, touch among them, not even an Arabic script to replace. Tchitcherine coordinated with the local Lik-bez center, one of a string known back in Moscow as the "red dzurts." Young and old Kirghiz came in from the plain, smelling of horses, sour milk and weed-smoke, inside to stare at slates filled with chalk marks. The stiff Latin symbols were almost as strange to the Russian cadre—tall Galina in her cast-off Army trousers and gray Cossack shirts . . . marcelled and soft-faced Luba, her dear friend . . . Vaslav Tchitcherine, the political eye ... all agents—though none thought of it this way—representing the NTA (New Turkic Alphabet) in uncommonly alien country.

In the mornings after mess, Tchitcherine will usually mosey down

to the red džurts there, fixing to look in on that Galina the school-marm—who appeals to what must be a feminine linkage or two in his personality . . . well . . . often he'll come outside to find his morning skies full of sheet-lightning: gusting, glaring. Awful. The ground shudders just below his hearing. It might be the end of the world, except that it is a fairly average day, for Central Asia. Pulse after heaven-wide pulse. Clouds, some in very clear profile, black and jagged, sail in armadas toward the Asian arctic, above the sweeping dessiatinas of grasses, of mullein stalks, rippling out of sight, green and gray in the wind. An amazing wind. But he stands in the street, out in it, hitching his pants, lapel-points whipped raiding against his chest, cursing Army, Party, History—whatever has put him here. He will not come to love this sky or plain, these people, their animals. Nor look back, no not even in the worst marsh-bivouacs of his soul, in naked Leningrad encounters with the certainty of his death, of the deaths of comrades, never keep any memory of Seven Rivers to shelter with. No music heard, no summer journey taken ... no horse seen against the steppe in the last daylight. . . .