Penguin books

Slowly, turn by turn, the couple's insults get gentler, funnier. What might have been a village apocalypse has gone on now into comic cooperation, as between a pair of vaudeville comedians. They are out of themselves, playing it all for the listeners to enjoy. The girl has the last word.

Did I hear you mention a marriage? Here there has been a marriage— This warm circle of song, Boisterous, loud as any marriage. ...

And I like you, even if there are one or two things— For a little while the feast gathers momentum. Drunks holler and women talk, and the little kids totter in and out of the huts, and the wind has

picked up some speed. Then the wandering singer begins to tune his dombra, and the Asian silence comes back.

"Are you going to get it all?" asks Dzaqyp Qulan.

"In stenography," replies Tchitcherine, his g a little glottal.

the aqyn's song

I have come from the edge of the world. I have come from the lungs of the wind, With a thing I have seen so awesome Even Dzambul could not sing it. With a fear in my heart so sharp It will cut the strongest of metals.

In the ancient tales it is told In a time that is older than Qorqyt, Who took from the wood of Syrghaj The first qobyz, and the first song— It is told that a land far distant Is the place of the Kirghiz Light.

In a place where words are unknown, And eyes shine like candles at night, And the face of God is a presence Behind the mask of the sky— At the tall black rock in the desert, In the time of the final days.

If the place were not so distant, If words were known, and spoken, Then the God might be a gold ikon, Or a page in a paper book. But It comes as the Kirghiz Light— There is no other way to know It.

The roar of Its voice is deafness, The flash of Its light is blindness. The floor of the desert rumbles, And Its face cannot be borne. And a man cannot be the same, After seeing the Kirghiz Light.

For I tell you that I have seen It

In a place which is older than darkness,

Where even Allah cannot reach.

As you see, my beard is an ice-field,

I walk with a stick to support me,

But this light must change us to children.

And now I cannot walk far, For a baby must learn to walk. And my words are reaching your ears As the meaningless sounds of a baby. For the Kirghiz Light took my eyes, Now I sense all Earth like a baby.

It is north, for a six-day ride,

Through the steep and death-gray canyons,

Then across the stony desert

To the mountain whose peak is a white džurt.

And if you have passed without danger,

The place of the black rock will find you.

But if you would not be born, Then stay with your warm red fire, And stay with your wife, in your tent, And the Light will never find you, And your heart will grow heavy with age, And your eyes will shut only to sleep.

"Got it," sez Tchitcherine. "Let's ride, comrade." Off again, the fires dying at their backs, the sounds of string music, of village carousing, presently swallowed behind the wind.

And on into the canyons. Far away to the north, a white mountain-top winks in the last sunlight. Down here, it is already shadowed evening.

Tchitcherine will reach the Kirghiz Light, but not his birth. He is no aqyn, and his heart was never ready. He will see It just before dawn. He will spend 12 hours then, face-up on the desert, a prehistoric city greater than Babylon lying in stifled mineral sleep a kilometer below his back, as the shadow of the tall rock, rising to a point, dances west to east and Džaqyp Qulan tends him, anxious as child and doll, and drying foam laces the necks of the two horses. But someday, like the mountains, like the young exiled women in their certain love, in their

innocence of him, like the morning earthquakes and the cloud-driving wind, a purge, a war, and millions after millions of souls gone behind him, he will hardly be able to remember It.

But in the Zone, hidden inside the summer Zone, the Rocket is waiting. He will be drawn the same way again. ...

D D D D D D D

Last week, in the British sector someplace, Slothrop, having been asshole enough to drink out of an ornamental pond in the Tiergarten, took sick. Any Berliner these days knows enough to boil water before drinking, though some then proceed to brew it with various things for tea, such as tulip bulbs, which is not good. Word is out that the center of the bulb is deadly poison. But they keep doing it. Once Slothrop— or Rocketman, as he is soon to be known—thought he might warn them about things like tulip bulbs. Bring in a little American enlightenment. But he gets so desperate with them, moving behind their scrims of European pain: he keeps pushing aside gauze after wavy gauze but there's always still the one, the impenetrable. . . .

So there he is, under the trees in summer leaf, in flower, many of them blasted horizontal or into chips and splinters—fine dust from the bridle paths rising in the sunrays by itself, ghosts of horses still taking their early-morning turns through the peacetime park. Up all night and thirsty, Slothrop lies on his stomach and slurps up water, just an old saddle tramp at the water hole here. . . . Fool. Vomiting, cramps, diarrhea, and who's he to lecture about tulip bulbs? He manages to crawl as far as an empty cellar, across the street from a wrecked church, curls up and spends the next days feverish, shivering, oozing shit that burns like acid—lost, alone with that sovereign Nazi movie-villain fist clamping in his bowels ja—you vill shit now, ja? Wondering if he'll ever see Berkshire again. Mommy, Mommy! The War's over, why can't I go home now? Nalline, the reflection from her Gold Star brightening her chins like a buttercup, smirks by the window and won't answer. . . .

A terrible time. Hallucinating Rolls Royces and bootheels in the night, coming to get him. Out in the street women in babushkas are lackadaisically digging trenches for the black iron water pipe that's stacked along the curbside. All day long they talk, shift after shift, into evening. Slothrop lies in the space where sunlight visits his cellar

for half an hour before going on to others with mean puddles of warmth—sorry, got to go now, schedule to keep, see you tomorrow if it doesn't rain, heh heh. . . .

Once Slothrop wakes to the sound of an American work detail marching down the street, cadence being counted by a Negro voice— yo lep, yo lep, yo lep O right O lep . . . kind of little German folk tune with some sliding up-scale on the word "right"—Slothrop can imagine his mannered jog of arm and head to the left as he comes down hard on that heel, the way they teach it in Basic . . . can see the man's smile. For a minute he has the truly unbalanced idea of running out in the street and asking them to take him back, requesting political asylum in America. But he's too weak. In his stomach, in his heart. He lies, listening the tramping and the voice out of earshot, the sound of his country fading away. . . . Fading like the WASP ghosts, the old-time DPs trailing rootless now down the roads out of his memory, crowding the rooftops of the freights of forgetfulness, knapsacks and poor refugee pockets stuffed with tracts nobody'd read, looking for another host: given up for good on Rocketman here. Somewhere between the burning in his head and the burning in his asshole, if the two can be conveniently separated, and paced to that dying cadence, he elaborates a fantasy in which Enzian, the African, finds him again—conies to offer him a way out.

Because it seems a while back that they did meet again, by the reedy edge of a marsh south of the capital. Unshaven, sweating, stinking Rocketman restlessly tripping out to the suburbs, among his people: there is haze over the sun, and a rotting swamp odor worse than Slothrop's own. Only two or three hours' sleep in the last couple of days. He stumbles on the Schwarzkommando, busy dredging for pieces of rocket. Formations of dark birds are cruising in the sky. The Africans have a partisan look: pieces here and there of old Wehrmacht and SS uniform, tattered civilian clothes, only one insigne in common, worn wherever it will show, a painted steel device in red, white and blue, thus:

Adapted from insignia the German troopers wore in South-West Africa when they came in 1904 to crush the Herero Rebellion—it was used to pin up half the brim of a wide-awake hat. For the Zone-Hereros it has become something deep, Slothrop gathers, maybe a little mystical. Though he recognizes the letters—

Klar, Entlüftung, Zündung, Vorstufe, Hauptstufe, the five positions of the launching switch in the A4 control car—he doesn't let on to Enzian.

They sit on a hillside eating bread and sausages. Children from the town move by in every direction. Someone has set up an army tent, someone has brought beer in kegs. A scratch band, a dozen brasses in tasseled, frayed gold and red uniforms play selections from Der Mei-stersmger. Fat-smoke drifts in the air. Choruses of drinkers in the distance break from time to time into laughter or a song. It's a Rocket-raising: a festival new to this country. Soon it will come to the folk-attention how close Wernher von Braun's birthday is to the Spring Equinox, and the same German impulse that once rolled flower-boats through the towns and staged mock battles between young Spring and deathwhite old Winter will be erecting strange floral towers out in the clearings and meadows, and the young scientist-surrogate will be going round and round with old Gravity or some such buffoon, and the children will be tickled, and laugh. . . .

Schwarzkommando struggle knee-deep in mud, engaged entirely with the salvage, with the moment. The A4 they're about to uncover was used in the last desperate battle for Berlin—an abortive firing, a warhead that didn't explode. Around its grave they're driving in planks for shoring, sending back mud in buckets and wood casks along a human chain to be dumped on shore, near where their rifles and kits are stacked.

"So Marvy was right. They didn't disarm you guys."

"They didn't know where to find us. We were a surprise. There are even now powerful factions in Paris who don't believe we exist. And most of the time I'm not so sure myself."

"How's that?"

"Well, I think we're here, but only in a statistical way. Something like that rock over there is just about 100% certain—it knows it's there, so does everybody else. But our own chances of being right here right now are only a little better than even—the slightest shift in the probabilities and we're gone—schnapp! like that."

"Peculiar talk, Oberst."

"Not if you've been where we have. Forty years ago, in Südwest, we were nearly exterminated. There was no reason. Can you understand that? No reason. We couldn't even find comfort in the Will of God Theory. These were Germans with names and service records, men in blue uniforms who killed clumsily and not without guilt. Search-and-destroy missions, every day. It went on for two years. The

orders came down from a human being, a scrupulous butcher named von Trotha. The thumb of mercy never touched his scales.

"We have a word that we whisper, a mantra for times that threaten to be bad. Mba-kayere. You may find that it will work for you. Mba-kayere. It means 'I am passed over.' To those of us who survived von Trotha, it also means that we have learned to stand outside our history and watch it, without feeling too much. A little schizoid. A sense for the statistics of our being. One reason we grew so close to the Rocket, I think, was this sharp awareness of how contingent, like ourselves, the Aggregat 4 could be—how at the mercy of small things . . . dust that gets in a timer and breaks electrical contact ... a film of grease you can't even see, oil from a touch of human fingers, left inside a liquid-oxygen valve, flaring up soon as the stuff hits and setting the whole thing off—I've seen that happen . . . rain that swells the bushings in the servos or leaks into a switch: corrosion, a short, a signal grounded out, Brennschluss too soon, and what was alive is only an Aggregat again, an Aggregat of pieces of dead matter, no longer anything that can move, or that has a Destiny with a shape—stop doing that with your eyebrows, Scuffling. I may have gone a bit native out here, that's all. Stay in the Zone long enough and you'll start getting ideas about Destiny yourself."

A cry from down in the marsh. Birds swirl upward, round and black, grains of coarse-cut pepper on this bouillabaisse sky. Little kids come skidding to a halt, and the brass band fall silent in mid-bar. En-zian is on his feet and loping down to where the others are gathering.

"Was ist los, meinen Sumpfmenschen?" The others, laughing, scoop up fistfuls of mud and start throwing them at their Nguarore-rue, who ducks, dodges, grabs him some of that mud and starts flinging it back. The Germans on shore stand blinking, politely aghast at this lack of discipline.

Down in the plank enclosure, a couple of muddy trim-tabs poke up now out of the marsh, with twelve feet of mud between them. Enzian, spattered and dripping, his white grin preceding him by several meters, vaults over the shoring and into the hole, and grabs a shovel. The moment has become roughly ceremonial: Andreas and Christian have moved up to either side to help him scrape and dig till about a foot of one fin-surface is exposed. The Determination of the Number. The Nguarorerue crouches and brushes away mud, revealing part of a slashmark, a white 2, and a 7.

"Outase." And glum faces on the others.

Slothrop's got a hunch. "You expected der Fünffachnullpunkt," he proposes to Enzian a little later, "the quintuple zero, right? Haa-aaah!" Gotcha, gotcha—

Throwing up his hands, "It's insane. I don't believe there is one."

"Zero probability?"

"I think it will depend on the number of searchers. Are your people after it?"

"I don't know. I only heard by accident. I don't have any people."

"Schwarzgerät, Schwarzkommando. Scuffling: suppose somewhere there were an alphabetical list, someone's list, an input to some intelligence arm, say. Some country, doesn't matter. But suppose that on this list, the two names, Blackinstrument, Blackcommand, just happened to be there, juxtaposed. That's all, an alphabetical coincidence. We wouldn't have to be real, and neither would it, correct?"

The marshes streak away, patched with light under the milk overcast. Negative shadows flicker white behind the edges of everything. "Well, this is all creepy enough here, Oberst," sez Slothrop. "You're not helping."

Enzian is staring into Slothrop's face, with something like a smile under his beard.

"O.K. Who is after it, then?" Being enigmatic, won't answer—is this bird looking to be needled? "That Major Marvy," opines Slothrop, "a-and that Tchitcherine, too!"

Ha! That did it. Like a salute, a boot-click, Enzian's face snaps into perfect neutrality. "You would oblige me," he begins, then settles for changing the subject. "You were down in the Mittelwerke. How did Marvy's people seem to be getting along with the Russians?"

"Ace buddies, seemed like."

"I have the feeling that the occupying Powers have just about reached agreement on a popular front against the Schwarzkommando. I don't know who you are, or how your lines are drawn. But they're trying to shut us down. I'm just back from Hamburg. We had trouble. It was made to look like a DP raid, but the British military government was behind it, and they had Russian cooperation."

"I'm sorry. Can I help?"

"Don't be reckless. Let's all wait and see. All anyone knows about you is that you keep showing up."

Toward dusk, the black birds descend, millions of them, to sit in the branches of trees nearby. The trees grow heavy with black birds, branches like dendrites of the Nervous System fattening,

deep in twittering nerve-dusk, in preparation for some important message. ...

Later in Berlin, down in the cellar among fever-dreams with shit leaking out of him at gallons per hour, too weak to aim more than token kicks at the rats running by with eyes fixed earnestly noplace, trying to make believe they don't have a newer and dearer status among the Berliners, at minimum points on his mental health chart, when the sun is gone so totally it might as well be for good, Slothrop's dumb idling heart sez: The Schwarzgerät is no Grail, Ace, that's not what the G in Imipolex G stands for. And you are no knightly hero. The best you can compare with is Tannhäuser, the Singing Nincompoop— you've been under one mountain at Nordhausen, been known to sing a song or two with uke accompaniment, and don'tcha feel you're in a sucking marshland of sin out here, Slothrop? maybe not the same thing William Slothrop, vomiting a good part of 1630 away over the side of that Arbella, meant when he said "sin." . . . But what you've done is put yourself on somebody else's voyage—some Frau Holda, some Venus in some mountain—playing her, its, game . . . you know that in some irreducible way it's an evil game. You play because you have nothing better to do, but that doesn't make it right. And where is the Pope whose staff's gonna bloom for you?

As a matter of fact, he is also just about to run into his Lisaura: someone he will be with for a while and then leave again. The Minnesinger abandoned his poor woman to suicide. What Slothrop will be leaving Greta Erdmann to is not so clear. Along the Havel in Neuba-belsberg she waits, less than the images of herself that survive in an indeterminate number of release prints here and there about the Zone, and even across the sea. . . . Every kind technician who ever threw a magenta gel across her key light for her has gone to war or death, and she is left nothing but God's indifferent sunlight in all its bleaching and terror. . . . Eyebrows plucked to pen-strokes, long hair streaked with gray, hands heavy with rings of all colors, opacities and uglinesses, wearing her dark prewar Chanel suits, no hat, scarves, always a flower, she is haunted by Central European night-whispers that blow, like the skin curtains of Berlin, more ghostly around her fattening, wrecked beauty the closer she and Slothrop draw. . . .

This is how they meet. One night Slothrop is out raiding a vegetable garden in the park. Thousands of people living in the open. He skirts their fires, stealthy— All he wants is a handful of greens here, a carrot or mangel-wurzel there, just to keep him going. When they see

him they throw rocks, lumber, once not long ago an old hand-grenade that didn't go off but made him shit where he stood.

This evening he is orbiting someplace near the Grosser Stern. It is long after curfew. Odors of woodsmoke and decay hang over the city. Among pulverized heads of stone margraves and electors, reconnoiter-ing a likely-looking cabbage patch, all of a sudden Slothrop picks up the scent of an unmistakable no it can't be yes it is it's a REEFER! A-and it's burning someplace close by. Goldshot green of the Rif's slant fields here, vapor-blossoms resinous and summery, charm his snoot on through bushes and matted grass, under the blasted trees and whatever sits in their branches.

Sure enough, in the hollow of an upended trunk, long roots fringing the scene like a leprechaun outpost, Slothrop finds one Emil ("Säure") Bummer, once the Weimar Republic's most notorious cat burglar and doper, flanked by two beautiful girls, handing around a cheerful little orange star. The depraved old man. Slothrop's on top of them before they notice. Bummer smiles, reaches up an arm, offering the remainder of what they've been smoking to Slothrop, who receives it in long dirty fingernails. Oboy. He hunkers down.

"Was ist los?" sez Säure. "We've had a windfall of kif. Allah has smiled on us, well actually he was smiling at everybody, we just happened to be in his direct line of sight. ..." His nickname, which means "acid" in German, developed back in the twenties, when he was carrying around a little bottle of schnapps which, if he got in a tight spot, he would bluff people into thinking was fuming nitric acid. He comes out now with another fat Moroccan reefer. They light up off of Slothrop's faithful Zippo.

Trudi, the blonde, and Magda, the sultry Bavarian, have spent the day looting a stash of Wagnerian opera costumes. There is a pointed helmet with horns, a full cape of green velvet, a pair of buckskin trousers.

"Saaaay," sez Slothrop, "that rig looks pretty sharp!"

"They're for you," Magda smiles.

"Aw . . . no. You'd get a better deal at the Tauschzentrale. . . ."

But Säure insists. "Haven't you ever noticed, when you're this Blitzed and you want somebody to show up, they always do?"

The girls are moving the coal of the reefer about, watching its reflection in the shiny helmet changing shapes, depths, grades of color

. . . hmm. It occurs to Slothrop here that without those horns on it,

why this helmet would look just like the nose assembly of the Rocket. And if he could find a few triangular scraps of leather, figure a way to sew them on to Tchitcherine's boots . . . yeah, a-and on the back of the cape put a big, scarlet, capital R— It is as pregnant a moment as when Ton to, after the legendary ambush, attempts to—

"Raketemensch!" screams Säure, grabbing the helmet and unscrewing the horns oíf of it. Names by themselves may be empty, but the act of naming. . . .

"You had the same idea?" Oh, strange. Säure carefully reaches up and places the helmet on Slothrop's head. Ceremonially the girls drape the cape around his shoulders. Troll scouting parties have already sent runners back to inform their people.

"Good. Now listen, Rocketman, I'm in a bit of trouble."

"Hah?" Slothrop has been imagining a mil-scale Rocketman Hype, in which the people bring him food, wine and maidens in a four-color dispensation in which there is a lot of skipping and singing "La, la, la, la," and beefsteaks blossoming from these strafed lindens, and roast turkeys thudding down like soft hail on Berlin, sweet potatoes a-and melted marshmallows, bubbling up out of the ground. . . .

"Do you have any armies?" Trudi wants to know. Slothrop, or Rocketman, hands over half a withered pack.

The reefer keeps coming around: darts and stabs through this root shelter. Everybody forgets what it is they've been talking about. There's the smell of earth. Bugs rush through, aerating. Magda has lit one of Slothrop's cigarettes for him and he tastes raspberry lipstick. Lipstick? Who's got lipstick these days? What are all these people here into, anyway?

Berlin is dark enough for stars, the accustomed stars but never so clearly arranged. It is possible also to make up your own constellations. "Oh," Säure recalls, "I had this problem ..."

"I'm really hungry," it occurs to Slothrop.

Trudi is telling Magda about her boy friend Gustav, who wants to live inside the piano. "All you could see was his feet sticking out, he kept saying, 'You all hate me, you hate this piano!' " They're giggling now.

"Plucking on the strings," sez Magda, "right? He's so paranoid.'"

Trudi has these big, blonde Prussian legs. Tiny blonde hairs dance up and down in the starlight, up under her skirt and back, all through the shadows of her knees, around under the hollows behind them, this starry jittering. . . . The stump towers above and cups them all, a giant nerve cell, dendrites extended into the city, the night. Signals coming

in from all directions, and from back in time too, probably, if not indeed forward. . . .

Säure, who is never able entirely to lay off business, rolls, flows to his feet, clutching on to a root till his head decides where it is going to come to rest. Magda, her ear at its entrance, is banging on Rocket-man's helmet with a stick. It gongs in chords. The separate notes aren't right on pitch, either: they sound very odd together. . . .