V.

by Thomas Pynchon

  He completed his job of setting up the antennas, then made his way round cupolas and chimney pots, up and down slopes and slates till at length he vaulted clumsily over a low wall and it seemed some tropic as well, for the life there he found too lavish, spectral, probably carnivorous; not in good taste.

  “How pretty he is.” The woman, dressed now in jodhpurs and an army shirt, leaned against the wall, smoking a cigarette. All at once, as he’d been half-expecting, cries of pain lanced a morning quiet that had known only visiting kites and wind, and the dry rustling of the exterior veld. Mondaugen knew, without having to run to see, that the cries had come from the courtyard where he’d seen the crimson stain. Neither he nor the woman moved. It somehow having become part of a mutual constraint that neither of them show curiosity. Voilà: conspiracy already, without a dozen words having passed between them.

  Her name proved to be Vera Meroving, her companion a Lieutenant Weissmann, her city Munich.

  “Perhaps we even met one Fasching,” she said, “masked and strangers.”

  Mondaugen doubted, but had they met: were there any least basis for that “conspiracy” a moment ago: it would surely have been somewhere like Munich, a city dying of abandon, venality, a mark swollen with fiscal cancer.

  As the distance between them gradually diminished Mondaugen saw that her left eye was artificial: she, noticing his curiosity, obligingly removed the eye and held it out to him in the hollow of her hand. A bubble blown translucent, its “white” would show up when in the socket as a half-lit sea green. A fine network of nearly microscopic fractures covered its surface. Inside were the delicately-wrought wheels, springs, ratchets of a watch, wound by a gold key which Fräulein Meroving wore on a slender chain round her neck. Darker green and flecks of gold had been fused into twelve vaguely zodiacal shapes, placed annular on the surface of the bubble to represent the iris and also the face of the watch.

  “What was it like outside?”

  He told her the little he knew. Her hands had begun to tremble: he noticed it when she went to replace the eye. He could scarcely hear her when she said:

  “It could be 1904 again.”

  Curious: van Wijk had said that. What was 1904 to these people? He was about to ask her when Lieutenant Weissmann appeared in mufti from behind an unwholesome-looking palm and pulled her by the hand, back into the depths of the house.

  Two things made Foppl’s a fortunate place to be carrying on sferic research. First, the farmer had given Mondaugen a room to himself in a turret at one corner of the house; a little enclave of scientific endeavor, buffered by a number of empty storage rooms and with access to the roof through a stained-glass window portraying an early Christian martyr being devoured by wild beasts.

  Second, modest though their demands were, there was an auxiliary source of electric power for his receivers in the small generator Foppl kept to light the giant chandelier in the dining hall. Rather than rely, as he had been doing, on a number of bulky batteries, Mondaugen was sure it wouldn’t be too difficult simply to tap off and devise circuitry to modify what power he needed, either to operate the equipment directly or to recharge the batteries. Accordingly, that afternoon, after arranging his effects, equipment and the attendant paper work into an imitation of professional disorder, Mondaugen set off into the house and down, in search of this generator.

  Soon, padding down a narrow, sloping corridor, he was brought to attention by a mirror hung some twenty feet ahead, angled to reflect the interior of a room around the next corner. Framed for him there were Vera Meroving and her lieutenant in profile, she striking at his chest with what appeared to be a small riding crop, he twisting a gloved hand into her hair and talking to her all the while, so precisely that the voyeur Mondaugen could lip-read each obscenity. The geometry of the corridors somehow baffled all sound: Mondaugen, with the queer excitement he’d felt watching her at her window that morning, expected captions explaining it all to flash on to the mirror. But she finally released Weissmann; he reached out with the curiously gloved hand and closed the door, and it was as if Mondaugen had dreamed them.

  Presently he began to hear music, which grew louder the deeper he descended into this house. Accordion, fiddle and guitar were playing a tango full of minor chords and an eerie flatting of certain notes which to German ears should have remained natural. A young girl’s voice was singing sweetly:

  Love’s a lash,

  Kisses gall the tongue, harrow the heart;

  Caresses tease

  Cankered tissue apart.

  Liebchen, come

  Be my Hottentot bondsman tonight,

  The sjambok’s kiss

  Is unending delight.

  Love, my little slave,

  Is color-blind;

  For white and black

  Are only states of mind.

  So at my feet

  Nod and genuflect, whimper for me:

  Though tears are dried

  Their pain is yet to be.

  Enchanted, Mondaugen peered round the door jamb and found the singer to be a child of not more than sixteen, with white-blond, hip-length hair and breasts perhaps too large for her slender frame.

  “I am Hedwig Vogelsang,” she informed him, “and my purpose on earth is to tantalize and send raving the race of man.” Whereupon the musicians, hidden from them in an alcove behind a hanging arras, struck up a kind of schottische; Mondaugen, overcome by the sudden scent of musk, brought in a puff to his nostrils by interior winds which could not have arisen by accident, seized her round the waist and wheeled with her across the room, and out, and through a bedroom lined with mirrors, round a canopied four-poster and into a long gallery, stabbed at ten-yard intervals down its length by yellow daggers of African sun, hung with nostalgic landscapes of a Rhine valley that never existed, portraits of Prussian officers who’d died long before Caprivi (some even before Bismarck) and their blond, untender ladies who’d nothing now but dust to bloom in; past rhythmic gusts of blond sun that crazed the eyeballs with vein-images; out of the gallery and into a tiny unfurnished room hung all in black velvet, high as the house, narrowing into a chimney and open at the top, so that one could see the stars in the daytime; finally down three or four steps to Foppl’s own planetarium, a circular room with a great wooden sun, overlaid with gold leaf, burning cold in the very center and round it the nine planets and their moons, suspended from tracks in the ceiling, actuated by a coarse cobweb of chains, pulleys, belts, racks, pinions and worms, all receiving their prime impulse from a treadmill in the corner, usually operated for the amusement of the guests by a Bondelswaartz, now unoccupied. Having long fled all vestiges of music Mondaugen released her here, skipped to the treadmill and began a jog-trot that set the solar system in motion, creaking and whining in a way that raised a prickling in the teeth. Rattling, shuddering, the wooden planets began to rotate and spin, Saturn’s rings to whirl, moons their precessions, our own Earth its nutational wobble, all picking up speed; as the girl continued to dance, having chosen the planet Venus for her partner; as Mondaugen dashed along his own geodesic, following in the footsteps of a generation of slaves.

  When at length he tired, slowed and stopped she’d gone, vanished into the wooden reaches of what remained after all a parody of space. Mondaugen, breathing heavily, staggered off the treadmill to carry on his descent and search for the generator.

  Soon he stumbled into a basement room where gardening implements were stored. As if the entire day had come into being only to prepare him for this, he discovered a Bondel male, facedown and naked, the back and buttocks showing scar tissue from old sjambokings as well as more recent wounds, laid open across the flesh like so many toothless smiles. Hardening himself the weakling Mondaugen approached the man and stooped to listen for breathing or a heartbeat, trying not to see the white vertebra that winked at him from one long opening.

 
; “Don’t touch him.” Foppl stood holding a sjambok or cattle whip of giraffe hide, tapping the handle against his leg in a steady, syncopated figure. “He doesn’t want you to help. Even to sympathize. He doesn’t want anything but the sjambok.” Raising his voice till it found the hysterical-bitch level Foppl always affected with Bondels: “You like the sjambok, don’t you, Andreas.”

  Andreas moved his head feebly and whispered; “Baas . . .”

  “Your people have defied the Government,” Foppl continued, “they’ve rebelled, they have sinned. General von Trotha will have to come back to punish you all. He’ll have to bring his soldiers with the beards and the bright eyes, and his artillery that speaks with a loud voice. How you will enjoy it, Andreas. Like Jesus returning to Earth, von Trotha is coming to deliver you. Be joyful; sing hymns of thanks. And until then love me as your parent, because I am von Trotha’s arm, and the agent of his will.”

  As van Wijk had bade him do, Mondaugen remembered to ask Foppl about 1904 and the “days of von Trotha.” If Foppl’s response was sick, it was sick of more than simple enthusiasm; not only did he yarn about the past—first there in the cellar as both stood watching a Bondelswaartz whose face Mondaugen was never to see continue to die; later at riotous feasting, on watch or patrol, to ragtime accompaniment in the grand ballroom; even up in the turret, as deliberate interruption to the experiment—but he also seemed under compulsion somehow to re-create the Deutsch-Südwestafrika of nearly twenty years ago, in word and perhaps in deed. “Perhaps” because as the siege party progressed it became more and more difficult to make the distinction.

  One midnight Mondaugen stood on a small balcony just under the eaves, officially on watch, though little could be seen in the uncertain illumination. The moon, or half of it, had risen above the house: his antennas cut like rigging dead-black across its face. As he swung his rifle idly by its shoulder strap, gazing out across the ravine at nothing in particular, someone stepped on to the balcony beside him: it was an old Englishman named Godolphin, tiny in the moonlight. Small scrubland noises now and again rose to them from the outside.

  “I hope I don’t disturb you,” Godolphin said. Mondaugen shrugged, keeping his eyes in a constant sweep over what he guessed to be the horizon. “I enjoy it on watch,” the Englishman continued, “it’s the only peace there is to this eternal celebration.” He was a retired sea captain; in his seventies, Mondaugen would guess. “I was in Cape Town, trying to raise a crew for the Pole.”

  Mondaugen’s eyebrows went up. Embarrassed, he began to pick at his nose. “The South Pole?”

  “Of course. Rather awkward if it were the other, haw-haw.

  “And I’d heard of a stout boat in Swakopmund. But of course she was too small. Hardly do for the pack ice. Foppl was in town, and invited me out for a weekend. I imagine I needed the rest.”

  “You sound cheerful. In the face of what must be frequent disappointment.”

  “They leave the sting out. Treat the doddering old fool with sympathy. He’s living in the past. Of course I’m living in the past. I was there.”

  “At the Pole.”

  “Certainly. Now I have to go back, it’s that simple. I’m beginning to think that if I get through our siege party I shall be quite ready for anything the Antarctic has for me.”

  Mondaugen was inclined to agree. “Though I don’t plan on any little Antarctic.”

  The old sea dog chuckled. “Oh there will be. You wait. Everyone has an Antarctic.”

  Which, it occurred to Mondaugen, was as far South as one could get. At first he’d plunged eagerly into the social life that jittered all over the sprawling plantation house, usually leaving his scientific duties until the early afternoon, when everyone but the watch was asleep. He had even begun a dogged pursuit of Hedwig Vogelsang, but somehow kept running into Vera Meroving instead. Southsickness in its tertiary stage, whispered that adenoidal Saxon youth who was Mondaugen’s doppelgänger: beware, beware.

  The woman, twice as old as he, exerted a sexual fascination he found impossible to explain away. He’d meet her head-on in corridors, or rounding some salient of cabinetwork, or on the roof, or simply in the night, always unlooked for. He would make no advances, she no response; but despite all efforts to hold it in check, their conspiracy grew.

  As if it were a real affair, Lieutenant Weissmann cornered him in the billiard room. Mondaugen quivered and prepared to flee: but it proved to be something else entirely.

  “You’re from Munich,” Weissmann established. “Ever been around the Schwabing quarter?” On occasion. “The Brennessel cabaret?” Never. “Ever heard of D’Annunzio?” Then: Mussolini? Fiume? Italia irredenta? Fascisti? National Socialist German Workers’ Party? Adolf Hitler? Kautsky’s Independents?

  “So many capital letters,” Mondaugen protested.

  “From Munich, and never heard of Hitler,” said Weissmann, as if “Hitler” were the name of an avant-garde play. “What the hell’s wrong with young people.” Light from the green overhead lamp turned his spectacles to twin, tender leaves, giving him a gentle look.

  “I’m an engineer, you see. Politics isn’t my line.”

  “Someday we’ll need you,” Weissmann told him, “for something or other, I’m sure. Specialized and limited as you are, you fellows will be valuable. I didn’t mean to get angry.”

  “Politics is a kind of engineering, isn’t it. With people as your raw material.”

  “I don’t know,” Weissmann said. “Tell me, how long are you staying in this part of the world.”

  “No longer than I have to. Six months? It’s indefinite.”

  “If I could put you in the way of something, oh, with a little authority to it, not really involving much of your time . . .”

  “Organizing, you’d call it?”

  “Yes, you’re sharp. You knew right away, didn’t you. Yes. You are my man. The young people especially, Mondaugen, because you see—I know this won’t be repeated—we could be getting it back.”

  “The Protectorate? But it’s under the League of Nations.”

  Weissmann threw back his head and began to laugh, and would say no more. Mondaugen shrugged, took down a cue, dumped the three balls from their velvet bag and practiced draw shots till well into the morning.

  He emerged from the billiard room to hot jazz from somewhere overhead. Blinking, he made his way up marble steps to the grand ballroom and found the dance floor empty. Clothing of both sexes was littered about; the music, which came from a Gramophone in the corner, roared gay and hollow under the electric chandelier. But no one was there, no one at all. He plodded up to his turret room with its ludicrous circular bed and found that a typhoon of sferics had been bombarding the earth. He fell asleep and dreamed, for the first time since he’d left it, of Munich.

  In the dream it was Fasching, the mad German Carnival or Mardi Gras that ends the day before Lent begins. The season in Munich, under the Weimar Republic and the inflation, had followed since the war a constantly rising curve, taking human depravity as ordinate. Chief reason being that no one in the city knew if he’d be alive or well come next Fasching. Any windfall—food, firewood, coal—was consumed as quickly as possible. Why hoard, why ration? Depression hung in the gray strata of clouds, looked at you out of faces waiting in bread queues and dehumanized by the bitter cold. Depression stalked the Liebigstrasse, where Mondaugen had had an attic room in a mansarde: a figure with an old woman’s face, bent against the wind off the Isar and wrapped tightly in a frayed black coat; who might, like some angel of death, mark in pink spittle the doorsteps of those who’d starve tomorrow.

  It was dark. He was in an old cloth jacket, a stocking cap tugged down over his ears, arms linked with a number of young people he didn’t know but suspected were students, all singing a death-song and weaving side to side in a chain, broadside to the street’s centerline. He could hear
bands of other rollickers, drunk and singing lustily in other streets. Beneath a tree, near one of the infrequent streetlights, he came upon a boy and girl, coupled, one of the girl’s fat and aging thighs exposed to the still-winter wind. He stooped and covered them with his old jacket, his tears fell and froze in mid-air, and rattled like sleet on the couple, who’d turned to stone.

  He was in a beer hall. Young, old, students, workmen, grandfathers, adolescent girls drank, sang, cried, fondled blindly after same- and different-sexed alike. Someone had set a blaze in the fireplace and was roasting a cat he’d found in the street. The black oak clock above the fireplace ticked terribly loud in strange waves of silence that swept regularly over the company. Girls appeared out of the confusion of moving faces, sat on his lap while he squeezed breasts and thighs and tweaked noses; beer spilled at the far end of the table and swept the table’s length in a great foam cascade. The fire that had been roasting the cat spread to a number of tables and had to be doused with more beer; fat and charred-black, the cat itself was snatched from the hands of its unfortunate cook and tossed about the room like a football, blistering the hands that passed it on, till it disintegrated among roars of laughter. Smoke hung like winter fog in the beer hall, changing the massed weaving of bodies to more a writhing perhaps of damned in some underworld. Faces all had the same curious whiteness: concave cheeks, highlighted temples, bone of the starved corpse there just under the skin.

  Vera Meroving appeared (why Vera? her black mask covered the entire head) in black sweater and black dancer’s tights. “Come,” she whispered; led him by the hand through narrow streets, hardly lit but thronged with celebrants who sang and cheered in tubercular voices. White faces, like diseased blooms, bobbed along in the dark as if moved by other forces toward some graveyard, to pay homage at an important burial.