—DOROTHY, arriving in Oz

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WE ARE SAFELY PAST THE DAYS of the Eis-Heiligen—St. Pancratius, St. Servatius, St. Bonifacius, die kalte Sophie… they hover in clouds above the vineyards, holy beings of ice, ready with a breath, an intention, to ruin the year with frost and cold. In certain years, especially War years, they are short on charity, peevish, smug in their power: not quite saintly or even Christian. The prayers of growers, pickers and wine enthusiasts must reach them, but there’s no telling how the ice-saints feel—coarse laughter, pagan annoyance, who understands this rear-guard who preserve winter against the revolutionaries of May?

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 arterials 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… .