But the tour with General Kammler’s rocketeers is what Slothrop, perversely, wants—wants?—to know about, “Well I’ve been to that Nordhausen, sure, seen the bits and pieces. But never a fully-assembled A4. That must really be something, huh?”

Thanatz is holding out his stein for a refill. The waiter, deadpan, dribbles water down a spoon to turn the absinthe milky green while Thanatz caresses his buttocks, then moves away. It is not clear if Thanatz has been thinking about his answer. “Yes, fueled, alive, ready for firing… fifty feet high, trembling… and then the fantastic, virile roar. Your ears nearly burst. Cruel, hard, thrusting into the virgin-blue robes of the sky, my friend. Oh, so phallic. Wouldn’t you say?”

“Uh…”

“Hmm, ja, you would have got on with them out at the batteries, they were sedate, like you. More studious than your infantry or Panzer types, attentive to the point of fanaticism. Oh, with notable exceptions of course. One lives for notable exceptions…. There was a boy.” Drunk reminiscence? Is he faking this? “His name was Gottfried. God’s peace, which I trust he’s found. For us I hold no such hope. We are weighed in the balance and found wanting, and the Butcher has had His thumb in the scales… you think I’m jaded. So did I, until that terrible week. It was a time of dissolution, falling back across the Niedersächsisch oil fields. Then I understood I was but a dewy child. The battery commander had become a screaming maniac. He called himself ‘Blicero.’ He’d begun to talk the way the captain in Wozzeck sings, his voice breaking suddenly up into the higher registers of hysteria. Things were falling apart, and he reverted to some ancestral version of himself, screamed at the sky, sat hours in a rigid trance, with his eyes rolled clear up into his head. Breaking without warning into that ungodly coloratura. White blank ovals, the eyes of a statue, with the gray rain behind them. He had left 1945, wired his nerves back into the pre-Christian earth we fled across, into the Urstoff of the primitive German, God’s poorest and most panicked creature. You and I perhaps have become over the generations so Christianized, so enfeebled by Gesellschaft and our obligation to its celebrated ‘Contract,’ which never did exist, that we, even we, are appalled by reversions like that. But deep, out of its silence, the Urstoff wakes, and sings… and on the last day… it is shameful… through that whole terrible day, I had an erection… don’t judge me… it was out of my control… everything was out of control—”

About here they are interrupted by Margherita and Bianca, playing stage mother and reluctant child. Whispers to the bandleader, fun-seekers crowding eagerly around a cleared space where Bianca now stands pouting, her little red frock halfway up her slender thighs, with black lace petticoats peeping from beneath the hem, surely it’s going to be something sophisticated, bigcity, and wicked, but what’s she doing with her finger posed aside of one dimpled cheek like this—at which point comes the band’s intro, and pre-vomit saliva begins to gush into Slothrop’s mouth, along with a horrible doubt into his brain about how he is going to make it through the next few minutes.