Kurt Vonnegut - Mother Night

My pace down the stairs was firm and regular.

Now I saw the woman.

She smiled up at me, raising her chin so as to show her features frankly, clearly.

Her hair was snow-white.

Aside from that, she was my Helga untouched by time.

Aside from that, she was as lithe and blooming as my Helga had been on our wedding night.

We cried, like babies, wrestled each other up the stairs to my attic.

As we passed Father Keeley and Vice-Bundesfuehrer Krapptauer, I saw that Keeley was crying. Krapptauer stood at attention, honoring the idea of an Anglo-Saxon family. Jones, further up the stairs, was radiant with pleasure in the miracle he had worked. He rubbed and rubbed his jewelled hands.

'My — my wife,' I said to my old friend Kraft, as Helga and I entered my attic.

And Kraft, trying to keep from crying, chewed the bit of his cold corncob pipe in two. He never did quite cry, but he was close to doing it — genuinely close to doing it, I think.

Jones, Krapptauer and Keeley followed us in. 'How is it,' I said to Jones, 'that it's you who gives me back my wife?'

'A fantastic coincidence — ' said Jones. 'One day I learned that you were still alive. A month later I learned that your wife was still alive. What can I call a coincidence like that but the Hand of God?'

'I don't know,' I said.

'My paper has a small circulation in West Germany,' said Jones. 'One of my subscribers read about you, and he sent me a cable. He asked me if I knew your wife had just turned up as a refugee in West Berlin.'

'Why didn't he cable me?' I said. I turned to Helga.

'Sweetheart — ' I said in German, 'why didn't you cable me?'

'We'd been apart so long, I'd been dead so long,' she said in English, 'I thought surely you'd built a new life, with no room in it for me, I'd hoped that.'

'My life is nothing but room for you,' I said. 'It could never be filled by anyone but you.'

'So much to say, so much to tell — ' she said, melting against me. I looked down on her wonderingly. Her skin was soft and clear. She was amazingly well-preserved for a woman of forty-five.

What made her state of preservation even more remarkable was the story she now told of how she had spent the past fifteen years.

She was captured and raped in the Crimea, she said. She was shipped to the Ukraine by boxcar, was put to work in a labor gang,

'We were stumbling sluts,' she said, 'married to mud. When the war was over, nobody bothered to tell us. Our tragedy was permanent. No records were kept of us anywhere. We shuffled through rained villages aimlessly. Anyone who had a menial, pointless job to do had only to wave us down and we would do it'

She separated herself from me in order to tell her yarn with larger gestures. I wandered over to my front window to listen — listen while looking through dusty panes into the twigs of a birdless, leafless tree.

Drawn crudely in the dust of three window-panes were a swastika, a hammer and sickle, and the Stars and Stripes. I had drawn the three symbols weeks before, at the conclusion of an argument about patriotism with Kraft. I had given a hearty cheer for each symbol, demonstrating to Kraft the meaning of patriotism to, represent a Nazi, a Communist, and an American.

'Hooray, hooray, hooray.' I'd said,

On and on Helga spun her yarn, weaving a biography on the crazy loom of modern history. She escaped from the labor gang after five years, she said, was caught a day later by Asiatic half-wits with submachine guns and police dogs.

She spent three years in the prison, she said, and then she was sent to Siberia as an interpreter and file clerk in a huge prisoner-of-war camp. Eight thousand S.S. men were still held captive there, though the war had been over for years.

'I was there for eight years,' she said, 'mercifully hypnotized by simple routines. We kept beautiful records of all those prisoners, of all those meaningless lives behind barbed-wire. Those S.S. men, once so young and lean and vicious, were growing gray and soft and self-pitying — ' she said, 'husbands without wives, fathers without children, shopkeepers without shops, tradesmen without trades.'

Thinking about the subdued S.S. men, Helga asked herself the riddle of the Sphinx. 'What creature walks in the morning on four feet, at noon on two, at evening on three?'

'Man,' said Helga, huskily.

She told of being repatriated — repatriated after a fashion. She was returned not to Berlin but to Dresden, in East Germany. She was put to work in a cigarette factory, which she described in oppressive detail.

One day she ran away to East Berlin, then crossed to West Berlin. Days after that she was winging to me.

'Who paid your way?' I said.

'Admirers of yours,' said Jones warmly. 'Don't feel you have to thank them. They feel they owe you a debt of gratitude they'll never be able to repay.'

'For what?' I said.

'For having the courage to tell the truth during the war,' said Jones, 'when everybody else was telling lies.'

Vice-Bundesfuehrer Krapptauer, on his own initiative, went down all those stairs to get my Helga's luggage from Jones' limousine. The reunion of Helga and me had made him feel young and courtly again.

Nobody knew what he was up to until he reappeared in my doorway with a suitcase in either hand. Jones and Keeley were filled with consternation, because of Krapptauer's syncopated, leaky old heart

The Vice-Bundesfuehrer was the color of tomato juice.

'You fool,' said Jones.

'No, no I'm perfectly fine,' said Krapptauer, smiling.

'Why didn't you let Robert do it?' said Jones. Robert was his chauffeur, sitting in the limousine below. Robert was a colored man, seventy-three years old. Robert was Robert Sterling Wilson, erstwhile jailbird, Japanese agent, and 'Black Fuehrer of Harlem'

'You should have let Robert bring those things up ' said Jones. 'My gosh — you mustn't risk your life like that.'

'It is an honor to risk my life,' said Krapptauer, 'for the wife of a man who served Adolf Hitler as well as Howard Campbell did.'

And he dropped dead.

We tried to revive him, but he was stone dead, slack-mouthed, obscenely gaga.

I ran down to the second floor, where Dr. Abraham Epstein lived with his mother. The doctor was home. Dr. Epstein treated poor old Krapptauer pretty roughly, forced him to demonstrate for us all how really dead he was.

Epstein was Jewish, and I thought Jones or Keeley might say something to him about the way he was punching and poking Krapptauer. But the two antique Fascists were childishly respectful and dependent

About the only thing Jones said to Epstein, after Epstein had pronounced Krapptauer very dead, was, 'I happen to be a dentist, Doctor.'

'That so?' said Epstein. He wasn't much interested. He went back to his own apartment to call an ambulance.

Jones covered Krapptauer with one of my war-surplus blankets. 'Just when things were finally beginning to look up for him again,' he said of the death,

'In what way?' I said.

'He was beginning to get a little organization going again,' said Jones. 'Not a big thing — but loyal, dependable, devoted.'

'What was it called?' I said.

'The Iron Guard of the White Sons of the American Constitution,' said Jones. 'He had a real talent for welding perfectly ordinary youths into a disciplined, determined force.' Jones shook his head sadly. 'He was getting such a fine response from the young people.'

'He loved young people, and young people loved him,' said Father Keeley. He was still weeping.

'That's the epitaph that should be carved on his tombstone,' said Jones. 'He used to work with youngsters in my cellar. You should see how he fixed it up for them — just ordinary kids from all walks of life.'