Kurt Vonnegut - Mother Night

My call on the Noths had nothing to do with cunning. I really wanted to say goodbye to them, to have them say goodbye to me. I cared about them — pitied them, loved them in a way.

The iron gates of the great white house were open. Werner Noth himself was standing beside them, his hands on his hips. He was watching a work gang of Polish and Russian slave women. The women were lugging trunks and furniture from the house to three waiting horse-drawn wagons.

The wagon drivers were small, gold Mongols of some sort, early prizes of the Russian campaign.

The supervisor of the women was a fat, middle-aged Dutchman in a shabby business suit

Guarding the women was a tall and ancient man with a single-shot rifle from the Franco-Prussian War.

On the old guard's ruined breast dangled the Iron Cross.

A woman slave shuffled out of the house carrying a luminously beautiful blue vase. She was shod in wooden clogs hinged with canvas. She was a nameless, ageless, sexless ragbag. Her eyes were like oysters. Her nose was frostbitten, mottled white and cherry-red.

She seemed in danger of dropping the vase, of withdrawing so deeply into herself as simply to let the vase slip away.

My father-in-law saw the vase about to drop, and he went off like a burglar alarm. He shrieked at God to have pity on him just once, to make sense just once, to show him just one other energetic and intelligent human being.

He snatched the vase from the dazed woman. Close to unashamed tears, he asked us all to adore the blue vase that laziness and stupidity had almost let slip from the world.

The shabby Dutchman, the straw boss, now went up to the woman and repeated to her, word for word and shriek for shriek, what my father-in-law had said. The antique soldier came along with him, to represent the force that would be used on the woman, if necessary.

What was finally done with her was curious. She wasn't hurt.

She was deprived of the honor of carrying any more of Noth's things.

She was made to stand to one side while others continued to be trusted with treasures. Her punishment was to be made to feel like a fool. She had been given her opportunity to participate in civilization, and she had muffed it.

'I've come to say goodbye,' I said to Noth.

'Goodbye,' he said.

'I'm going to the front,' I said.

'Right over that way,' he said, pointing to the East 'An easy walk from here. You can make it in a day, picking buttercups as you go.'

'It isn't very likely well see each other again, I guess,' I said.

'So?' he said.

I shrugged. 'So nothing,' I said.

'Exactly,' he said. 'Nothing and nothing and nothing.'

'May I ask where you're moving to?' I said.

'I am staying here,' he said. 'My wife and daughter are going to my brother's home outside of Cologne.'

'Is there anything I can do to help?' I said.

'Yes,' he said. 'You can shoot Resi's dog. It can't make the trip. I have no interest in it, will not be able to give it the care and companionship Resi has led it to expect. So shoot it, please.'

'Where is it?' I said.

'I think you'll find it in the music room with Resi,' he said. 'She knows its to be shot, You will have no trouble with her.'

'All right,' I said.

'That's quite a uniform,' he said.

'Thank you,' I said.

'Would it be rude of me to ask what it represents?' he said. I had never worn it in his presence.

I explained it to him, showed him the device on the hilt of my dagger. The device, silver on walnut, was an American eagle that clasped a swastika in its right claw and devoured a snake in its left claw. The snake was meant to represent international Jewish communism. There were thirteen stars around the head of the eagle, representing the thirteen original American colonies. I had made the original sketch of the device, and, since I don't draw very well, I had drawn six-pointed stars of David rather than five-pointed stars of the U.SA. The silversmith, while lavishly improving on my eagle, had reproduced my six-pointed stars exactly.

It was the stars that caught my father-in-law's fancy. 'These represent the thirteen Jews in Franklin Roosevelt's cabinet,' he said.

'That's a very funny idea,' I said.

'Everyone thinks the Germans have no sense of humor,' he said.

'Germany is the most misunderstood country in the world,' I said.

'You are one of the few outsiders who really understands us,' he said.

'I hope that's a compliment I deserve,' I said.

'It's a compliment you didn't come by very easily,' he said. 'You broke my heart when you married my daughter. I wanted a German soldier for a son-in-law.'

'Sorry,' I said.

'You made her happy,' he said.

'I hope so,' I said.

'That made me hate you more,' he said. 'Happiness has no place in war.'

'Sorry,' I said.

'Because I hated you so much,' he said, 'I studied you. I listened to everything you said. I never missed a broadcast.'

'I didn't know that,' I said.

'No one knows everything,' he said. 'Did you know,' he said, 'that until almost this very moment nothing would have delighted me more than to prove that you were a spy, to see you shot?'

'No,' I said.

'And do you know why I don't care now if you were a spy or not?' he said. 'You could tell me now that you were a spy, and we would go on talking calmly, just as we're talking now. I would let you wander off to wherever spies go when a war is over. You know why?' he said.

'No,' I said.

'Because you could never have served the enemy as well as you served us,' he said. 'I realized that almost all the ideas that I hold now, that make me unashamed of anything I may have felt or done as a Nazi, came not from Hitler, not from Goebbels, not from Himmler — but from you.' He took my hand. 'You alone kept me from concluding that Germany had gone insane.'

He turned away from me abruptly. He went to the oyster-eyed woman who had almost dropped the blue vase. She was standing against a wall where she had been ordered to stand, was numbly playing the punished dunce.

Werner Noth shook her a little, trying to arouse an atom of intelligence in her. He pointed to another woman who was carrying a hideous Chinese, carved-oak dog, carrying it as carefully as though it were a baby.

'You see?' Noth said to the dunce. He wasn't intentionally tormenting the dunce. He was trying to make her, in spite of her stupidity, a better-rounded, more useful human being.

'You see?' he said again, earnestly, helpfully, pleadingly. 'That's the way to handle precious things.'

I went into the music room of Werner Noth's emptying house and found little Resi and her dog.

Little Resi was ten years old then. She was curled in a wing-chair by a window. Her view was not of the ruins of Berlin but of the walled orchard, of the snowy lace that the treetops made.

There was no heat in the house. Resi was bundled up in a coat and scarf and thick wool stockings. A small suitcase was beside her. When the wagon train outside was ready to move, she would be ready to board it.

She had taken off her mittens, laid them neatly on the arm of the chair. She had bared her hands in order to pet the dog in her lap. The dog was a dachshund that had, on a wartime diet, lost all its hair and been all but immobilized by dropsical fat

The dog looked like some early amphibian meant to waddle in ooze. While Resi caressed it, its brown eyes bugged with the blindness of ecstasy. Every bit of its awareness followed like thimbles the fingertips that stroked its hide.

I did not know Resi well. She had chilled me once, fairly early in the war, by lispingly calling me an American spy. Since then, I had spent as little time as possible before her childish gaze. When I came into the music room I was startled to see how much she was coming to resemble my Helga.