Kurt Vonnegut - Mother Night

'Who did that?' said Resi.

'Who did what?' I said.

'That,' she said, pointing to my namecard on the mailbox. Somebody had drawn a swastika after my name in blue ink.

'It's something quite new,' I said uneasily. 'Maybe we'd better not go upstairs. Maybe whoever did it is up there.'

'I don't understand,' she said.

'You picked a miserable time to come to me, Resi,' I said. 'I had a cozy little burrow, where you and I might have been quite content — '

'Burrow?' she said.

'A hole in the ground, made secret and snug,' I said. 'But, God! — ' I said in anguish, 'just when you were coming to me, something laid my den wide open!' I told her how my notoriety had been renewed. 'Now the carnivores,' I said, 'scenting a freshly opened den, are closing in.'

'Go to another country,' she said.

'What other country?' I said.

'Any country you like,' she said. 'You have the money to go anywhere you want'

'Anywhere I want — ' I said.

And then a bald, bristly fat man carrying a shopping bag came in. He shouldered Resi and me away from the mailboxes with a hoarse, unapologetic bully's apology.

''Scuse me,' he said. He read the names on the mailboxes like a first-grader, putting a finger under each name, studying each name for a long, long time.

'Campbell!' he said at last, with massive satisfaction. 'Howard W. Campbell.' He turned to me accusingly. 'You know him?' he said.

'No,' I said.

'No,' he said, becoming radiant with malevolence. 'You look just like him.' He took a copy of the Daily News from the shopping bag, opened it to an inside page, handed it to Resi. 'Now, don't that look a lot like the gentleman you're with?' he said to her.

'Let me see,' I said. I took the paper from Resi's slack fingers, saw the picture of myself and Lieutenant O'Hare, standing before the gallows at Ohrdruf so long ago.

The story underneath the picture said that the government of Israel had located me after a fifteen-year search. That government was now requesting that the United States release me to Israel for trial What did they want to try me for? Complicity in the murder of six million Jews.

The man hit me right through the newspaper before I could comment

Down I went banging my head on an ash can.

The man stood over me. 'Before the Jews put you in a cage in a zoo or whatever they're gonna do to you,' he said, 'I'd just like to play a little with you myself.'

I shook my head, trying to clear it

'Felt that one, did you?' he said.

'Yes,' I said.

'That one was for Private Irving Buchanon,' he said.

'Is that who you are?' I said.

'Buchanon is dead,' he said. 'He was the best friend I ever had. Five miles in from Omaha Beach, the Germans cut his nuts off and hung him from a telephone pole.'

He kicked me in the ribs, holding Resi off with one hand. That's for Ansel Brewer,' he said, 'run over by a Tiger tank at Aachen.'

He kicked me again. 'That's for Eddie McCarty, cut in two by a burp gun in the Ardennes,' he said. 'Eddie was gonna be a doctor.'

He drew back his big foot to kick me in the head. 'And this one — ' he said, and that's the last I heard. The kick was for somebody else who'd been killed in war. It knocked me cold.

Resi told me later what the last things the man said were, and what the present for me was in the shopping bag.

'I'm one guy who hasn't forgot that war,' he said to me, though I could not hear him. 'Everybody else has forgot it, as near as I can tell — but not me.

'I brought you this,' he said, 'so you could save everybody a lot of trouble.'

And he left.

Resi put (he noose in the ash can, where it was found the next morning by a garbage man named Lazlo Szombathy. Szombathy actually hanged himself with it — but that is another story.

As for my own story:

I regained consciousness on a ruptured studio couch in a damp, overheated room that was hung with mildewed Nazi banners. There was a cardboard fireplace, a dime-store's idea of how to have a merry Christmas. In it were cardboard birch logs, a green electric light and cellophane tongues of eternal fire.

Over this fireplace was a chromo of Adolf Hitler. It was swathed in black silk.

I myself was stripped to my olive-drab underwear, covered with a bedspread of simulated leopard skin. I groaned and sat up, skyrockets going off in my skull. I looked down at the leopard skin and mumbled something.

'What did you say, darling?' said Resi. She was sitting right beside the cot, though I hadn't seen her until she spoke.

'Don't tell me — ' I said, drawing the leopard skin closer about me, 'I've joined the Hottentots.'

My research assistants here, lively, keen young people, have provided me with a photostat of a story in the New York Times, telling of the death of Lazlo Szombathy, the man who killed himself with the rope intended for me.

So I didn't dream that, either.

Szombathy did the big trick the night after I was beaten up.

He had come to this country after being a Freedom Fighter against the Russians in Hungary, according to the Times. He was a fratricide, according to the Times, having shot his brother Miklos, Second Minister of Education in Hungary.

Before he gave himself the big sleep, Szombathy wrote a note and pinned it to his trouser leg. There was nothing in the note about his having killed his brother.

His complaint was that he had been a respected veterinarian in Hungary, but that he was not permitted to practice in America. He had bitter things to say about freedom in America. He thought it was illusory.

In a final fandango of paranoia and masochism, Szombathy closed his note with a hint that he knew how to cure cancer. American doctors laughed at him, he said, whenever he tried to tell them how.

So much for Szombathy.

As for the room where I awakened after my beating: it was the cellar that had been furnished for the Iron Guard of the White Sons of the American Constitution by the late August Krapptauer, the cellar of Dr. Lionel J. D. Jones, D.D.S., D.D. Somewhere upstairs a printing press was running, turning out copies of The White Christian Minuteman.

From some other chamber in the cellar, partly soundproofed, came the idiotically monotonous banging of target practice.

After my beating, I had been given first aid by young Dr. Abraham Epstein, the doctor in my building who had pronounced Krapptauer dead. From Epstein's apartment, Resi had called Dr. Jones for help and advice.

'Why Jones?' I said.

'He was the only person in this country I knew I could trust,' said Resi. 'He was the only person I knew for sure was on your side.'

'What is life without friends?' I said.

I have no recollection of it, but Resi tells me that I regained consciousness in Epstein's apartment. Jones picked Resi and me up in his limousine, took me to a hospital, where I was X-rayed. I had three broken ribs taped up. After that I was taken to Jones' cellar and bedded down.

'Why here?' I said.

'It's safe,' said ResL

'From what?' I said.

'The Jews,' she said.

The Black Fuehrer of Harlem, Jones' chauffeur, now came in with a tray of eggs, toast, and scalding coffee. He set it down on a table for me.

'Headache?' he asked me.

'Yes,' I said.

'Take a aspirin,' he said.

'Thank you for the advice,' I said.

'Most things in this world don't work — ' he said, 'but aspirin do.'

'The — the Republic of Israel really wants me — ' I said to Resi in groping disbelief, 'to — to try me for — for what the paper said?'

'Dr. Jones says the American Government won't let you go' said Resi, 'but that the Jews will send men to kidnap you, the way they did Adolf Eichmann.'

'Such a piffling prisoner — ' I murmured.