Kurt Vonnegut - Mother Night

'Ain't like just having a Jew here and a Jew there after you,' said the Black Fuehrer.

'What?' I said.

'I mean,' he said, 'they got a country now. I mean, they got Jewish battleships, they got Jewish airplanes, they got Jewish tanks. They got Jewish everything out after you but a Jewish hydrogen bomb.'

'Who in God's name is doing that shooting?' I said. 'Can't he stop until my head feels a little better?'

'That's your friend,' said Resi.

'Dr. Jones?' I said.

'George Kraft,' she said.

'Kraft?' I said. 'What's he doing here?'

'He's coming with us,' said Resi.

'To where?' I said.

'It's all been decided,' said Resi. 'Everybody agrees, darling, the best thing is for us to get out of the country. Dr. Jones has made arrangements.'

'What sort of arrangements?' I said.

'He has a friend with an airplane. As soon as you're well enough, darling, we get on the plane, fly to some divine place where you aren't known, and well start life all over again.'

I went to see George Kraft, there in Jones basement. I found him standing at the head of a long corridor, the far end of which was packed with sandbags. Pinned to the sandbags was a target in the shape of a man.

The target was a caricature of a cigar-smoking Jew. The Jew was standing on broken crosses and little naked women. In one hand the Jew held a bag of money labeled International Banking. In the other hand he held a Russian flag. From the pockets of his suit, little fathers, mothers, and children in scale with the naked women under his feet, cried out for mercy.

All these details were not evident from the far end of the shooting gallery, but it wasn't necessary for me to approach the target in order to know about them,

I had drawn the target in about 1941.

Millions of copies of the target were run off in Germany. It had so delighted my superiors that I was given a bonus of a ten-pound ham, thirty gallons of gasoline, and a week's all-expenses-paid vacation for my wife and myself at the Schreiberhaus in Riesengebirge.

I must admit that this target represents an excess of zeal, since I was not working as a graphic artist for the Nazis. I offer it in evidence against myself. I presume my authorship of it is news even to the Haifa Institute for the Documentation of War Criminals. I submit, however, that I drew the monster in order to establish myself even more solidly as a Nazi. I overdrew it, with an effect that would have been ludicrous anywhere but in Germany or Jones basement, and I drew it far more amateurishly than I can really draw.

It succeeded, nonetheless.

I was flabbergasted by its success. The Hitler Youth and S.S. recruits fired at almost nothing else, and I even got a letter of thanks for the targets from Heinrich Himmler.

'It has improved my marksmanship a hundred per cent,' he wrote. 'What pure Aryan can look at that wonderful target,' he said, 'and not shoot to kill?'

Watching Kraft pop away at that target, I understood its popularity for the first time. The amateurishness of it made it look like something drawn on the wall of a public lavatory; it recalled the stink, diseased twilight, humid resonance, and vile privacy of a stall in a public lavatory — echoed exactly the soul's condition in a man at war.

I had drawn better than I knew.

Kraft, oblivious to me in my leopard skin, fired again. He was using a Luger as big as a siege howitzer. It was chambered and bored for mere twenty-two's however, making anti-climactic, peewee bangs. Kraft fired again, and a sandbag two feet to the left of the target's head bled sand.

'Try opening your eyes the next time you fire,' I said.

'Oh' he said, putting the pistol down, 'you're up and around.'

'Yes,' I said.

'Too bad what happened,' he said.

'I thought so,' I said.

'Maybe it's for the best, though,' he said. 'Maybe well all wind up thanking God it happened.'

'How so?' I said.

'It's jarred us out of our ruts,' he said.

'That's for certain,' I said.

'When you get out of this country with your girl, get yourself new surroundings, a new identity, you'll start writing again,' he said, 'and you'll write ten times better than you ever did before. Think of the maturity you'll be bringing to your writing!'

'My head aches too much just now — ' I said.

'It'll stop aching soon,' he said. 'It isn't broken and it's filled with a heartbreakingly clear understanding of the self and the world.'

'Um,' I said.

'And I'm going to be a better painter for the change, too,' he said. 'I've never seen the tropics before — that brutal glut of color, that visible, audible heat — '

'What's this about the tropics?' I said.

'I thought that's where we'd go,' he said. 'That's where Resi wants to go, too.'

'You're coming, too?' I said.

'Do you mind?' he said.

'People have certainly been active while I slept,' I said.

'Was that wrong of us?' said Kraft. 'Did we plan anything that would be bad for you?'

'George — ' I said, 'why should you throw in your lot with us? Why should you come down into this cellar with the black beetles, too? You have no enemies. Stay with us, George, and you'll deserve every enemy I have.'

He put his hand on my shoulder, looked deep into my eyes. 'Howard — ' he said, 'when my wife died, I had no allegiance to anything on earth. I, too, was a meaningless fragment of a nation of two.

'And then I discovered something I had never known before — what a true friend was,' he said. 'I throw my lot in with you gladly, friend. Nothing else interests me. Nothing else attracts me in the least. With your permission, my paints and I would like nothing better than to go with you wherever Fate takes you next.'

'This — this is friendship indeed,' I said.

'I hope so,' he said.

I spent two days in that queer basement — as a meditative invalid.

My clothes had been ruined in the beating I'd taken. So, from the resources of Jones household, I was given other clothes. I was given a pair of shiny black trousers by Father Keeley, a silver-colored shirt by Dr. Jones, a shirt that had once been part of the uniform of a defunct American Fascist movement called, straightforwardly enough, 'The Silver Shirts.' And the Black Fuehrer gave me a tiny orange sports coat that made me look like an organ-grinder's monkey.

And Resi Noth and George Kraft kept me company tenderly — not only nursed me, but did my dreaming and planning for me as well. The big dream was to get out of America as soon as possible. Conversations, in which I took very little part, were a sort of roulette played with the names of warm places purported to be Edens: Acapulco ... Minorca ... Rhodes ... even the Vale of Kashmir, Zanzibar, and the Andaman Islands.

The news from the outside world was not such as to make my remaining in America attractive — or even conceivable. Father Keeley went out and bought newspapers several times a day, and, for supplementary enlightenment, we had the blatting of the radio.

The Republic of Israel stepped up its demands for me, encouraged by rumors that I wasn't an American citizen, that I was, in fact, a citizen of nowhere. And the Republic's demands were framed so as to be educational, too — teaching that a propagandist of my sort was as much a murderer as Heydrich, Eichmann, Himmler, or any of the gruesome rest.

That may be so. I had hoped, as a broadcaster, to be merely ludicrous, but this is a hard world to be ludicrous in, with so many human beings so reluctant to laugh, so incapable of thought, so eager to believe and snarl and hate. So many people wanted to believe me.

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.