Kurt Vonnegut - Mother Night

While the column of air enclosed by the stairs had carried in the past a melancholy freight of coal dust and cooking smells and the sweat of plumbing, that air was cold and sharp now. Every window in my attic had been broken. All warm gases had been whisked up the stairwell and out my windows, as though up a whistling flue.

The air was clean.

The feeling of a stale old building suddenly laid open, an infected atmosphere lanced, made clean, was familiar to me. I had felt it often enough in Berlin. Helga and I were bombed out twice. Both times there was a staircase left to climb.

One time we climbed the stairs to a roofless and windowless home, a home otherwise magically undisturbed. Another time, we climbed the stairs to cold thin air, two floors below where home had been.

Both moments at those splintered stairheads under the open sky were exquisite.

The exquisiteness went on for only a short time, naturally, for, like any human family, we loved our nests and needed them. But, for a minute or two, anyway, Helga and I felt like Noah and his wife on Mount Ararat

There is no better feeling than that

And then the air-raid sirens blew again, and we realized that we were ordinary people, without dove or covenant, and that the flood, far from being over, had scarcely begun.

I remember one time, when Helga and I went from the head of a splintered staircase in the sky down into a shelter deep in the ground, and the big bombs walked all around above. And they walked and they walked and they walked, and it seemed that they never would go away.

And the shelter was long and narrow, like a railroad car, and it was full.

And there was a man, a woman, and their three children on the bench facing Helga and me. And the woman started speaking to the ceiling, the bombs, the airplanes, the sky, and to God Almighty above all that.

She started softly, but she wasn't talking to anybody in the shelter itself.

'All right — ' she said, 'here we are. We're right down here. We hear you up there. We hear how angry you are.' The loudness of her voice jumped sharply.

'Dear God, how angry you are!' she cried.

Her husband — a haggard civilian with a patch over one eye, with the recognition button of the Nazi teachers union on his lapel — spoke to her warningly.

She did not hear him.

'What is it you want us to do?' she said to the ceiling and all that lay above. 'Whatever it is you want us to do,' she said, 'tell us, and well do it!'

A bomb crashed down close by, shook loose from the ceiling a snowfall of calcimine, brought the woman to her feet shrieking, and her husband with her.

'We surrender! We give up!' she yelled, and great relief and happiness spread over her face. 'You can stop now,' she yelled. She laughed. 'We quit! It's over!' She turned to tell the good news to her children.

Her husband knocked her cold.

That one-eyed teacher set her down on the bench, propped her against the wall. And then he went to the highest-ranking person present, a vice-admiral, as it happened. 'She's a woman ... hysterical... they get hysterical ... she doesn't mean it ... she has the Golden Order of Parenthood ...' he said to the vice-admiral.

The vice-admiral wasn't baffled or annoyed. He didn't feel miscast. With fine dignity, he gave the man absolution. It's all right,' he said. 'It's understandable. Don't worry.'

The teacher marveled at a system that could forgive weakness. 'Heil Hitler,' he said, bowing as he backed away.

'Heil Hitler,' said the vice-admiral.

The teacher now began to revive his wife. He had good news for her — that she was forgiven, that everyone understood.

And all the time the bombs walked and walked overhead, and the schoolteacher's three children did not bat an eye.

Nor, I thought, would they ever.

Nor, I thought, would I

Ever again.

The door of my ratty attic had been torn off its hinges, had disappeared entirely. In its place the janitor had tacked a pup-tent of mine, and over the pup-tent a zigzag of boards. He had written on the zigzag boards, in gold radiator paint that reflected the light of my match:

'Nobody and nothing inside.'

Be that as it may, somebody had since ripped a bottom corner of the canvas free of its tacks, giving my ratty attic a small, triangular flap-door, like a tepee.

I crawled in.

The light switch in my attic did not respond, either. What light there was came through the few unbroken window panes. The broken panes had been replaced with wads of paper, rags, clothes and bedding. Night winds whistled around these wads. What light there was, was blue.

I looked out through the back windows by the stove, looked down into the foreshortened enchantment of the little private park below, the little Eden formed of joined back yards. No one was playing in it now.

There was no one in it to cry, as I should have liked someone to cry:

'Olly-olly-ox-in-freeeeeee.'

There was a stir, a rustle in the shadows of my attic. I imagined it to be the rustle of a rat

I was wrong.

It was the rustle of Bernard B. O'Hare, the man who had captured me so long ago. It was the stir of my own personal Fury, the man who perceived his noblest aspect in his loathing and hounding of me.

I do not mean to slander him by associating the sound he made with the sound of a rat. I do not think of O'Hare as a rat, though his actions with regard to me had the same nagging irrelevance as the rats' scrabbling passions in my attic walls. I didn't really know O'Hare, and I didn't want to know him. The fact of his having put me under arrest in Germany was a fact of submicroscopic interest to me. He wasn't my nemesis. My game was up long before O'Hare took me into custody. To me, O'Hare was simply one more gatherer of wind-blown trash in the tracks of war,

O'Hare had a far more exciting view of what we were to each other. When drunk, at any rate, he thought of himself as St George and of me as the dragon.

When I first saw him in the shadows of my attic, he was seated on a galvanized bucket turned upside down. He was in the uniform of the American Legion. He had a quart of whisky with him. He had apparently been waiting for me a long time, drinking and smoking the while. He was drunk, but he had kept his uniform neat. His tie was straight His cap was on and set at the proper angle. The uniform was important to him, was supposed to be important to me, too.

'Know who I am?' he said. 'Yes,' I said.

'I'm not as young as I was once,' he said. 'Haven't changed much, have I?'

'No,' I said. I've described him earlier in this account as having looked like a lean young wolf. When I saw him in my attic, he looked unhealthy-pale and stringy and hot-eyed. He had become less wolf than coyote, I thought His post-war years had not been years of merry blooming.

'Expecting me?' he said.

'You told me I could,' I said. I had to be polite and careful with him, I supposed correctly that he meant to hurt me. The fact that he was in a very neat uniform, and that he was smaller and much lighter than me, suggested that he had a weapon on him somewhere — most likely a gun.

He now got off the bucket, showing me, in his ramshackle rising, how drunk he was. He knocked the bucket over in the process.

He grinned. 'Ever have nightmares about me, Campbell?' he said.

'Often,' I said. It was a lie, of course.

'Surprised I didn't bring anybody with me?' he said.

'Yes,' I said.

'Plenty of people wanted to come along,' he said. 'There was a whole bunch wanted to come down with me from Boston. And after I got to New York this afternoon, I went into a bar and got talking to some strangers, and they asked if they could come along, too.'

'Um,' I said.