Kurt Vonnegut - Mother Night

Dr. Goebbels had a dream of producing the pageant annually in Warsaw after the war, of letting the ruins of the ghetto stand forever as a setting for it. 'There would be Jews in the pageant?' I asked him.

'Certainly' he said, 'thousands of them.'

'May I ask, sir,' I said, 'where you expect to find any Jews after the war?'

He saw the humor in this. 'A very good question,' he said, chuckling. 'Well have to take that up with Hoess,' he said.

'With whom?' I said. I hadn't yet been to Warsaw, hadn't yet met with brother Hoess.

'He's running a little health resort for Jews in Poland,' said Goebbels. 'We must be sure to ask him to save us some.'

Can the writing of this ghastly pageant be added to the list of my war crimes? No, thank God. It never got much beyond having a working tide, which was: 'Last Full Measure.'

I am willing to admit, however, that I probably would have written it if there had been enough time, if my superiors had put enough pressure on me.

Actually, I am willing to admit almost anything.

About this pageant: it had one peculiar result it brought the Gettysburg Address of Abraham Lincoln to the attention of Goebbels, and then to the attention of Hitler himself.

Goebbels asked me where I'd gotten the working title, so I made a translation for him of the entire Gettysburg Address.

He read it, his lips moving all the time. 'You know,' he said to me, 'this is a very fine piece of propaganda. We are never as modern, as far ahead of the past as we like to think we are.'

'It's a very famous speech in my native land,' I said. 'Every schoolchild has to learn it by heart.'

'Do you miss America?' he said.

'I miss the mountains, the rivers, the broad plains, the forests,' I said. 'But I could never be happy with the Jews in charge of everything.'

'They will be taken care of in due time,' he said.

'I live for that day — my wife and I will Scar that day,' I said.

'How is your wife?' he said.

'Blooming, thank you,' I said.

'A beautiful woman,' he said.

'I'll tell her you said so,' I said. 'It will please her immensely.'

'About the speech by Abraham Lincoln' he said.

'Sir — ?' I said.

'There are phrases in here that might be used most impressively in dedications of German military cemeteries,' he said. 'I haven't been happy at all, frankly, with most of our funeral oratory. This seems to have the extra dimension I've been looking for. I'd like very much to send this to Hitler.'

'Whatever you say, sir,' I said.

'Lincoln wasn't a Jew, was he?' he said.

'I'm sure not,' I said.

It would be very embarrassing to me if he turned out to be one,' he said.

'I've never heard anyone suggest that he was,' I said.

'The name Abraham is very suspicious, to say the least,' said Goebbels.

'I'm sure his parents didn't realize that it was a Jewish name,' I said. 'They must have just liked the sound of it. They were simple frontier people. If they'd known the name was Jewish, I'm sure they would have called him something more American, like George or Stanley or Fred.'

Two weeks later, the Gettysburg Address came back from Hitler. There was a note from der Fuehrer himself stapled to the top of it. 'Some parts of this,' he wrote, 'almost made me weep. All northern peoples are one in their deep feelings for soldiers. It is perhaps our greatest bond.'

Strange I never dream of Hitler or Goebbels or Hoess or Goering or any of the other nightmare people of the world war numbered 'two.' I dream of women, instead.

I asked Bernard Mengel, the guard who watches over me while I sleep here in Jerusalem, if he had any clues as to what I dreamed about.

'Last night?' he said.

'Any night,' I said.

'Last night it was women,' he said. 'Two names you said over and over.'

'What were they?' I said.

'Helga was one,' he said.

'My wife,' I said.

'The other was Resi,' he said.

'My wife's younger sister,' I said. 'Just their names that's all.'

'You said "Goodbye,'' he said.

'Goodbye' I echoed. That certainly made sense, whether I dreamed or not Helga and Resi were both gone forever.

'And you talked about New York' said Mengel. 'You mumbled, and then you said "New York," and then you mumbled some more.'

That made sense, too, as do most of the things I dream. I lived in New York for a long time before coming to Israel.

'New York City must be Heaven,' said Mengel.

'It might well be for you,' I said. 'It was hell for me — or not Hell, something worse than Hell.'

'What could be worse than Hell?' he said.

'Purgatory,' I said.

About that purgatory of mine in New York City: I was in it for fifteen years.

I disappeared from Germany at the end of the Second World War. I reappeared, unrecognized, in Greenwich Village. There I rented a depressing attic apartment with rats squeaking and scrabbling in the walls. I continued to inhabit that attic until a month ago, when I was brought to Israel for trial.

There was one pleasant thing about my ratty attic: the back window of it overlooked a little private park, a little Eden formed by joined back yards. That park, that Eden, was walled off from the streets by houses on all sides.

It was big enough for children to play hide-and-seek in.

I often heard a cry from that little Eden, a child's cry that never failed to make me stop and listen. It was the sweetly mournful cry that meant a game of hide-and-seek was over, that those still hiding were to come out of hiding, that it was time to go home.

The cry was this: 'Olly-olly-ox-in-free.'

And I, hiding from many people who might want to hurt or kill me, often longed for someone to give that cry for me, to end my endless game of hide-and-seek with a sweet and mournful —

'Olly-olly-ox-in-free.'

I, Howard W. Campbell, Jr., was born in Schenectady, New York, on February 16, 1912. My father, who was raised in Tennessee, the son of a Baptist minister, was an engineer in the Service Engineering Department of the General Electric Company.

The mission of the Service Engineering Department was to install, maintain and repair General Electric heavy equipment sold anywhere in the world. My father, whose assignments were at first only in the United States, was rarely home. And his job demanded such varied forms of technical cleverness of him that he had scant time and imagination left over for anything else. The man was the job and the job was the man.

The only nontechnical book I ever saw him look at was a picture history of the First World War. It was a big book, with pictures a foot high and a foot-and-a-half wide. My father never seemed to tire of looking at the book, though he hadn't been in the war.

He never told me what the book meant to him, and I never asked him. All he ever said to me about it was that it wasn't for children, that I wasn't to look at it

So, of course, I looked at it every time I was left alone. There were pictures of men hung on barbed wire, mutilated women, bodies stacked like cord-wood — all the usual furniture of world wars.

My mother was the former Virginia Crocker, the daughter of a portrait photographer from Indianapolis. She was a housewife and an amateur cellist. She played cello with the Schenectady Symphony Orchestra, and she once had dreams of my playing the cello, too.

I failed as a cellist because I, like my father, am tone-deaf.

I had no brothers and sisters, and my father was seldom home. So I was for many years the principal companion of my mother. She was a beautiful, talented, morbid person. I think she was drunk most of the time. I remember a time when she filled a saucer with a mixture of rubbing alcohol and table salt. She put the saucer on the kitchen table, turned out all the lights, and had me sit facing her across the table.