Kurt Vonnegut: Mother Night

And then she touched off the mixture with a match. The flame was almost pure yellow, a sodium flame, and it made her look like a corpse to me, made me look like a corpse to her.

'There — ' she said, 'that's what well look like when we're dead.'

This queer demonstration not only scared me; it scared her, too. My mother scared herself with her own queerness, and from that moment on I ceased to be her companion. From that moment on she hardly spoke to me — cut me dead, I'm sure, out of fear of doing or saying something even crazier.

All that happened in Schenectady, before I was ten.

In 1923, when I was eleven, my father was assigned to the General Electric Office in Berlin, Germany. From then on, my education, my friends, and my principal language were German.

I eventually became a playwright in the German language, and I took a German wife, the actress Helga Noth. Helga Noth was the elder of the two daughters of Werner Noth, the Chief of Police of Berlin.

My father and mother left Germany in 1939, when war came.

My wife and I stayed on.

I earned my keep until the war ended in 1945 as a writer and broadcaster of Nazi propaganda to the English-speaking world. I was the leading expert on American problems in the Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda.

When the war was ending, I was high on the list of war criminals, largely because my offenses were so obscenely public.

I was captured by one Lieutenant Bernard B. O'Hare of the American Third Army near Hersfeld on April 12, 1945. I was on a motorcycle, unarmed. While entitled to a uniform, a blue and gold one, I was not wearing it. I was in mufti, in a blue serge suit and a moth-eaten coat with a fur collar.

As it happened, the Third Army had overrun Ohrdruf, the first Nazi death camp the Americans were to see, two days before. I was taken there, was forced to look at it all — the lime pits, the gallows, the whipping posts — at the gutted and scabby, bug-eyed, spavined dead in heaps.

The idea was to show me the consequences of what I had done.

The Ohrdruf gallows were capable of hanging six at a time. When I saw them, there was a dead camp guard at the end of each rope.

And it was expected that I would hang soon, too.

I expected it myself, and I took an interest in the peace of the six guards at the ends of their ropes.

They had died fast.

My photograph was taken while I looked up at the gallows. Lieutenant O'Hare was standing behind me, lean as a young wolf, as full of hatred as a rattlesnake.

The picture was on the cover of Life, and came close to winning a Pulitzer Prize.

I did not hang.

I committed high treason, crimes against humanity, and crimes against my own conscience, and I got away with them until now.

I got away with them because I was an American agent all through the war. My broadcasts carried coded information out of Germany.

The code was a matter of mannerisms, pauses, emphases, coughs, seeming stumbles in certain key sentences. Persons I never saw gave me my instructions told me in which sentences of a broadcast the mannerisms were to appear. I do not know to this day what information went out through me. From the simplicity of most of my instructions, I gather that I was usually giving yes or no answers to questions that had been put to the spy apparatus. Occasionally, as during the build-up for the Normandy invasion, my instructions were more complicated, and my phrasing and diction sounded like the last stages of double pneumonia.

That was the extent of my usefulness to the Allied cause.

And that usefulness was what saved my neck.

I was provided with cover. I was never acknowledged as an American agent, but the treason case against me was sabotaged. I was freed on nonexistent technicalities about my citizenship, and I was helped to disappear.

I came to New York under an assumed name. I started a new life, in a manner of speaking, in my ratty attic overlooking the secret park.

I was left alone — so much alone that I was able to take back my own name, and almost nobody wondered if I was the Howard W. Campbell, Jr.

I would occasionally find my name in a newspaper or magazine — never as an important person, but as one name in a long list of names of war criminals who had disappeared. There were rumors of me in Iran, Argentina, Ireland... . Israeli agents were said to be looking high and low for me.

Be that as it may, no agent ever knocked on my door. Nobody knocked on my door, even though the name on my mailbox was plain for anybody to see: Howard W. Campbell, Jr.

Until the very end of my purgatory in Greenwich Village, the closest I came to being detected in my infamy was when I went to a Jewish doctor in the same building as my attic. I had an infected thumb.

The doctor's name was Abraham Epstein. He lived with his mother on the second floor. They had just moved in.

When I gave him my name, it meant nothing to him, but it did mean something to his mother. Epstein was young, fresh out of medical school. His mother was old — heavy, slow, deeply lined, sadly, bitterly watchful

'That is a very famous name,' she said. 'You must know that.'

'Pardon me?' I said.

'You do not know about anybody else named Howard W. Campbell, Jr.?' she said.

'I suppose there are some others,' I said.

'How old are you?' she said.

I told her.

'Then you are old enough to remember the war,' she said.

'Forget the war,' her son said to her, affectionately but sharply. He was bandaging my thumb.

'And you never heard Howard W. Campbell, Jr., broadcasting from Berlin?' she said to me.

'I do remember now — yes,' I said. 'I'd forgotten. That was a long time ago. I never listened to him, but I remember he was in the news. Those things fade.'

'They should fade,' said young Dr. Epstein. 'They belong to a period of insanity that should be forgotten as quickly as possible.'

'Auschwitz,' said his mother.

'Forget Auschwitz,' said Dr. Epstein.

'Do you know what Auschwitz was?' his mother asked me.

'Yes,' I said.

'That was where I spent my young womanhood,' she said. 'And that was where my son the doctor here spent his childhood.'

'I never think about it,' said Dr. Epstein abruptly. 'There — that thumb should be all right in a couple of days. Keep it warm, keep it dry.' And he hustled me toward the door.

'Sprechen Sie Deutseh?' his mother called after me as I was leaving.

'Pardon me?' I said.

'I asked if you spoke German,' she said.

'Oh,' I said. 'No — I'm afraid not,' I said. I experimented shyly with the language. 'Nein' I said. 'That's no, isn't it?'

'Very good,' she said.

'Auf wiedersehen,' I said. 'That's goodbye, isn't it?'

'Until we meet again,' she said.

'Oh,' I said. 'Well, — auf wiedersehen.'

'Auf wiedersehen,' she said.

I was recruited as an American agent in 1938, three years before America got into the war. I was recruited one spring day in the Tier garden in Berlin.

I had been married to Helga Noth a month.

I was twenty-six.

I was a fairly successful playwright, writing in the language in which I write best, German. I had one play, 'The Goblet,' running in both Dresden and Berlin. Another play of mine, 'The Snow Rose.' was then in production in Berlin. I had just finished a third one, 'Seventy Times Seven.' All three plays were medieval romances, about as political as chocolate ?clairs.

I was sitting alone on a park bench in the sunshine that day, thinking of a fourth play that was beginning to write itself in my mind. It gave itself a title, which was 'Das Reich der Zwei' — 'Nation of Two.'