Kurt Vonnegut: Mother Night

Make new friends,

But keep the old.

One is silver,

the other's gold.

My wife never knew I was a spy.

I would have lost nothing by telling her. My telling her wouldn't have made her love me less. My telling her wouldn't have put me in any danger. It would simply have made my heavenly Helga's world, which was already something to make The Book of Revelation seem pedestrian.

The war was enough without that.

My Helga believed that I meant the nutty things I said on the radio, said at parties. We were always going to parties.

We were a very popular couple, gay and patriotic. People used to tell us that we cheered them up, made them want to go on. And Helga didn't go through the war simply looking decorative, either. She entertained the troops, often within the sound of enemy guns.

Enemy guns? Somebody's guns, anyway.

That was how I toast her. She was entertaining troops in the Crimea, and the Russians took the Crimea back. My Helga was presumed dead.

After the war, I paid a good deal of my money to a private detective agency in West Berlin to trace the wispiest word of her. Results: zero. My standing offer to the agency, unclaimed, was a prize of ten thousand dollars for clear proof that my Helga was either alive or dead.

Hi ho.

My Helga believed I meant the things I said about the races of man and the machines of history, and I was grateful No matter what I was really, no matter what I really meant, uncritical love was what I needed — and my Helga was the angel who gave it to me.

Copiously.

No young person on earth is so excellent in all respects as to need no uncritical love. Good Lord — as youngsters play their parts in political tragedies with casts of billions, uncritical love is the only real treasure they can look for.

Das Reich der Zwei, the nation of two my Helga and I had its territory, the territory we defended so jealously, didn't go much beyond the bounds of our great double bed.

Flat, tufted, springy little country, with my Helga and me for mountains.

And, with nothing in my life making sense but love, what a student of geography I was What a map I could draw for a tourist a micron high, a sub microscopic Wanderv?gel bicycling between a mole and a curly golden hair on either side of my Helga's belly button. If this image is in bad taste, God help me. Everybody is supposed to play games for mental health. I have simply described the game, an adult interpretation of 'This-Little-Piggy' that was ours.

Oh, how we clung, my Helga and I — how mindlessly we clung!

We didn't listen to each other's words. We heard only the melodies in our voices. The things we listened for carried no more intelligence than the purrs and growls of big cats.

If we had listened for more, had thought about what we heard, what a nauseated couple we would have been, Away from the sovereign territory of our nation of two, we talked like the patriotic lunatics all around us.

But it did not count.

Only one thing counted —

The nation of two.

And when that nation ceased to be, I became what I am today and what I always will be, a stateless person.

I can't say I wasn't warned. The man who recruited me that spring day in the Tiergarden so long ago now — that man told my fortune pretty well.

'To do your job right,' my Blue Fairy Godmother told me, 'you'll have to commit high treason, have to serve the enemy well. You won't ever be forgiven for that, because there isn't any legal device by which you can be forgiven.

The most that will be done for you,' he said, 'is that your neck will be saved. But there will be no magic time when you will be cleared, when America will call you out of biding with a cheerful: Olly-olly-ox-in-free.'

My mother and father died. Some say they died of broken hearts. They died in their middle sixties, at any rate, when hearts break easily.

They did not live to see the end of the war, nor did they ever see their beamish boy again. They did not disinherit me, though they must have been bitterly tempted to do so. They bequeathed to Howard W. Campbell, Jr., the notorious anti-Semite, turncoat and radio star, stocks, real estate, cash and personal property which were, in 1945, at the time of probate, worth forty-eight thousand dollars.

That boodle, through growth and inflation, has come to be worth four times that much now, giving me an unearned income of seven thousand dollars a year.

Say what you like about me, I have never touched my principal.

During my postwar years as an odd duck and recluse in Greenwich Village, I lived on about four dollars a day, rent included, and I even had a television set.

My new furnishings were all war surplus, like myself — a narrow steel cot, olive drab blankets with 'U.S.A.' on them, folding canvas chairs, mess kits to cook in and eat out of. Even my library was largely war surplus, coming as it did from recreation kits intended for troops overseas.

And, since phonograph records came in these unused kits, too, I got myself a war-surplus, weather-proofed, portable phonograph, guaranteed to play in any climate from the Bering Straits to the Arafura Sea. By buying the recreation kits, each one a sealed pig-in-a-poke, I came into possession of twenty-six recordings of Bing Crosby's 'White Christmas.'

My overcoat, my raincoat, my jacket, my socks and my underwear were war surplus, too.

By buying a war-surplus first-aid kit for a dollar, I also came into possession of a quantity of morphine. The buzzards in the war-surplus business were so glutted with carrion as to have overlooked it

I was tempted to take the morphine, reflecting that, if it made me feel happy, I would, after all, have enough money to support the habit but then I understood that I was already drugged.

I was feeling no pain.

My narcotic was what had got me through the war; it was an ability to let my emotions be stirred by only one thing — my love for Helga. This concentration of my emotions on so small an area had begun as a young lover's happy illusion, had developed into a device to keep me from going insane during the war, and had finally become the permanent axis about which my thoughts revolved.

And so, with my Helga presumed dead, I became a death-worshipper, as content as any narrow-minded religious nut anywhere. Always alone, I drank toasts to her, said good morning to her, said good night to her, played music for her, and didn't give a damn for one thing else.

And then one day in 1958, after thirteen years of living like that, I bought a war-surplus wood-carving set. It was surplus not from the Second World War but from the Korean war. It cost me three dollars.

When I got it home, I started to carve up my broom handle to no particular purpose. And it suddenly occurred to me to make a chess set.

I speak of suddenness here, because I was startled to find myself with an enthusiasm. I was so enthusiastic that I carved for twelve hours straight, sank sharp tools into the palm of my left hand a dozen times, and still would not stop. I was an elated, gory mess when I was finished. I had a handsome set of chessmen to show for my labors.

And yet another strange impulse came upon me.

I felt compelled to show somebody, somebody still among the living, the marvelous thing I had made.

So, made boisterous by both creativity and drink, I went downstairs and banged on the door of my neighbor, not even knowing who my neighbor was.

My neighbor was a foxy old man named George Kraft. That was only one of his names. The real name of this old man was Colonel Iona Potapov. This antique sonofabitch was a Russian agent, had been operating continuously in America since 1935.

I didn't know that.