Kurt Vonnegut - Mother Night

And he didn't know at first who I was, either.

It was dumb luck that brought us together. No conspiracy was involved at first. It was I who knocked on his door, invaded his privacy. If I hadn't carved that chess set, we never would have met.

Kraft and I'll call him that from now on, because that's how I think of him, had three or four locks on his front door.

I induced him to unlock them all by asking him if he played chess. There was dumb luck again. Nothing else would have made him open up.

People helping me with my research later, incidentally, tell me that the name of lona Potapov was a popular one in European chess tournaments in the early thirties. He actually beat the Grand Master Tartakover in Rotterdam in 1931.

When he opened up, I saw that he was a painter. There was an easel in the middle of his living room with a fresh canvas on it, and there were stunning paintings by him on every wall.

When I talk about Kraft, alias Potapov, I'm a lot more comfortable than when I talk about Wirtanen, alias God-knows-what. Wirtanen has left no more of a trail than an inchworm crossing a billiard table. Evidences of Kraft are everywhere. At this very moment, I'm told, Kraft's paintings are bringing as much as ten thousand dollars apiece in New York.

I have at hand a clipping from the New York Herald Tribune of March third, about two weeks ago, in which a critic says of Kraft as a painter:

Here at last is a capable and grateful heir to the fantastic inventiveness and experimentation in painting during the past hundred years. Aristotle is said to have been the last man to understand the whole of his culture. George Kraft is surely the first man to understand the whole of modern art, to understand it in his sinews and bones.

With incredible grace and firmness he combines the visions of a score of warring schools of painting, past and present. He thrills and humbles us with harmony, seems to say to us, 'If you want another Renaissance, this is what the paintings expressing its spirit will took like.'

George Kraft, alias Iona Potapov, is being permitted to continue his remarkable art career in the Federal Penitentiary at Fort Leavenworth. We all might well reflect, along, no doubt, with Kraft — Potapov himself, on how summarily his career would have been crushed in a prison in his native Russia.

Well — when Kraft opened his door for me, I knew his paintings were good. I didn't know they were that good. I suspect that the review above was written by a pansy full of brandy Alexanders.

'I didn't know I had a painter living underneath me,' 1 said to Kraft.

'Maybe you don't have one,' he said.

'Marvelous paintings!' I said. 'Where do you exhibit?'

'I never have,' he said.

'You'd make a fortune if you did,' I said.

'You're nice to say so,' he said, 'but I started painting too late.' He then told me what was supposed to be the story of his life, none of it true.

He said he was a widower from Indianapolis. As a young man, he said, he'd wanted to be an artist, but he'd gone into business instead — the paint and wallpaper business.

'My wife died two years ago,' he said, and he managed to look a little moist around the eyes. He had a wife, all right, but not underground in Indianapolis.

He had a very live wife named Tanya in Borisoglebsk. He hadn't seen her for twenty-five years.

'When she died,' he said to me, 'I found my spirit wanted to choose between only two things — suicide, or the dreams I'd had in my youth. I am an old fool who borrowed the dreams of a young fool. I bought myself some canvas and paint, and I came to Greenwich Village.'

'No children?' I said.

'None,' he said sadly. He actually had three children and nine grandchildren. His oldest son, Ilya, is a famous rocket expert.

'The only relative I've got in this world is art — ' he said, 'and I'm the poorest relative art ever had.' He didn't mean he was impoverished. He meant he was a bad painter. He had plenty of money, he told me. He'd sold his business in Indianapolis, he said, for a very good price.

'Chess — ' he said, 'you said something about Chess?'

I had the chessmen I'd whittled, in a shoebox. I showed them to him. 'I just made these,' I said, 'and now I've got a terrific yen to play with them.'

'Pride yourself on your game, do you?' he said.

I haven't played for a good while,' I said.

Almost all the chess I'd played had been with Werner Noth, my father-in-law, the Chief of Police of Berlin. I used to beat Noth pretty consistently — on Sunday afternoons when my Helga and I went calling on him. The only tournament I ever played in was an intramural thing in the German Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda. I finished eleventh in a field of sixty-five.

In ping-pong I did a good deal better. I was ping-pong champion of the Ministry for four years running, singles and doubles. My doubles partner was Heinz Schildknecht, an expert at propagandizing Australians and New Zealanders. One time Heinz and I took on a doubles team composed of Reichsleiter Goebbels and Oberdienstleiter Karl Hederich. We sat them down 21-2, 21-1, 21-0.

History often goes hand-in-hand with sports.

Kraft had a chessboard. We set up my men on it, and we began to play.

And the thick, bristly, olive-drab cocoon I had built for myself was frayed a little, was weakened enough to let some pale light in.

I enjoyed the game, was able to come up with enough intuitively interesting moves to give my new friend entertainment while he beat me.

After that, Kraft and I played at least three games a day, every day for a year. And we built up between ourselves a pathetic sort of domesticity that we both felt need of. We began tasting our food again, making little discoveries in grocery stores, bringing them home to share. When strawberries came in season, I remember, Kraft and I whooped it up as though Jesus had returned.

One particularly touching thing between us was the matter of wines. Kraft knew a lot more than I did about wines, and he often brought home cobwebby treasures to go with a meal. But, even though Kraft always had a filled glass before him when we sat down to eat, the wine was all for me. Kraft was an alcoholic. He could not take so much as a sip of wine without starting on a bender that could last a month.

That much of what he told me about himself was true. He was a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, had been for sixteen years. While he used AA. meetings as spy drops, his appetite for what the meetings offered spiritually was real. He once told me, in all sincerity, that the greatest contribution America had made to the world, a contribution that would be remembered for thousands of years, was the invention of A.A.

It was typical of his schizophrenia as a spy that he would use an institution he so admired for purposes of espionage.

It was typical of his schizophrenia as a spy that he should also be a true friend of mine, and that he should eventually think of a way to use me cruelly in advancing the Russian cause.

For a little while I lied to Kraft about who I was and what I'd done. But the friendship deepened so much, so fast, that I soon told him everything.

'It's so unjust!' he said. 'It makes me ashamed to be an American! Why can't the Government step forward and say, "Here! This man you've been spitting on is a hero!''' He was indignant, and, for all I know, he was sincere in his indignation.

'Nobody spits on me,' I said. 'Nobody even knows I'm alive any more.'

He was eager to see my plays. When I told him I didn't have copies of any of them, he made me tell him about them, scene by scene — had me performing them for him.

He said he thought they were marvelous. Maybe he was sincere. I don't know. My plays seemed rapid to me, but it's possible he liked them.