Mother Night

by Kurt Vonnegut

  Kuhl und hell der Sonnenaufgang,

  leis und suss der Glocke Klang.

  Ein Magdlein hold, Krug in der Hand,

  sitzt an des tiefen Brunnens Rand.

  In English? Roughly:

  Cool, bright sunrise--

  Faint, sweet bell.

  Maiden with a pitcher

  By a cool, deep well.

  I read that poem out loud, and then I read another. I was and am a very bad poet. I do not set down these poems to be admired. The second poem I read was, I think, the next-to-the-last poem I ever wrote. It was dated 1937, and it had this title: "Gedanken uber unseren Abstand vom Zietgeschehen," or, roughly, "Reflections on Not Participating in Current Events."

  It went like this:

  Eine machtige Dampfwalze naht

  und schwartz der Sonne Pfad, rollt uber geduckte Menschen dahin, will keiner ihr entfliehn.

  Mein Lieb und ich schaun starren Blickes

  das Ratsel dieses Blutgeschickes.

  "Kommt mit herab," die Menschheit schreit, "Die Walze ist die Geschichte der Zeit!"

  Mein Lieb und ich gehn auf die Flucht, wo keine Dampfwalze uns sucht, und leben auf den Bergeshohen, getrennt vom schwarzen Zeitgeschehen.

  Sollen wir bleiben mit den andern zu sterben?

  Doch nein, wir zwei wollen nicht verderben!

  Nun ist's vorbei!--Wir sehn mit Erbleichen

  die Opfer der Walze, vefaulte Leichen.

  In English?

  I saw a huge steam roller,

  It blotted out the sun.

  The people all lay down, lay down; They did not try to run.

  My love and I, we looked amazed

  Upon the gory mystery.

  "Lie down, lie down!" the people cried.

  "The great machine is history!"

  My love and I, we ran away,

  The engine did not find us.

  We ran up to a mountain top,

  Left history far behind us.

  Perhaps we should have stayed and died, But somehow we don't think so.

  We went to see where history'd been, And my, the dead did stink so.

  "How is it," I said to Helga, "that you have all these things?"

  "When I went to West Berlin," she said, "I went to the theater to see if there was a theater left--if there was anyone I knew left--if anyone had any news of you." She didn't have to explain which theater she meant. She meant the little theater where my plays had been produced in Berlin, where Helga had been the star so often.

  "It got through most of the war, I know," I said. "It still exists?"

  "Yes," she said. "And when I asked about you, they knew nothing. And when I told them what you had once meant to that theater, someone remembered that there was a trunk in the loft with your name on it."

  *

  I passed my hand over the manuscripts. "And in it were these," I said. I remembered the trunk now, remembered when I'd closed it up at the start of the war, remembered when I'd thought of the trunk as a coffin for the young man I would never be again.

  "You already have copies of these things?" she said.

  "No," I said. "Not a scrap."

  "You don't write any more?" she said.

  "There hasn't been anything I've wanted to say," I said.

  "After all you've seen, all you've been through, darling?" she said.

  "It's all I've seen, all I've been through," I said, "that makes it damn nearly impossible for me to say anything. I've lost the knack of making sense. I speak gibberish to the civilized world, and it replies in kind."

  "There was another poem, your last poem, it must have been--" she said, "written in eyebrow pencil on the inside of the trunk lid."

  "Oh?" I said.

  She recited it for me:

  Hier liegt Howard Campbells Geist geborgen,

  frei von des Korpers qualenden Sorgen.

  Sein leerer Leib durchstreift die Welt,

  und kargen Lohn dafur erhalt.

  Triffst du die beiden getrennt allerwarts

  verbrenn den Leib, doch schone dies, sein Herz.

  In English?

  Here lies Howard Campbell's essence,

  Freed from his body's noisome nuisance.

  His body, empty, prowls the earth,

  Earning what a body's worth.

  If his body and his essence remain apart,

  Burn his body, but spare this, his heart.

  There was a knock on the door.

  It was George Kraft knocking on my door, and I let him in.

  He was very jangled because his corn-cob pipe had disappeared. It was the first time I'd seen him without the pipe, the first time he showed me how dependent he was on the pipe for peace. He was so full of anxiety that he whined.

  "Somebody took it or somebody knocked it down behind something or--I just can't imagine why anybody would have done anything with it," he whined. He expected Helga and me to share his anxiety, to think that the disappearance of the pipe was the most important event of the day.

  He was insufferable.

  "Why would anybody touch the pipe?" he said. "What good would it do anybody?" He was opening and shutting his hands, blinking often, sniffling, acting like a dope addict with withdrawal symptoms, though he had never smoked anything in the missing pipe. "Just tell me--" he said, "why would anybody take the pipe?"

  "I don't know, George," I said testily. "If we find it, we'll let you know."

  "Could I look around for myself?" he said. "Go ahead," I said.

  And he turned the place upside down, rattling pots and pans, banging cupboard doors, fishing back of the radiators with a poker, clangingly.

  The effect of this performance on Helga and me was to wed us--to urge us into an easy relationship that might otherwise have been a long while coming.

  We stood side by side, resenting the invasion of our nation of two.

  "It wasn't a very valuable pipe, was it?" I said.

  "Yes it was--to me," he said.

  "Buy another one," I said.

  "I want that one," he said. "I'm used to it. That's the pipe I want." He opened the breadbox, looked inside.

  "Maybe the ambulance attendants took it," I said.

  "Why would they do that?" he said.

  "Maybe they thought it belonged to the dead man," I said. "Maybe they put it in the dead man's pocket."

  "That's it!" cried Kraft, and he scuttled out the door.

  23

  CHAPTER SIX HUNDRED

  AND FORTY-THREE ...

  ONE OF THE THINGS Helga had in her suitcase, as I've already said, was a book by me. It was a manuscript. I had never intended that it be published. I regarded it as unpublishable--except by pornographers.

  It was called Memoirs of a Monogamous Casanova. In it I told of my conquests of all the hundreds of women my wife, my Helga, had been. It was clinical, obsessed--some say, insane. It was a diary, recording day by day for the first two years of the war, our erotic life--to the exclusion of all else. There is not one word in it to indicate even the century or the continent of its origin.

  There is a man of many moods, a woman of many moods. In some of the early entries, settings are referred to sketchily. But from there on, there are no settings at all.

  Helga knew I kept the peculiar diary. I kept it as one of many devices for keeping our sexual pleasure keen. The book is not only a report of an experiment, but a part of the experiment it reports--a self-conscious experiment by a man and a woman to be endlessly fascinating to each other sexually--

  To be more than that.

  To be to each other, body and soul, sufficient reasons for living, though there might not be a single other satisfaction to be had.

  The epigraph of the book is to the point, I think.

  It is a poem by William Blake called "The Question Answered":

  What is it men in women do require?

  The lineaments of Gratified Desire.

  What is it women do in men require?

  The lineaments of Gratifie
d Desire.

  I might aptly add here one last chapter to the Memoirs, chapter 643, describing the night I spent in a New York hotel with Helga, after having been without her for so many years.

  I leave it to an editor of taste and delicacy to abridge with innocent polka dots whatever might offend.

  MEMOIRS OF A MONOGAMOUS CASANOVA, CHAPTER 643

  We had been apart for sixteen years. My first lust that night was in my finger tips. Other parts of me ... that were contended later were contended in a ritual way, thoroughly, to ... clinical perfection. No part of me could complain, and no part of my wife could complain, I trust, of being victimized by busy-work, time-serving ... or jerry-building. But my finger tips had the best of it that night. ...

  Which is not to say that I found myself to be an ... old man, dependent, if I was to please a woman, on ... foreplay and nothing more. On the contrary, I was as ... ready a lover as a seventeen-year-old ... with his ... girl ...

  And as full of wonder.

  And it was in my fingers that the wonder lived. Calm, resourceful, thoughtful, these ... explorers, these ... strategists, these ... scouts, these ... skirmishers, deployed themselves over the ... terrain.

  And all the news they gathered was good. ...

  My wife was a ... slave girl bedded with an ... emperor that night, seemingly struck dumb, seemingly not even able to speak a word of my language. And yet, how eloquent she was, letting her eyes, her breathing ... express what they must, unable to keep them from expressing what they must. ...

  And how simple, how sublimely familiar was the tale her ... body told! ... It was like the breeze's tale of what a breeze is, like the rose's tale of what the rose is. ...

  After my subtle, thoughtful and grateful fingers came greedier things, instruments of pleasure without memories, without manners, without patience. These my slave girl met in greedy kind ... until Mother Nature herself, who had made the most extravagant demands upon us, could ask no more. Mother Nature herself ... called an end to the game. ...

  We rolled apart. ...

  We spoke coherently to each other for the first time since bedding down.

  "Hello," she said.

  "Hello," I said.

  "Welcome home," she said.

  End of chapter 643.

  The city sky was clean and hard and bright the next morning, looking like an enchanted dome that would shatter at a tap or ring like a great glass bell.

  My Helga and I stepped from our hotel to the sidewalk snappily. I was lavish in my courtliness, and my Helga was no less grand in her respect and gratitude. We had had a marvelous night.

  I was not wearing war-surplus clothing. I was wearing the clothes I had put on after fleeing Berlin, after shucking off the uniform of the Free American Corps. I was wearing the clothes--fur-collared impresario's cloak and blue serge suit--I had been captured in. I was also carrying, for whimsy, a cane. I did marvelous things with the cane: rococo manuals of arms, Charlie Chaplin twirls, polo strokes at orts in the gutter.

  And all the while my Helga's small hand rested on my good left arm, creeping in an endless and erotic exploration of the tingling area between the inside of my elbow and the crest of my stringy biceps.

  We were on our way to buy a bed, a bed like our bed in Berlin.

  But all the stores were closed. The day wasn't Sunday, and it wasn't any holiday I could think of. When we got to Fifth Avenue, there were American flags flying as far as the eye could see. "Good God Almighty," I said wonderingly.

  "What does it mean?" said Helga.

  "Maybe they declared war last night," I said.

  She tightened her fingers on my arm convulsively. "You don't really think so, do you?" she said. She thought it was possible.

  "A joke," I said. "Some kind of holiday, obviously."

  "What holiday?" she said.

  I was still drawing blanks. "As your host in this wonderful land of ours," I said, "I should explain to you the deep significance of this great day in our national lives, but nothing comes to me."

  "Nothing?" she said.

  "I'm as baffled as you are," I said. "I might as well be the Prince of Cambodia."

  A uniformed colored man was sweeping the walk in front of an apartment. His blue and gold uniform bore a striking resemblance to the uniform of the Free American Corps, even to the final touch of a pale lavender stripe down his trouser legs. The name of the apartment house was stitched over his breast pocket. "Sylvan House" was the name of the place, though the only tree near it was a sapling, bandaged, armored and guy-wired.

  I asked the man what day it was.

  He told me it was Veterans' Day.

  "What date is it?" I said.

  "November eleventh, sir," he said.

  "November eleventh is Armistice Day, not Veterans' Day," I said.

  "Where you been?" he said. "They changed all that years ago."

  "Veterans' Day," I said to Helga as we walked on. "Used to be Armistice Day. Now it's Veterans' Day."

  "That upsets you?" she said.

  "Oh, it's just so damn cheap, so damn typical," I said. "This used to be a day in honor of the dead of World War One, but the living couldn't keep their grubby hands off of it, wanted the glory of the dead for themselves. So typical, so typical. Any time anything of real dignity appears in this country, it's torn to shreds and thrown to the mob."

  "You hate America, don't you?" she said.

  "That would be as silly as loving it," I said. "It's impossible for me to get emotional about it, because real estate doesn't interest me. It's no doubt a great flaw in my personality, but I can't think in terms of boundaries. Those imaginary lines are as unreal to me as elves and pixies. I can't believe that they mark the end or the beginning of anything of real concern to a human soul. Virtues and vices, pleasures and pains cross boundaries at will."

  "You've changed so," she said.

  "People should be changed by world wars," I said, "else what are world wars for?"

  "Maybe you've changed so much you don't really love me any more," she said. "Maybe I've changed so much--"

  "After a night like last night," I said, "how could you say such a thing?"

  "We really haven't talked anything over--" she said.

  "What is there to talk about?" I said. "Nothing you could say would make me love you more or less. Our love is too deep for words ever to touch it. It's soul love."

  She sighed. "How lovely that is--if it's true." She put her hands close together, but not touching. "Our souls in love."

  "A love that can weather anything," I said.

  "Your soul feels love now for my soul?" she said.

  "Obviously," I said.

  "And you couldn't be deceived by that feeling?" she said. "You couldn't be mistaken?"

  "Not a chance," I said.

  "And nothing I could say could spoil it?" she said.

  "Nothing," I said.

  "All right," she said, "I have something to say that I was afraid to say before. I'm not afraid to say it now."

  "Say away!" I said lightly.

  "I'm not Helga," she said. "I'm her little sister Resi."

  24

  A POLYGAMOUS

  CASANOVA ...

  AFTER SHE GAVE ME the news, I took her into a nearby cafeteria so we could sit down. The ceiling was high. The lights were merciless. The clatter was hell.

  "Why did you do this to me?" I said.

  "Because I love you," she said.

  "How could you love me?" I said.

  "I've always loved you--since I was a very little girl," she said.

  I put my head in my hands. "This is terrible," I said.

  "I--I thought it was beautiful," she said.

  "What now?" I said.

  "It can't go on?" she said.

  "Oh, Jesus--how bewildering," I said.

  "I found the words to kill the love, didn't I--" she said, "the love that couldn't be killed?"

  "I don't know," I said. I shook my head. "What is this strange cri
me I've committed?"

  "I'm the one who's committed the crime," she said. "I must have been crazy. When I escaped into West Berlin, when they gave me a form to fill out, asked me who I was, what I was--who I knew--"

  "That long, long story you told--" I said, "about Russia, about Dresden--was any of it true?"

  "The cigarette factory in Dresden--that was true," she said. "My running away to Berlin was true. Not much else. The cigarette factory--" she said, "that was the truest thing--ten hours a day, six days a week, ten years."

  "Sorry," I said.

  "I'm the one who's sorry," she said. "Life's been too hard for me ever to afford much guilt. A really bad conscience is as much out of my reach as a mink coat. Daydreams were what kept me going at that machine, day after day, and I had no right to them."

  "Why not?" I said.

  "They were all daydreams of being somebody I wasn't."

  "No harm in that," I said.

  "Look at the harm," she said. "Look at you. Look at me. Look at our love affair. I daydreamed of being my sister Helga. Helga, Helga, Helga--that's who I was. The lovely actress with the handsome playwright husband, that's who I was. Resi, the cigarette-machine operator--she simply disappeared."

  "You could have picked a worse person to be," I said.

  She became very brave now. "It's who I am," she said. "It's who I am. I'm Helga, Helga, Helga. You believed it. What better test could I be put to? Have I been Helga to you?"

  "That's a hell of a question to put to a gentleman," I said.

  "Am I entitled to an answer?" she said.

  "You're entitled to the answer yes," I said. "I have to answer yes, but I have to say I'm not a well man, either. My judgment, my senses, my intuition obviously aren't all they could be."

  "Or maybe they are all they should be," she said. "Maybe you haven't been deceived."

  "Tell me what you know about Helga," I said.

  "Dead," she said.

  "You're sure?" I said.

  "Isn't she?" she said.

  "I don't know," I said.

  "I haven't heard a word," she said. "Have you?"

  "No," I said.

  "Living people make words, don't they?" she said. "Especially if they love someone as much as Helga loved you."

  "You'd think so," I said.

  "I love you as much as Helga did," she said.

  "Thank you," I said.

  "And you did hear from me," she said. "It took some doing, but you did hear from me."

  "Indeed," I said.

  "When I got to West Berlin," she said, "and they gave me the forms to fill out--name, occupation, nearest living relative--I had my choice. I could be Resi Noth, cigarette-machine operator, with no relatives anywhere. Or I could be Helga Noth, actress, wife of a handsome, adorable, brilliant playwright in the U.S.A." She leaned forward. "You tell me--" she said, "which one should I have been?"