Mother Night

by Kurt Vonnegut

  "I know he would," I said. "I ran into him on Fifty-second Street about a month ago, and he called me by name. He was very shocked to see me in such reduced circumstances. He said he knew a lot of people in the public relations business, and he offered to talk to them about giving me a job."

  "You'd be good at public relations," said Kraft.

  "I certainly don't have any powerful convictions to get in the way of a client's message," I said.

  The game of Old Maid broke up, with Father Keeley the loser, with that pathetic old virgin still stuck with the queen of spades.

  "Well," said Keeley, as though he'd won much in the past, as though a rich future were still his, "you can't win them all."

  He and the Black Fuehrer went upstairs, pausing each few steps to count to twenty.

  And then Resi, Kraft-Potapov and I were alone.

  Resi came over to me, put her arm around my waist, laid her cheek against my chest. "Just think, darling--" she said.

  "Hmm?" I said.

  "Tomorrow we'll be in Mexico," she said.

  "Um," I said.

  "You seem worried," she said.

  "Me worry?" I said.

  "Preoccupied," she said.

  "Do I look preoccupied to you?" I said to Kraft. He was studying the picture of the swamp again.

  "No," he said.

  "My good old normal self," I said.

  Kraft pointed to a pterodactyl that was winging over the swamp. "Who would think a thing like that could fly?" he said.

  "Who would ever think that a ramshackle old fart like me would win the heart of such a beautiful girl, and have such a talented, loyal friend besides?" I said.

  "I find it very easy to love you," said Resi. "I always have."

  "I was just thinking--" I said.

  "Tell me your thoughts," said Resi.

  "Maybe Mexico isn't exactly what we want," I said.

  "We can always move on," said Kraft.

  "Maybe--there at the Mexico City airport--" I said, "maybe we could just get right on a jet--"

  Kraft put his magazine down. "And go where?" he said.

  "I don't know," I said. "Just go somewhere very fast. I suppose it's the idea of movement that excites me; I've been sitting still so long."

  "Um," said Kraft.

  "Moscow, maybe," I said.

  "What?" said Kraft incredulously.

  "Moscow," I said. "I'd like very much to see Moscow."

  "That's a novel idea," said Kraft.

  "You don't like it?" I said.

  "I--I'll have to think about it," he said.

  Resi started to move away from me, but I held her tight. "You think about it, too," I said to her.

  "If you want me to," she said faintly.

  "Heaven!" I said, and I jiggled her to make her bubble. "The more I think about it, the more attractive it becomes," I said. "If we only stayed in Mexico City for two minutes between planes, that would be long enough for me."

  Kraft stood up, exercising his fingers elaborately. "This is a joke?" he said.

  "Is it?" I said. "An old friend like you should be able to tell if I'm joking or not."

  "You must be joking," he said. "What is there in Moscow that could interest you?"

  "I'd try to locate an old friend of mine," I said.

  "I didn't know you had a friend in Moscow," he said.

  "I don't know that he's in Moscow--just somewhere in Russia," I said. "I'd have to make inquiries."

  "What's his name?" said Kraft.

  "Stepan Bodovskov--" I said, "the writer."

  "Oh," said Kraft. He sat down again, picked up the magazine again.

  "You've heard of him?" I said.

  "No," he said.

  "What about Colonel Iona Potapov?" I said.

  Resi twisted away from me, stood with her back to the farthest wall.

  "You know Potapov?" I asked her.

  "No," she said.

  "You?" I asked Kraft.

  "No," he said. "Why don't you tell me about him?"

  "He's a communist agent," I said. "He's trying to get me to Mexico City so I can be kidnaped and flown to Moscow for trial."

  "No!" said Resi.

  "Shut up!" Kraft said to her. He stood, threw the magazine aside. He went for a small pistol he had in his pocket, but I got the drop on him with the Luger.

  I made him throw the pistol on the floor.

  "Look at us--" he said wonderingly, as though he were an innocent bystander, "cowboys and Indians."

  "Howard--" said Resi.

  "Don't say a word," Kraft warned her.

  "Darling--" said Resi tearfully, "the dream about Mexico--I thought it was really coming true! We were all going to escape!" She opened her arms. "Tomorrow--" she said weakly.

  "Tomorrow--" she whispered again.

  And then she went to Kraft, as though she wanted to claw him. But there was no strength in her hands. The hold they took on Kraft was feeble.

  "We were all going to be born anew," she said to him brokenly. "You, too--you, too. Didn't--didn't you want that for yourself? How could you speak so warmly about the new lives we would have, and still not want them?"

  Kraft did not reply.

  Resi turned to me. "I am a communist agent--yes. And so is he. He is Colonel Iona Potapov. And our mission was to get you to Moscow. But I wasn't going to go through with it--because I love you, because the love you gave me was the only love I've ever had, the only love I ever will have.

  "I told you I wasn't going through with it, didn't I?" she said to Kraft.

  "She told me," said Kraft.

  "And he agreed with me," said Resi. "And he came up with this dream of Mexico, where we would all get out of the trap--live happily ever after."

  "How did you find out?" Kraft asked me.

  "American agents followed the scheme all the way," I said. "This place is surrounded now. You're cooked."

  38

  AH, SWEET MYSTERY

  OF LIFE ...

  ABOUT THE RAID--

  About Resi Noth--

  About how she died--

  About how she died in my arms, there in the basement of the Reverend Lionel J. D. Jones, D.D.S., D.D.--

  It was wholly unexpected.

  Resi seemed so in favor of life, so right for life, that the possibility of her preferring death did not occur to me.

  I was sufficiently a man of the world, or sufficiently unimaginative--take your choice--to think that a girl that young and pretty and clever would have an entertaining time of it, no matter where fate and politics shoved her next. And, as I pointed out to her, nothing worse than deportation was in store for her.

  "Nothing worse than that?" she said.

  "That's all," I said. "I doubt that you'll even have to pay for your passage back."

  "You're not sorry to see me go?" she said.

  "Certainly, I'm sorry," I said. "But there's nothing I can do to keep you with me. Any minute now people are going to come in here and arrest you. You don't expect me to fight them, do you?"

  "You won't fight them?" she said.

  "Of course not," I said. "What chance would I have?"

  "That matters?" she said.

  "You mean--" I said, 'why don't I die for love, like a knight in a Howard W. Campbell, Jr., play?"

  "That's exactly what I mean," she said. "Why don't we die together, right here and now?"

  I laughed. "Resi, darling--" I said, "you have a full life ahead of you."

  "I have a full life behind me--" she said, "all in those few sweet hours with you."

  "That sounds like a line I might have written as a young man," I said.

  "It is a line you wrote as a young man," she said.

  "Foolish young man," I said.

  "I adore that young man," she said.

  "When was it you fell in love with him?" I said. "As a child?"

  "As a child--and then as a woman," she said. "When they gave me all the things you'd written, told me to study them, that's when I f
ell in love as a woman."

  "I'm sorry--I can't congratulate you on your literary tastes," I said.

  "You no longer believe that love is the only thing to live for?" she said.

  "No," I said.

  "Then tell me what to live for--anything at all," she said beseechingly. "It doesn't have to be love. Anything at all!" She gestured at objects around the shabby room, dramatizing exquisitely my own sense of the world's being a junk shop. "I'll live for that chair, that picture, that furnace pipe, that couch, that crack in the wall! Tell me to live for it, and I will!" she cried.

  It was now me that her strengthless hands laid hold of. She closed her eyes, wept. "It doesn't have to be love," she whispered. "Just tell me what it should be."

  "Resi--" I said gently.

  "Tell me!" she said, and strength came into her hands, did tender violence to my clothes.

  "I'm an old man--" I said helplessly. It was a coward's lie. I am not an old man.

  "All right, old man--tell me what to live for," she said. "Tell me what you live for, so I can live for it, too--here or ten thousand kilometers from here! Tell me why you want to go on being alive, so I can go on wanting to be alive, too!"

  And then the raiders broke in.

  The forces of law and order plunged in through every door, waving guns, blowing whistles, shining dazzling lights where there was plenty of light already.

  There was a small army of them, and they exclaimed over all the melodramatically evil goodies in the cellar. They exclaimed like children around a Christmas tree.

  A dozen of them, all young, apple-cheeked and virtuous, surrounded Resi, Kraft-Potapov and me, took my Luger away from me, turned us into rag dolls as they ransacked us for other weapons.

  More raiders came down the stairs prodding the Reverend Dr. Lionel J. D. Jones, the Black Fuehrer, and Father Keeley before them.

  Dr. Jones stopped halfway down the stairs, confronted his tormentors. "All I've done," he said majestically, "is do what you people should be doing."

  "What should we be doing?" said a G-man. He was obviously in command of the raid.

  "Protecting the Republic," said Jones. "Why bother us? Everything we do is to make the country stronger! Join with us, and let's go after the people who are trying to make it weaker!"

  "Who's that?" said the G-man.

  "I have to tell you?" said Jones. "Haven't you even found that out in the course of your work? The Jews! The Catholics! The Negroes! The Orientals! The Unitarians! The foreign-born, who don't have any understanding of democracy, who play right into the hands of the socialists, the communists, the anarchists, the anti-Christ and the Jews!"

  "For your information," said the G-man in cool triumph, "I am a Jew."

  "That proves what I've just been saying!" said Jones.

  "How's that?" said the G-man.

  "The Jews have infiltrated everything!" said Jones, smiling the smile of a logician who could never be topped.

  "You talk about the Catholics and the Negroes--" said the G-man, "and yet, here your two best friends are a Catholic and a Negro."

  "What's so mysterious about that?" said Jones.

  "Don't you hate them?" said the G-man.

  "Certainly not," said Jones. "We all believe the same basic thing."

  "What's that?" said the G-man.

  "This once-proud country of ours is falling into the hands of the wrong people," said Jones. He nodded, and so did Father Keeley and the Black Fuehrer. "And, before it gets back on the right track," said Jones, "some heads are going to roll."

  I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be likened unto a system of gears whose teeth have been filed off at random. Such a snaggle-toothed thought machine, driven by a standard or even a substandard libido, whirls with the jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell.

  The boss G-man concluded wrongly that there were no teeth on the gears in the mind of Jones. "You're completely crazy," he said.

  Jones wasn't completely crazy. The dismaying thing about the classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, though mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined.

  Hence the cuckoo clock in Hell--keeping perfect time for eight minutes and thirty-three seconds, jumping ahead fourteen minutes, keeping perfect time for six seconds, jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping ahead a year.

  The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases.

  The willful filing off of gear teeth, the willful doing without certain obvious pieces of information--

  That was how a household as contradictory as one composed of Jones, Father Keeley, Vice-Bundesfuehrer Krapptauer, and the Black Fuehrer could exist in relative harmony--

  That was how my father-in-law could contain in one mind an indifference toward slave women and love for a blue vase--

  That was how Rudolf Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz, could alternate over the loudspeakers of Auschwitz great music and calls for corpse-carriers--

  That was how Nazi Germany could sense no important differences between civilization and hydrophobia--

  That is the closest I can come to explaining the legions, the nations of lunatics I've seen in my time. And for me to attempt such a mechanical explanation is perhaps a reflection of the father whose son I was. Am. When I pause to think about it, which is rarely, I am, after all, the son of an engineer.

  Since there is no one else to praise me, I will praise myself--will say that I have never tampered with a single tooth in my thought machine, such as it is. There are teeth missing, God knows--some I was born without, teeth that will never grow. And other teeth have been stripped by the clutchless shifts of history--

  But never have I willfully destroyed a tooth on a gear of my thinking machine. Never have I said to myself, "This fact I can do without."

  Howard W. Campbell, Jr., praises himself! There's life in the old boy yet!

  And, where there's life--

  There is life.

  39

  RESI MOTH BOWS OUT ...

  "MY ONLY REGRET," Dr. Jones said to the boss G-man there on the cellar stairs, "is that I have but one life to give to my country."

  "We'll see if we can't dig up some other regrets for you, too," said the boss.

  Now the Iron Guard of the White Sons of the American Constitution crowded in from the furnace room. Some of the guardsmen were hysterical. The paranoia their parents had been inculcating for years had suddenly paid off. Here was persecution!

  One youth clutched the staff on an American flag. He waved it back and forth, banging the eagle on the tip of the staff against overhead pipes.

  "This is your country's flag!" he cried.

  "We already know that," said the boss G-man. "Take it away from him!"

  "This day will go down in history!" said Jones.

  "Every day goes down in history," said the boss. "All right--" he said, "where's the man who calls himself George Kraft?"

  Kraft raised his hand. He did it almost cheerfully.

  "Is that your country's flag, too?" said the boss wryly.

  "I'd have to look at it more closely," said Kraft.

  "How does it feel to have such a long and distinguished career come to an end?" the boss asked Kraft.

  "All careers do end," said Kraft. "That's something I've known for a long time."

  "Maybe they'll make a movie of your life," said the boss.

  Kraft smiled. "Maybe," he said. "I would want a lot of money for the rights."

  "There's only one actor who could really play the part, though," said the boss. "He might be hard to get."

  "Oh?" said Kraft. "Who is that?"

  "Charlie Chaplin," said the boss. "Who else could play a spy who was steadily drunk from 1941 until 1948? Who else could play a Russian spy who built an ap
paratus composed almost entirely of American agents?"

  Kraft's urbanity dropped away, revealing him as a pale and puckered old man. "That's not true!" he said.

  "Ask your superiors, if you don't believe me," said the boss.

  "They know?" said Kraft.

  "They finally caught on," said the boss. "You were on your way home to a bullet in the back of your neck."

  "Why did you save me?" said Kraft.

  "Call it sentimentality," said the boss.

  Kraft thought his situation over, and schizophrenia rescued him neatly. "None of this really concerns me," he said and his urbanity returned.

  "Why not?" said the boss.

  "Because I'm a painter," said Kraft. "That's the main thing I am."

  "Be sure to bring your paintbox to prison," said the boss. He switched his attention to Resi. "You, of course, are Resi Noth," he said.

  "Yes," she said.

  "Have you enjoyed your little stay in our country?" said the boss.

  "What am I supposed to say?" said Resi.

  "Anything you like," said the boss. "If you have any complaints, I'll pass them on to the proper authorities. We're trying to increase the tourist trade from Europe, you know."

  "You say very funny things," she said unsmilingly. "I am sorry I can't say funny things back. This is not a funny time for me."

  "I'm sorry to hear that," said the boss lightly.

  "You aren't sorry," said Resi. "I am the only person who is sorry.

  "I am sorry I have nothing to live for," said Resi. "All I have is love for one man, but that man does not love me. He is so used up that he can't love any more. There is nothing left of him but curiosity and a pair of eyes.

  "I can't say anything funny," said Resi. "But I can show you something interesting."

  Resi seemed to dab her lip with a finger. What she really did was put a little capsule of cyanide in her mouth.

  "I will show you a woman who dies for love," she said.

  Right then and there, Resi Noth pitched into my arms, stone dead.

  40

  FREEDOM AGAIN...

  I WAS ARRESTED along with everyone else in the house. I was released within an hour, thanks, I suppose, to the intercession of my Blue Fairy Godmother. The place where I was held so briefly was an unmarked office in the Empire State Building.

  An agent took me down on an elevator and out onto the sidewalk, restoring me to the mainstream of life. I took perhaps fifty steps down the sidewalk, and then I stopped.

  I froze.

  It was not guilt that froze me. I had taught myself never to feel guilt.

  It was not a ghastly sense of loss that froze me. I had taught myself to covet nothing.