Bluebeard

by Kurt Vonnegut

"Then you are a coward," she said, "and that is how I will remember you."

  I thought that over, and then I heard myself say: "All right, I will go get the keys. And then, Mrs. Berman, I would be most grateful if you would come with me."

  Out into the dark we went, a flashlight beam dancing before us. She was subdued, humble, awed and virginal. I was elated, high as a kite and absolutely petrified.

  We walked on flagstones at first, but then they veered off in the direction of the carriage house. After that we trod the stubble path cut through the wilderness by Franklin Cooley and his mowing machine.

  I unlocked the barn doors and reached inside, my fingers on the light switch. "Scared?" I said.

  "Yes," she said.

  "So am I," I said.

  Remember now: we were standing at the extreme right end of a painting eight feet high and sixty-four feet long. When I turned on the floodlights, we would be seeing the picture compressed by foreshortening to a seeming triangle eight feet high, all right, but only five feet wide. There was no telling from that vantage point what the painting really was--what the painting was all about.

  I flicked on the switch.

  There was a moment of silence, and then Mrs. Berman gasped in wonderment.

  "Stay right where you are," I told her, "and tell me what you think of it."

  "I can't come any farther?" she said.

  "In a minute," I said, "but first I want to hear you say what it looks like from here."

  "A big fence," she said.

  "Go on," I said.

  "A very big fence, an incredibly high and long fence," she said, "every square inch of it encrusted with the most gorgeous jewelry."

  "Thank you very much," I said. "And now take my hand and close your eyes. I am going to lead you to the middle, and you can look again."

  She closed her eyes, and she followed me as unresistingly as a toy balloon.

  When we were in the middle, with thirty-two feet of the painting extending to either side, I told her to open her eyes again.

  We were standing on the rim of a beautiful green valley in the springtime. By actual count, there were five thousand, two hundred and nineteen people on the rim with us or down below. The largest person was the size of a cigarette, and the smallest a flyspeck. There were farmhouses here and there, and the ruins of a medieval watchtower on the rim where we stood. The picture was so realistic that it might have been a photograph.

  "Where are we?" said Circe Berman.

  "Where I was," I said, "when the sun came up the day the Second World War ended in Europe."

  35

  IT IS ALL PART of the regular tour of my museum now. First come the doomed little girls on swings in the foyer, and then the earliest works of the first Abstract Expressionists, and then the perfectly tremendous whatchamacallit in the potato barn. I have unspiked the sliding doors at the far end of the barn, so that the greatly increased flow of visitors can move past the whatchamacallit without eddies and backwash. In one end they go, and out the other. Many of them will go through two times or more: not the whole show, just through the potato barn.

  Ha!

  No solemn critic has yet appeared. Several laymen and laywomen have asked me, however, to say what sort of a painting I would call it. I told them what I will tell the first critic to show up, if one ever comes, and one may never come, since the whatchamacallit is so exciting to the common people:

  "It isn't a painting at all! It's a tourist attraction! It's a World's Fair! It's a Disneyland!"

  It is a gruesome Disneyland. Nobody is cute there.

  On an average, there are ten clearly drawn World War Two survivors to each square foot of the painting. Even the figures in the distance, no bigger than flyspecks, when examined through one of several magnifying glasses I keep in the barn, prove to be concentration-camp victims or slave laborers or prisoners of war from this or that country, or soldiers from this or that military unit on the German side, or local farmers and their families, or lunatics set free from asylums, and on and on.

  There is a war story to go with every figure in the picture, no matter how small. I made up a story, and then painted the person it had happened to. I at first made myself available in the barn to tell anyone who asked what the story was of this person or that one, but soon gave up in exhaustion. "Make up your own war stories as you look at the whatchamacallit," I tell people. I stay in the house here, and simply point the way out to the potato barn.

  That night with Circe Berman, though, I was glad to tell her any of the stories she wished to hear.

  "Are you in there?" she said.

  I pointed out myself at the bottom and right above the floor. I pointed with the toe of my shoe. I was the largest figure--the one as big as a cigarette. I was also the only one of the thousands with his back to the camera, so to speak. The crack between the fourth and fifth panels ran up my spine and parted my hair, and might be taken for the soul of Rabo Karabekian.

  "This man clinging to your leg is looking up at you as though you were God," she said.

  "He is dying of pneumonia, and will be dead in two hours," I said. "He is a Canadian bombardier who was shot down over an oil field in Hungary. He doesn't know who I am. He can't even see my face. All he can see is a thick fog which isn't there, and he's asking me if we are home yet."

  "And what are you telling him?" she said.

  "What would you tell him?" I said. "I'm telling him, 'Yes! We're home! We're home!'"

  "Who is this man in the funny-looking suit?" she said.

  "That is a concentration-camp guard who threw away his SS uniform and stole the suit from a scarecrow," I said. I pointed out a group of concentration camp victims far away from the masquerading guard. Several of them were on the ground and dying, like the Canadian bombardier. "He brought these people to the valley and dumped them, but doesn't know where to go next. Anybody who catches him will know he is an SS man--because he has his serial number tattooed on his upper left arm."

  "And these two?" she said.

  "Yugoslavian partisans," I said.

  "This one?" she said.

  "A sergeant major in the Moroccan Spahis, captured in North Africa," I said.

  "And this one with a pipe in his mouth?" she said.

  "A Scottish glider pilot captured on D-Day," I said.

  "They're just from everywhere, aren't they?" she said.

  "This is Gurkha here," I said, "all the way from Nepal. And this machine-gun squad in German uniforms: they're Ukrainians who changed sides early in the war. When the Russians finally reach the valley, they'll be hanged or shot."

  "There don't seem to be any women," she said.

  "Look closer," I said. "Half the concentration camp people and half the people from the lunatic asylums are women. They just don't look much like women anymore. They aren't what you might call 'movie stars.'"

  "There don't seem to be any healthy women," she said.

  "Wrong again," I said. "You'll find healthy ones at either end--in the corners at the bottom."

  We went to the extreme right end for a look. "My goodness," she said, "it's like a display in a museum of natural history." So it was. There was a farmhouse down at the bottom of both ends: each one buttoned up tight like a little fort, its high gates closed, and all the animals in the courtyard. And I had made a schematic cut through the earth below them, so as to show their cellars, too, just as a museum display might give away the secrets of animals' burrows underground.

  "The healthy women are in the cellar with the beets and potatoes and turnips," I said. "They are putting off being raped as long as possible, but they have heard the history of other wars in the area, so they know that rape will surely come."

  "Does the picture have a title?" she said, rejoining me at the middle.

  "Yes it does," I said.

  "What is it?" she said.

  And I said: "'Now It's the Women's Turn.'"

  "Am I crazy," she said, indicating a figure lurking near the ruined watchtower,
"or is this a Japanese soldier?"

  "That's what he is," I said. "He is a major in the army. You can tell that from the gold star and two brown stripes on the cuff of his left sleeve. And he still has his sword. He would rather die than give up his sword."

  "I'm surprised that there were any Japanese there," she said.

  "There weren't," I said, "but I thought there should be one there so I put one there."

  "Why?" she said.

  "Because," I said, "the Japanese were as responsible as the Germans for turning Americans into a bunch of bankrupt militaristic fuckups--after we'd done such a good job of being sincere war-haters after the First World War."

  "And this woman lying here--" she said, "she's dead?"

  "She's dead," I said. "She's an old queen of the Gypsies."

  "She's so fat," she said. "Is she the only fat person? Everybody else is so skinny."

  "Dying is the only way to get fat in Happy Valley," I said. "She's as fat as a circus freak because she's been dead three days."

  "'Happy Valley,'" echoed Circe.

  "Or 'Peacetime' or 'Heaven' or 'the Garden of Eden' or 'Springtime' or whatever you want to call it," I said.

  "She's the only one who's all alone," said Circe. "Or is she?"

  "Just about," I said. "People don't smell too nice after they've been dead three days. She was the first stranger to arrive in Happy Valley, and she came all alone, and she died almost right away."

  "Where are the other Gypsies?" she said.

  "With their fiddles and tambourines and brightly painted caravans?" I said. "And their reputation for thieving, which was much deserved?"

  Mrs. Berman told me a legend about Gypsies I had never heard before: "They stole the nails from the Roman soldiers who were about to crucify Jesus," she said. "When the soldiers looked for the nails, they had disappeared mysteriously. Gypsies had stolen them, and Jesus and the crowd had to wait until the soldiers sent for new nails. After that, God Almighty gave permission to all Gypsies to steal all they could." She pointed to the bloated Gypsy queen. "She believed that story. All Gypsies do."

  "Too bad for her that she believed it," I said. "Or maybe it didn't matter whether she believed it or not, since she was starving to death when she arrived all alone in Happy Valley.

  "She tried to steal a chicken from the farmhouse," I said. "The farmer saw her from this bedroom window, and took a shot at her with a small-caliber rifle he kept under his feather mattress. She ran away. He thought he had missed her, but he hadn't. She had a little bullet in her abdomen, and she lay down there and died. Three days later, the rest of us came along."

  "If she's a queen of the Gypsies, where are her subjects?" Circe asked again.

  I explained that she had been queen of only about forty people at the peak of her power, including babes in arms. While there were notorious disputes in Europe as to which races and subraces were vermin, all Europeans could agree that the thieving, fortune-telling, childstealing Gypsies were the enemies of all decent humankind. So they were hunted down everywhere. The queen and her people gave up their caravans, and their traditional costumes, too--gave up everything which might identify them as Gypsies. They hid in forests in the daytime, and foraged for food at night.

  One night, when the queen went out alone to look for food, one of her subjects, a fourteen-year-old boy, was caught stealing a ham from a Slovak mortar squad which had deserted the German lines on the Russian front. They were headed home, which wasn't far from Happy Valley. They made the boy lead them to the Gypsy camp, where they killed everybody. So when the queen came back, she didn't have any subjects.

  Such was the story I made up for Circe Berman.

  Circe provided the missing link in the narrative. "So she wandered into Happy Valley, looking for other Gypsies," she said.

  "Right!" I said. "But there weren't many Gypsies to be found anywhere in Europe. Most of them had been rounded up and gassed in extermination camps, which was fine with everybody. Who likes thieves?"

  She took a closer look at the dead woman and turned away in disgust. "Ugh!" she said. "What's coming from her mouth? Blood and maggots?"

  "Rubies and diamonds," I said. "She smells so awful, and looks like such bad luck, that nobody has come close enough to notice yet."

  "And of all these people here," she said wonderingly, "who will be the first to notice?"

  I indicated the former concentration camp guard in the rags of a scarecrow. "This man," I said.

  36

  "SOLDIERS, SOLDIERS, SOLDIERS," she mar veled. "Uniforms, uniforms, uniforms."

  The uniforms, what was left of them, were as authentic as I could make them. That was my homage to my master, Dan Gregory.

  "Fathers are always so proud, the first time they see their sons in uniform," she said.

  "I know Big John Karpinski was," I said. He is my neighbor to the north, of course. Big John's son Little John did badly in high school, and the police caught him selling dope. So he joined the Army while the Vietnam War was going on. And the first time he came home in uniform, I never saw Big John so happy, because it looked to him as though Little John was all straightened out and would finally amount to something.

  But then Little John came home in a body bag.

  Big John and his wife Dorene, incidentally, are dividing their farm, where three generations of Karpinskis grew up, into six-acre lots. It was in the local paper yesterday. Those lots will sell like hotcakes, since so many of the second-story windows of houses built on them, overlooking my property, will have a water view.

  Big John and Dorene will become cash millionaires in a condominium in Florida, where winter never comes. So they are losing their own sacred plot of earth at the foot of their own Mount Ararat, so to speak--without experiencing that ultimate disgrace: a massacre.

  "Was your father proud of you when he saw you for the first time in a uniform?" Circe asked me.

  "He didn't live to see it," I said, "and I'm glad he didn't. If he had, he would have thrown an awl or a boot at me."

  "Why?" she said.

  "Don't forget that it was young soldiers whose parents thought they were finally going to amount to something who killed everybody he'd ever known and loved. If he'd seen me in a uniform, he would have bared his teeth like a dog with rabies. He would have said, 'Swine!' He would have said, 'Pig!' He would have said, 'Murderer! Get out of here!'"

  "What do you think will eventually become of this painting?" she said.

  "It's too big to throw away," I said. "Maybe it'll go to that private museum in Lubbock, Texas, where they have most of the paintings of Dan Gregory. I thought it might wind up behind the longest bar in the world, wherever that is--probably in Texas, too. But the customers would be climbing up on the bar all the time, trying to see what was really going on--kicking over glasses, stepping on the complimentary hors d'oeuvres."

  I said that it would eventually be up to my two sons, Terry and Henri, to decide what was to become of "Now It's the Women's Turn."

  "You're leaving it to them?" she said. She knew that they hated me, and had had their last name legally changed to that of Dorothy's second husband, Roy--the only real father they'd ever had.

  "You think it's kind of a joke to leave them this?" said Circe. "You think it's worthless? I'm here to tell you this is a terribly important painting someway."

  "I think maybe it's terribly important the same way a head-on collision is important," I said. "There's undeniable impact. Something has sure as hell happened."

  "You leave those ingrates this," she said, "and you'll make them multimillionaires."

  "They'll be that in any case," I said. "I'm leaving them everything I own, including your pictures of the little girls in swings and the pool table, unless you want those back. After I die, they'll have to do only one little thing to get it all."

  "What's that?" she said.

  "Merely have their names and those of my grandchildren legally changed back to 'Karabekian,'" I said.

  "Y
ou care that much?" she said.

  "I'm doing it for my mother," I said. "She wasn't even a Karabekian by birth, but she was the one who wanted, no matter where, no matter what, the name Karabekian to live on and on."

  "How many of these are portraits of actual people?" she said.

  "The bombardier clinging to my leg: that's his face, as I remember it. These two Estonians in German uniforms are Laurel and Hardy. This French collaborator here is Charlie Chaplin. These two Polish slave laborers on the other side of the tower from me are Jackson Pollock and Terry Kitchen."

  "So there you are across the bottom: the Three Musketeers," she said.

  "There we are," I agreed.

  "The death of the other two so close together must have been a terrible blow to you," she said.

  "We'd stopped being friends long before then," I said. "It was all the boozing we did together that made people call us that. It didn't have anything to do with painting. We could have been plumbers. One or the other of us would stop drinking for a little while, and sometimes all three of us--and that was that for the Three Musketeers, long before the other two killed themselves. 'Quite a blow,' you say, Mrs. Berman? Not at all. The only thing I did after I heard about it was become a hermit for eight years or so."

  "And then Rothko killed himself after that," she said.

  "Yup," I said. We were extricating ourselves from Happy Valley, and returning to real life. The melancholy roll-call of real-life suicides among the Abstract Expressionists again: Gorky by hanging in 1948, Pollock and then almost immediately Kitchen, by drunken driving and then pistol in 1956--and then Rothko with all possible messiness by knife in 1970.

  I told her with sharpness which surprised me, and surprised her, too, that those violent deaths were like our drinking, and had nothing to do with our painting.

  "I certainly won't argue with you," she said.

  "Really!" I said. "Word of honor!" I said, my vehemence unspent. "The whole magical thing about our painting, Mrs. Berman, and this was old stuff in music, but it was brand new in painting: it was pure essence of human wonder, and wholly apart from food, from sex, from clothes, from houses, from drugs, from cars, from news, from money, from crime, from punishment, from games, from war, from peace--and surely apart from the universal human impulse among painters and plumbers alike toward inexplicable despair and self-destruction!"