Armageddon in Retrospect

by Kurt Vonnegut

  “Oui.”

  “Sorry,” said Elmer. “Haven’t seen hide nor hair of him.”

  “Eh?”

  “Je n’ai vu pas ni peau ni cheveux de lui,” said Elmer.

  The Normans faced each other again, desolately.

  “Hélas!”

  “Zut!”

  They went into the forest again slowly.

  “Allo, allo, allo?”

  “Hien! Robert? Allo?”

  “Father! Listen!” said Ethelbert wildly.

  “Shhhhh,” said Elmer gently. “I’m talking to your mother now.”

  “It’s just like that fool unicorn trap,” said Ivy. “I didn’t understand that, neither. I was real patient about that trap. I never said a word. But now I’m going to speak my piece.”

  “Speak it,” said Elmer.

  “That trap don’t have nothing to do with nothing,” said Ivy.

  Tears formed on the rims of Elmer’s eyes. The image of the twigs, the scratch in the earth, and the boy’s imagination said all there was to say about his life—the life that was about to end.

  “There ain’t no unicorns around here,” said Ivy, proud of her knowledge.

  “I know,” said Elmer. “Ethelbert and I know.”

  “And you getting yourself hung ain’t going to make anything better, neither,” said Ivy.

  “I know. Ethelbert and I know that, too,” said Elmer.

  “Maybe I’m the dumb one,” said Ivy.

  Elmer suddenly felt the terror and loneliness and pain-to-come that were the price for the perfect thing he was doing—the price of the taste of a drink from a cold, pure spring. They were far worse than shame could ever be.

  Elmer swallowed. His neck hurt where the noose would bite. “Ivy, honey,” he said, “I sure hope you are.”

  That night, Elmer prayed for a new husband for Ivy, a stout heart for Ethelbert, and a merciful death and paradise for himself on the morrow.

  “Amen,” said Elmer.

  “Maybe you could just pretend to be tax collector,” said Ivy.

  “Where would I get the just-pretend taxes?” said Elmer.

  “Maybe you could be tax collector for just a little while,” said Ivy.

  “Just long enough to get hated for good reason,” said Elmer. “Then I could hang.”

  “There’s always something,” said Ivy. Her nose reddened.

  “Ivy—” said Elmer.

  “Hmmm?”

  “Ivy—I understand about the blue dress all shot through with little gold crosses,” said Elmer. “I want that for you, too.”

  “And the drawers for you and Ethelbert,” said Ivy. “It wasn’t all just for me.”

  “Ivy,” said Elmer, “what I’m doing—it’s more important than those horse drapes.”

  “That’s my trouble,” said Ivy. “I just can’t imagine anything grander than them.”

  “Neither can I,” said Elmer. “But there are such things. There’s got to be.” He smiled sadly. “Whatever they are,” he said, “they’re what I’ll be dancing about when I dance on air tomorrow.”

  “I wish Ethelbert would get back,” said Ivy. “We should all be together.”

  “He had to check his trap,” said Elmer. “Life goes on.”

  “I’m glad them Normans finally went home,” said Ivy. “It was allo and hien and hélas and zut and poof till I thought I’d near go crazy. I guess they done found Robert the Horrible.”

  “Thus sealing my doom,” said Elmer. He sighed. “I’ll go look for Ethelbert,” he said. “How better could a man spend his last night on earth than in bringing his son home from the forest?”

  Elmer went out into a pale blue world of night under a half-moon. He followed the path that Ethelbert’s feet had worn—followed it to the high, black wall of the forest.

  “Ethelbert!” he called.

  There was no reply.

  Elmer pushed into the forest. Branches whipped his face, and brambles snatched at his legs.

  “Ethelbert!”

  Only the gibbet replied. The chains squawked, and a skeleton fell rattling to earth. There were now only seventeen exhibits in the eighteen arches. There was room for one more.

  Elmer’s anxiety for Ethelbert grew. It drove him hard, deeper and deeper into the forest. He came to a clearing, and rested, panting, sweat stinging his eyes.

  “Ethelbert!”

  “Father?” said Ethelbert in the thicket ahead. “Come here and help me.”

  Elmer went into the thicket blindly, his hands groping before him.

  Ethelbert caught his father’s hand in the perfect darkness. “Careful!” said Ethelbert. “Another step, and you’ll be in the trap.”

  “Oh,” said Elmer. “That was a close thing.” Playfully, to make the boy feel good, he filled his voice with fear. “Whoooooey! I guess!”

  Ethelbert pulled his hand down, and pressed it against something lying on the ground.

  Elmer was amazed to feel the form of a big, dead stag. He knelt by it. “A deer!” he said.

  His voice came back to him, seemingly from the bowels of the earth. “A deer, a deer, a deer.”

  “It took me an hour to get it out of the trap,” said Ethelbert.

  “Trap, trap, trap,” said the echo.

  “Really?” said Elmer. “Good Lord, boy! I had no idea that trap was that good!”

  “Good, good, good,” said the echo.

  “You don’t know the half of it,” said Ethelbert.

  “It, it, it,” said the echo.

  “Where’s that echo coming from?” said Elmer.

  “From, from, from?” said the echo.

  “From right in front of you,” said Ethelbert. “From the trap.”

  Elmer threw himself backwards as Ethelbert’s voice came out of the hole before him, came out of the earth as though from the gates of Hell itself.

  “Trap, trap, trap.”

  “You dug it?” said Elmer, aghast.

  “God dug it,” said Ethelbert. “It’s the chimney of a cave.”

  Elmer stretched out limp on the ground. He rested his head on the cooling, stiffening haunch of the stag. There was only one flaw in the thicket’s roof of verdure. Through that flaw came the light from one bright star. Elmer saw the star as a rainbow through the prisms of grateful tears.

  “I have nothing more to ask of life,” said Elmer. “Tonight, everything has been given me—and more, and more, and more. With God’s help, my son has caught a unicorn.” He touched Ethelbert’s foot, and stroked its arch. “If God listens even to the prayers of an humble woodcutter and his son,” he said, “what can’t the world become?”

  Elmer almost slipped away to sleep, so much at one was he with the plan of things.

  Ethelbert roused him. “Shall we take the stag down to Mom?” said Ethelbert. “A midnight feast?”

  “Not the whole deer,” said Elmer. “Too risky. We’ll cut some choice steaks, and leave the rest hidden here.”

  “Have you got a knife?” said Ethelbert.

  “No,” said Elmer. “Against the law, you know.”

  “I’ll get something to cut with,” said Ethelbert.

  Elmer, still lying down, heard his son lower himself into the chimney of the cave; heard him seek and find footholds deeper and deeper in the earth; heard him grunting and wrestling with logs at the bottom.

  When Ethelbert returned, he was carrying something long that caught the glint from the one bright star. “This should do it,” he said.

  He gave to Elmer Robert the Horrible’s keen, two-handed broadsword.

  It was midnight.

  The little family was stuffed with venison.

  Elmer picked his teeth with Robert the Horrible’s poignard.

  Ethelbert, on watch at the door, wiped his lips with a plume.

  Ivy pulled the horse-drapes about her contentedly. “If I’d of knowed you was going to catch something,” she said, “I wouldn’t of thought that trap was such a dumb idea.”

  “T
hat’s the way it is with traps,” said Elmer. He leaned back and tried to feel elated about not hanging the next day, now that Robert the Horrible was dead. But he found the reprieve a dull affair compared to the other thoughts carousing in the stately dome of his head.

  “There’s just one thing I got to ask,” said Ivy.

  “Name it,” said Elmer expansively.

  “I wish you two’d quit making light of me, telling me this is unicorn meat,” said Ivy. “You think I’ll believe anything you tell me.”

  “It is unicorn meat,” said Elmer. “And I’m going to tell you something else you can believe.” He slipped on Robert the Horrible’s iron gauntlet, and rapped the table with it. “Ivy—there’s a great day coming for the little people.”

  Ivy looked at him adoringly. “Ain’t you and Ethelbert nice,” she said, “going out and getting me the clothes for it?”

  There were hoofbeats in the distance.

  “Hide everything!” said Ethelbert.

  In an instant, every vestige of Robert the Horrible and the deer was out of sight.

  Norman warriors, armed to the teeth, thundered by Elmer the woodcutter’s humble hut.

  They shouted in fear and defiance of formless demons in the night.

  “Hien! Hien! Courage, mes braves!”

  The hoofbeats faded away.

  Unknown Soldier

  It was all nonsense, of course, when they said our baby was the first one to be born in New York City into the third millennium of the Christian era—at ten seconds past midnight on January first, 2000. For starters, the third millennium, as countless people had pointed out, would not begin until January first, 2001. Planetarily speaking, the new year was already six hours old when our child was born, since it had begun that much earlier at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England, where time begins. Never mind that the numbering of years since the birth of Christ could only be approximate. The datum was so obscure. And who can say in which minute a child was born? When its head appeared? When all of it was outside the mother? When the umbilical cord was cut? Since there were many valuable prizes to be given to the city’s first baby of 2000, and its parents, and the chief physician in attendance, it was agreed well in advance of the contest that severing the cord should not count, since the moment could be delayed past the crucial midnight. There might be doctors all over the city with their eyes on the clock and their scissors poised, and of course with witnesses present, watching the scissors, watching the clock. The winning doctor would get an all-expense-paid vacation on one of the few islands where a tourist could still feel fairly secure, which was Bermuda. A battalion of British paratroops was stationed there. Understandably, doctors might be tempted to fudge the birthtime, given the opportunity.

  No matter what the criteria, defining the moment of birth was a lot less controversial than declaring when a fertilized ovum was a human being in the mother’s womb. For the purpose of the contest, the moment of birth was the moment when the baby’s eyes or eyelids were first bathed in light from the outside world, when they could first be seen by the witnesses. So the baby, which was the case with ours, would still be partly inside the mother. If she had been a breech-birth, of course, the eyes would have been almost the last things to appear. And here comes the most nonsensical aspect of the contest we won: If she had been a breech-birth, or had Down’s syndrome or spina bifida or been a crack baby or an AIDS baby or whatever, she surely would have been disqualified for the prizes on some supposed technicality having to do with timing rather than, or so the judges would have said, her variations from so-called norms. She was, after all, supposed to symbolize how healthy and delightful the next thousand years were supposed to be. One guarantee by the judges was that race and religion and national origin of the parents could not possibly skew their deliberations. And it is true that I am a native American Black, and my wife, while classified as white, was born in Cuba. But it surely did not hurt that I was head of the Sociology Department at Columbia University, or that my wife was a physical therapist at New York Hospital. I am certain that our baby won over several other candidates, including a newborn boy found in a trashcan in Brooklyn, because we were middle class.

  We got a Ford station wagon and three lifetime passes to Disney World and a home entertainment console, with a six-foot screen and a VCR and a sound system capable of playing every sort of record or tape, and equipment for a home gymnasium, and so on. And the baby got a Government Bond worth fifty thousand dollars at maturity, and a bassinet and a stroller and free diaper service and on and on. But then she died when she was only six weeks old. The doctor who helped her into the world was in Bermuda at the time, and he did not hear about her death there. Her death was no more big news there, or anywhere outside of New York City, than her birth had been. It wasn’t big news here, either, since nobody but the promoters of the asinine contest and the business people who had donated the prizes took all the hoopla about her at all seriously, the blather about her representing so many wonderful things, the mingling of races in beauty and happiness, the rebirth of the spirit which had once made New York the greatest city in the world in the greatest nation in the world, and just plain peace, and I don’t know what all. It seems to me now that she was like an unknown soldier in a war memorial, a little bit of flesh and bone and hair which was extolled to the point of lunacy. Hardly anybody came to her funeral, incidentally. The TV station whose idea the contest was sent a minor executive, not even a personality, and surely not a camera crew. Who wants to watch the burial of the next thousand years? If television refuses to look at something, it is as though it never happened. It can erase anything, even whole continents, such as Africa, one big desert now, where millions upon millions of babies, with a brand-new thousand years of history looming before them, starve to death. It was Crib Death Syndrome which killed our daughter, they say. This is a genetic defect as yet, and perhaps forever, undetectable by amniocentesis. She was our first child. Ah me.

  Spoils

  If, on Judgment Day, God were to ask Paul which of the two should rightly be his eternal residence, Heaven or Hell, Paul would likely suggest that, by his own and by Cosmic standards, Hell was his destiny—recalling the wretched thing he had done. The Almighty, in all His Wisdom, might recognize that Paul’s life on the whole had been a harmless one, and that his tender conscience had already tortured him mightily—for the thing he did.

  Paul’s garish adventures as a prisoner of war in Sudetenland lost their troubling forms as they mired down in the past, but one dismal image would not sink from his consciousness. His wife’s playful banter at dinner one night served to recall what he longed to forget. Sue had spent the afternoon with Mrs. Ward, next door, and Mrs. Ward had shown her an exquisite silver service for twenty-four, which, Sue was astonished to learn, Mr. Ward had liberated and brought home from the war in Europe.

  “Honey,” Sue chided him, “couldn’t you have brought home just a little something better than you did?”

  It was not likely that the Germans bewailed Paul’s plundering, for one rusty and badly bent Luftwaffe saber was the whole of his loot. His companions in the Russian Zone, under post-war anarchy, Free Enterprise par excellence that lasted for weeks, came home laden with treasure like Spanish galleons, while Paul was content with his foolish relic. Though he had weeks to seek and take what he would, his first hours as a swashbuckling conqueror were his last. The thing that broke his spirit and his hate, the image that tormented him, began taking shape on a glorious morning of Spring in the mountains, May 8, 1945.

  It took Paul and his fellow prisoners of war in Hellendorf, Sudetenland, some time to get used to the absence of their guards, who had prudently taken to the forests and hilltops the night before. He and two other Americans wandered uncertainly down the teeming road toward Peterswald, another tranquil farming village of five hundred war-bewildered souls. Humanity moved in wailing rivers, flowing in both directions with a unanimous lament—“The Russians are coming!” After four tediou
s kilometers in this milieu, the three settled on the bank of a stream that cut through Peterswald, wondering how they might reach the American lines, wondering if the Russians were killing everyone in their path as some said. Near them, secure in a barn-sheltered hutch, a white rabbit sat in darkness, listening to the uncustomary din without.

  The trio felt no part of the terror that surged through the village, no pity. “God knows the arrogant block-heads have been begging for it,” said Paul, and the others nodded in grim amusement. “After what the Germans did to them, you can’t blame the Russians, no matter what they do,” said Paul; and again his companions nodded. They sat in silence and watched as frantic mothers hid with their young in cellars, as others scurried up the hillside and into the woods, or deserted their homes to flee down the road with a few precious parcels.

  A wide-eyed, long-striding British lance corporal shouted from the road, “Better get a move on, lads; they’re in Hellendorf right now!”

  A cloud of dust in the west, the roar of trucks, the scattering of frightened refugees, and the Russians entered the village, pitching cigarettes to the astonished citizens, and giving wet, enthusiastic kisses to all who dared show themselves. Paul cavorted about their trucks, laughing and shouting, and catching the loaves and chunks of meat thrown to him by those liberators who heard his “American! American!” above the wild accordion music that streamed from the red-starred trucks. Happy and excited, he and his friends returned to the brookside with armloads of food, and at once began to stuff themselves.

  But as they ate, the others—Czechs, Poles, Jugoslavs, Russians, a fearsome horde of outraged German slaves—came to smash and loot and burn for the merry hell of it, in the wake of the Russian Army. Systematically, in purposeful knots of three and four, they went from house to house, breaking down doors, threatening the occupants, and taking what pleased them. Overlooking plunder was not likely, for Peterswald was built in a narrow draw, only one house deep on either side of a single road. Paul thought that thousands must have explored every house from cellar to attic before the moonlit evening came.