Armageddon In Retrospect - Kurt Vonnegut [22]
“Mmmmmmmmmmm,” said Coleman.
“Food, food, food,” muttered Corporal Kleinhans. “All day, every day, all I hear is food! Get up. Get to work! You and your damn fool notebooks. That’s plundering, you know. I can shoot you for that.” He closed his eyes and sighed. “Food,” he said softly. “What good does it do to talk about it, to write about it? Talk about girls. Talk about music. Talk about liquor.” He implored Heaven with outstretched arms. “What kind of soldiers are these that spend all day exchanging recipes?”
“You’re hungry, too, aren’t you?” said Kniptash. “What have you got against food?”
“I get quite enough to eat,” said Kleinhans off-handedly.
“Six slices of black bread and three bowls of soup a day—that’s enough?” said Coleman.
“That’s plenty,” argued Kleinhans. “I feel better. I was overweight before the war. Now I’m as trim as I was as a young man. Before the war, everybody was overweight, living to eat instead of eating to live.” He smiled wanly. “Germany has never been healthier.”
“Yeah, but aren’t you hungry?” persisted Kniptash.
“Food isn’t the only thing in my life, nor the most important.” said Kleinhans. “Come, now, get up!”
Kniptash and Coleman arose reluctantly. “Got plaster or something in the end of your barrel, Pop,” said Coleman. They shuffled slowly back onto the littered street, with Kleinhans bringing up the rear, digging plaster from his rifle muzzle with a match, and denouncing the notebooks.
Donnini picked out a small rock from millions, carried it over to the curb and lay it at the feet of Kleinhans. He rested for a moment, his hands on his hips. “Hot,” he said.
“Just right for working,” said Kleinhans. He sat down on the curb. “What were you in civilian life, a cook?” he said after a long silence.
“I helped my father run his Italian restaurant in New York.”
“I had a place in Breslau for a while,” said Kleinhans. “That was long ago.” He sighed. “Seems silly now how much time and energy Germans used to spend just stuffing themselves with rich food. Such a silly waste.” He looked past Donnini and glared. He waggled a finger at Coleman and Kniptash, who stood together in the middle of the street, each with a baseball-sized rock in one hand, a notebook in the other.
“It seems to me there was sour cream in it,” Coleman was saying.
“Put those books away!” commanded Kleinhans. “Haven’t you got a girl? Talk about your girl!”
“Sure I got a girl,” said Coleman irritably. “Name’s Mary.”
“Is that all there is to know about her?” said Kleinhans.
Coleman looked puzzled. “Last name’s Fiske—Mary Fiske.”
“Well, is this Mary Fiske pretty? What does she do?”
Coleman narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. “One time I was waiting for her to come downstairs and I watched her old lady make a lemon meringue pie,” he said. “What she did was take some sugar and some cornstarch and a pinch of salt, and mix it in with a couple of cups of wat—”
“Please, let’s talk about music. Like music?” said Kleinhans.
“And then what’d she do?” said Kniptash. He had laid his rock down, and was now writing in his notebook. “She used eggs, didn’t she?”
“Please, boys, no,” pleaded Kleinhans.
“Sure she used eggs,” said Coleman. “And butter, too. Plenty of butter and eggs.”
II.
It was four days later that Kniptash found the crayons in a basement—on the same day that Kleinhans had begged for and been refused relief from the punishment detail.
When they had set out that morning, Kleinhans had been in a terrible temper, and had railed at his three charges for not keeping in step and for marching with their hands in their pockets. “Go ahead and talk, talk, talk about food, you women,” he had taunted them. “I don’t have to listen anymore!” Triumphantly, he had pulled two wads of cotton from his cartridge pouch and stuffed them into his ears. “Now I can think my own thoughts. Ha!”
At noon, Kniptash sneaked into the cellar of a bombed-out house, hoping for a rack of full mason jars such as he knew were in his snug cellar at home.