Armageddon In Retrospect - Kurt Vonnegut [29]
My stomach growled. “Oh hell, Louis,” I sighed, “leave it there.”
When I awoke the next morning, I looked at my wrist to see what time it was. And then I recalled that I no longer owned a watch. The man in the bunk overhead was also astir. I asked him for the time. He stuck his head over the side, and I saw that his jaws were crammed with bread; he blew a shower of crumbs over me as he answered. He said he no longer had a watch. He chewed and swallowed until a major portion of the great wad of bread was cleared from his mouth and he could make himself understood. “I should care what time it is when Louis will give me two loaves and ten cigarettes for a watch that wasn’t worth twenty dollars new?” he asked.
Louis had a monopoly on rapport with the guards. His avowed harmony with Nazi principles convinced our keepers that he was the only bright one among us, and we all had to do our Black-Marketeering through this superficial Judas. Six weeks after we had been quartered in Dresden, nobody had any way of knowing what time it was outside of Louis and the guards. Two weeks after that, Louis had done every married man out of his wedding ring with this argument: “O.K., go ahead and be sentimental, go ahead and starve to death. Love’s a wonderful thing, they tell me.”
His profits were enormous. I later found out that my watch, for instance, brought a price of one hundred cigarettes and six loaves of bread. Anyone familiar with starvation will recognize that this was a handsome prize. Louis converted most of his wealth into the most negotiable of all securities, cigarettes. And it wasn’t long before the possibilities of being a loan shark had occurred to him. Once every two weeks we were issued twenty cigarettes. Slaves of the tobacco habit would exhaust the ration in one or two days, and would be in a state of frenzy until the next ration came. Louis, who was coming to be known as “The People’s Friend” or “Honest John,” announced that cigarettes might be borrowed from him at a reasonable fifty-percent interest until the next ration. He soon had his wealth loaned out and increasing by half every two weeks. I was terribly in debt to him, with nothing left for collateral but my soul. I took him to task for his greed: “Christ drove the moneylenders from the temple,” I reminded him.
“That was money they were lending, my boy,” he replied. “I’m not beggin’ you to borrow my cigarettes, am I? You’re beggin’ me to lend you some. Cigarettes are luxuries, friend. You don’t have to smoke to stay alive. You’d probably live longer if you didn’t smoke. Why don’t you give up the filthy habit?”
“How many can you let me have until next Tuesday?” I asked.
When usury had swelled his hoard to an all-time high, a catastrophe, which he had been awaiting impatiently, caused the value of his cigarettes to sky-rocket. The USAAF swept over the feeble Dresden defenses to demolish, among other things, the major cigarette factories. As a consequence, not only the P.W. cigarette ration, but that of the guards and civilians as well, was cut off completely. Louis was a major figure in local finance. The guards found themselves without a smoke to their names, and began selling our rings and watches back to Louis at a lower price than they had given him. Some put his wealth as high as one hundred watches. Louis’ own estimate, however, was a modest fifty-three watches, seventeen wedding rings, seven high school rings, and an heirloom watch-fob. “Some of the watches need a lot of work done on them,” he told me.
When I say that the AAF got the cigarette factories