Armageddon In Retrospect - Kurt Vonnegut [42]
He had a point about my clothes. They were ripped and stained and patched, and I looked more like a resident of skid row than an American soldier. But, as you might expect, George still looked pretty sharp. The guards kept him in cigarettes as well as food, and he could trade the smokes for just about anything in camp he wanted. He got himself several changes of clothes that way, and the guards let him use an iron they had in their shack, so he was the camp fashion plate.
His game was over now. Nobody had to trade with him anymore, and the men who’d taken such good care of him were gone. Maybe that’s what was scaring him, and not the Russians. “Let’s go, Sammy,” he said. He was pleading with me, a person he hadn’t had a friendly word for in eight months at close quarters.
“Go ahead, if you want to,” I said. “You don’t have to ask my permission, George. Go on. I’m staying here with the rest of the guys.”
He didn’t move. “You and me, Sammy, we’ll stick together.” He grinned and draped his arm around my shoulders.
I twisted away, and walked across the prison yard. All we had in common was red hair. He worried me: I couldn’t figure out what his angle was on suddenly becoming a great pal of mine. And George was the kind of guy who always had an angle.
He followed me across the yard, and put his big arm around my shoulders again. “O.K., Sammy, we’ll stay here and wait.”
“I don’t give a damn what you do.”
“O.K., O.K.,” he laughed. “I was just going to suggest, since we got an hour or so to wait, why don’t you and me go down the road a piece and see if we can’t get us some smokes and souvenirs? Both speaking German, we ought to make out real good, you and me.”
I was dying for a smoke, and he knew it. I’d traded him my gloves for two cigarettes a couple of months before—when it had been plenty cold—and I hadn’t had one since. George started me thinking about what that first inhale would be like. There’d be cigarettes in the nearest town, Peterswald, two uphill miles away.
“Whaddya say, Sammy?”
I shrugged. “What the hell—let’s go.”
“Attaboy.”
“Where you going?” yelled one of the guys in the prison yard.
“Out to have us a quick look around,” George answered.
“Be back in an hour,” I added.
“Want some company?” yelled the guy.
George kept on walking, and didn’t answer. “Get a mob, and they’ll louse up everything,” he said winking. “Two’s just right.”
I looked at him. He had a smile fixed on his face, but that didn’t keep me from seeing that he was still plenty scared.
“What are you afraid of, George?”
“Old Georgie afraid of something? That’ll be the day.”
We took our place in the noisy crowd, and began to climb the gentle grade to Peterswald.
II.
Sometimes, when I think about what happened in Peterswald, I make excuses for myself—that I was drunk, that I was a little crazy after having been locked up and hungry for so long. The hell of it is that I wasn’t forced into doing what I did. I wasn’t cornered. I did it because I wanted to.
Peterswald wasn’t what I’d expected. I’d hoped for at least a store or two where we could beg or steal a couple of cigarettes and something to eat. But the town wasn’t anything more than two dozen farms, each with a wall and a ten-foot gate. They were jammed together on a green hilltop, overlooking the fields, so that they formed a solid fort. With tanks and artillery on their way, though, Peterswald was nothing but a pretty push-over, and it didn’t look like anybody felt like making the Russians fight for it.
Here and there a white flag—a bedsheet on the end of a broomstick—fluttered from a second-story window. Every gate stood open—unconditional surrender.
“This looks as good as any,” said George. He gripped my arm, steered me out of the mob, through the gate, and into the hard-packed courtyard of the first farm we came to.
The yard was closed in on three sides by the house and farm buildings, with the wall and gate across the fourth. Looking through the open doors into the vacant barns, and through the windows into the still house, I felt for the first time like what I really