Armageddon In Retrospect - Kurt Vonnegut [48]
The Commandant’s Desk
I was sitting before the window of my small cabinetmaking shop in the Czechoslovakian town of Beda. My widowed daughter, Marta, held the curtain back for me, and watched the Americans through one corner of the window, being careful not to block any of my view with her head.
“I wish he would turn this way, so we could see his face,” I said impatiently. “Marta, pull the curtain back more.”
“Is he a general?” said Marta.
“A general as commandant for Beda?” I laughed. “A corporal, maybe. How well fed they all look, eh? Aaaaaah, they eat—how they eat!” I ran my hand along the back of my black cat. “Now, kitty, you have only to cross the street for your first taste of American cream.” I raised my hands over my head. “Marta! Do you feel it, do you feel it? The Russians are gone, Marta, they’re gone!”
And now, we were trying to see the face of the American commandant, who was moving into the building across the street—where the Russian commandant had been a few weeks before. The Americans went inside, kicking their way through rubbish and splintered furniture. For a while, there was nothing to see through my window. I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes.
“It’s over, the killing is all over,” I said, “and we’re alive. Did you think that was possible? Did anyone in his right mind expect to be alive when it was over?”
“I feel almost as though being alive were something to be ashamed of,” she said.
“The world will probably feel that way for a long, long time. You can at least thank God you’ve come through it all with very little guilt in all the killing. Having been helpless in the middle has that advantage. Think of the guilt on the shoulders of the Americans—a hundred thousand dead in the Moscow bombings, fifty thousand in Kiev—”
“What about the guilt of the Russians?” she said passionately.
“No—not the Russians. That’s one of the joys of losing a war. You surrender your guilt along with your capital, and join the ranks of the innocent little people.”
The cat rubbed her flanks against my wooden leg and purred. I suppose most men with wooden legs conceal the fact as best they can. I lost my left leg as an Austrian infantryman in 1916, and I wear one trouser leg higher than the other to show off the handsome oak peg I made for myself after World War I. Carved in the peg are the images of Georges Clemenceau, David Lloyd George, and Woodrow Wilson, who helped the Czech Republic rise from the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1919, when I was twenty-five. And below these images are two more, each within a wreath: Tomáš; Masaryk and Eduard Beneš;, the first leaders of the Republic. There are other faces that should be added, and now, now that peace is with us once again, perhaps I’ll carve them. The only carving I’ve done on the peg in the past thirty years is crude and obscure, and maybe barbaric—three deep nicks near the iron tip, for the three German officers whose car I sent down a mountainside one night in 1943, during the Nazi occupation.
These men across the street weren’t the first Americans I’d seen. I owned a furniture factory in Prague during the days of the Republic, and I did a great deal of business with buyers for American department stores. When the Nazis came, I lost my factory, and moved to Beda, this quiet town in the foothills of Sudetenland. My wife died soon after that, of the rarest of causes, the natural ones. Then I had only my daughter, Marta.
Now, praise God, I was seeing Americans again—after the Nazis, after the Russian Army of World War II, after the Czech communists, after the Russians again. Knowing this day was coming had kept me alive. Hidden under the floorboards of my workshop was a bottle of Scotch that had constantly tried my willpower. But I left it in its hidingplace. It was to be my present to the Americans when they finally came.
“They’re coming out,” said Marta.
I opened my eyes to see a stocky, red-headed American major staring at me from