Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [11]
And Armenians haven’t succeeded only in business here. The great writer William Saroyan was an Armenian, and so is Dr. George Mintouchian, the new president of the University of Chicago. Dr. Mintouchian is a renowned Shakespeare scholar, something my father could have been.
And Circe Berman has just come into the room and read what is in my typewriter, which is ten of the lines above. She is gone again. She said again that my father obviously suffered from Survivor’s Syndrome.
“Everybody who is alive is a survivor, and everybody who is dead isn’t,” I said. “So everybody alive must have the Survivor’s Syndrome. It’s that or death. I am so damn sick of people telling me proudly that they are survivors! Nine times out of ten it’s a cannibal or billionaire!”
“You still haven’t forgiven your father for being what he had to be,” she said. “That’s why you’re yelling now.”
“I wasn’t yelling,” I said.
“They can hear you in Portugal,” she said. That’s where you wind up if you put out to sea from my private beach and sail due east, as she had figured out from the globe in the library. You wind up in Oporto, Portugal.
“You envy your father’s ordeal,” she said.
“I had an ordeal of my own!” I said. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a one-eyed man.”
“You told me yourself that there was almost no pain, and that it healed right away,” she said, which was true. I don’t remember being hit, but only the approach of a white German tank and German soldiers all in white across a snow-covered meadow in Luxembourg. I was unconscious when I was taken prisoner, and was kept that way by morphine until I woke up in a German military hospital in a church across the border, in Germany. She was right: I had to endure no more pain in the war than a civilian experiences in a dentist’s chair.
The wound healed so quickly that I was soon shipped off to a camp as just another unremarkable prisoner.
Still, I insisted that I was as entitled to a Survivor’s Syndrome as my father, so she asked me two questions. The first one was this: “Do you believe sometimes that you are a good person in a world where almost all of the other good people are dead?”
“No,” I said.
“Do you sometimes believe that you must be wicked, since all the good people are dead, and that the only way to clear your name is to be dead, too?”
“No,” I said.
“You may be entitled to the Survivor’s Syndrome, but you didn’t get it,” she said. “Would you like to try for tuberculosis instead?”
“How do you know so much about the Survivor’s Syndrome?” I asked her. This wasn’t a boorish question to ask her, since she had told me during our first meeting on the beach that she and her husband, although both Jewish, had had no knowledge of relatives they might have had in Europe and who might have been killed during the Holocaust. They were both from families which had been in the United States for several generations, and which had lost all contact with European relatives.
“I wrote a book about it,” she said. “Rather—I wrote about people like you: children of a parent who had survived some sort of mass killing. It’s called The Underground.”
Needless to say, I have not read that or any of the Polly Madison books, although they seem, now that I have started looking around for them, as available as packs of chewing gum.
Not that I would need to leave the house to get a copy of The Underground or any other Polly Madison book, Mrs. Berman informs me. The cook’s daughter Celeste has every one of them.
Mrs. Berman, the most ferocious enemy of privacy I ever knew, has also discovered that Celeste, although only fifteen, already takes birth-control pills.
The formidable widow Berman told me the plot of The Underground, which is this: Three girls, one black, one Jewish and one Japanese, feel drawn together and separate from the rest of their classmates for reasons they can’t explain. They form a little club which they call, again for reasons they can