Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [5]
New York City, here I come. This is terrible!
“Tell me how your parents died,” she said. I couldn’t believe my ears.
“I beg your pardon?” I said.
“What good is ‘Hello’?” she said.
She had stopped me in my tracks. “I’ve always thought it was better than nothing,” I said, “but I could be wrong.”
“What does ‘Hello’ mean?” she said.
And I said, “I had always understood it to mean ‘Hello.’”
“Well it doesn’t,” she said. “It means, ‘Don’t talk about anything important.’ It means, ‘I’m smiling but not listening, so just go away.’”
“Tell Mama!” Can you beat it?
She had straight black hair and large brown eyes like my mother—but she was much taller than my mother, and a little bit taller than me, for that matter. She was also much shapelier than my mother, who let herself become quite heavy, and who didn’t care much what her hair looked like, either, or her clothes. Mother didn’t care because Father didn’t care.
And I told Mrs. Berman this about my mother: “She died when I was twelve—of a tetanus infection she evidently picked up while working in a cannery in California. The cannery was built on the site of an old livery stable, and tetanus bacteria often colonize the intestines of horses without hurting them, and then become durable spores, armored little seeds, when excreted. One of them lurking in the dirt around and under the cannery was somehow exhumed and sent traveling. After a long, long sleep it awakened in Paradise, something we would all like to do. Paradise was a cut in my mother’s hand.”
“So long, Mama,” said Circe Berman.
There was that word Mama again.
“At least she didn’t have to endure the Great Depression, which was only one year away,” I said.
And at least she didn’t have to see her only child come home a cyclops from World War Two.
“And how did your father die?” she said.
“In the Bijou Theater in San Ignacio in 1938,” I said. “He went to the movie alone. He never even considered remarrying.”
He still lived over the little store in California where he had got his first foothold in the economy of the United States of America. I had been living in Manhattan for five years then—and was working as an artist for an advertising agency. When the movie was over, the lights came on, and everybody went home but Father.
“What was the movie?” she asked.
And I said, “Captains Courageous, starring Spencer Tracy and Freddie Bartholomew.”
What Father might have made of that movie, which was about cod fishermen in the North Atlantic, God only knows. Maybe he didn’t see any of it before he died. If he did see some of it, he must have gotten rueful satisfaction from its having absolutely nothing to do with anything he had ever seen or anybody he had ever known. He welcomed all proofs that the planet he had known and loved during his boyhood had disappeared entirely.
That was his way of honoring all the friends and relatives he had lost in the massacre.
You could say that he became his own Turk over here, knocking himself down and spitting on himself. He could have studied English and become a respected teacher there in San Ignacio, and started writing poetry again, or maybe translated the Armenian poets he loved so much into English. But that wasn’t humiliating enough. Nothing would do but that he, with all his education, become what his father and grandfather had been, which was a cobbler.
He was good at that craft, which he had learned as a boy, and which I would learn as a boy. But how he complained] At least he pitied himself in Armenian, which only Mother and I could understand. There weren’t any other Armenians within a hundred miles of San Ignacio.
“I am looking for William Shakespeare, your greatest poet,” he might say as he worked. “Have you ever heard of him?” He knew Shakespeare backwards and forwards in Armenian, and would often quote him. “To be or not to be …”for example, as far as he was concerned, was, “Linel kam chlinel …”
“Tear out my tongue if you catch me speaking Armenian,” he might say. That was the penalty the Turks set in the seventeenth century