Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [63]
I even remember his helpful suggestion: that I become “Robert King.” Just think: somebody might now be trespassing on my private beach and gazing in awe at this mansion, and wondering who could be rich enough to live this well, and the answer could so easily have been this: “Robert King.”
But the Army adopted me as Rabo Karabekian—as I was soon to discover, for this reason: Major General Daniel Whitehall, then the commander of the combat troops of the Corps of Engineers, wanted an oil painting of himself in full uniform, and believed that somebody with a foreign-sounding name could do the best job. As an Army regular, of course, I would have to paint him for free. And this was a man ravenous for immortality. He was going to be retired in six months, by reason of failing kidneys, having barely missed service in two world wars.
God only knows what became of the portrait I did of him—after hours during basic training. I used the most expensive materials, which he was more than glad to buy for me. There is one painting of mine which might actually outlive the “Mona Lisa”! If I had realized that at the time I might have given him a puzzling half-smile, whose meaning only I knew for certain: he had become a general, but had missed the two big wars of his lifetime.
Another painting of mine which just might outlive the “Mona Lisa,” for better or for worse, is the gigantic son of a bitch out in the potato barn.
So much I only now realize! When I did the portrait of General Whitehall in a mansion nearly as grand as this one, which was the property of the Army, I was stereotypically Armenian! Welcome home to my true nature! I was a scrawny recruit and he was a Pasha weighing more than two hundred pounds, who could squash me like an insect anytime he pleased.
But what sly and self-serving advice, but actually very good advice, too, I was able to give him along with flattery on this order: “You have a very strong chin. Did you know that?”
In what must surely have been the manner of powerless Armenian advisors in Turkish courts, I congratulated him on having ideas he might never have had before. An example: “You must be thinking very hard how important aerial photography is going to be, if war should come.” War, of course, had come to practically everybody but the United States by then.
“Yes,” he said.
“Would you turn your head the least little bit to the left?” I said. “Wonderful! That way there aren’t such deep shadows in your eye sockets. I certainly don’t want to lose those eyes. And could you imagine now that you are looking from a hilltop at sunset—over a valley where a battle is going to take place the next day?”
So he did that as best he could, and he couldn’t talk without ruining everything. But, like a dentist, I was prefectly free to go on jabbering. “Good! Wonderful! Perfect! Don’t move anything!” I said. And then I added almost absentmindedly as I laid the paint on: “Every branch of the service is claiming camouflage from the air as their specialty, even though it’s obviously the business of the Engineers.”
And I said a little later: “Artists are so naturally good at camouflage, I guess I’m just the first of many to be recruited by the Corps of Engineers.”
Did such a sly and smarmy and Levantine seduction work? You be the judge:
The painting was unveiled at the General’s retirement ceremonies. I had completed my basic training and been promoted to private first class. I was simply another soldier with an obsolescent Springfield rifle, standing in ranks before the bunting-draped scaffold which supported the painting on an easel, and from which the General spoke.