Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [73]
“There was never a time when he had the food to himself. We saw it delivered, and then he divided it up with all of us watching. Still, he somehow remained sleek and contended-looking while the rest of us became skeletons.
“He was feasting absentmindedly on crumbs and dribblings that fell on the tabletop and clung to his knife and ladle.”
This same innocent phenomenon, by the way, explains the great prosperity of many of my neighbors up and down the beach here. They are in charge of such wealth as remains in this generally bankrupt country, since they are so trustworthy. A little bit of it is bound to try to find its way to their mouths from their busy fingers and implements.
Old Soldier’s Anecdote Number Three: “One evening in May,” I said, “we were marched out of our camp and into the countryside. We were halted at about three in the morning, and told to sleep under the stars as best we could.
“When we awoke at sunrise, the guards were gone, and we found that we were on the rim of a valley near the ruins of an ancient stone watchtower. Below us, in that innocent farmland, were thousands upon thousands of people like us, who had been brought there by their guards, had been dumped. These weren’t only prisoners of war. They were people who had been marched out of concentration camps and factories where they had been slaves, and out of regular prisons for criminals, and out of lunatic asylums. The idea was to turn us loose as far as possible from the cities, where we might raise hell.
“And there were civilians there, too, who had run and run from the Russian front or the American and British front. The fronts had actually met to the north and south of us.
“And there were hundreds in German uniforms, with their weapons still in working order, but docile now, waiting for whomever they were expected to surrender to.”
“The Peaceable Kingdom,” said Marilee.
I changed the subject from war to peace. I told Marilee that I had returned to the arts after a long hiatus, and had, to my own astonishment, become a creator of serious paintings which would make Dan Gregory turn over in his hero’s grave in Egypt, paintings such as the world had never seen before.
She protested in mock horror. “Oh, please—not the arts again,” she said. “They’re a swamp I’ll never get out of as long as I live.”
But she listened thoughtfully when I told her about our little gang in New York City, whose paintings were nothing alike except for one thing: they were about nothing but themselves.
When I was all talked out, she sighed, and she shook her head. “It was the last conceivable thing a painter could do to a canvas, so you did it,” she said. “Leave it to Americans to write, ‘The End.’”
“I hope that’s not what we’re doing,” I said.
“I hope very much that it is what you’re doing,” she said. “After all that men have done to the women and children and every other defenseless thing on this planet, it is time that not just every painting, but every piece of music, every statue, every play, every poem and book a man creates, should say only this: ‘We are much too horrible for this nice place. We give up. We quit. The end!’”
She said that our unexpected reunion was a stroke of luck for her, since she thought I might have brought the solution to an interior decorating problem which had been nagging at her for years, namely: what sort of pictures, if any, should she put on the inane blanks between the columns of her rotunda? “I want to leave some sort of mark on this place while I have it,” she said, “and the rotunda seems the place to do it.
“I considered hiring women and children to paint murals of the death camps and the bombing of Hiroshima and the planting of land mines, and maybe the burning of witches and the feeding