Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [87]
“It isn’t a painting at all! It’s a tourist attraction! It’s a World’s Fair! It’s a Disneyland!”
It is a gruesome Disneyland. Nobody is cute there.
On an average, there are ten clearly drawn World War Two survivors to each square foot of the painting. Even the figures in the distance, no bigger than flyspecks, when examined through one of several magnifying glasses I keep in the barn, prove to be concentration-camp victims or slave laborers or prisoners of war from this or that country, or soldiers from this or that military unit on the German side, or local farmers and their families, or lunatics set free from asylums, and on and on.
There is a war story to go with every figure in the picture, no matter how small. I made up a story, and then painted the person it had happened to. I at first made myself available in the barn to tell anyone who asked what the story was of this person or that one, but soon gave up in exhaustion. “Make up your own war stories as you look at the whatchamacallit,” I tell people. I stay in the house here, and simply point the way out to the potato barn.
That night with Circe Berman, though, I was glad to tell her any of the stories she wished to hear.
“Are you in there?” she said.
I pointed out myself at the bottom and right above the floor. I pointed with the toe of my shoe. I was the largest figure—the one as big as a cigarette. I was also the only one of the thousands with his back to the camera, so to speak. The crack between the fourth and fifth panels ran up my spine and parted my hair, and might be taken for the soul of Rabo Karabekian.
“This man clinging to your leg is looking up at you as though you were God,” she said.
“He is dying of pneumonia, and will be dead in two hours,” I said. “He is a Canadian bombardier who was shot down over an oil field in Hungary. He doesn’t know who I am. He can’t even see my face. All he can see is a thick fog which isn’t there, and he’s asking me if we are home yet.”
“And what are you telling him?” she said.
“What would you tell him?” I said. “I’m telling him, ‘Yes! We’re home! We’re home!’”
“Who is this man in the funny-looking suit?” she said.
“That is a concentration-camp guard who threw away his SS uniform and stole the suit from a scarecrow,” I said. I pointed out a group of concentration camp victims far away from the masquerading guard. Several of them were on the ground and dying, like the Canadian bombardier. “He brought these people to the valley and dumped them, but doesn’t know where to go next. Anybody who catches him will know he is an SS man—because he has his serial number tattooed on his upper left arm.”
“And these two?” she said.
“Yugoslavian partisans,” I said.
“This one?” she said.
“A sergeant major in the Moroccan Spahis, captured in North Africa,” I said.
“And this one with a pipe in his mouth?” she said.
“A Scottish glider pilot captured on D-Day,” I said.
“They’re just from everywhere, aren’t they?” she said.
“This is Gurkha here,” I said, “all the way from Nepal. And this machine-gun squad in German uniforms: they’re Ukrainians who changed sides early in the war. When the Russians finally reach the valley, they’ll be hanged or shot.”
“There don’t seem to be any women,” she said.
“Look closer,” I said. “Half the concentration camp people and half the people from the lunatic asylums are women. They just don’t look much like women anymore. They aren’t what you might call ‘movie stars.’”
“There don’t seem to be any healthy women,” she said.
“Wrong again,” I said. “You’ll find healthy ones at either end—in the corners at the bottom.”
We went to the extreme right end for a look. “My goodness,” she said, “it’s like a display in a museum of natural history.” So it was. There was a farmhouse down at the bottom of both ends: each one buttoned up tight like a little fort, its high gates closed, and all the animals in the courtyard. And I had made a schematic