Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [88]
“The healthy women are in the cellar with the beets and potatoes and turnips,” I said. “They are putting off being raped as long as possible, but they have heard the history of other wars in the area, so they know that rape will surely come.”
“Does the picture have a title?” she said, rejoining me at the middle.
“Yes it does,” I said.
“What is it?” she said.
And I said: “‘Now It’s the Women’s Turn.’”
“Am I crazy,” she said, indicating a figure lurking near the ruined watchtower, “or is this a Japanese soldier?”
“That’s what he is,” I said. “He is a major in the army. You can tell that from the gold star and two brown stripes on the cuff of his left sleeve. And he still has his sword. He would rather die than give up his sword.”
“I’m surprised that there were any Japanese there,” she said.
“There weren’t,” I said, “but I thought there should be one there so I put one there.”
“Why?” she said.
“Because,” I said, “the Japanese were as responsible as the Germans for turning Americans into a bunch of bankrupt militaristic fuckups—after we’d done such a good job of being sincere war-haters after the First World War.”
“And this woman lying here—” she said, “she’s dead?”
“She’s dead,” I said. “She’s an old queen of the Gypsies.”
“She’s so fat,” she said. “Is she the only fat person? Everybody else is so skinny.”
“Dying is the only way to get fat in Happy Valley,” I said. “She’s as fat as a circus freak because she’s been dead three days.”
“‘Happy Valley,’” echoed Circe.
“Or ‘Peacetime’ or ‘Heaven’ or ‘the Garden of Eden’ or ‘Springtime’ or whatever you want to call it,” I said.
“She’s the only one who’s all alone,” said Circe. “Or is she?”
“Just about,” I said. “People don’t smell too nice after they’ve been dead three days. She was the first stranger to arrive in Happy Valley, and she came all alone, and she died almost right away.”
“Where are the other Gypsies?” she said.
“With their fiddles and tambourines and brightly painted caravans?” I said. “And their reputation for thieving, which was much deserved?”
Mrs. Berman told me a legend about Gypsies I had never heard before: “They stole the nails from the Roman soldiers who were about to crucify Jesus,” she said. “When the soldiers looked for the nails, they had disappeared mysteriously. Gypsies had stolen them, and Jesus and the crowd had to wait until the soldiers sent for new nails. After that, God Almighty gave permission to all Gypsies to steal all they could.” She pointed to the bloated Gypsy queen. “She believed that story. All Gypsies do.”
“Too bad for her that she believed it,” I said. “Or maybe it didn’t matter whether she believed it or not, since she was starving to death when she arrived all alone in Happy Valley.
“She tried to steal a chicken from the farmhouse,” I said. “The farmer saw her from this bedroom window, and took a shot at her with a small-caliber rifle he kept under his feather mattress. She ran away. He thought he had missed her, but he hadn’t. She had a little bullet in her abdomen, and she lay down there and died. Three days later, the rest of us came along.”
“If she’s a queen of the Gypsies, where are her subjects?” Circe asked again.
I explained that she had been queen of only about forty people at the peak of her power, including babes in arms. While there were notorious disputes in Europe as to which races and subraces were vermin, all Europeans could agree that the thieving, fortune-telling, childstealing Gypsies were the enemies of all decent humankind. So they were hunted down everywhere. The queen and her people gave up their caravans, and their traditional costumes, too—gave up everything which might identify them as Gypsies. They hid in forests in the daytime, and foraged for food at night.
One night, when the queen went out alone to look for food, one of her subjects, a fourteen-year-old boy, was caught stealing a ham from a Slovak mortar squad which had