Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [18]
Life goes on.
My late wife Ruth, the grandmother of these children, was born in Vienna. Her family owned a rarebook store there—before the Nazis took it away from them. She was six years younger than I. Her father and mother and two siblings were killed in concentration camps. She herself was hidden by a Christian family, but was discovered and arrested, along with the head of that family, in Nineteen-hundred and Forty-two. So she herself was in a concentration camp near Munich, finally liberated by American troops, for the last two years of the war. She herself would die in her sleep in Nineteen-hundred and Seventy-four—of congestive heart failure, two weeks before my own arrest. Whither I went, and no matter how clumsily, there did my Ruth go—as long as she could. If I marveled at this out loud, she would say, “Where else could I be? What else could I do?”
She might have been a great translator, for one thing. Languages came so easily to her, as they did not to me. I spent four years in Germany after the Second World War, but never mastered German. But there was no European language that Ruth could not speak at least a little bit. She passed the time in the concentration camp, waiting for death, by getting other prisoners to teach her languages she did not know. Thus did she become fluent in Romany, the tongue of the Gypsies, and even learned the words to some songs in Basque. She might have become a portrait artist. That was another thing she had done in prison: With a finger dipped in lampblack, she had drawn on the walls likenesses of those passing through. She might have been a famous photographer. When she was only sixteen, three years before Germany annexed Austria, she photographed one hundred beggars in Vienna, all of whom were terribly wounded veterans of World War One. These were sold in portfolios, one of which I have found recently, and to my heartbroken amazement, in the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. She could also play the piano, whereas I am tone-deaf. I cannot even sing “Sally in the Garden” on key.
I was Ruth’s inferior, you might say.
When things started to go really badly for me in the fifties and sixties, when I was unable to get a decent job anywhere, despite all the high posts I had held in government, despite all the important people I knew, it was Ruth who rescued our unpopular little family out in Chevy Chase. She began with two failures, which depressed her at first, but which would later make her laugh so hard that tears streamed from her eyes. Her first failure was as a piano player in a cocktail lounge. The proprietor, when he fired her, told her that she was too good, that his particular clientele “… didn’t appreciate the finer things in life.” Her second failure was as a wedding photographer. There was always an air of prewar doom about her photographs, which no retoucher would eradicate. It was as though the entire wedding party would wind up in the trenches or the gas chambers by and by.
But then she became an interior decorator, beguiling prospective clients with watercolors of rooms she would like to do for them. And I was her clumsy assistant, hanging draperies, holding wallpaper samples against a wall, taking telephone messages from clients, running errands, picking up swatches of this and that—and on and on. I set fire to eleven hundred dollars’ worth of blue velvet draperies one time. No wonder my son never respected me.
When did he ever have a chance to?
My God—there his mother was, trying to support the family, and scrimping and saving to get by. And there his unemployed father was, always in the way and helpless, and finally setting fire to a fortune in draperies with a cigarette!
Hooray for a Harvard education! Oh, to be the proud son of a Harvard man!
Ruth was a tiny woman, incidentally—with coppery skin and straight black hair and high cheekbones and deep-set eyes. The first time I laid eyes on her, which was in Nuremberg, Germany, in late August of Nineteen-hundred and Forty-five,