Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [22]
The visible part of the clock consisted of seven robots, which represented seven fourteenth-century electors. They were designed to circle an eighth robot, which represented the Holy Roman Emperor Charles the Fourth, and to celebrate his exclusion, in Thirteen-hundred and Fifty-six, of the Papacy from the selection of German rulers. The clock had been knocked out by bombing. American soldiers who were clever with machinery had begun on their own time to tinker with it as soon as they occupied the city. Most Germans I had talked to were so demoralized that they did not care if the Männleinlaufen never ran again. But it was running again, anyway. Thanks to American ingenuity, the electors were circling Charles the Fourth again.
“Well,” said Ruth, when the sounds of the bells had died away, “when you eight-year-olds kill Evil here in Nuremberg, be sure to bury it at a crossroads and drive a stake through its heart—or you just might see it again at the next full moooooooooooooooooon.”
3
BUT MY UNFLAGGING optimism prevailed. Ruth consented at last to marry me, to let me try to make her the happiest of women, despite all the ghastly things that had happened to her so far. She was a virgin, and so very nearly was I, although I was thirty-three—although, roughly speaking, half my life was over.
Oh, to be sure, I had, while in Washington, “made love,” as they say, to this woman or that one from time to time. There was a WAC. There was a Navy nurse. There was a stenographer in the Department of Commerce typing pool. But I was fundamentally a fanatical monk in the service of war, war, war. There were many like me. Nothing else in life is nearly so obsessive as war, war, war.
My wedding gift to Ruth was a wood carving commissioned by me. It depicted hands of an old person pressed together in prayer. It was a three-dimensional rendering of a drawing by Albrecht Dürer, a sixteenth-century artist, whose house Ruth and I had visited many times in Nuremberg, during our courting days. That was my invention, so far as I know, having those famous hands on paper rendered in the round. Such hands have since been manufactured by the millions and are staples of dim-witted piety in gift shops everywhere.
Soon after our marriage I was transferred to Wiesbaden, Germany, outside of Frankfurt am Main, where I was placed in charge of a team of civilian engineers, which was winnowing mountains of captured German technical documents for inventions and manufacturing methods and trade secrets American industry might use. It did not matter that I knew no math or chemistry or physics—any more than it had mattered when I went to work for the Department of Agriculture that I had never been near a farm, that I had not even tended a pot of African violets on a windowsill. There was nothing that a humanist could not supervise—or so it was widely believed at the time.
Our son was born by cesarean section in Wiesbaden. Ben Shapiro, who had been my best man, and who had also been transferred to Wiesbaden, delivered the child. He had just been promoted to full colonel. In a few years Senator Joseph R. McCarthy would find that promotion to have been sinister, since it was well known that Shapiro had been a communist before the war. “Who promoted Shapiro to Wiesbaden?” he would want to know.
We named our son Walter F. Starbuck, Jr. Little did we dream that the name would become as onerous as Judas Iscariot, Jr., to the boy. He would seek legal remedy when he turned twenty-one, would have his name changed to Walter F. Stankiewicz, the name that appears over his columns in The New York Times. Stankiewicz, of course, was our discarded family name. And I must laugh now, remembering something my father once told me about his arrival at Ellis Island as an immigrant. He was advised