Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [24]
But then his gaze fell upon the scene in which two anti-Semitic children teach Bingo to high-ranking Nazis in their madly theatrical uniforms. In amazed admiration for something brilliant he himself had written, and Trout had never thought of himself as worth a hill of beans as a writer, he praised the scene as an echo of this prophecy from the Book of Isaiah:
“The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.”
A fatling is any young animal fattened for slaughter.
“I read that scene,” Trout told me and Monica, “and I asked myself, ‘How the hell did I do that?’ ”
That wasn’t the first time I’d heard a person who had done a remarkable piece of work ask that delightful question. Back in the 1960s, long, long before the timequake, I had a great big old house in Barnstable Village on Cape Cod, where my first wife, Jane Marie Vonnegut, née Cox, and I were raising four boys and two girls. The ell where I did my writing was falling down.
I had it pulled all the way down and hauled away. I hired my friend Ted Adler, a skilled man-of-all-work my age, to build me a new one like the old one. Ted alone built the forms for the footings. Ted supervised the pouring of concrete from a ready-mix truck. He personally laid concrete blocks atop the footings. He framed the superstructure, put on the sheathing and siding, and shingled the roof and wired the place. He hung the windows and doors. He nailed up and jointed the Sheetrock inside.
The Sheetrock was the last step. I myself would do the exterior and interior painting. I told Ted I wanted to do at least that much, or he would have done that, too. When he himself had finished, and he had taken all the scraps I , didn’t want for kindling to the dump, he had me stand next to him outside and look at my new ell from thirty feet away.
And then he asked it: “How the hell did I do that?”
That question remains for me in the summer of 1996 one of my three favorite quotations. Two of the three are questions rather than good advice of any kind. The second is Jesus Christ’s “Who is it they say I am?”
The third is from my son Mark, pediatrician and watercolorist and sax player. I’ve already quoted him in another book: “We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”
One might protest, “My dear Dr. Vonnegut, we can’t all be pediatricians.”
In “Bunker Bingo Party,” the Nazis participate in Bingo, with the Minister of Propaganda, arguably the most effective communicator in history, calling out the coordinates of winning or losing squares on the players’ cards. The game proves as analgesic for war criminals in deep doodoo as it continues to be for harmless old biddies at church fairs.
Several of the war criminals wear an Iron Cross, awarded only to Germans who have demonstrated battlefield fearlessness so excessive as to be classifiable as psychopathic. Hitler wears one. He won it as a corporal in Western Civilization’s first unsuccessful attempt to commit suicide.
I was a PFC during the second botched effort to end it all. Like Ernest Hemingway, I never shot a human being. Maybe Hitler never did that big trick, either. He didn’t get his country’s highest decoration for killing a lot of people. He got it for being such a brave messenger. Not everybody on a battlefield is supposed to concentrate on nothing but killing. I myself was an intelligence and reconnaissance scout, going places our side hadn’t occupied, looking for enemies. I wasn’t supposed to fight them if I found them. I was supposed to stay unnoticed and alive, so I could tell my superiors where they were, and what it looked like they were doing.
It was wintertime, and I myself was awarded my country’s second-lowest decoration, a Purple Heart for frost-bite.
When I got home from my war, my uncle Dan clapped me on the back, and he bellowed, “You’re a man now!”
I damn near killed my first German.
To return to Trout’s roman