Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [40]
Writers who are swoopers, it seems to me, find it wonderful that people are funny or tragic or whatever, worth reporting, without wondering why or how people are alive in the first place.
Bashers, while ostensibly making sentence after sentence as efficient as possible, may actually be breaking down seeming doors and fences, cutting their ways through seeming barbed-wire entanglements, under fire and in an atmosphere of mustard gas, in search of answers to these eternal questions: “What in heck should we be doing? What in heck is really going on?”
If bashers are unwilling to settle for the basher Voltaire’s “Il faut cultiver notre jardin, ” that leaves the politics of human rights, which I am prepared to discuss. I begin with a couple of true stories from the end of Trout’s and my war in Europe.
Here’s the thing: For a few days after Germany surrendered, on May 7th, 1945, having been directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of maybe forty million people, there was a pocket of anarchy south of Dresden, near the Czech border, which had yet to be occupied and policed by troops of the Soviet Union. I was in it, and have described it some in my novel Bluebeard. Thousands of prisoners of war like myself had been turned loose there, along with death camp survivors with tattooed arms, and lunatics and convicted felons and Gypsies, and who knows what else.
Get this: There were also German troops there, still armed but humbled, and looking for anybody but the Soviet Union to surrender to. My particular war buddy Bernard V. O‘Hare and I talked to some of them. O’Hare, having become a lawyer for both the prosecution and the defense in later life, is up in Heaven now. Back then, though, we could both hear the Germans saying that America would now have to do what they had been doing, which was to fight the godless Communists.
We replied that we didn’t think so. We expected the USSR to try to become more like the USA, with freedom of speech and religion, and fair trials and honestly elected officials, and so on. We, in turn, would try to do what they claimed to be doing, which was to distribute goods and services and opportunities more fairly: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” That sort of thing.
Occam’s Razor.
And then O’Hare and I, not much more than kids actually, went into an undefended barn there in the springtime countryside. We wanted something to eat, anything to eat. But we found a wounded and obviously dying captain of the notoriously heartless Nazi Schutzstaffel, the SS, in a haymow instead. He might easily, until very recently, have been in charge of tormenting and planning the extinction of some of the death camp survivors not far away.
Like all members of the SS, and like all death camp survivors as well, this captain presumably had a serial number tattooed on his arm. Want to talk about postwar irony? There was a lot of that.
He asked O’Hare and me to go away. He would soon be dead, and said he looked forward to being such. As we prepared to depart, not feeling much about him one way or the other, he cleared his throat, signaling that he had something more to say after all. This was the last-words business again. If he had any, who but us could hear them?
“I have just wasted the past ten years of my life,” he said.
You want to talk about a timequake?
36
My wife thinks I think I’m such hot stuff. She’s wrong. I don’t think I’m such hot stuff.
My hero George Bernard Shaw, socialist, and shrewd and funny playwright, said in his eighties that if he was considered smart, he sure pitied people who were considered dumb. He said that, having lived as long as he had, he was at last sufficiently wise to serve as a reasonably competent office boy.
That’s how I feel.
When the City of London wanted to give Shaw its Order of Merit, he thanked them for it, but said he had already given it to himself.
I would