Welcome to the Monkey House - Kurt Vonnegut [119]
Stepan made pleasant jokes about his little house in the sky. He said it was a cylinder ten meters long and four meters in diameter. It could be very cozy. And Stepan told us that there were little windows in his house, and a television camera, and a telescope, and radar, and all manner of instruments. How delightful to live in a time when such things could be! How delightful to be the father of the man who was the eyes, ears, and heart in space for all mankind!
He would remain up there for a month, he said. We began to count the days. Every night we listened to a broadcast of recordings of things Stepan had said. We heard nothing about his nosebleeds and his nausea and his crying. We heard only the calm, brave things he had said. And then, on the tenth night, there were no more recordings of Stepan. There was only music at eight o’clock. There was no news of Stepan at all, and we knew he was dead.
Only now, a year later, have we learned how Stepan died and where his body is. When I became accustomed to the horror of it, Mr. Ashland, I said, "So be it. May Major Stepan Ivankov and Captain Bryant Ashland serve to reproach us, whenever we look at the sky, for making a world in which there is no trust. May the two men be the beginning of trust between peoples. May they mark the end of the time when science sent our good, brave young men hurtling to meet in death."
I enclose a photograph of my family, taken during Stepan’s last visit to us. It is an excellent picture of Stepan. The body of water in the background is the Black Sea.
Mikhail Ivankov
Dear Mr. Ivankov:
Thank you for the letter about our sons. I never did get it in the mail. It was in all the papers after your Mr. Koshevoi read it out loud in the United Nations. I never did get a copy just for me. I guess Mr. Koshevoi forgot to drop it in the mailbox. That’s all right. I guess that’s the modern way to deliver important letters, just hand them to reporters. They say your letter to me is just about the most important thing that’s happened lately, outside of the fact we didn’t go to war over what happened between our two boys.
I don’t speak Russian, and I don’t have anybody right close by who does, so you’ll have to excuse the English. Alexei can read it to you. You tell him he writes English very well—better than I do.
Oh, I could have had a lot of expert help with this letter, if I’d wanted it—people happy to write to you in perfect Russian or perfect English or perfect anything at all. Seems like everybody in this country is like your boy Alexei. They all know better than I do what I should say to you. They say I have a chance to make history, if I answer you back the right things. One big magazine in New York offered me two thousand dollars for my letter back to you, and then it turned out I wasn’t even supposed to write a letter for all that money. The magazine people had already written it, and all I had to do was sign it. Don’t worry. I didn’t.
I tell you, Mr. Ivankov, I have had a bellyful of experts. If you ask me, our boys were experted to death. Your experts would do something, then our experts would answer back with some fancy billion-dollar stunt, and then your experts would answer that back with something fancier, and what happened finally happened. It was just like a bunch of kids with billions of dollars or billions of rubles or whatever.
You are lucky you have a son left, Mr. Ivankov. Hazel and I don’t. Bryant was the only son Hazel and I had. We didn’t call him Bryant after he was christened. We called him Bud. We have one daughter, named Charlene. She works for the telephone company in Jacksonville. She called up when she saw your letter in the paper, and she is the only expert about what I ought to say I’ve listened to. She’s a real expert, I figure, because she is Bud’s twin. Bud never married, so Charlene is as close as you can get to Bud. She said you did a good job, showing how your Stepan was a good-hearted man, trying to do what was right, just like anybody else. She said I should show you the same about Bud. And then she started