Mother Night

by Kurt Vonnegut

  "This--this is friendship indeed," I said.

  "I hope so," he said.

  29

  ADOLF EICHMANN

  AND ME ...

  I SPENT TWO DAYS in that queer basement--as a meditative invalid.

  My clothes had been ruined in the beating I'd taken. So, from the resources of Jones' household, I was given other clothes. I was given a pair of shiny black trousers by Father Keeley, a silver-colored shirt by Dr. Jones, a shirt that had once been part of the uniform of a defunct American Fascist movement called, straightforwardly enough, "The Silver Shirts." And the Black Fuehrer gave me a tiny orange sports coat that made me look like an organ-grinder's monkey.

  And Resi Noth and George Kraft kept me company tenderly--not only nursed me, but did my dreaming and planning for me as well. The big dream was to get out of America as soon as possible. Conversations, in which I took very little part, were a sort of roulette played with the names of warm places purported to be Edens: Acapulco ... Minorca ... Rhodes ... even the Vale of Kashmir, Zanzibar, and the Andaman Islands.

  The news from the outside world was not such as to make my remaining in America attractive--or even conceivable. Father Keeley went out and bought newspapers several times a day, and, for supplementary enlightenment, we had the blatting of the radio.

  The Republic of Israel stepped up its demands for me, encouraged by rumors that I wasn't an American citizen, that I was, in fact, a citizen of nowhere. And the Republic's demands were framed so as to be educational, too--teaching that a propagandist of my sort was as much a murderer as Heydrich, Eichmann, Himmler, or any of the gruesome rest.

  That may be so. I had hoped, as a broadcaster, to be merely ludicrous, but this is a hard world to be ludicrous in, with so many human beings so reluctant to laugh, so incapable of thought, so eager to believe and snarl and hate. So many people wanted to believe me!

  Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.

  West Germany asked the Government of the United States politely if I might be a citizen of theirs. They had no proof one way or another, since all records pertaining to me had burned during the war. If I was a citizen of theirs, they said, they would be as pleased as Israel to have me for trial.

  If I was a German, they said in effect, they were certainly ashamed of a German like me.

  Soviet Russia, in short words that sounded like ball bearings being dropped into wet gravel, said that no trial was necessary. A Fascist like me, they said, should be squashed underfoot like a cockroach.

  But it was the anger of my neighbors that really stank of sudden death. The more barbaric newspapers printed without comment letters from people who wanted me displayed from coast to coast in an iron cage; from heroes who volunteered to serve in a firing squad for me, as though the use of small arms were a skill known to few; from people who planned to do nothing themselves, but were confident enough in American civilization to know that there were other, stronger, younger people who would know what to do.

  And these last-named patriots were right in having confidence. I doubt if there has ever been a society that has been without strong and young people eager to experiment with homicide, provided no very awful penalties are attached to it.

  According to the newspapers and radio, justifiably angry people had already done what they could about me, breaking into my ratty attic, smashing my windows, tearing up or carting off my worldly goods. The hated attic was now under police guard around the clock.

  The New York Post pointed out editorially that the police could scarcely give me the protection I needed, since my enemies were so numerous and so understandably murderous. What was called for, said the Post helplessly, was a battalion of Marines to surround me for the rest of my days.

  The New York Daily News suggested that my biggest war crime was not killing myself like a gentleman. Presumably Hitler was a gentleman.

  The News, incidentally, also printed a letter from Bernard B. O'Hare, the man who had captured me in Germany, the man who had recently written me a letter with copious carbons.

  "I want this guy all for myself," O'Hare wrote of me. "I deserve this guy all for myself. I was the guy who caught him in Germany. If I'd known then he was going to get away, I would have blown his head off right then and there. If anybody sees Campbell before I do, tell him Bernie O'Hare is on his way from Boston by nonstop plane."

  The New York Times said that tolerating and even protecting vermin like me was one of the maddening necessities in the life of a truly free society.

  The United States Government, as Resi had told me, was not going to turn me over to the Republic of Israel. There was no legal machinery for that.

  The United States Government did promise, however, to make a full and open review of my puzzling case, to find out exactly what my citizenship status was, to find out why I had never even been brought to trial.

  That Government expressed queasy surprise that I was even within its borders.

  The New York Times published a portrait of me as a much younger man, my official portrait as a Nazi and idol of the international airwaves. I can only guess at the year in which the picture was taken--1941, I think.

  Arndt Klopfer, the photographer who took the picture of me, did his best to make me look like a Maxfield Parrish Jesus covered with cold cream. He even gave me a halo, a judiciously placed spot of nebulous light in the background. The halo was no special effect for me alone. Everybody who went to Klopfer got a halo, including Adolf Eichmann.

  I can say that for certain about Eichmann, without asking for confirmation from the Haifa Institute, because Eichmann had his picture taken just ahead of me at Klopfer's studio. It was the only time I ever met Eichmann--the only time in Germany. I met him again here in Israel--only two weeks ago, when I was incarcerated briefly in Tel Aviv.

  About that reunion: I was locked up in Tel Aviv for twenty-four hours. On my way to my cell there, the guards stopped me outside Eichmann's cell to hear what we had to say to each other, if anything.

  We didn't recognize each other, and the guards had to introduce us.

  Eichmann was writing the story of his life, just as I am now writing the story of my life. That chinless old plucked buzzard, with six million murders to explain away, gave me a saintly smile. He was sweetly interested in his work, in me, in the guards in the prison, in everybody.

  He beamed at me, and he said, "I'm not mad at anybody."

  "That's certainly the way to be," I said.

  "I've got some advice for you," he said.

  "I'd be glad to have it," I said.

  "Relax," he said, beaming, beaming, beaming. "Just relax."

  "That's how I got here," I said.

  "Life is divided up into phases," he said. "Each one is very different from the others, and you have to be able to recognize what is expected of you in each phase. That's the secret of successful living."

  "It's good of you to share the secret with me," I said.

  "I'm a writer now," he said. "I never thought I'd be a writer."

  "May I ask a personal question?" I said.

  "Certainly," he said benignly. "That's the phase I'm in now. This is the time for thinking and answering. Ask whatever you like."

  "Do you feel that you're guilty of murdering six million Jews?" I said.

  "Absolutely not," said the architect of Auschwitz, the introducer of conveyor belts into crematoria, the greatest customer in the world for the gas called Cyklon-B.

  Not knowing the man for sure, I tried some intramural satire on him--what seemed to me to be intramural satire. "You were simply a soldier, were you--" I said, "taking orders from higher-ups, like soldiers around the world?"

  Eichmann turned to a guard, and talked to him in rapid-fire Yiddish, indignant Yiddish. If he'd spoken it slowly, I would have understood it, but he spoke too fast.

  "What did he say?" I asked the guard.

  "He wondered if we'd showed y
ou his statement," said the guard. "He made us promise not to show it to anybody until it was done."

  "I haven't seen it," I said to Eichmann.

  "Then how do you know what my defense is going to be?" he said.

  This man actually believed that he had invented his own trite defense, though a whole nation of ninety some-odd million had made the same defense before him. Such was his paltry understanding of the God-like human act of invention.

  The more I think about Eichmann and me, the more I think that he should be sent to the hospital, and that I am the sort of person for whom punishments by fair, just men were devised.

  As a friend of the court that will try Eichmann, I offer my opinion that Eichmann cannot distinguish between right and wrong--that not only right and wrong, but truth and falsehood, hope and despair, beauty and ugliness, kindness and cruelty, comedy and tragedy, are all processed by Eichmann's mind indiscriminately, like birdshot through a bugle.

  My case is different. I always know when I tell a lie, am capable of imagining the cruel consequences of anybody's believing my lies, know cruelty is wrong. I could no more lie without noticing it than I could unknowingly pass a kidney stone.

  If there is another life after this one, I would like very much, in the next one, to be the sort of person of whom it could truly be said, "Forgive him--he knows not what he does."

  This cannot be said of me now.

  The only advantage to me of knowing the difference between right and wrong, as nearly as I can tell, is that I can sometimes laugh when the Eichmanns can see nothing funny.

  "You still write?" Eichmann asked me, there in Tel Aviv.

  "One last project--" I said, "a command performance for the archives."

  "You are a professional writer?" he said.

  "Some say so," I said.

  "Tell me--" he said, "do you set a certain time of day aside for writing, whether you feel like it or not--or do you wait for inspiration to strike, night or day?"

  "A schedule," I said, remembering back so many years.

  I got some of his respect back. "Yes, yes--" he said, nodding, "a schedule. That's what I've found, too. Sometimes I simply stare at a blank sheet of paper, but I still sit here and stare at it for the whole period I've set aside for work. Does alcohol help?"

  "I think it only seems to--and only seems to for about half an hour," I said. This, too, was an opinion from my youth.

  Eichmann made a joke. "Listen--" he said, "about those six million--"

  "Yes?" I said.

  "I could spare you a few for your book," he said. "I don't think I really need them all."

  I offer this joke to history, on the assumption that no tape recorder was around. This was one of the memorable quips of the bureaucratic Genghis Khan.

  It's possible that Eichmann wanted me to recognize that I had killed a lot of people, too, by the exercise of my fat mouth. But I doubt that he was that subtle a man, man of as many parts as he was. I think, if we ever got right down to it, that, out of the six million murders generally regarded as his, he wouldn't lend me so much as one. If he were to start farming out all those murders, after all, Eichmann as Eichmann's idea of Eichmann would disappear.

  The guards took me away, and the only other encounter I had with the Man of the Century was in the form of a note, smuggled mysteriously from his prison in Tel Aviv to mine in Jerusalem. The note was dropped at my feet by a person unknown in the exercise yard here. I picked it up, read it, and this is what it said:

  "Do you think a literary agent is absolutely necessary?" The note was signed by Eichmann.

  My reply was this: "For book club and movie sales in the United States of America, absolutely."

  30

  DON QUIXOTE ...

  WE WOULD FLY to Mexico City--Kraft, Resi, and I. That became the plan. Dr. Jones would not only provide us with transportation, he would provide us with a reception committee in Mexico City as well.

  From Mexico City we would go exploring by automobile, would seek some secret village in which to spend the rest of our days.

  The plan was surely as charming a daydream as I had had in many a day. And it seemed not only possible but certain that I would write again.

  Shyly, I told Resi so.

  She wept for joy. For real joy? Who knows. I can only guarantee that the tears were wet and salty.

  "Did I have anything to do with this lovely, this heavenly miracle?" she said.

  "Everything," I said, holding her close.

  "No, no--very little--" she said, "but some--thank God, some. The big miracle is the talent you were born with."

  "The big miracle," I said, "is your power to raise the dead."

  "Love does that," she said. "And it raised me, too. How alive do you think I was--before?"

  "Shall I write about it?" I said. "In our village there in Mexico, on the rim of the Pacific--is that what I should write first?"

  "Yes--yes, oh yes--darling, darling," she said. "I'll take such good care of you while you do it. Will--will you have any time for me?"

  "The afternoons and the evenings and the nights," I said. "That's all the time I'll be able to give you."

  "Have you decided on a name yet?" she said.

  "Name?" I said.

  "Your new name--the name of the new writer whose beautiful works come mysteriously out of Mexico," she said. "I will be Mrs.--"

  "Senora--" I said.

  "Senora who?" she said. "Senor and Senora who?"

  "Christen us," I said.

  "It's too important for me to decide right away," she said.

  Kraft came in at this point.

  Resi asked him to suggest a pseudonym for me.

  "What about Don Quixote?" he said. "That," he said to Resi, "would make you Dulcinea del Toboso, and I would sign my paintings Sancho Panza."

  Dr. Jones now came in with Father Keeley. "The plane will be ready tomorrow morning," he said. "You're sure you'll be well enough to travel?"

  "I'm well enough right now," I said.

  "The man who'll meet you in Mexico City is Arndt Klopfer," said Jones. "Can you remember that?"

  "The photographer?" I said.

  "You know him?" said Jones.

  "He took my official photograph in Berlin," I said.

  "He's the biggest brewer in Mexico now," said Jones.

  "For God's sake," I said. "The last I heard, his studio got hit with a five-hundred-pound bomb."

  "You can't keep a good man down," said Jones. "Now then--Father Keeley and I have a special request to make of you."

  "Oh?" I said.

  "Tonight is the weekly meeting of the Iron Guard of the White Sons of the Constitution," said Jones. "Father Keeley and I want to stage some sort of memorial service for August Krapptauer."

  "I see," I said.

  "Father Keeley and I don't think we could deliver the eulogy without breaking down," said Jones. "It would be a terrible emotional ordeal for either one of us. We wonder if you, a very famous speaker, a man with a golden tongue, if I may say so--we were wondering if you would accept the honor of saying a few words."

  I could hardly refuse. "Thank you, gentlemen," I said. "A eulogy?"

  "Father Keeley thought up a general theme, if that would help," said Jones.

  "It would help a lot, a general theme would," I said. "I could certainly use one."

  Father Keeley cleared his throat. "I think the theme should be," that addled old cleric said, "His Truth Goes Marching On."

  31

  "HIS TRUTH GOES

  MARCHING ON ..."

  THE IRON GUARD of the White Sons of the American Constitution assembled on ranks of folding chairs in the furnace room of Dr. Jones' basement. The guardsmen were twenty in number, ranging in age from sixteen to twenty. They were all blond. They were all over six feet tall.

  They were neatly dressed, wore suits and white shirts and neckties. All that identified them as guardsmen was a little piece of gold ribbon run through the buttonhole of the right lapel
of each.

  I would not have noticed this odd detail of buttonholes on the right lapels, lapels that conventionally have no buttonholes, if Dr. Jones hadn't pointed it out to me.

  "It's a way they have of identifying each other, even though the ribbon isn't worn," he said. "They can see their ranks growing," he said, "without anybody else noticing it."

  "They all have to take their coats to tailors and insist on buttonholes in the right lapel?" I said.

  "The mothers do it," said Father Keeley.

  Keeley, Jones, Resi, and I were sitting on a raised platform facing the guardsmen, our backs to the furnace. Resi was on the platform because she had agreed to say a few words to the boys about her firsthand experiences with communism behind the Iron Curtain.

  "Most tailors are Jews," said Dr. Jones. "We don't want to tip our hand."

  "Besides--" said Father Keeley, "it's good for the mothers to participate."

  Jones' chauffeur, The Black Fuehrer of Harlem, was now on the platform with us, hanging a big canvas sign behind us, tying its grommeted ends to steam pipes.

  This is what it said:

  "Get plenty of education. Lead your class in all things. Keep your body clean and strong. Keep your opinions to yourself."

  "These are neighborhood kids?" I asked Jones.

  "Oh, no," said Jones. "Only eight of them are even from New York City. Nine are from New Jersey, two are from Peekskill--the twins--and one comes all the way from Philadelphia."

  "Every week he comes from Philadelphia?" I said.

  "Where else can he get what August Krapptauer was offering here?" said Jones.

  "How were they recruited?" I said.

  "Through my paper," said Jones, "but they really recruited themselves. Worried, conscientious parents were writing to The White Christian Minuteman all the time, asking me if there wasn't some youth movement that wanted to keep the American bloodstream pure. One of the most heartbreaking letters I ever saw was from a woman in Bernardsville, New Jersey. She'd let her boy go into the Boy Scouts of America, not knowing that the true name of the B.S.A. ought to be 'the Boogies and Semites of America.' And the boy got to be an Eagle Scout, and then he went into the Army, went over to Japan, and came home with a Japanese wife."

  "When August Krapptauer read that letter he cried," said Father Keeley. "That's when he knew, tired as he was, he had to get back to working with youth again."