Mother Night

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

And I felt the dust of the Holy Land creeping in to bury me, sensed how thick a dust-and-rubble blanket I would one day wear. I felt thirty or forty feet of ruined cities above me;

“It’s so weak!” he said. “It has no body, no paprika, no zest! I thought you were a master of racial invective!” “I’m not?” I said.

Goebbels asked me where I’d gotten the working title, so I made a translation for him of the entire Gettysburg Address.

“Lincoln wasn’t a Jew, was he?” he said. “I’m sure not,” I said. “It would be very embarrassing to me if he turned out to be one,” he said. “I’ve never heard anyone suggest that he was,” I said. “The name Abraham is very suspicious, to say the least,” said Goebbels.

This queer demonstration not only scared me; it scared her, too. My mother scared herself with her own queerness, and from that moment on I ceased to be her companion. From that moment on she hardly spoke to me—cut me dead, I’m sure, out of fear of doing or saying something even crazier.

My narcotic was what had got me through the war; it was an ability to let my emotions be stirred by only one thing—my love for Helga. This concentration of my emotions on so small an area had begun as a young lover’s happy illusion, had developed into a device to keep me from going insane during the war, and had finally become the permanent axis about which my thoughts revolved.

The name of the book was Christ Was Not a Jew. He proved his point by reproducing in the book fifty famous paintings of Jesus. According to Jones, not one painting showed Jewish jaws or teeth.

There was no Uncle Tom in this cotton-haired old colored man. He walked in arthritically, but his thumbs were hooked into his Sam Browne belt, his chin was thrust out at us, and he kept his hat on.

I give him his hot cereal for breakfast, and then I tell him: ‘The colored people are gonna rise up in righteous wrath, and they’re gonna take over the world. White folks gonna finally lose!’” “All right, Robert,” said Jones patiently. “The colored people gonna have hydrogen bombs all their own,” he said. “They working on it right now. Pretty soon gonna be Japan’s turn to drop one. The rest of the colored folks gonna give them the honor of dropping the first one.”

He looked at me pityingly. “Who ever told you a Chinaman was a colored man?” he said.

A woman slave shuffled out of the house carrying a luminously beautiful blue vase. She was shod in wooden clogs hinged with canvas. She was a nameless, ageless, sexless ragbag. Her eyes were like oysters. Her nose was frostbitten, mottled white and cherry-red.

I explained it to him, showed him the device on the hilt of my dagger. The device, silver on walnut, was an American eagle that clasped a swastika in its right claw and devoured a snake in its left claw. The snake was meant to represent international Jewish communism. There were thirteen stars around the head of the eagle, representing the thirteen original American colonies. I had made the original sketch of the device, and, since I don’t draw very well, I had drawn six-pointed stars of David rather than five-pointed stars of the U.S.A. The silversmith, while lavishly improving on my eagle, had reproduced my six-pointed stars exactly.

The poor woman, made into sausage by unkind time, stood at attention, seemed to think that the execution of the dog was a ceremony of some nobility.

The hangwomen on the cover had breasts like cantaloupes, hips like horse collars, and their rags were the pathetic remains of nightgowns by Schiaparelli. The women in the photograph were as pretty as catfish wrapped in mattress-ticking.

We used to drink together, used to talk long into the night, especially after we both lost our wives.

“No,” he said, “this is one of those moments when somebody really speaks the truth, one of those rare moments. People hardly ever speak the truth, but now I am speaking the truth. If you are the friend I think you are, you’ll do me the honor of believing the friend I think I am when I speak the truth.”

“All people are insane,” he said. “They will do anything at any time, and God help anybody who looks for reasons.”

What were you doing in Hitler’s bunker—looking for your motorcycle and your best friend?

Perhaps we should have stayed and died, But somehow we don’t think so. We went to see where history’d been, And my, the dead did stink so.

I’ve lost the knack of making sense. I speak gibberish to the civilized world, and it replies in kind.”

It was like the breeze’s tale of what a breeze is, like the rose’s tale of what the rose is.

We saw a Veterans’ Day parade down Fifth Avenue, and I heard Resi’s laugh for the first time. It was nothing like Helga’s laugh, which was a rustling thing. Resi’s laugh was bright, melodious.

Resi put the noose in the ash can, where it was found the next morning by a garbage-man named Lazlo Szombathy. Szombathy actually hanged himself with it—but that is another story.

someone hangs themself with a noose intended for you

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.

He beamed at me and he shook my hand warmly, and he said, “Well—what did you think of that war, Campbell?”

But I hadn’t taken many steps before I understood that the only place I wanted to be was back in Jones’ cellar with my mistress and my best friend. I knew them for what they were, but the fact remained that they were all I had.

I am so much a credulous plaything of my senses that nothing is unreal to me.

Such a snaggle-toothed thought machine, driven by a standard or even a substandard libido, whirls with the jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell.

But never have I willfully destroyed a tooth on a gear of my thinking machine. Never have I said to myself, “This fact I can do without.”

“I guess there were good people killed on both sides,” he said.

“When the war ended,” O’Hare said to me, “I expected to be a lot more in fifteen years than a dispatcher of frozen-custard trucks.” “I guess we’ve all had disappointments,” I said.

O’Hare was so drugged by booze and fantasies of good triumphing over evil that he hadn’t expected me to defend myself.

“There are plenty of good reasons for fighting,” I said, “but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where’s evil? It’s that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It’s that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive.

“I’d like to surrender to an Auschwitzer,” I said. This made him mad. “Then find one who thinks about Auschwitz all the time!” he said. “There are plenty who think about nothing else. I never think about it!”

He offers the opinion that I was an ardent Nazi, but that I shouldn’t be held responsible for my acts, since I was a political idiot, an artist who could not distinguish between reality and dreams.