"Kurt Vonnegut - Mother Night" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vonnegut Kurt)

Introduction

This is the only story of mine whose moral I know. I don't think it's a marvellous moral, I simply
happen to know what it is: We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we
pretend to be.

My personal experience with Nazi monkey business was limited. There were some vile and lively
native American Fascists in my home town of Indianapolis during the thirties, and somebody slipped
me a copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Toon, I remember, which was supposed to be the Jews'
secret plan for taking over the world. And I remember some laughs about my aunt, too, who married
a German German, and who had to write to Indianapolis for proofs that she had no Jewish blood. The
Indianapolis mayor knew her from high school and dancing school, so he had fun putting ribbons and
official seals all over the documents the Germans required, which made them look like eighteenth-
century peace treaties.

After a while the war came, and I was in it, and I was captured, so I got to see a little of


file:///F|/rah/Kurt%20Vonnegut/Vonnegut%20-%20Mother%20Night.txt (1 of 100) [5/22/03 3:34:38 PM]
 file:///F|/rah/Kurt%20Vonnegut/Vonnegut%20-%20Mother%20Night.txt

Germany from the inside while the war was still going on. I was a private, a battalion scout, and,
under the terms of the Geneva Convention, I had to work for my keep, which was good, not bad I
didn't have to stay in prison all the time, somewhere out in the countryside. I got to go to a
city, which was Dresden, and to see the people and the things they did.

There were about a hundred of us in our particular work group, and we were put out as contract
labour to a factory that was making a vitamin-enriched malt syrup for pregnant women. It tasted
like thin honey laced with hickory smoke. It was good. I wish I had some right now. And the city
was lovely, highly ornamented, like Paris, and untouched by war. It was supposedly an "open" city,
not to be attacked since there were no troop concentrations or war industries there.

But high explosives were dropped on Dresden by American and British planes on the night of
February 13, 1945, just about twenty-one years ago, as I now write. There were no particular
targets for the bombs. The hope was that they would create a lot of kindling and drive firemen
underground.

And then hundreds of thousands of tiny incendiaries were scattered over the kindling, like seeds
on freshly turned loam. More bombs were dropped to keep firemen in their holes, and all the little
fires grew, joined one another, and became one apocalyptic flame. Hey presto: fire storm. It was
the largest massacre in European history, by the way. And so what?

We didn't get to see the fire storm. We were in a cool meat-locker under a slaughterhouse with our
six guards and ranks and ranks of dressed cadavers of cattle, pigs, horses, and sheep. We heard
the bombs walking around up there. Now and then there would be a gentle shower of calcimine. If we
had gone above to take a look, we would have been turned into artefacts

vi