"Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse Five" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vonnegut Kurt)

glaciers. I believe that too.

And, even if wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death.

When I was somewhat younger, working on my famous Dresden book, I asked an old war buddy named
Bernard V. O'Hare if I could come to see him. He was a district attorney in Pennsylvania. I was a
writer on Cape Cod. We had been privates in the war, infantry scouts. We had never expected to
make any money after the war, but we were doing quite well.
I had the Bell Telephone Company find him for me. They are wonderful that way. I have this,
disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone. I get drunk, and I drive my
wife away with a breath like mustard gas and roses. And then, speaking gravely and elegantly into
the telephone, I ask the telephone operators to connect me with this friend or that one, from whom
I have not heard in years.
I got O'Hare on the line in this way. He is short and I am tall. We were Mutt and Jeff in the
war. We were captured together in the war. I told him who I was on the telephone. He had no
trouble believing it. He was up. He was reading. Everybody else in his house was asleep.
'Listen,' I said, 'I'm writing this book about Dresden. I'd like some help remembering stuff.
I wonder if I could come down and see you, and we could drink and talk and remember.'
He was unenthusiastic. He said he couldn't remember much. He told me, though, to come ahead.
'I think the climax of the book will be the execution of poor old Edgar Derby,' I said. 'The
irony is so great. A whole city gets burned down, and thousands and thousands of people are
killed. And then this one American foot soldier is arrested in the ruins for taking a teapot. And
he's given a regular trial, and then he's shot by a firing squad.'
'Um,' said O'Hare.
'Don't you think that's really where the climax should come?' 'I don't know anything about
it,' he said. 'That's your trade, not mine.'

As a trafficker in climaxes and thrills and characterization and wonderful dialogue and
suspense and confrontations, I had outlined the Dresden story many times. The best outline I ever
made, or anyway the prettiest one, was on the back of a roll of wallpaper.
I used my daughter's crayons, a different color for each main character. One end of the
wallpaper was the beginning of the story, and the other end was the end, and then there was all
that middle part, which was the middle. And the blue line met the red line and then the yellow
line, and the yellow line stopped because the character represented by the yellow line was dead.
And so on. The destruction of Dresden was represented by a vertical band of orange cross-hatching,
and all the lines that were still alive passed through it, came out the other side.
The end, where all the lines stopped, was a beetfield on the Elbe, outside of Halle. The rain
was coming down. The war in Europe had been over for a couple of weeks. We were formed in ranks,
with Russian soldiers guarding us-Englishmen, Americans, Dutchmen, Belgians, Frenchmen, Canadians,
South Africans, New Zealanders, Australians, thousands of us about to stop being prisoners of war.
And on the other side of the field were thousands of Russians and Poles and Yugoslavians and
so on guarded by American soldiers. An exchange was made there in the rain-one for one. O'Hare and
I climbed into the back of an American truck with a lot of others. O'Hare didn't have any
souvenirs. Almost everybody else did. I had a ceremonial Luftwaffe saber, still do. The rabid



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