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

office building. The elevator door on the first floor was ornamental iron lace. Iron ivy snaked in
and out of the holes. There was an iron twig with two iron lovebirds perched upon it.
This veteran decided to take his car into the basement, and he closed the door and started
down, but his wedding ring Was caught in all the ornaments. So he was hoisted into the air and the
floor of the car went down, dropped out from under him, and the top of the car squashed him. So it
goes.
So I phoned this in, and the woman who was going to cut the stencil asked me. 'What did his
wife say?'
'She doesn't know yet,' I said. 'It just happened.'
'Call her up and get a statement.'
'What?'


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'Tell her you're Captain Finn of the Police Department. Say you have some sad news. Give her
the news, and see what she says.'
So I did. She said about what you would expect her to say. There was a baby. And so on.
When I got back to the office, the woman writer asked me, just for her own information, what
the squashed guy had looked Eke when he was squashed.
I told her.
'Did it bother you?' she said. She was eating a Three Musketeers Candy Bar.
'Heck no, Nancy,' I said. 'I've seen lots worse than that in the war.'

Even then I was supposedly writing a book about Dresden. It wasn't a famous air raid back then
in America. Not many Americans knew how much worse it had been than Hiroshima, for instance. I
didn't know that, either. There hadn't been much publicity.
I happened to tell a University of Chicago professor at a cocktail party about the raid as I
had seen it, about the book I would write. He was a member of a thing called The Committee on
Social Thought. And he told me about the concentration camps, and about how the Germans had made
soap and candles out of the fat of dead Jews and so on.
All could say was, 'I know, I know. I know.'

The Second World War had certainly made everybody very tough. And I became a public
relations man for General Electric in Schenectady, New York, and a volunteer fireman in the
Village of Alplaus, where I bought my first home. My boss there was one of the toughest guys I
ever hope to meet. He had been a lieutenant colonel in public relations in Baltimore. While I
was in Schenectady he joined the Dutch Reformed Church, which is a very tough church, indeed.
He used to ask me sneeringly sometimes why I hadn't been an officer,, as though I'd done
something wrong.
My wife and I had lost our baby fat. Those were our scrawny years. We had a lot of scrawny
veterans and their scrawny wives for friends. The nicest veterans in Schenectady,, I thought,, the
kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who'd really fought.
I wrote the Air Force back then, asking for details about the raid on Dresden, who ordered it,
how many planes did it, why they did it, what desirable results there had been and so on. I was
answered by a man who, like myself, was in public relations. He said that he was sorry, but that
the information was top secret still.
I read the letter out loud to my wife, and I said, 'Secret? My God-from whom?'