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

We were United World Federalists back then. I don't know what we are now. Telephoners, I
guess. We telephone a lot-or I do, anyway, late at night.

A couple of weeks after I telephoned my old war buddy, Bernard V. O'Hare, I really did go to
see him. That must have been in 1964 or so-whatever the last year was for the New York World's
Fair. Eheu, fugaces labuntur anni. My name is Yon Yonson. There was a young man from Stamboul.
I took two little girls with me, my daughter, Nanny, and her best friend, Allison Mitchell.
They had never been off Cape Cod before. When we saw a river, we had to stop so they could stand
by it and think about it for a while. They had never seen water in that long and narrow, unsalted
form before. The river was the Hudson. There were carp in there and we saw them. They were as big
as atomic submarines.
We saw waterfalls, too, streams jumping off cliffs into the valley of the Delaware. There were
lots of things to stop and see-and then it was time to go, always time to go. The little girls
were wearing white party dresses and black party shoes, so strangers would know at once how nice
they were. 'Time to go, girls,' I'd say. And we would go.
And the sun went down, and we had supper in an Italian place, and then I knocked on the front
door of the beautiful stone house of Bernard V. O'Hare. I was carrying a bottle of Irish whiskey
like a dinner bell.
I met his nice wife, Mary, to whom I dedicate this book. I dedicate it to Gerhard Müller, the
Dresden taxi driver, too. Mary O'Hare is a trained nurse, which is a lovely thing for a woman to
be.
Mary admired the two little girls I'd brought, mixed them in with her own children, sent them
all upstairs to play games and watch television. It was only after the children were gone that I
sensed that Mary didn't like me or didn't like something about the night. She was polite but
chilly.
'It's a nice cozy house you have here,' I said, and it really was.
'I've fixed up a place where you can talk and not be bothered,' she said.



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'Good,' I said, and I imagined two leather chairs near a fire in a paneled room, where two old
soldiers could drink and talk. But she took us into the kitchen. She had put two straight-backed
chairs at a kitchen table with a white porcelain top. That table top was screaming with reflected
light from a two-hundred-watt bulb overhead. Mary had prepared an operating room. She put only
one glass on it, which was for me. She explained that O'Hare couldn't drink the hard stuff since
the war.
So we sat down. O'Hare was embarrassed, but he wouldn't tell me what was wrong. I couldn't
imagine what it was about me that could bum up Mary so. I was a family man. I'd been married
only once. I wasn't a drunk. I hadn't done her husband any dirt in the war.
She fixed herself a Coca-Cola, made a lot of noise banging the ice-cube tray in the stainless
steel sink. Then she went into another part of the house. But she wouldn't sit still. She was
moving all over the house, opening and shutting doors, even moving furniture around to work off
anger.
I asked O'Hare what I'd said or done to make her act that way.
'It's all right,' he said. "Don't worry about it. It doesn't have anything to do with you.'
That was kind of him. He was lying. It had everything to do with me.
So we tried to ignore Mary and remember the war. I took a couple of belts of the booze I'd