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

brought. We would chuckle or grin sometimes, as though war stories were coming back, but neither
one of us could remember anything good. O'Hare remembered one guy who got into a lot of wine in
Dresden, before it was bombed, and we had to take him home in a wheelbarrow.
It wasn't much to write a book about. I remembered two Russian soldiers who had looted a
clock factory. They had a horse-drawn wagon full of clocks. They were happy and drunk. They
were smoking huge cigarettes they had rolled in newspaper.
That was about it for memories, and Mary was still making noise. She finally came out in the
kitchen again for another Coke. She took another tray of ice cubes from the refrigerator, banged
it in the sink, even though there was already plenty of ice out.
Then she turned to me, let me see how angry she was, and that the anger was for me. She had
been talking to herself, so what she said was a fragment of a much larger conversation. "You were
just babies then!' she said.
'What?" I said.
'You were just babies in the war-like the ones upstairs! '
I nodded that this was true. We had been foolish virgins in the war, right at the end of
childhood.
'But you're not going to write it that way, are you.' This wasn't a question. It was an
accusation.
'I-I don't know,' I said.
'Well, I know,' she said. 'You'll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you'll be played
in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty
old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we'll have a lot more of them. And they'll be fought
by babies like the babies upstairs.'
So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn't want her babies or anybody
else's babies killed in wars. And she thought wars were partly encouraged by books and movies.

So I held up my right hand and I made her a promise 'Mary,' I said, 'I don't think this book
is ever going to be finished. I must have written five thousand pages by now, and thrown them all
away. If I ever do finish it, though, I give you my word of honor: there won't be a part for Frank
Sinatra or John Wayne.
'I tell you what,' I said, 'I'll call it The Children's Crusade.'
She was my friend after that.

O'Hare and I gave up on remembering, went into the living room, talked about other things. We
became curious about the real Children's Crusade, so O'Hare looked it up in a book he had,
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, by Charles Mackay, LL.D. It was first
published in London in 1841.
Mackay had a low opinion of all Crusades. The Children's Crusade struck him as only slightly
more sordid than the ten Crusades for grown-ups. O'Hare read this handsome passage out loud:
History in her solemn page informs us that the Crusaders were but ignorant and savage men,
that their motives were those of bigotry unmitigated, and that their pathway was one of blood and
rears. Romance, on the other hand, dilates upon their piety and heroism, and portrays, in her
most glowing and impassioned hues, their virtue and magnanimity, the imperishable honor they
acquired for themselves, and the great services they rendered to Christianity.


file:///F|/rah/Kurt%20Vonnegut/Kurt%20Vonnegut%20-%20Slaughterhouse-Five.txt (6 of 66) [5/22/03 3:33:30 PM]
 file:///F|/rah/Kurt%20Vonnegut/Kurt%20Vonnegut%20-%20Slaughterhouse-Five.txt

And then O'Hare read this: Now what was the grand result of all these struggles? Europe