Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

K?hl und hell der Sonnenaugang,

leis und s?ss der Glocke Klang.

Ein M?gdlein hold, Krug in der Hand,

sitzt an des tiefen Brunnens Rand.

In English? Roughly:

Cool, bright sunrise ĄX

Faint, sweet bell.

Maiden with a pitcher

by a cool, deep well.

I read that poem out loud, and then I read another. I was and am a very bad poet. I do not set down these poems to be admired. The second poem I read was, I think, the next-to-the-last poem I ever wrote. It was dated 1937, and it had this title: ‘Gedanken ?ber unseren Abstand vom Zietgeschehen,’ or, roughly, ‘Reflections on Not Participating in Current Events.’

It went like this:

Eine m?chtige Dampfwalze naht

vnd schw?rtz der Sonne Pfad,

rollt ?ber geduckte Menschen dahin,

will keiner ihr entfliehn.

Mein Lieb und ich schaun starren Blickes

das R?tsel dieses Blutgeschickes.

‘Kommt mit herab,’ die Menschheit schreit,

‘Die Walze ist die Geschichte der Zeit!’

Mein Lieb und ich gehn auf die Flucht,

wo keine Dampfwalze uns sucht,

und leben auf den Bergesh?hen,

getrennt vom schwarzen Zeitgeschehen.

Sollen wir bleiben mit den andern zu sterben?

Doch nein, wir zwei wollen nicht verderben!

Nun ist’s vorbeti! ĄX Wir sehn mit Erbleichen

die Opfer der Walze, verfaulte Leichen.

In English?

I saw a huge steam roller,

It blotted out the sun.

The people all lay down, lay down;

They did not try to run.

My love and I, we looked amazed

Upon the gory mystery.

‘Lie down, lie down!’ the people cried.

‘The great machine is history!’

My love and I, we ran away,

The engine did not find us.

We ran up to a mountain top,

Left history far behind us.

Perhaps we should have stayed and died,

But somehow we don’t think so.

We went to see where history’d been,

And my, the dead did stink so.

‘How is it,’ I said to Helga, ‘that you have all these things?’

‘When I went to West Berlin,’ she said, ‘I went to the theater to see if there was a theater left ĄX if there was anyone I knew left ĄX if anyone had any news of you.’ She didn’t have to explain which theater she meant. She meant the little theater where my plays had been produced in Berlin, where Helga had been the star so often.

‘It got through most of the war, I know,’ I said. ‘It still exists?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And when I asked about you, they knew nothing. And when I told them what you had once meant to that theater, someone remembered that there was a trunk in the loft with your name on it.’

I passed my hand over the manuscripts. ‘And in it were these,’ I said. I remembered the trunk now, remembered when I’d closed it up at the start of the war, remembered when I’d thought of the trunk as a coffin for the young man I would never be again.

‘You already have copies of these things?’ she said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not a scrap.’

‘You don’t write any more?’ she said.

‘There hasn’t been anything I’ve wanted to say,’ I said.

‘After all you’ve seen, all you’ve been through, darling?’ she said.

‘It’s all I’ve seen, all I’ve been through,’ I said, ‘that makes it damn nearly impossible for me to say anything. I’ve lost the knack of making sense. I speak gibberish to the civilized world, and it replies in kind.’

‘There was another poem, your last poem, it must have been ĄX ‘ she said, ‘written in eyebrow pencil on the inside of the trunk lid.’

‘Oh?’ I said.

She recited it for me:

Hier liegt Howard Campbells Geist geborgen,

frei von des K?rpers qualenden Sorgen.

Sein leerer Leib durchstreift die Welt,

und kargen Lohn daf?r erh?lt.

Triffst du die beiden getrennt allerw?rts

verbrenn den Leib, doch scheme dies, sein Herz.

In English?

Here lies Howard Campbell’s essence,

Freed from his body’s noisome nuisance.

His body, empty, prowls the earth,

Earning what a body’s worth.

If his body and his essence remain apart,

Burn his body, but spare this, his heart

There was a knock on the door.

It was George Kraft knocking on my door, and I let him in.

He was very jangled because his corncob pipe had disappeared. It was the first time I’d seen him without the pipe, the first time he showed me how dependent he was on the pipe for peace. He was so full of anxiety that he whined.

‘Somebody took it or somebody knocked it down behind something or ĄX I just can’t imagine why anybody would have done anything with it,’ he whined. He expected Helga and me to share his anxiety, to think that the disappearance of the pipe was the most important event of the day. He was insufferable.

‘Why would anybody touch the pipe?’ he said. ‘What good would it do anybody?’ He was opening and shutting his bands, blinking often, sniffling, acting like a dope addict with withdrawal symptoms, though he had never smoked anything in the missing pipe. ‘Just tell me ĄX ‘ he said, ‘why would anybody take the pipe?’

‘I don’t know, George,’ I said testily. If we find it, well let you know.’

‘Could I look around for myself?’ he said. ‘Go ahead,’ I said.

And he turned the place upside down, rattling pots and pans, banging cupboard doors, fishing back of the radiators with a poker, clangingly.

The effect of this performance on Helga and me was to wed us ĄX to urge us into an easy relationship that might otherwise have been a long while coming.

We stood side by side, resenting the invasion of our nation of two.

‘It wasn’t a very valuable pipe, was it?’ I said.

‘Yes it was ĄX to me,’ he said. ‘Buy another one,’ I said.

‘I want that one,’ he said. ‘I’m used to it. That’s the pipe I want’ He opened the breadbox, looked inside.

‘Maybe the ambulance attendants took it,’ I said.

‘Why would they do that?’ he said. ‘Maybe they thought it belonged to the dead man,’ I said. ‘Maybe they put it in the dead man’s pocket.’ That’s it cried Kraft, and he scuttled out the door.

23: Chapter Six Hundred and Forty-three …

One of the things Helga had in her suitcase, as I’ve already said, was a book by me. It was a manuscript I had never intended that it be published. I regarded it as unpublishable except by pornographers.

It was called Memoirs of a Monogamous Casanova. In it I told of my conquests of all the hundreds of women my wife, my Helga, had been. It was clinical, obsessed, some say, insane. It was a diary, recording day by day for the first two years of the war, our erotic life ĄX to the exclusion of all else. There is not one word in it to indicate even the century or the continent of its origin.

There is a man of many moods, a woman of many moods. In some of the early entries, settings are referred to sketchily. But from there on, there are no settings at all

Helga knew I kept the peculiar diary. I kept it as one of many devices for keeping our sexual pleasure keen. The book is not only a report of an experiment, but a part of the experiment it reports ĄX a self-conscious experiment by a man and a woman to be endlessly fascinating to each other sexually ĄX .

To be more than that.

To be to each other, body and soul, sufficient reasons for living, though there might not be a single other satisfaction to be had.

The epigraph of the book is to the point, I think.

It is a poem by William Blake called ‘The Question Answered’:

What is it men in women do require?

The lineaments of Gratified Desire.

What is it women do in men require?

The lineaments of Gratified Desire.

I might aptly add here one last chapter to the Memoirs, chapter 643, describing the night I spent in a New York hotel with Helga, after having been without her for so many years.

I leave it to an editor of taste and delicacy to abridge with innocent polka dots whatever might offend.

MEMOIRS OF A MONOGAMOUS CASANOVA, CHAPTER 643

We had been apart for sixteen years. My first lust that night was in my fingertips. Other parts of me … that were contented later were contented in a ritual way, thoroughly, to … clinical perfection. No part of me could complain, and no part of my wife could complain, I trust, of being victimized by busy-work, time-serving… or jerry-building. But my finger tips had the best of it that night…

Which is not to say that I found myself to be an … old man, dependent, if I was to please a woman, on … foreplay and nothing more. On the contrary, I was as … ready a lover as a seventeen-year-old … with his … girl…

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