Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The experience of sitting there in the dark, hearing the things I’d said, didn’t shock me. It might be helpful in my defense to say that I broke into a cold sweat, or some such nonsense. But I’ve always known what I did. I’ve always been able to live with what I did. How? Through that simple and widespread boon to modern mankind ĄX schizophrenia.

There was one adventure in the dark worth reporting, though. Somebody put a note in my pocket, did it with intentional clumsiness, so that I would know the note was there.

When the light came on again, I could not guess who had given me the note.

I delivered my eulogy of August Krapptauer, saying, incidentally, what I pretty much believe, that Krapptauer’s sort of truth would probably be with mankind forever, as long as there were men and women around who listened to their hearts instead of their minds.

I got a nice round of applause from the audience, and a drumroll from the Black Fuehrer. I went into the lavatory to read the note. The note was printed on lined paper torn from a small spiral notebook. This is what it said:

‘Coalbin door unlocked. Leave at once. I am waiting for you in vacant store directly across street urgent Your life in danger. Eat this.’

It was signed by my Blue Fairy Godmother, by Lionel Frank Wirtanen.

32: Rosenfeld …

My lawyer here in Jerusalem, Mr. Alvin Dobrowitz, has told me that I would surely win my case if I could produce one witness who had seen me in the company of the man known to me as Colonel Frank Wirtanen.

I met Wirtanen three times: before the war, immediately after the war, and finally, in the back of a vacant store across the street from the residence of The Reverend Doctor Lionel J. D. Jones, D.D.S., D.D. Only at the first meeting, the meeting on the park bench, did anyone see us together. And those who saw us were no more likely to fix us in their memories than were the squirrels and birds.

The second time I met him was in Wiesbaden, Germany, in the dining hall of what had once been an officers candidate school of the Engineers Corps of the Wehrmacht. There was a great mural on the wall of that dining hall, a tank coming down a lovely, winding country lane. The sun was shining in the mural, The sky was clear. This bucolic scene was about to be shattered.

In a thicket, in the foreground of the mural, was a merry little band of steel-helmeted Robin Hoods, engineers whose latest prank was to mine the lane and to implement the impending merriment with an anti-tank gun and a light machine gun.

They were so happy.

How did I get to Wiesbaden?

I was taken from a Third Army prisoner-of-war pen near Ohrdruf on April 15, three days after my capture by Lieutenant Bernard B. O’Hare.

I was driven to Wiesbaden in a jeep, was guarded by a first lieutenant whose name is unknown to me. We didn’t talk much. I did not interest him. He spent the entire trip in a slow smoldering rage about something that had nothing to do with me. Had he been slighted, insulted, cheated, maligned, grievously misunderstood? I don’t know.

At any rate, I don’t think he would be much help as a witness. He was carrying out orders that bored him. He asked his way to the camp, and then to the dining hall. He left me at the door of the dining hall, told me to go inside and wait And then he drove off, leaving me unguarded.

I went inside, though I might easily have wandered into the countryside again.

Inside that melancholy barn, all alone, seated on a table under the mural, was my Blue Fairy Godmother.

Wirtanen was wearing the uniform of an American soldier-zippered jacket; olive-drab trousers and shirt, the shirt open at the neck; combat boots. He had no weapon. Neither did he wear any symbol of rank or unit

He was a short-legged man. When I saw him sitting there on the table, he was swinging his feet, and his feet were far off the floor. He must have been at least fifty-five then, seven years older than when last I’d seen him. He was bald, had put on weight

Colonel Frank Wirtanen had the impudent pink-baby look that victory and an American combat uniform seemed to produce in so many older men.

He beamed at me and he shook my hand warmly, and he said, ‘Well ĄX what did you think of that war, Campbell?’

‘I would just as soon have stayed out of it’ I said.

‘Congratulations,’ he said. ‘You lived through it, anyway. A lot of people didn’t you know.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘My wife, for instance.’

‘Sorry about that’ he said.

‘I found out she was missing the same day you did,’ he said.

‘How?’ I said.

‘From you,’ he said. ‘That was one of the pieces of information you broadcast that night’

This news, that I had broadcast the coded announcement of my Helga’s disappearance, broadcast it without even knowing what I was doing, somehow upset me more than anything in the whole adventure. It upsets me even now. Why, I don’t know.

It represented, I suppose a wider separation of my several selves than even I can bear to think about

At that climactic moment in my life, when I had to suppose that my Helga was dead, I would have liked to mourn as an agonized soul, indivisible. But no. One part of me told the world of the tragedy in code. The rest of me did not even know that the announcement was being made.

‘That was vital military information? That had to be got out of Germany at the risk of my neck?’ I said to Wirtanen.

‘Certainly,’ he said. ‘The instant we got it, we began to act.’

‘To act?’ I said, mystified. ‘To act how?’

‘To find a replacement for you,’ said Wirtanen. ‘We thought you’d kill yourself before the sun came up again.’

‘I should have,’ I said.

‘I’m damn glad you didn’t,’ he said.

‘I’m damn sorry I didn’t,’ I said. ‘You would think that a man who’s spent as much time in the theater as I have would know when the proper time came for the hero to die ĄX if he was to be a hero.’ I snapped my fingers softly. ‘There goes the whole play about Helga and me, “Nation of Two,” I said, ‘because I missed my cue for the great suicide scene.’

‘I don’t admire suicide,’ said Wirtanen.

‘I admire form,’ I said. ‘I admire things with a beginning, a middle, an end ĄX and, whenever possible, a moral, too.’

‘There’s a chance she’s still alive, I guess,’ said Wirtanen.

‘A loose end,’ I said. ‘An irrelevancy. The play is over.’

‘You said something about a moral?’ he said.

‘If I’d killed myself when you expected me to kill myself,’ I said, ‘maybe a moral would have occurred to you.’

‘I’ll have to think’ he said.

‘Take your time,’ I said.

‘I’m not used to things having form ĄX or morals, either,’ he said. ‘If you’d died, I probably would have said something like, “Goddamn, now what will we do?” A moral? It’s a big enough job just burying the dead, without trying to draw a moral from each death,’ he said. ‘Half the dead don’t even have names. I might have said you were a good soldier.’

‘Was I’ I said.

‘Of all the agents who were my dream children, so to speak, you were the only one who got clear through the war both reliable and alive,’ he said. ‘I did a little morbid arithmetic last night, Campbell ĄX calculated that you, by being neither incompetent nor dead, were one in ‘forty-two.’

‘What about the people who fed me information?’ I said.

‘Dead, all dead,’ he said. ‘Every one of them a woman, by the way. Seven of them, in all ĄX each one of them, before she was caught, living only to transmit information to you. Think of it, Campbell ĄX seven women you satisfied again and again and again, and they finally died for the satisfaction that was yours to give them. And not one of them betrayed you, either, when she was caught. Think of that, too.’

‘I can’t say you’ve relieved any shortage of things to think about,’ I said to Wirtanen. ‘I don’t mean to diminish your stature as a teacher and philosopher, but I had things to think about even before this happy reunion. So what happens to me next?’

‘You’ve already disappeared again,’ he said. Third Army’s been relieved of you, and there’ll be no records here to show that you ever arrived.’ He spread his hands. ‘Where would you like to go from here, and who would you like to be?’

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