Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I can’t say I wasn’t warned. The man who recruited me that spring day in the Tiergarden so long ago now ĄX that man told my fortune pretty well.

‘To do your job right,’ my Blue Fairy Godmother told me, ‘you’ll have to commit high treason, have to serve the enemy well. You won’t ever be forgiven for that, because there isn’t any legal device by which you can be forgiven.

The most that will be done for you,’ he said, ‘is that your neck will be saved. But there will be no magic time when you will be cleared, when America will call you out of biding with a cheerful: Olly-olly-ox-in-free.’

11: War Surplus …

My mother and father died. Some say they died of broken hearts. They died in their middle sixties, at any rate, when hearts break easily.

They did not live to see the end of the war, nor did they ever see their beamish boy again. They did not disinherit me, though they must have been bitterly tempted to do so. They bequeathed to Howard W. Campbell, Jr., the notorious anti-Semite, turncoat and radio star, stocks, real estate, cash and personal property which were, in 1945, at the time of probate, worth forty-eight thousand dollars.

That boodle, through growth and inflation, has come to be worth four times that much now, giving me an unearned income of seven thousand dollars a year.

Say what you like about me, I have never touched my principal.

During my postwar years as an odd duck and recluse in Greenwich Village, I lived on about four dollars a day, rent included, and I even had a television set.

My new furnishings were all war surplus, like myself ĄX a narrow steel cot, olive drab blankets with ‘U.S.A.’ on them, folding canvas chairs, mess kits to cook in and eat out of. Even my library was largely war surplus, coming as it did from recreation kits intended for troops overseas.

And, since phonograph records came in these unused kits, too, I got myself a war-surplus, weather-proofed, portable phonograph, guaranteed to play in any climate from the Bering Straits to the Arafura Sea. By buying the recreation kits, each one a sealed pig-in-a-poke, I came into possession of twenty-six recordings of Bing Crosby’s ‘White Christmas.’

My overcoat, my raincoat, my jacket, my socks and my underwear were war surplus, too.

By buying a war-surplus first-aid kit for a dollar, I also came into possession of a quantity of morphine. The buzzards in the war-surplus business were so glutted with carrion as to have overlooked it

I was tempted to take the morphine, reflecting that, if it made me feel happy, I would, after all, have enough money to support the habit but then I understood that I was already drugged.

I was feeling no pain.

My narcotic was what had got me through the war; it was an ability to let my emotions be stirred by only one thing ĄX my love for Helga. This concentration of my emotions on so small an area had begun as a young lover’s happy illusion, had developed into a device to keep me from going insane during the war, and had finally become the permanent axis about which my thoughts revolved.

And so, with my Helga presumed dead, I became a death-worshipper, as content as any narrow-minded religious nut anywhere. Always alone, I drank toasts to her, said good morning to her, said good night to her, played music for her, and didn’t give a damn for one thing else.

And then one day in 1958, after thirteen years of living like that, I bought a war-surplus wood-carving set. It was surplus not from the Second World War but from the Korean war. It cost me three dollars.

When I got it home, I started to carve up my broom handle to no particular purpose. And it suddenly occurred to me to make a chess set.

I speak of suddenness here, because I was startled to find myself with an enthusiasm. I was so enthusiastic that I carved for twelve hours straight, sank sharp tools into the palm of my left hand a dozen times, and still would not stop. I was an elated, gory mess when I was finished. I had a handsome set of chessmen to show for my labors.

And yet another strange impulse came upon me.

I felt compelled to show somebody, somebody still among the living, the marvelous thing I had made.

So, made boisterous by both creativity and drink, I went downstairs and banged on the door of my neighbor, not even knowing who my neighbor was.

My neighbor was a foxy old man named George Kraft. That was only one of his names. The real name of this old man was Colonel Iona Potapov. This antique sonofabitch was a Russian agent, had been operating continuously in America since 1935.

I didn’t know that.

And he didn’t know at first who I was, either.

It was dumb luck that brought us together. No conspiracy was involved at first. It was I who knocked on his door, invaded his privacy. If I hadn’t carved that chess set, we never would have met.

Kraft and I’ll call him that from now on, because that’s how I think of him, had three or four locks on his front door.

I induced him to unlock them all by asking him if he played chess. There was dumb luck again. Nothing else would have made him open up.

People helping me with my research later, incidentally, tell me that the name of lona Potapov was a popular one in European chess tournaments in the early thirties. He actually beat the Grand Master Tartakover in Rotterdam in 1931.

When he opened up, I saw that he was a painter. There was an easel in the middle of his living room with a fresh canvas on it, and there were stunning paintings by him on every wall.

When I talk about Kraft, alias Potapov, I’m a lot more comfortable than when I talk about Wirtanen, alias God-knows-what. Wirtanen has left no more of a trail than an inchworm crossing a billiard table. Evidences of Kraft are everywhere. At this very moment, I’m told, Kraft’s paintings are bringing as much as ten thousand dollars apiece in New York.

I have at hand a clipping from the New York Herald Tribune of March third, about two weeks ago, in which a critic says of Kraft as a painter:

Here at last is a capable and grateful heir to the fantastic inventiveness and experimentation in painting during the past hundred years. Aristotle is said to have been the last man to understand the whole of his culture. George Kraft is surely the first man to understand the whole of modern art, to understand it in his sinews and bones.

With incredible grace and firmness he combines the visions of a score of warring schools of painting, past and present. He thrills and humbles us with harmony, seems to say to us, ‘If you want another Renaissance, this is what the paintings expressing its spirit will took like.’

George Kraft, alias Iona Potapov, is being permitted to continue his remarkable art career in the Federal Penitentiary at Fort Leavenworth. We all might well reflect, along, no doubt, with Kraft ĄX Potapov himself, on how summarily his career would have been crushed in a prison in his native Russia.

Well ĄX when Kraft opened his door for me, I knew his paintings were good. I didn’t know they were that good. I suspect that the review above was written by a pansy full of brandy Alexanders.

‘I didn’t know I had a painter living underneath me,’ 1 said to Kraft.

‘Maybe you don’t have one,’ he said.

‘Marvelous paintings!’ I said. ‘Where do you exhibit?’

‘I never have,’ he said.

‘You’d make a fortune if you did,’ I said.

‘You’re nice to say so,’ he said, ‘but I started painting too late.’ He then told me what was supposed to be the story of his life, none of it true.

He said he was a widower from Indianapolis. As a young man, he said, he’d wanted to be an artist, but he’d gone into business instead ĄX the paint and wallpaper business.

‘My wife died two years ago,’ he said, and he managed to look a little moist around the eyes. He had a wife, all right, but not underground in Indianapolis.

He had a very live wife named Tanya in Borisoglebsk. He hadn’t seen her for twenty-five years.

‘When she died,’ he said to me, ‘I found my spirit wanted to choose between only two things ĄX suicide, or the dreams I’d had in my youth. I am an old fool who borrowed the dreams of a young fool. I bought myself some canvas and paint, and I came to Greenwich Village.’

‘No children?’ I said.

‘None,’ he said sadly. He actually had three children and nine grandchildren. His oldest son, Ilya, is a famous rocket expert.

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