Free Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut Page B

I don’t draw very well, I had drawn six-pointed stars of David rather than five-pointed stars of the U.S.A. The silversmith, while lavishly improving on my eagle, had reproduced my six-pointed stars exactly.
    It was the stars that caught my father-in-law’s fancy. “These represent the thirteen Jews in Franklin Roosevelt’s cabinet,” he said.
    “That’s a very funny idea,” I said.
    “Everyone thinks the Germans have no sense of humor,” he said.
    “Germany is the most misunderstood country in the world,” I said.
    “You are one of the few outsiders who really understands us,” he said.
    “I hope that’s a compliment I deserve,” I said.
    “It’s a compliment you didn’t come by very easily,” he said. “You broke my heart when you married my daughter. I wanted a German soldier for a son-in-law.”
    “Sorry,” I said.
    “You made her happy,” he said.
    “I hope so,” I said.
    “That made me hate you more,” he said. “Happiness has no place in war.”
    “Sorry,” I said.
    “Because I hated you so much,” he said, “I studied you. I listened to everything you said. I never missed a broadcast.”
    “I didn’t know that,” I said.
    “No one knows everything,” he said. “Did you know,” he said, “that until almost this very moment nothing would have delighted me more than to prove that you were a spy, to see you shot?”
    “No,” I said.
    “And do you know why I don’t care now if you were a spy or not?” he said. “You could tell me now that you were a spy, and we would go on talking calmly, just as we’re talking now. I would let you wander off to wherever spies go when a war is over. You know why?” he said.
    “No,” I said.
    “Because you could never have served the enemy as well as you served us,” he said. “I realized that almost all the ideas that I hold now, that make me unashamed of anything I may have felt or done as a Nazi, came not from Hitler, not from Goebbels, not from Himmler—but from you.” He took my hand. “You alone kept me from concluding that Germany had gone insane.”
    He turned away from me abruptly. He went to the oyster-eyed woman who had almost dropped the blue vase. She was standing against a wall where she hadbeen ordered to stand, was numbly playing the punished dunce.
    Werner Noth shook her a little, trying to arouse an atom of intelligence in her. He pointed to another woman who was carrying a hideous Chinese carved-oak dog, carrying it as carefully as though it were a baby.
    “You see?” Noth said to the dunce. He wasn’t intentionally tormenting the dunce. He was trying to make her, in spite of her stupidity, a better-rounded, more useful human being.
    “You see?” he said again, earnestly, helpfully, pleadingly. “That’s the way to handle precious things.”

19
LITTLE RESI NOTH …

    I WENT INTO the music room of Werner Noth’s emptying house and found little Resi and her dog.
    Little Resi was ten years old then. She was curled in a wing-chair by a window. Her view was not of the ruins of Berlin but of the walled orchard, of the snowy lace that the treetops made.
    There was no heat in the house. Resi was bundled up in a coat and scarf and thick wool stockings. A small suitcase was beside her. When the wagon train outside was ready to move, she would be ready to board it.
    She had taken off her mittens, laid them neatly on the arm of the chair. She had bared her hands in order to pet the dog in her lap. The dog was a dachshund that had, on a wartime diet, lost all its hair and been all but immobilized by dropsical fat.
    The dog looked like some early amphibian meant to waddle in ooze. While Resi caressed it, its browneyes bugged with the blindness of ecstasy. Every bit of its awareness followed like thimbles the fingertips that stroked its hide.
    I did not know Resi well. She had chilled me once, fairly early in the war, by lispingly calling me an American spy. Since then, I had spent as little time as possible before