Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse Five

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SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE

OR THE CHILDREN'S

CRUSADE

A Duty-dance with Death

KURT VONNEGUT, JR.

A fourth-generation German-American

now living in easy circumstances

on Cape Cod

[and smoking too much],

who, as an American infantry scout

hors de combat,

as a prisoner of war,

witnessed the fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany,

'The Florence of the Elbe,'

a long time ago,

and survived to tell the tale.

This is a novel

somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic

manner of tales

of the planet Tralfamadore,

where the flying saucers

come from.

Peace.

Granada Publishing Limited

Published in 1972 by Panther Books Ltd

Frogmore, St Albans, Herts AL2 2NF

Reprinted 1972, 1973 (twice), 1974, 1975

First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd 1970

Made and printed in Great Britain by

Richard Clay (The Chaucer Press) Ltd

Bungy, Suffolk

Set in Linotype Plantin

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be

lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form

of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition

including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

This book is published at a net price and is supplied subject to the Publishers Association

Standard Conditions of Sale registered under the Restrictive Trade Practices Act, 1956.

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following material:

THE COLLECTED POEMS OF THEODORE ROETHKE

printed by permission of Doubleday & Company, Inc.

THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN by David Irving:

From the Introduction by Ira C. Eaker, Lt. Gen. USAF (RET.) and Foreword by Air Marshall Sir

Rinehart and Winston, Inc. and William Kimber and Co. Limited.

of MCA Inc. Copyright renewed 1955,1956 and assigned to MCA Music, a division of MCA Inc. Used by

permission.

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for

Mary O’Hare

and

Gerhard Müller

The cattle are lowing,

The Baby awakes,

But the little Lord Jesus

No crying He makes.

One

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew

really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn't his. Another guy I knew really did

threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war. And so on. I've

changed all the names.

I really did go back to Dresden with Guggenheim money (God love it) in 1967. It looked a lot

like Dayton, Ohio, more open spaces than Dayton has. There must be tons of human bone meal in the

ground.

I went back there with an old war buddy, Bernard V. O'Hare, and we made friends with a taxi

driver, who took us to the slaughterhouse where we had been locked up at night as prisoner of war.

His name was Gerhard Müller. He told us that he was a prisoner of the Americans for a while. We

asked him how it was to live under Communism, and he said that it was terrible at first, because

everybody had to work so hard, and because there wasn't much shelter or food or clothing. But

things were much better now. He had a pleasant little apartment, and his daughter was getting an

excellent education. His mother was incinerated in the Dresden fire-storm. So it goes.

He sent O'Hare a postcard at Christmastime, and here is what it said:

'I wish you and your family also as to your friend Merry Christmas and a happy New Year and I

hope that we'll meet again in a world of peace and freedom in the taxi cab if the accident will.'

I like that very much: 'If the accident will.'

I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time.

When I got home from the Second World War twenty-three years ago, I thought it would be easy for

me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be to report what

I had seen. And I thought, too, that it would be a masterpiece or at least make me a lot of money,

since the subject was so big.

But not many words about Dresden came from my mind then-not enough of them to make a book,

anyway. And not many words come now, either, when I have become an old fart with his memories and

his Pall Malls, with his sons full grown. I think of how useless the Dresden -part of my memory

has been, and yet how tempting Dresden has been to write about, and I am reminded of the famous

limerick:

There was a young man from Stamboul,

Who soliloquized thus to his tool,

'You took all my wealth

And you ruined my health,

And now you won't pee, you old fool’

And I'm reminded, too, of the song that goes

My name is Yon Yonson,

I work in Wisconsin,

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I work in a lumbermill there.

The people I meet when I walk down the street,

They say, 'What's your name?

And I say,

‘My name is Yon Yonson,

I work in Wisconsin...

And so on to infinity.

Over the years, people I've met have often asked me what I'm working on, and I've usually

replied that the main thing was a book about Dresden.

I said that to Harrison Starr, the movie-maker, one time, and he raised his eyebrows and

inquired, 'Is it an anti-war book?'

'Yes,' I said. 'I guess.'

'You know what I say to people when I hear they're writing anti-war books?'

'No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?'

'I say, "Why don't you write an anti-glacier book instead?"'

What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as

glaciers. I believe that too.

And, even if wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death.

When I was somewhat younger, working on my famous Dresden book, I asked an old war buddy named

Bernard V. O'Hare if I could come to see him. He was a district attorney in Pennsylvania. I was a

writer on Cape Cod. We had been privates in the war, infantry scouts. We had never expected to

make any money after the war, but we were doing quite well.

I had the Bell Telephone Company find him for me. They are wonderful that way. I have this,

disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone. I get drunk, and I drive my

wife away with a breath like mustard gas and roses. And then, speaking gravely and elegantly into

the telephone, I ask the telephone operators to connect me with this friend or that one, from whom

I have not heard in years.

I got O'Hare on the line in this way. He is short and I am tall. We were Mutt and Jeff in the

war. We were captured together in the war. I told him who I was on the telephone. He had no

trouble believing it. He was up. He was reading. Everybody else in his house was asleep.

'Listen,' I said, 'I'm writing this book about Dresden. I'd like some help remembering stuff.

I wonder if I could come down and see you, and we could drink and talk and remember.'

He was unenthusiastic. He said he couldn't remember much. He told me, though, to come ahead.

'I think the climax of the book will be the execution of poor old Edgar Derby,' I said. 'The

irony is so great. A whole city gets burned down, and thousands and thousands of people are

killed. And then this one American foot soldier is arrested in the ruins for taking a teapot. And

he's given a regular trial, and then he's shot by a firing squad.'

'Um,' said O'Hare.

'Don't you think that's really where the climax should come?' 'I don't know anything about

it,' he said. 'That's your trade, not mine.'

As a trafficker in climaxes and thrills and characterization and wonderful dialogue and

suspense and confrontations, I had outlined the Dresden story many times. The best outline I ever

made, or anyway the prettiest one, was on the back of a roll of wallpaper.

I used my daughter's crayons, a different color for each main character. One end of the

wallpaper was the beginning of the story, and the other end was the end, and then there was all

that middle part, which was the middle. And the blue line met the red line and then the yellow

line, and the yellow line stopped because the character represented by the yellow line was dead.

And so on. The destruction of Dresden was represented by a vertical band of orange cross-hatching,

and all the lines that were still alive passed through it, came out the other side.

The end, where all the lines stopped, was a beetfield on the Elbe, outside of Halle. The rain

was coming down. The war in Europe had been over for a couple of weeks. We were formed in ranks,

with Russian soldiers guarding us-Englishmen, Americans, Dutchmen, Belgians, Frenchmen, Canadians,

South Africans, New Zealanders, Australians, thousands of us about to stop being prisoners of war.

And on the other side of the field were thousands of Russians and Poles and Yugoslavians and

so on guarded by American soldiers. An exchange was made there in the rain-one for one. O'Hare and

I climbed into the back of an American truck with a lot of others. O'Hare didn't have any

souvenirs. Almost everybody else did. I had a ceremonial Luftwaffe saber, still do. The rabid

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little American I call Paul Lazzaro in this book had about a quart of diamonds and emeralds and

rubies and so on' He had taken these from dead people in the cellars of Dresden.' So it goes.

An idiotic Englishman, who had lost all his teeth somewhere had his souvenir in a canvas bag.

The bag was resting on my insteps. He would peek into the bag every now and then, and he would

roll his eyes and swivel his scrawny neck,, trying to catch people looking covetously at his bag.

And he would bounce the bag on my insteps.

I thought this bouncing was accidental. But I was mistaken. He had to show somebody what was in

the bag, and he had decided he could trust me. He caught my eye, winked, opened the bag. There was

a plaster model of the Eiffel Tower in there. It was painted gold. It had a clock in it.

'There's a smashin' thing,' he said.

And we were flown to a rest camp in France, where we were fed chocolate malted milkshakes and

other rich foods until we were all covered with baby fat. Then we were sent home, and I married a

pretty girl who was covered with baby fat, too.

And we had babies.

And they're all grown up now, and I'm an old fart with his memories and his Pall Malls. My

name is Yon Yonson, I work in Wisconsin, I work in a lumbermill there.

Sometimes I try to call up old girl friends on the telephone late at night, after my wife has

gone to bed. 'Operator, I wonder if you could give me the number of a Mrs. So-and-So. I think she

lives at such-and-such.'

'I'm sorry, sir. There is no such listing.'

'Thanks, Operator. Thanks just the same.'

And I let the dog out or I let him in, and we talk some. I let him know I like him, and he

lets me know he likes me. He doesn't mind the smell of mustard gas and roses.

'You're all right, Sandy, I'll say to the dog. 'You know that, Sandy? You're O.K.'

Sometimes I'll turn on the radio and listen to a talk program from Boston or New York. I

can't stand recorded music if I've been drinking a good deal.

Sooner or later I go to bed, and my wife asks me what time it is. She always has to know the

time. Sometimes I don't know, and I say, 'Search me.'

I think about my education sometimes. I went to the University of Chicago for a while after

the Second World War. I was a student in the Department of Anthropology. At that time, they were

teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody. They may be teaching that still.

Another thing they taught was that nobody was ridiculous or bad or disgusting. Shortly before

my father died, he said to me, 'You know-you never wrote a story with a villain in it.'

I told him that was one of the things I learned in college after the war.

While I was studying to be an anthropologist, I was also working as a police reporter for the

famous Chicago City News Bureau for twenty-eight dollars a week. One time they switched me from

the night shift to the day shift., so I worked sixteen hours straight. We were supported by all

the newspapers in town, and the AP and the UP and all that. And we would cover the courts and the

police stations and the Fire Department and the Coast Guard out on Lake Michigan and all that. We

were connected to the institutions that supported us by means of pneumatic tubes which ran under

the streets of Chicago.

Reporters would telephone in stories to writers wearing headphones, and the writers would

stencil the stories on mimeograph sheets. The stories were mimeographed and stuffed into the brass

and velvet cartridges which the pneumatic tubes ate. The very toughest reporters and writers were

women who had taken over the jobs of men who'd gone to war.

And the first story I covered I had to dictate over the telephone to one of those beastly

girls. It was about a young veteran who had taken a job running an old-fashioned elevator in an

office building. The elevator door on the first floor was ornamental iron lace. Iron ivy snaked in

and out of the holes. There was an iron twig with two iron lovebirds perched upon it.

This veteran decided to take his car into the basement, and he closed the door and started

down, but his wedding ring Was caught in all the ornaments. So he was hoisted into the air and the

floor of the car went down, dropped out from under him, and the top of the car squashed him. So it

goes.

So I phoned this in, and the woman who was going to cut the stencil asked me. 'What did his

wife say?'

'She doesn't know yet,' I said. 'It just happened.'

'Call her up and get a statement.'

'What?'

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'Tell her you're Captain Finn of the Police Department. Say you have some sad news. Give her

the news, and see what she says.'

So I did. She said about what you would expect her to say. There was a baby. And so on.

When I got back to the office, the woman writer asked me, just for her own information, what

the squashed guy had looked Eke when he was squashed.

I told her.

'Did it bother you?' she said. She was eating a Three Musketeers Candy Bar.

'Heck no, Nancy,' I said. 'I've seen lots worse than that in the war.'

Even then I was supposedly writing a book about Dresden. It wasn't a famous air raid back then

in America. Not many Americans knew how much worse it had been than Hiroshima, for instance. I

didn't know that, either. There hadn't been much publicity.

I happened to tell a University of Chicago professor at a cocktail party about the raid as I

had seen it, about the book I would write. He was a member of a thing called The Committee on

Social Thought. And he told me about the concentration camps, and about how the Germans had made

soap and candles out of the fat of dead Jews and so on.

All could say was, 'I know, I know. I know.'

The Second World War had certainly made everybody very tough. And I became a public

relations man for General Electric in Schenectady, New York, and a volunteer fireman in the

Village of Alplaus, where I bought my first home. My boss there was one of the toughest guys I

ever hope to meet. He had been a lieutenant colonel in public relations in Baltimore. While I

was in Schenectady he joined the Dutch Reformed Church, which is a very tough church, indeed.

He used to ask me sneeringly sometimes why I hadn't been an officer,, as though I'd done

something wrong.

My wife and I had lost our baby fat. Those were our scrawny years. We had a lot of scrawny

veterans and their scrawny wives for friends. The nicest veterans in Schenectady,, I thought,, the

kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who'd really fought.

I wrote the Air Force back then, asking for details about the raid on Dresden, who ordered it,

how many planes did it, why they did it, what desirable results there had been and so on. I was

answered by a man who, like myself, was in public relations. He said that he was sorry, but that

the information was top secret still.

I read the letter out loud to my wife, and I said, 'Secret? My God-from whom?'

We were United World Federalists back then. I don't know what we are now. Telephoners, I

guess. We telephone a lot-or I do, anyway, late at night.

A couple of weeks after I telephoned my old war buddy, Bernard V. O'Hare, I really did go to

see him. That must have been in 1964 or so-whatever the last year was for the New York World's

Fair. Eheu, fugaces labuntur anni. My name is Yon Yonson. There was a young man from Stamboul.

I took two little girls with me, my daughter, Nanny, and her best friend, Allison Mitchell.

They had never been off Cape Cod before. When we saw a river, we had to stop so they could stand

by it and think about it for a while. They had never seen water in that long and narrow, unsalted

form before. The river was the Hudson. There were carp in there and we saw them. They were as big

as atomic submarines.

We saw waterfalls, too, streams jumping off cliffs into the valley of the Delaware. There were

lots of things to stop and see-and then it was time to go, always time to go. The little girls

were wearing white party dresses and black party shoes, so strangers would know at once how nice

they were. 'Time to go, girls,' I'd say. And we would go.

And the sun went down, and we had supper in an Italian place, and then I knocked on the front

door of the beautiful stone house of Bernard V. O'Hare. I was carrying a bottle of Irish whiskey

like a dinner bell.

I met his nice wife, Mary, to whom I dedicate this book. I dedicate it to Gerhard Müller, the

Dresden taxi driver, too. Mary O'Hare is a trained nurse, which is a lovely thing for a woman to

be.

Mary admired the two little girls I'd brought, mixed them in with her own children, sent them

all upstairs to play games and watch television. It was only after the children were gone that I

sensed that Mary didn't like me or didn't like something about the night. She was polite but

chilly.

'It's a nice cozy house you have here,' I said, and it really was.

'I've fixed up a place where you can talk and not be bothered,' she said.

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'Good,' I said, and I imagined two leather chairs near a fire in a paneled room, where two old

soldiers could drink and talk. But she took us into the kitchen. She had put two straight-backed

chairs at a kitchen table with a white porcelain top. That table top was screaming with reflected

light from a two-hundred-watt bulb overhead. Mary had prepared an operating room. She put only

one glass on it, which was for me. She explained that O'Hare couldn't drink the hard stuff since

the war.

So we sat down. O'Hare was embarrassed, but he wouldn't tell me what was wrong. I couldn't

imagine what it was about me that could bum up Mary so. I was a family man. I'd been married

only once. I wasn't a drunk. I hadn't done her husband any dirt in the war.

She fixed herself a Coca-Cola, made a lot of noise banging the ice-cube tray in the stainless

steel sink. Then she went into another part of the house. But she wouldn't sit still. She was

moving all over the house, opening and shutting doors, even moving furniture around to work off

anger.

I asked O'Hare what I'd said or done to make her act that way.

'It's all right,' he said. "Don't worry about it. It doesn't have anything to do with you.'

That was kind of him. He was lying. It had everything to do with me.

So we tried to ignore Mary and remember the war. I took a couple of belts of the booze I'd

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.

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

expended millions of her treasures, and the blood of two million of her people; and a handful of

quarrelsome knights retained possession of Palestine for about one hundred years!

Mackay told us that the Children's Crusade started in 1213, when two monks got the idea of

raising armies of children in Germany and France, and selling them in North Africa as slaves.

Thirty thousand children volunteered, thinking they were going to Palestine. They were no doubt

idle and deserted children who generally swarm in great cities, nurtured on vice and daring, said

Mackay, and ready for anything.

Pope Innocent the Third thought they were going to Palestine, too, and he was thrilled. 'These

children are awake while we are asleep!' he said.

Most of the children were shipped out of Marseilles, and about half of them drowned in

shipwrecks. The other half got to North Africa where they were sold.

Through a misunderstanding, some children reported for duty at Genoa, where no slave ships

were waiting. They were fed and sheltered and questioned kindly by good people there-then given a

little money and a lot of advice and sent back home.

'Hooray for the good people of Genoa,' said Mary O'Hare.

I slept that night in one of the children's bedrooms. O'Hare had put a book for me on the

bedside table. It was Dresden, History, Stage and Gallery, by Mary Endell. It was published in

1908, and its introduction began

It is hoped that this little book will make itself useful. It attempts to give to an English-

reading public a bird's-eye view of how Dresden came to look as it does, architecturally; of how

it expanded musically, through the genius of a few men, to its present bloom; and it calls

attention to certain permanent landmarks in art that make its Gallery the resort of those seeking

lasting impressions.

I read some history further on

Now, in 1760, Dresden underwent siege by the Prussians. On the fifteenth of July began the

cannonade. The Picture-Gallery took fire. Many of the paintings had been transported to -the

Konigstein, but some were seriously injured by splinters of bombshells-notably Francia's 'Baptism

of Christ.' Furthermore, the stately Kreuzkirche tower, from which the enemy's movements had been

watched day and night, stood in flames. It later succumbed. In sturdy contrast with the pitiful

fate of the Kreuzkirche, stood the Frauenkirche, from the curves of whose stone dome the Prussian

bombs -rebounded like rain. Friederich was obliged finally to give up the siege, because he

learned of the fall of Glatz, the critical point of his new conquests. 'We must be off to Silesia,

so that we do not lose everything.'

The devastation of Dresden was boundless. When Goethe as a young student visited the city, he

still found sad ruins 'Von der Kuppel der Frauenkirche sah ich these leidigen Trümmer zwischen die

schone stddtische Ordnung hineingesät; da rühmte mir der Kiister die Kunst des Baumeisters,

welcher Kirche und Kuppel auf einen so unerüinschten Fall schon eingeyichtet und bombenfest erbaut

hatte. Der gute Sakristan deutete mir alsdann auf Ruinen nach allen Seiten und sagte bedenklich

lakonisch: Das hat her Feind Gethan!'

The two little girls and I crossed the Delaware River where George Washington had crossed it,

the next morning. We went to the New York World's Fair, saw what the past had been like, according

to the Ford Motor Car Company and Walt Disney, saw what the future would be like, according to

General Motors.

And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to

keep.

I taught creative writing in the famous Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa for a

couple of years after that. I got into some perfectly beautiful trouble, got out of it again. I

taught in the afternoons. In the mornings I wrote. I was not be disturbed. I was working on my

famous book about Dresden.

And somewhere in there a nice man named Seymour Lawrence gave me a three-book contract, and I

said, 'O.K., the first of the three will be my famous book about Dresden.'

The friends of Seymour Lawrence call him 'Sam.' And I say to Sam now: 'Sam-here's the book.'

It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about

a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again.

Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.

And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like 'Poo-tee-weet?'

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I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and

that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee.

I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express

contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.

As I've said I recently went back to Dresden with my friend O'Hare. We had a million laughs in

Hamburg and West Berlin and East Berlin and Vienna and Salzburg and Helsinki, and in Leningrad,

too. It was very good for me, because I saw a lot of authentic backgrounds for made-up stories

which I will write later on. One of them will be Russian Baroque and another will be No Kissing

and another will be Dollar Bar and another will be If the Accident Will, and so on.

And so on.

There was a Lufthansa plane that was supposed to fly from Philadelphia to Boston to Frankfurt.

O'Hare was supposed to get on in Philadelphia and I was supposed to get on in Boston, and off we'd

go. But Boston was socked in, so the plane flew straight to Frankfurt from Philadelphia. And I

became a non-person in the Boston Fog, and Lufthansa put me in a limousine with some other non-

persons and sent us to a motel for a non-night.

The time would not pass. Somebody was playing with the clocks, and not only with the electric

clocks, but the wind-up kind, too. The second hand on my watch would twitch once, and a year

would pass, and then it would twitch again.

There was nothing I could do about it. As an Earthling., I had to believe whatever clocks said-

and calendars.

I had two books with me, which I'd meant to read on the plane. One was Words for the Wind, by

Theodore Roethke, and this is what I found in there:

I wake to steep, and take my waking slow.

I feet my late in what I cannot fear.

I learn by going where I have to go.

My other book was Erika Ostrovsky's Céline and His Vision. Céline was a brave French soldier

in the First World War-until his skull was cracked. After that he couldn't sleep, and there were

noises in his head. He became a doctor, and he treated poor people in the daytime, and he wrote

grotesque novels all night. No art is possible without a dance with death, he wrote.

The truth is death, he wrote. I've fought nicely against it as long as I could ... danced

with it, festooned it, waltzed it around ... decorated it with streamers, titillated it...

Time obsessed him. Miss Ostrovsky reminded me of the amazing scene in Death on the Installment

Plan where Céline wants to stop the bustling of a street crowd. He screams on paper, Make them

stop ... don't let them move anymore at all ... There, make them freeze ... once and for all! ...

So that they won't disappear anymore!

I looked through the Gideon Bible in my motel room for tales of great destruction. The sun was

risen upon the Earth when Lot entered into Zo-ar, I read. Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon

Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of Heaven; and He overthrew those cities, and all

the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.

So it goes.

Those were vile people in both those cities, as is well known. The world was better off

without them.

And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes

had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.

She was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes.

People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore.

I've finished my war book now. The next one I write is going to be fun.

This one is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt. It begins

like this:

Listen:

Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

It ends like this:

Poo-tee-weet?

Two

Listen:

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Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day. He has walked

through a door in 1955 and come out another one in 1941. He has gone back through that door to

find himself in 1963. He has seen his birth and death many times, he says, and pays random visits

to all the events in between.

He says.

Billy is spastic in time, has no control over where he is going next, and the trips aren't

necessarily fun. He is 'm a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what

part of his life he is going to have to act in next.

Billy was bon in 1922 in Ilium, New York, the only child of a barber there. He was a funny-

looking child who became a funny-looking youth-tall and weak, and shaped like a bottle of Coca-

Cola. He graduated from Ilium High School in the upper third of his class, and attended night

sessions at the Ilium School of Optometry for one semester before being drafted for military

service in the Second World War. His father died in a hunting accident during the war. So it

goes.

Billy saw service with the infantry in Europe, and was taken prisoner by the Germans. After

his honorable discharge from the Army in 1945, Billy again enrolled in the Ilium School of

Optometry. During his senior year there, he became engaged to the daughter of the founder and

owner of the school, and then suffered a mild nervous collapse.

He was treated in a veterans' hospital near Lake Placid, and was given shock treatments and

released. He married his fiancée, finished his education, and was set up in business in Ilium by

his father-in-law. Ilium is a particularly good city for optometrists because the General Forge

and Foundry Company is there. Every employee is required to own a pair of safety glasses, and to

wear them in areas where manufacturing is going on. GF&F has sixty-eight thousand employees in

Ilium. That calls for a lot of lenses and a lot of frames.

Frames are where the money is.

Bill became rich. He had two children, Barbara and Robert. In time, his daughter Barbara

married another optometrist., and Billy set him up in business. Billy's son Robert had a lot of

trouble in high school, but then he joined the famous Green Berets. He straightened out, became a

fine Young man, and he fought in Vietnam.

Early in 1968, a group of optometrists, with Billy among them, chartered an airplane to fly

them from Ilium to an international convention of optometrists in Montreal. The plane crashed on

top of Sugarbush Mountain, in Vermont. Everybody was killed but Billy. So it goes.

While Billy was recuperating in a hospital in Vermont, his wife died accidentally of carbon-

monoxide poisoning. So it goes.

When Billy finally got home to Ilium after the airplane crash, he was quiet for a while. He

had a terrible scar across the top Of his skull. He didn't resume practice. He had a

housekeeper. His daughter came over almost every day.

And then, without any warning, Billy went to New York City, and got on an all-night radio

program devoted to talk. He told about having come unstuck in time. He said, too, that he had

been kidnapped by a flying saucer in 1967. The saucer was from the planet Tralfamadore, he said.

He was taken to Tralfamadore, where he was displayed naked in a zoo, he said. He was mated there

with a former Earthling movie star named Montana Wildhack.

Some night owls in Ilium heard Billy on the radio, and one of them called Billy's daughter

Barbara. Barbara was upset. She and her husband went down to New York and brought Billy home.

Billy insisted mildly that everything he had said on the radio was true. He said he had been

kidnapped by the Tralfamadorians on the night of his daughter's wedding. He hadn't been missed, he

said, because the Tralfamadorians had taken him through a time warp, so that he could be on

Tralfamadore for years, and still be away from Earth for only a microsecond.

Another month went by without incident, and then Billy wrote a letter to the Ilium News

Leader, which the paper published. It described the creatures from Tralfamadore.

The letter said that they were two feet high, and green., and shaped like plumber's friends.

Their suction cups were on the ground, and their shafts, which were extremely flexible, usually

pointed to the sky. At the top of each shaft was a little hand with a green eye in its palm. The

creatures were friendly, and they could see in four dimensions. They pitied Earthlings for being

able to see only three. They had many wonderful things to teach Earthlings, especially about time.

Billy promised to tell what some of those wonderful things were in his next letter.

Billy was working on his second letter when the first letter was published. The second letter

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started out like this:

'The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only

appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at

his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The

Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of

the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can

look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one

moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone

forever.

'When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad

condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other

moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the

Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "so it goes."'

And so on.

Billy was working on this letter in the basement rumpus room of his empty house. It was his

housekeeper's day off. There was an old typewriter in the rumpus room. It was a beast. It weighed

as much as a storage battery. Billy couldn't carry it very far very easily, which was why he was

writing in the rumpus room instead of somewhere else.

The oil burner had quit. A mouse had eaten through the insulation of a wire leading to the

thermostat. The temperature in the house was down to fifty degrees, but Billy hadn't noticed. He

wasn't warmly dressed, either. He was barefoot, and still in his pajamas and a bathrobe, though it

was late afternoon. His bare feet were blue and ivory.

The cockles of Billy's heart, at any rate, were glowing coals. What made them so hot was Billy's

belief that he was going to comfort so many people with the truth about time. His door chimes

upstairs had been ringing and ringing. It was his daughter Barbara up there wanting in. Now she

let herself in with a key, crossed the floor over his head calling, 'Father? Daddy, where are

you?' And so on.

Billy didn't answer her, so she was nearly hysterical, expecting to find his corpse. And then

she looked into the very last place there was to look-which was the rumpus room.

'Why didn't you answer me when I called?' Barbara wanted to know, standing there in the door

of the rumpus room. She had the afternoon paper with her, the one in which Billy described his

friends from Tralfamadore.

'I didn't hear you,' said Billy.

The orchestration of the moment was this: Barbara was only twenty-one years old, but she

thought her father was senile, even though he was only forty-six-senile because of damage to his

brain in the airplane crash. She also thought that she was head of the family, since she had had

to manage her mother's funeral, since she had to get a housekeeper for Billy, and all that. Also,

Barbara and her husband were having to look after Billy's business interests, which were

considerable, since Billy didn't seem to give a damn for business any more. All this

responsibility at such an early age made her a bitchy flibbertigibbet. And Billy, meanwhile, was

trying to hang onto his dignity, to persuade Barbara and everybody else that he was far from

senile, that, on the contrary, he was devoting himself to a calling much higher than mere

business.

He was doing nothing less now, he thought, then prescribing corrective lenses for Earthling

souls. So many of those souls were lost and wretched, Billy believed, because they could not see

as well as Ws little green friends on Tralfamadore.

'Don't lie to me, Father,' said Barbara. 'I know perfectly well you heard me when I called.'

This was a fairly pretty girl, except that she had legs like an Edwardian grand piano. Now she

raised hell with him about the letter in the paper. She said he was making a laughing stock of

himself and everybody associated with him.

'Father, Father, Father,' said Barbara, 'what are we going to do with you? Are you going to

force us to put you where your mother is?' Billy's mother was still alive. She was in bed in an

old people's home called Pine Knoll on the edge of Ilium.

'What is it about my letter that makes you so mad?' Billy wanted to know.

'It's all just crazy. None of it's true! '

'It's all true. ' Bill's anger was not going to rise with hers. He never got mad at anything.

He was wonderful that way.

'There is no such planet as Tralfamadore.'

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Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse Five

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