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1、Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Slaughterhouse-Five Kurt Vonnegut, Jr: Slaughterhouse-Five Published: 19?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 Dr
2、esden, 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. for Mary OHare and Gerhard Mller The cattle are lowing, The Baby
3、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 wasnt his. Another guy I knew really did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gu
4、nmen after the war. And so on. Ive 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, Be
5、rnard V. OHare, 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 Mller. 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
6、that it was terrible at first, because everybody had to work so hard, and because there wasnt 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-sto
7、rm. So it goes. He sent OHare 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 well meet again in a world of peace and freedom in the taxi cab if the accident will. I like that very much: If
8、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 repor
9、t 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 fa
10、rt 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, Yo
11、u took all my wealth And you ruined my health, And now you wont pee, you old fool And Im reminded, too, of the song that goes: My name is Yon Yonson, I work in Wisconsin, I work in a lumbermill there. The people I meet when I walk down the street, They say, Whats your name? And I say, My name is Yon
12、 Yonson, I work in Wisconsin. And so on to infinity. Over the years, people Ive met have often asked me what Im working on, and Ive 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 a
13、n anti-war book? Yes, I said. I guess. You know what I say to people when I hear theyre writing anti-war books? No. What do you say, Harrison Starr? I say, Why dont 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 a
14、s glaciers. I believe that too. And, even if wars didnt 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. OHare if I could come to see him. He was a district attorney in Pennsylva
15、nia. 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, involvi
16、ng 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 OHare on the
17、 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, Im writing this book about D
18、resden. Id 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 couldnt 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,
19、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 hes given a regular trial, and then hes shot by a firing squad. Um, said OHare. Dont you think tha
20、ts really where the climax should come? I dont know anything about it, he said. Thats 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,
21、or anyway the prettiest one, was on the back of a roll of wallpaper. I used my daughters 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
22、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
23、, 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, Frenc
24、hmen, 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. OHa
25、re and I climbed into the back of an American truck with a lot of others. OHare didnt have any souvenirs. Almost everybody else did. I had a ceremonial Luftwaffe saber, still do. The rabid little American I call Paul Lazzaro in this book had about a quart of diamonds and emeralds and rubies and so o
26、n. 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 scra
27、wny 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 wa
28、s a plaster model of the Eiffel Tower in there. It was painted gold. It had a clock in it. Theres 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,
29、and I married a pretty girl who was covered with baby fat, too. And we had babies. And theyre all grown up now, and Im 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 teleph
30、one 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. Im 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 le
31、t him know I like him, and he lets me know he likes me. He doesnt mind the smell of mustard gas and roses. Youre all right, Sandy, Ill say to the dog. You know that, Sandy? Youre O.K. Sometimes Ill turn on the radio and listen to a talk program from Boston or New York. I cant stand recorded music if
32、 Ive 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 dont 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 st
33、udent 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-yo
34、u 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
35、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 w
36、ere 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 t
37、he 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 whod 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
38、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
39、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
40、asked me. What did his wife say? She doesnt know yet, I said. It just happened. Call her up and get a statement. What? Tell her youre 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
41、. 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 like 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. Ive seen lo
42、ts worse than that in the war. Even then I was supposedly writing a book about Dresden. It wasnt a famous air raid back then in America. Not many Americans knew how much worse it had been than Hiroshima, for instance. I didnt know that, either. There hadnt been much publicity. I happened to tell a U
43、niversity 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 dea
44、d Jews and so on. All I 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 the
45、re 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 hadnt been an officer, as though
46、Id 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 whod really f
47、ought. 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 i
48、nformation 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 dont 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. OHare, I really did go to see him. That must have been in 1964 or so-whatever the last year was for the New York Worlds Fair. Eheu, fugaces labuntur anni. My name is Yon Yonson. There was a young man from Stamboul. I to
