"Herr Reichsmarschall" I said to the oldest.
"Mein lieber Herr Rabinowitz," he answered in kind.
"Ich mochte ein Fest haben und tanzen. Konnen wir Musik haben, zum Singen und Tanzen? Wir werden mehr arbeiten."
"Mein lieber Herr Rabinowitz." They had fun with me too. "Es ist verboten. Das ist nicht erlaubt."
"Fragen Sie doch, bitte. Wurden Sie das nicht auch gerne haben?"
"Es ist nicht erlaubt."
They were too scared to ask anybody. Then came the circus posters, and I decided to make a real try for that one, with Vonnegut and the good soldier Schweik, the three of us. They wanted no part of it. I could see nothing to lose.
"Why not? Shit, wouldn't we all want to? We'll go ask him together. We need a rest. We'll all die here of boredom if we just have to keep waiting."
"Not me," said Schweik, in his very slow English. "Humbly begging your pardon, Rabinowitz, I find I can get myself in enough trouble just doing what I'm told. I've been through this before, longer than you think, more times than you know about. Humbly begging your pardon--"
"Okay, okay." I cut him off. "I'll do it myself."
That night the bombers came for us. In the daytime American planes flew in low, far apart, and shattered buildings in different parts of the city, and we thought it strange that the bombs should drop so far from each other and be aimed at nothing but houses. We wondered why. They were making splintered wreckage for the fires to come, but we didn't know that. When the sirens sounded again in the evening we went down as usual to our meat storage locker underneath our slaughterhouse. This time we stayed. There was no all clear. Through our rock walls and cement ceiling we heard strange strong, dull thumps and thuds that did not sound to us like bomb explosions. They were the charges of incendiaries. In a little while the bulbs hanging from the ceiling went out and the hum of the ventilation fans stopped. The power plant was out. Air blew into the vents anyway, and we could breathe. An unusual roar arose, came closer, grew louder, stayed for hours. It was like the noise of a train going suddenly into a tunnel with a blast of wind, except it just stayed, or a roller-coaster at the top accelerating down. But it did not weaken. The roar was air, it was the draft miles wide sucked into the whole city by the flames outside, and it was as powerful as a cyclone. When it finally lessened, near dawn, two guards climbed timidly back up the stairs to try a look outside. They came back like ghosts.
"Es brennt. Alies brennt. Die ganze Stadt. Alles ist zerstort."
"Everything's on fire," I translated, in the same hushed voice. "The city is gone."
We could not imagine what that meant.
In the morning when they led us up outside into the rain, everyone else was dead. They were dead in the street, burned black into stubs and turned brown by the ash still dropping from the layers of smoke going up everywhere. They were dead in the blackened houses in which the wood had all burned and dead in the cellars. The churches were gone and the opera house had tilted over and fallen into the square. A trolley car had blown over onto its side and burned also. A column of smoke sailed up through the roof of the blackened skeleton of the railroad station, and the raindrops were blotched with soot and ashes and reminded
me of the dingy water from the hose in the junkshop we cleaned up with when the day's work was finished. At the far side of the park, we could see that the trees, all the trees, were burning singly like torches, like a civic display, and I thought of blazing pinwheels, of the fireworks in Coney Island off the Steeplechase pier I'd enjoyed every Tuesday night in the summer for as long as I'd lived, of the million dazzling lights of Luna Park. Our building was gone, the slaughterhouse we'd lived in, and every one of the other buildings in our section of the city. We stood without moving for more than an hour before someone drove up in a car to tell us what to do, and these people in uniform were as dazed as we were. It took more than another hour before they could decide, before they pointed off and told us to walk out of the city toward the hills and the mountains. All around us, as far as we could see, everyone was dead, men, women, and children, every parrot, cat, dog, and canary. I felt sorry for them all. I felt sorry for the Polish slave laborers. I felt sorry for the Germans.
I felt sorry for myself. I didn't count. For a second I almost cried. Didn't they care that we might be there? I still don't know why we were spared.
I saw I made no difference. It all would have taken place without me and come out just the same. I would make no difference anywhere, except at home with my family and maybe with a few friends. And after that, I knew I would never even want to vote. I did for Truman, because he was good for Israel, but after that I never have. After FDR there hasn't been a single one I thought enough about to look up to, and I don't want to give any of those bragging bastards in both parties the satisfaction of thinking for a minute I'm in favor of seeing them succeed in their ambitions.
"They don't know that, Lew," Sammy said to me way back, with that superior, college-educated smile he used to wear. He was trying to get me interested in Adlai Stevenson, and then later in John Kennedy. "They don't know that you aren't giving them the satisfaction."
"But I do," I answered. "And that's what I mean. We don't count, and our votes won't count either. About how long do you think it will take you to get sick of Kennedy?"
It took him less than a week, I think, before those inauguration balls were even half over, and I don't think Sammy has voted again either since maybe Lyndon Johnson.
I don't spend much time keeping track of the world and can't see that it would change anything if I did. I mind my own business. What's important I hear about. What I learned I remembered, and it turned out to be true. It didn't mean a thing, me being in the army, it didn't count at all. It would have happened the same way without me--the ashes, the smoke, the dead, the outcome. I had nothing to do with Hitler and nothing to do with the state of Israel. I don't want the blame and I don't want the credit. The only place I've counted is at home, with Claire and the kids. Somewhere for whoever wants them later on, maybe the grandchildren, I've put away my Bronze Star, my combat infantryman's badge, my unit citation, the sergeant's stripes I had when I got out of the army, and the shoulder patch with the red number 1 of the First Division, the Big Red 1, which went through hell before I joined them and went through more hell after I was gone. We've got four grandchildren now. I love everyone in my family and feel I would demolish, maybe really kill, anyone who threatened to hurt any one of them.
"You would break his back?" Sammy said this with a smile the last time he visited.
"I will break his back." I smiled too. "Even now."
Even now.
When it starts popping up again in one spot, the radiation sharpshooters at the hospital can take aim and burn away what they like to call another new growth and I know is another tumor. If it pops up again in what they call the diaphragm and I call the belly, I am nauseous before and nauseous afterward, with that nausea I can't stand the thought of that I really think might finally put me away someday if I have to keep living with it. Unless I'm with Sammy, and then I am "nauseated," because he likes to play at what he calls a pedagogue and I call a smartass.
"Lew, tell me," he asked. He laughed softly. "How many backs have you broken in your lifetime?"
"Counting that guy on the car who grabbed that purse?"
"That wasn't a fight, Lew. And you didn't break his back. How many?"
I thought a minute. "None. I never had to. Saying I would was always enough."