"Kurt Vonnegut - Bluebeard" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vonnegut Kurt)

What else can I say?
R.K.
1

HAVING WRITTEN "The End" to this story of my life, I find it prudent to scamper back here
to before the beginning, to my front door, so to speak, and to make this apology to arriving
guests: "I promised you an autobiography, but something went wrong in the kitchen. It turns out
to be a diary of this past troubled summer, too! We can always send out for pizzas if necessary.
Come in, come in."

* * *

I am the erstwhile American painter Rabo Karabekian, a one-eyed man. I was born of
immigrant parents in San Ignacio, California, in 1916. I begin this autobiography seventy-one
years later. To those unfamiliar with the ancient mysteries of arithmetic, that makes this year
1987.
I was not born a cyclops. I was deprived of my left eye while commanding a platoon of
Army Engineers, curiously enough artists of one sort or another in civilian life, in Luxembourg
near the end of World War Two. We were specialists in camouflage, but at that time were
fighting for our lives as ordinary infantry. The unit was composed of artists, since it was the
theory of someone in the Army that we would be especially good at camouflage.
And so we were! And we were! What hallucinations we gave the Germans as to what was
dangerous to them behind our lines, and what was not. Yes, and we were allowed to live like
artists, too, hilariously careless in matters of dress and military courtesy. We were never attached
to a unit as quotidian as a division or even a corps. We were under orders which came directly
from the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force, which assigned us
temporarily to this or that general, who had heard of our astonishing illusions. He was our patron
for just a little while, permissive and fascinated and finally grateful.
Then off we went again.
Since I had joined the regular Army and become a lieutenant two years before the United
States backed into the war, I might have attained the rank of lieutenant colonel at least by the end
of the war. But I refused all promotions beyond captain in order to remain with my happy family
of thirty-six men. That was my first experience with a family that large. My second came after
the war, when I found myself a friend and seeming peer of those American painters who have
now entered art history as founders of the Abstract Expressionist school.

* * *

My mother and father had families bigger than those two of mine back in the Old World -
- and of course their relatives back there were blood relatives. They lost their blood relatives to a
massacre by the Turkish Empire of about one million of its Armenian citizens, who were thought
to be treacherous for two reasons: first because they were clever and educated, and second
because so many of them had relatives on the other side of Turkey's border with its enemy, the
Russian Empire.
 It was an age of Empires. So is this one, not all that well disguised.

* * *

The German Empire, allied with the Turks, sent impassive military observers to evaluate
this century's first genocide, a word which did not exist in any language then. The word is now