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

understood everywhere to mean a carefully planned effort to kill every member, be it man,
woman, or child, of a perceived subfamily of the human race.
The problems presented by such ambitious projects are purely industrial: how to kill that
many big, resourceful animals cheaply and quickly, make sure that nobody gets away, and
dispose of mountains of meat and bones afterwards. The Turks, in their pioneering effort, had
neither the aptitude for really big business nor the specialized machinery required. The Germans
would exhibit both par excellence only one quarter of a century later. The Turks simply took all
the Armenians they could find in their homes or places of work or refreshment or play or worship
or education or whatever, marched them out into the countryside, and kept them away from food
and water and shelter, and shot and bashed them and so on until they all appeared to be dead. It
was up to dogs and vultures and rodents and so on, and finally worms, to clean up the mess
afterwards.
My mother, who wasn't yet my mother, only pretended to be dead among the corpses.
My father, who wasn't yet her husband, hid in the shit and piss of a privy behind the
schoolhouse where he was a teacher when the soldiers came. The school day was over, and my
father-to-be was all alone in the schoolhouse writing poetry, he told me one time. Then he heard
the soldiers coming and understood what they meant to do. Father never saw or heard the actual
killing. For him, the stillness of the village, of which he was the only inhabitant at nightfall, all
covered with shit and piss, was his most terrible memory of the massacre.

* * *

Although my mother's memories from the Old World were more gruesome than my
father's, since she was right there in the killing fields, she somehow managed to put the massacre
behind her and find much to like in the United States, and to daydream about a family future
here.
My father never did.

* * *

I am a widower. My wife, n├йe Edith Taft, who was my second such, died two years ago.
She left me this nineteen-room house on the waterfront of East Hampton, Long Island, which had
been in her Anglo-Saxon family from Cincinnati, Ohio, for three generations. Her ancestors
surely never expected it to fall into the hands of a man with a name as exotic as Rabo
Karabekian.
If they haunt this place, they do it with such Episcopalian good manners that no one has
so far noticed them. If I were to come upon the spook of one of them on the grand staircase, and
he or she indicated that I had no rights to this house, I would say this to him or her: "Blame the
Statue of Liberty."

* * *
 Dear Edith and I were happily married for twenty years. She was a grandniece of William
Howard Taft, the twenty-seventh president of the United States and the tenth chief justice of the
Supreme Court. She was the widow of a Cincinnati sportsman and investment banker named
Richard Fairbanks, Jr., himself descended from Charles Warren Fairbanks, a United States
senator from Indiana and then vice-president under Theodore Roosevelt.
We came to know each other long before her husband died when I persuaded her, and
him, too, although this was her property, not his, to rent their unused potato barn to me for a
studio. They had never been potato farmers, of course. They had simply bought land from a
farmer next door, to the north, away from the beach, in order to keep it from being developed.