"Kurt Vonnegut - Deadeye Dick" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vonnegut Kurt)

Who is Celia? What is she?

That all her swains commend her?

тАФ OTTO WALTZ
(1892-1960)


тАФ1тАФ

To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life.

I have caught life. I have come down with life. I was a wisp of undifferentiated nothingness, and then a
little peephole opened quite suddenly. Light and sound poured in. Voices began to describe me and my
surroundings. Nothing they said could be appealed. They said I was a boy named Rudolph Waltz, and
that was that. They said the year was 1932, and that was that. They said I was in Midland City, Ohio, and
that was that.

They never shut up. Year after year they piled detail upon detail. They do it still. You know what they say
now? They say the year is 1982, and that I am fifty years old.

Blah blah blah.

***



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My father was Otto Waltz, whose peephole opened in 1892, and he was told, among other things, that he
was the heir to a fortune earned principally by a quack medicine known as 'Saint Elmo's Remedy'. It was
grain alcohol dyed purple, flavoured with cloves and sarsaparilla root, and laced with opium and cocaine.
As the joke goes: It was absolutely harmless unless discontinued.

He, too, was a Midland City native. He was an only child, and his mother, on the basis of almost no
evidence whatsoever, concluded that he could be another Leonardo da Vinci. She had a studio built for
him in a loft of the carriage house behind the family mansion when he was only ten years old, and she
hired a rapscallion German cabinetmaker, who had studied art in Berlin in his youth, to give Father
drawing and painting lessons at weekends and after school.

It was a sweet racket for both teacher and pupil. The teacher's name was August Gunther, and his
peephole must have opened in Germany around 1850. Teaching paid as well as cabinetmaking, and,
unlike cabinetmaking, allowed him to be as drunk as he pleased.

After Father's voice changed, moreover, Gunther could take him on overnight visits by rail to