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

He was no good at catching likenesses, either. He showed the Academy several portraits of his mother,
and I have no idea what she looked like. Her peephole closed long before mine opened. But I do know
that no two of Father's portraits of her resemble each other in the least.

Father was told to come back to the Academy in two weeks, at which time they would tell him whether
they would take him in or not.

He was in rags at the time, with a piece of rope for a belt, and with patched trousers and so on тАФ
although he was receiving an enormous allowance from home. Vienna was then the capital of a great
empire, and there were so many elaborate uniforms and exotic costumes, and so much wine and music
that it seemed to Father to be a fancy dress ball. So he decided to come to the party as a starving artist.
What fun!

And he must have been very good-looking then, for he was, in my opinion, the best-looking man in
Midland City when I got to know him a quarter of a century later. He was slender and erect to the end. He
was six feet tall. His eyes were blue. He had curly golden hair, and he had lost almost none of it when his
peephole closed, when he was allowed to stop being Otto Waltz, when he became just another wisp of
undifferentiated nothingness again.

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So he came back in two weeks, and a professor handed him back his portfolio, saying that his work was
ludicrous. And there was another young man in rags there, and he, too, had his portfolio returned with
scorn.

His name was Adolf Hitler. He was a native Austrian. He had come from Linz.

And Father was so mad at the professor that he got his revenge right there and then. He asked to see some
of Hitler's work, with the professor looking on. He picked a picture at random, and he said it was a
brilliant piece of work, and he bought it from Hitler for more cash on the spot than the professor,
probably, could earn in a month or more.

Only an hour before, Hitler had sold his overcoat so that he could get a little something to eat, even
though winter was coming on. So there is a chance that, if it weren't for my father, Hitler might have died
of pneumonia or malnutrition in 1910.

Father and Hitler paired off for a while, as people will тАФcomforting and amusing each other, jeering at
the art establishment which had rejected them, and so on. I know they took several long walking trips,
just the two of them. I learned of their good times together from Mother. When I was old enough to be
curious about Father's past, World War Two was about to break out, and Father had developed lockjaw as
far as his friendship with Hitler was concerned.