"Kurt Vonnegut - Hocus Pocus" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vonnegut Kurt)

not in such quantities as to make life a bowl of cherries or anything approaching that. Right after my war,
when I had no idea what to do with the rest of my life, 1 ran into a former commanding officer of mine
who had become President of Tarkington College, in Scipio, New York. I was then only 35, and my wife
was still sane, and my mother-in-law was only slightly crazy. He offered me a teaching job, which I
accepted.
I could accept that job with a clear conscience, despite my lack of academic credentials beyond a mere
BS Degree from West Point, since all the students at larkington were learning-disabled in some way, or
plain stupid or comatose or whatever. No matter what the subject, my old CO assured me, I would have
little trouble keeping ahead of them.
The particular subject he wanted me to teach, whatтАЩs more, was 1 in which I had excelled at the
Academy, which was Physics.
The greatest stroke of luck for me, the biggest chunk of manna from Heaven, was that Tarkington had
need of somebody to play the Lutz Carillon, the great family of bells at the top of the tower of the college
library, where I am writing now.
I asked my old CO if the bells were swung by ropes. He said they used to be, but that they had been
electrified and were played by means of a keyboard now.
тАЬWhat does the keyboard look like?тАЭ I said.
тАЬLike a piano,тАЭ he said.
I had never played bells. Very few people have that clanging opportunity. But I could play a piano. So I said,
тАЬShake hands with your new carillonneur.тАЭ

The happiest moments in my life, without question, were when I played the Lutz Carillon at the start and
end of every day.

I went to work at Tarkington 25 years ago, and have lived in this beautiful valley ever since. This is home.
I have been a teacher here. I was a Warden for a little while, after Tarkington College officially became Tark-
ington State Reformatory in June of 1999, 20 months ago.
Now I myself am a prisoner here, but with pretty much the run of the place. I havenтАЩt been convicted of
anything yet. I am awaiting trial, which I guess will take place in Rochester, for supposedly having master-
minded the mass prison break at the New York State Maximum Security Adult Correctional Institution at
Athena, across the lake from here.
It turns out that I also have tuberculosis, and my poor, addled wife Margaret and her mother have been put
by court order into a lunatic asylum in Batavia,
New York, something I had never had the guts to do. I am so powerless and despised now that the man I
am named after, Eugene Debs, if he were still alive, might at last be somewhat fond of me.
 2
more optimistic times, when it was not widely understood that human beings were killing the planet
with the by-products of their own ingenuity and that a new Ice Age had begun in any case, the generic
name for the sort of horse-drawn covered wagon that carried freight and settlers across the prairies of
what was to become the United States of America, and eventually across the Rocky Mountains to the
Pacific Ocean, was тАЬConestogaтАЭтАФsince the first of these were built in the Conestoga Valley of
Pennsylvania.
They kept the pioneers supplied with cigars, among other things, so that cigars nowadays, in the year 2001,
are still called тАЬstogiesтАЭ sometimes, which is short for тАЬConestoga.тАЭ
By 1830, the sturdiest and most popular of these wagons were in fact made by the Mohiga Wagon Company
right here in Scipio, New York, at the pinched waist of Lake Mohiga, the deepest and coldest and
westernmost of the long and narrow Finger Lakes. So sophisticated cigar-smokers might want to stop calling
their stinkbombs тАЬstogiesтАЭ and call them тАЬmogiesтАЭ or тАЬhiggiesтАЭ instead.

The founder of the Mohiga Wagon Company was Aaron Tarkington, a brilliant inventor and manufac-