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

with a labor union after the Army let me go. Unions were admirable instruments for extorting
something like economic justice from employers then.
Uncle Alex must have thought something like this: "God help us. Against stupidity even the
gods contend in vain. Well - at least there is a Harvard man with whom he can discuss this
ridiculous dream."
(It was Schiller who first said that about stupidity and the gods. This was Nietzsche's reply:
"Against boredom even the gods contend in vain.")
So Uncle Alex and I sat down at a front table in Stegemeier's and ordered beers and waited for
Father and Hapgood to arrive. They would be coming separately. If they had come together, they
would have had nothing to say to each other on the way. Father by then had lost all interest in
politics and history and economics and such things. He had taken to saying that people talked too
much. Sensations meant more to him than ideas - especially the feel of natural materials at his
fingertips. When he was dying about twenty years later, he would say that he wished he had been a
potter, making mud pies all day long.
To me that was sad - because he was so well-educated. It seemed to me that he was throwing his
knowledge and intelligence away, just as a retreating soldier might throw away his rifle and pack.
Other people found it beautiful. He was a much-beloved man in the city, with wonderfully
talented hands. He was invariably courteous and innocent. To him all craftsmen were saints, no
matter how mean or stupid they might really be.
Uncle Alex, by the way, could do nothing with his hands. Neither could my mother. She could
not even cook a breakfast or sew on a button.
Powers Hapgood could mine coal. That's what he did after he graduated from Harvard, when his
classmates were taking jobs in family businesses and brokerages and banks and so on: He mined
coal. He believed that a true friend of the working people should be a worker himself - and a good
one, too.
So I have to say that my father, when I got to know him, when I myself was something like an
adult, was a good man in full retreat from life. My mother had already surrendered and vanished
from our table of organization. So an air of defeat has always been a companion of mine. So I have
always been enchanted by brave veterans like Powers Hapgood, and some others, who were still eager
for information of what was really going on, who were still full of ideas of how victory might yet
be snatched from the jaws of defeat. "If I am going to go on living," I have thought, "I had
better follow them."

******

I tried to write a story about a reunion between my father and myself in heaven one time. An early
draft of this book in fact began that way. I hoped in the story to become a really good friend of
his. But the story turned out perversely, as stories about real people we have known often do. It
seemed that in heaven people could be any age they liked, just so long as they had experienced
that age on Earth. Thus, John D. Rockefeller, for example, the founder of Standard Oil, could be
any age up to ninety-eight. King Tut could be any age up to nineteen, and so on. As author of the
story, I was dismayed that my father in heaven chose to be only nine years old.
I myself had chosen to be forty-four - respectable, but still quite sexy, too. My dismay with
Father turned to embarrassment and anger. He was lemurlike as a nine-year-old, all eyes and hands.
He had an endless supply of pencils and pads, and was forever tagging after me, drawing pictures
of simply everything and insisting that I admire them when they were done. New acquaintances would
sometimes ask me who that strange little boy was, and I would have to reply truthfully, since it
was impossible to lie in heaven, "It's my father."
Bullies liked to torment him, since he was not like other children. He did not enjoy
children's talk and children's games. Bullies would chase him and catch him and take off his pants