'Go take a flying fuck at the moon.'
The temperature climbed startlingly that day. The noontime was balmy. The Germans
brought soup and bread in two-wheeled carts which were pulled by Russians. The
Englishmen sent over real coffee and sugar and marmalade and cigarettes and cigars, and
the doors of the theater were left open, so the warmth could get in.
The Americans began to feel much better. They were able to hold their food. And then
it was time to go to Dresden. The Americans marched fairly stylishly out of the British
compound. Billy Pilgrim again led the parade. He had silver boots now, and a muff, and a
piece of azure curtain which he wore like a toga. Billy still had a beard. So did poor old
Edgar Derby, who was beside him. Derby was imagining letters to home, his lips
working tremulously.
Dear Margaret-We are leaving for Dresden today. Don t worry. It will never be
bombed. It is an open city. There was an election at noon, and guess what? And so on.
They came to the prison railroad yard again. They had arrived on only two cars. They
would depart far more comfortably on four. They saw the dead hobo again. He was
frozen stiff in the weeds beside the track. He was in a fetal position, trying even in death
to nestle like a spoon with others. There were no others now. He was nestling within thin
air and cinders. Somebody had taken his boots. His bare feet were blue and ivory. It was
all right, somehow, his being dead. So it goes.
The trip to Dresden was a lark. It took only two hours. Shriveled little bellies were full.
Sunlight and cold air came in through the ventilators. There were plenty of smokes from
the Englishmen.
The Americans arrived in Dresden at five in the afternoon. The boxcar doors were
opened, and the doorways framed the loveliest city that most of the Americans had ever
seen. The skyline was intricate and voluptuous and enchanted and absurd. It looked like a
Sunday school picture of Heaven to Billy Pilgrim.
Somebody behind him in the boxcar said, 'Oz.' That was I. That was me. The only
other city I'd ever seen was Indianapolis, Indiana.
Every other big city in Germany had been bombed and burned ferociously. Dresden
had not suffered so much as a cracked windowpane. Sirens went off every day, screamed
like hell, and people went down into cellars and listened to radios there. The planes were
always bound for someplace else-Leipzig, Chemnitz, Plauen, places like that. So it goes.
Steam radiators still whistled cheerily in Dresden. Street-cars clanged. Telephones rang
and were answered. Lights went on and off when switches were clicked. There were
theaters and restaurants. There was a zoo. The principal enterprises of the city were
medicine and food-processing and the making of cigarettes.
People were going home from work now in the late afternoon. They were tired.
Eight Dresdeners crossed the steel spaghetti of the railroad yard. They were wearing
new uniforms. They had been sworn into the army the day before. They were boys and
men past middle age, and two veterans who had been shot to pieces in Russia. Their
assignment was to guard one hundred American prisoners of war, who would work as
contract labor. A grandfather and his grandson were in the squad. The grandfather was an
architect.
The eight were grim as they approached the boxcars containing their wards. They
knew what sick and foolish soldiers they themselves appeared to be. One of them actually
had an artificial leg, and carried not only a loaded rifle but a cane. Still they were
expected to earn obedience and respect from tall cocky, murderous American
infantrymen who had just come from all the killing of the front.
And then they saw bearded Billy Pilgrim in his blue toga and silver shoes, with his
hands in a muff. He looked at least sixty years old. Next to Billy was little Paul Lazzaro
with a broken arm. He was fizzing with rabies. Next to Lazzaro was the poor old high
school teacher, Edgar Derby, mournfully pregnant with patriotism and middle age and
imaginary wisdom. And so on.
The eight ridiculous Dresdeners ascertained that these hundred ridiculous creatures
really were American fighting men fresh from the front. They smiled, and then they
laughed. Their terror evaporated. There was nothing to be afraid of. Here were more
crippled human beings, more fools like themselves. Here was light opera.
So out of the gate of the railroad yard and into the streets of Dresden marched the light
opera. Billy Pilgrim was the star. He led the parade. Thousands of people were on the
sidewalks, going home from work. They were watery and putty-colored, having eaten
mostly potatoes during the past two years. They had expected no blessings beyond the
mildness of the day. Suddenly-here was fun.
Billy did not meet many of the eyes that found him so entertaining. He was enchanted
by the architecture of the city. Merry amoretti wove garlands above windows. Roguish
fauns and naked nymphs peeked down at Billy from festooned cornices. Stone monkeys
frisked among scrolls and seashells and bamboo.
Billy, with his memories of the future, knew that the city would be smashed to
smithereens and then burned-in about thirty more days. He knew, too, that most of the
people watching him would soon be dead. So it goes.
And Billy worked his hands in his muff as he marched. His fingertips, working there in
the hot darkness of the muff, wanted to know what the two lumps in the lining of the little
impresario's coat were. The fingertips got inside the lining. They palpated the lumps, the
pea-shaped thing and the horseshoe-shaped thing. The parade had to halt by a busy
corner. The traffic light was red.
There at the comer, in the front rank of pedestrians, was a surgeon who had been
operating all day. He was a civilian, but his posture was military. He had served in two
world wars. The sight of Billy offended him, especially after he learned from the guards
that Billy was an American. It seemed to Wm that Billy was in abominable taste,
supposed that Billy had gone to a lot of silly trouble to costume himself just so.
The surgeon spoke English, and he said to Billy, 'I take it you find war a very comical
thing.'
Billy looked at him vaguely. Billy had lost track momentarily of where he was or how
he had gotten there. He had no idea that people thought he was clowning. It was Fate, of
course, which had costumed him-Fate, and a feeble will to survive.
'Did you expect us to laugh?' the surgeon asked him.
The surgeon was demanding some sort of satisfaction. Billy was mystified. Billy
wanted to be friendly, to help, if he could, but his resources were meager. His fingers
now held the two objects from the lining of the coat. Billy decided to show the surgeon
what they were.
'You thought we would enjoy being mocked?' the surgeon said. 'And do you feel proud
to represent America as you do?' Billy withdrew a hand from his muff, held it under the
surgeon's nose. On his palm rested a two-carat diamond and a partial denture. The
denture was an obscene little artifact-silver and pearl and tangerine. Billy smiled.
The parade pranced, staggered and reeled to the gate of the Dresden slaughterhouse,
and then it went inside. The slaughterhouse wasn't a busy place any more. Almost all the
hooved animals in Germany had been killed and eaten and excreted by human beings,
mostly soldiers. So it goes.
The Americans were taken to the fifth building inside the gate. It was a one-story
cement-block cube with sliding doors in front and back. It had been built as a shelter for
pigs about to be butchered. Now it was going to serve as a home away from home for one
hundred American prisoners of war. There were bunks in there, and two potbellied stoves
and a water tap. Behind it was a latrine, which was a one-rail fence with buckets under it.
There was a big number over the door of the building. The number was five. Before
the Americans could go inside, their only English-speaking guard told them to memorize
their simple address, in case they got lost in the big city. Their address was this:
'Schlachth?f-funf.' Schlachth?f meant slaughterhouse. Funf was good old five.
Seven
Billy Pilgrim got onto a chartered airplane in Ilium twenty-five years after that. He knew
he was going to crash, but he didn't want to make a fool of himself by saying so. It was
supposed to carry Billy and twenty-eight other optometrists to a convention in Montreal.
His wife, Valencia, was outside, and his father-in-law, Lionel Merble, was strapped to
the seat beside him.
Lionel Merble was a machine. Tralfamadorians, of course, say that every creature and
plant in the Universe is a machine. It amuses them that so many Earthlings are offended
by the idea of being machines.
Outside the plane, the machine named Valencia Merble Pilgrim was eating a Peter Paul
Mound Bar and waving bye-bye.
The plane took off without incident. The moment was structured that way. There was a
barbershop quartet on board. They were optometrists, too. They called themselves 'The
Febs,' which was an acronym for 'Four-eyed Bastards.'
When the plane was safely aloft, the machine that was Bill's father-in-law asked the
quartet to sing his favorite song. They knew what song he meant, and they sang it, and it
went like this:
In my prison cell I sit,
With my britches full of shit,
And my balls are bouncing gently on the floor.
And I see the bloody snag
When she bit me in the bag.
Oh, I'll never fuck a Polack any more.
Billy's father-in-law laughed and laughed at that, and he begged the quartet to sing the
other Polish song he liked so much. So they sang a song from the Pennsylvania coal
mines that began:
Me, and Mike, ve vork in mine.
Holy shit, ve have good time.
Vunce a veek ve get our pay.
Holy shit, no vork next day.
Speaking of people from Poland: Billy- Pilgrim accidentally saw a Pole hanged in
public, about three days after Billy got to Dresden. Billy just happened to be walking to
work with some others shortly after sunrise, and they came to a gallows and a small
crowd in front of a soccer stadium. The Pole was a farm laborer who was being hanged
for having had sexual intercourse with a German woman. So it goes.
Billy, knowing the plane was going to crash pretty soon, closed his eyes, traveled in
time back to 1944. He was back in the forest in Luxembourg again-with the Three
Musketeers. Roland Weary was shaking him, bonking his head against a tree. 'You guys
go on without me,' said Billy Pilgrim.
The barbershop quartet on the airplane was singing 'Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nelly,'
when the plane smacked into the top of Sugarbush Mountain in Vermont. Everybody was
killed but Billy and the copilot. So it goes.
The people who first got to the crash scene were young Austrian ski instructors from
the famous ski resort below. They spoke to each other in German as they went from body
to body. They wore black wind masks with two holes for their eyes and a red topknot.
They looked like golliwogs, like white people pretending to be black for the laughs they
could get.
Billy had a fractured skull, but he was still conscious. He didn't know where he was.
His lips were working, and one of the golliwogs put his ear close to them to hear what
might be his dying words.
Billy thought the golliwog had something to do with the Second World War, and he
whispered to him his address: 'Schlachth?f-funf.'
Billy was brought down Sugarbush Mountain on a toboggan. The golliwogs controlled
it with ropes and yodeled melodiously for right-of-way. Near the bottom, the trail
swooped around the pylons of a chair lift. Billy looked up at all the young people in
bright elastic clothing and enormous boots and goggles, bombed out of their skulls with
snow, swinging through the sky in yellow chairs. He supposed that they were part of an
amazing new phase of the Second World War. It was all right with him. Everything was
pretty much all right with Billy.
He was taken to a small private hospital. A famous brain surgeon came up from Boston
and operated on him for three hours. Billy was unconscious for two days after that, and
he dreamed millions of things, some of them true. The true things were time-travel.
One of the true things was his first evening in the slaughterhouse. He and poor old
Edgar Derby were pushing an empty two-wheeled cart down a dirt lane between empty
pens for animals. They were going to a communal kitchen for supper for all. They were
guarded by a sixteen-year-old German named Werner Gluck. The axles of the cart were
greased with the fat of dead animals. So it goes.
The sun had just gone down, and its afterglow was backlighting the city, which formed
low cliffs around the bucolic void to the idle stockyards. The city was blacked out
because bombers might come, so Billy didn't get to see Dresden do one of the most
cheerful things a city is capable of doing when the sun goes down, which is to wink its
lights on one by one.
There was a broad river to reflect those lights, which would have made their nighttime
winkings very pretty indeed. It was the Elbe.
Werner Gluck, the young guard, was a Dresden boy. He had never been in the
slaughterhouse before, so he wasn't sure where the kitchen was. He was tall and weak
like Billy, might have been a younger brother of his. They were, in fact, distant cousins,
something they never found out. Gluck was armed with an incredibly heavy musket, a
single-shot museum piece with an octagonal barrel and a smooth bore. He had fixed his
bayonet. It was like a long knitting needle. It had no blood gutters.
Gluck led the way to a building that he thought might contain the kitchen, and he
opened the sliding doors in its side. There wasn't a kitchen in there, though. There was a
dressing room adjacent to a communal shower, and there was a lot of steam. In the steam
were about thirty teen-age girls with no clothes on. They were German refugees from
Breslau, which had been tremendously bombed. They had just arrived in Dresden, too.
Dresden was jammed with refugees.
There those girls were with all their private parts bare, for anybody to see. And there in
