Happy Birthday, Wanda June by Kurt Vonnegut (read out loud books .txt) 📕

was never in England?

HAROLD

Behind a desk for a little while. file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Ku...egut%20-%20Happy%20Birthday%20Wanda-June.htm (50 of 143) [10/16/2004 4:36:53 PM]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, WANDA JUNE

(contemptuously)

A desk! They had him planning air raids. A city can't flee like a coward or fight like a man, and the choice between fleeing and fighting was at the core of the life of Harold Ryan. There was only one thing he enjoyed more than watching someone make that choice, and that was making the choice himself. Ask about Spain, where he was the youngest soldier in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. He was a famous sniper. They called him "La Picadura"--"the sting."

PAUL

(echoing wonderingly)

"The sting."

HAROLD

As in "Death, where is thy sting?" He killed at least fifty men, wounded hundreds more.

PAUL

(slightly dismayed at such murderousness)

"The sting."

HAROLD

Ask about the time he and I were parachuted into Yugoslavia to join a guerrilla band--in the war against the Nazis.

PAUL

Tell me that.

HAROLD

I saw your father fight Major Siegfried von Konigswald, the Beast of Yugoslavia, hand to hand. file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Ku...egut%20-%20Happy%20Birthday%20Wanda-June.htm (51 of 143) [10/16/2004 4:36:53 PM]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, WANDA JUNE

PAUL

(his excitement rising) Tell me that! Tell me that!

HAROLD

Hid by day--fought by night. At sunset one day, your father and I, peering through field glasses, saw a black Mercedes draw up to a village inn. It was escorted by two motorcyclists and an armored car. Out of the Mercedes stepped one of the most hateful men in all of history--the Beast of Yugoslavia.

PAUL

Wow.

HAROLD

We blacked our hands and faces. At midnight we crept out of the forest and into the village. The name of the village was Mhravitch. Remember that name!

PAUL

Mhravitch.

HAROLD

We came up behind a sentry, and your father slit his throat before he could utter a sound.

PAUL

(involuntarily)

Uck.

HAROLD

Don't care for cold steel? A knife is worse than a bullet?

PAUL

I don't know.

HAROLD

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Ku...egut%20-%20Happy%20Birthday%20Wanda-June.htm (52 of 143) [10/16/2004 4:36:53 PM]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, WANDA JUNE

The story gets hairier. Should I stop?

PAUL

Go on.

HAROLD

We caught another Kraut alone in a back lane. Your father choked him to death with a length of piano wire. Your father was quite a virtuoso with piano wire. That's nicer than a knife, isn't it--as long as you don't look at the face afterwards. The face turns a curious shade of avocado. I must ask the doctor why that is. At any rate, we stole into the back of the inn, and, with the permission of the management, we poisoned the wine of six Krauts who were carousing there.

PAUL

Where did you get the poison?

HAROLD

We carried cyanide capsules. We were supposed to swallow them in case we were captured. It was your father's opinion that the Krauts needed them more than we did at the time.

PAUL

And one of them was the Beast of Yugoslavia?

HAROLD

The Beast was upstairs, and he came running downstairs, for his men were making loud farewells and last wills and testaments--editorializing about the hospitality they had received. And your father said to file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Ku...egut%20-%20Happy%20Birthday%20Wanda-June.htm (53 of 143) [10/16/2004 4:36:53 PM]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, WANDA JUNE

him in perfect German, which he had learned in the Spanish Civil War,

"Major, something tragic seems to have happened to your bodyguard. I am Harold Ryan, of the United States of America. You, I believe, are the Beast of Yugoslavia." Blackout.

SCENE SEVEN

SILENCE. Pitch blackness. The sounds of a Nazi rally come up slowly: "Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!" Spotlight comes up on MAJOR SIEGFRIED VON KONIGSWALD, and officer in the dreaded SS. He is in full ceremonial uniform. The sounds fade.

VON KONIGSWALD

(sadly, resignedly, remembering) Ja ja. Ja ja.

(pause)

I am Major Siegfried von Konigswald. They used to call me "The Beast of Yugoslavia," on account of all the people I had tortured and shot--and hanged. We'd bop 'em on the head. We'd hook 'em up to the electricity. We'd stick 'em with hypodermic syringes full of all kinds of stuff. One time we killed a guy with orange juice. There was a train wreck, and two of the freight cars were loaded with oranges, so we had oceans of orange juice. It was a joke--how much orange juice we had. And we were interrogating a guy one day, and he wouldn't talk, and the next thing I know--somebody's filling up this big syringe with orange juice.

(pause)

There was a guerrilla war going on. You couldn't tell who was a file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Ku...egut%20-%20Happy%20Birthday%20Wanda-June.htm (54 of 143) [10/16/2004 4:36:53 PM]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, WANDA JUNE

guerrilla and who wasn't. Even if you got one, it was still a civilian you got. Telling Americans what a guerrilla war is like--that's coals to Newcastle. How do you like that for idiomatic English? "Coals to Newcastle." (laughs)

That Harold Ryan--he says he spoke to me in perfect German? He talks German like my ass chews gum. I'm glad to hear the wonderful thing he said before he killed me. I sure didn't understand it the first time around. I figured he was a Lithuanian or something, which will give you an idea of how wrong you can be. All I knew was he was very proud about something, and he had a machine pistol, and it was aimed at me. The woods were full of all kinds of nuts who were proud of some damn thing or other, and they all had guns. They were always looking for revenge. You find a way to bottle revenge--that's the end of Schnapps und Coca-Cola. (pause)

Harold Ryan said he killed maybe two hundred guys. I killed a hundred times that many, I bet. That's still peanuts, of course, compared to what that crazy Looseleaf did. Harold and me--we was doing it the hard way. I hope the record books will show that. There should