The Return of Munchausen Read online

  The shock of someone’s shoulder against his shoulder upset a line: Dropping rhymes, the poet raised his eyes and looked around. He had gone well past his entrance. Suddenly he felt—like heavy weights tied to his knees—his exhaustion. Unding mulled the irksome sum: two times two hundred made a dead loss of four hundred steps—his only reward.

  Ernst Unding was hardly a regular reader of the morning papers. But after his parting conversation with Munchausen, he happened to see a three-line item about a member of the diplomatic corps, Baron von M., having left on the express—on some mysterious errand—for London. Then a week later the large type of a dispatch announced the successful agency in influential English circles of von M. The name’s remaining letters seemed to have vanished in the London fog. Unding put the paper aside with a smile. Further reports went past him: he caught cold and took to his bed where he lay oblivious of events for five or six weeks. When he had recovered strength enough to creep to the casement and open it, he met a sunny blast of spring air. From below, ricocheting off walls, came the rivalrous voices of newspaper boys. Leaning over the sill, Unding caught first the end, then the beginning, then the whole cry:

  “Extra! Extra! Baron Munchausen on Karl Marx!”

  “Munchausen on . . .”

  The wind began to blow. The convalescent closed the window and, breathing hard, let himself down into a chair. His lips articulated the soundless words: “Here we go.”

  •

  Meanwhile, Baron Munchausen, safely arrived in London, was being received, as he put it, with extreme solicitude by the local fogs. The fogs served him humbly and faithfully. He could fill heads full of them more deftly than an expert milkmaid decanting her ware into canisters.

  “Horses and voters,” the baron liked to say among friends, “if you do not put blinkers on them, they will throw you into the nearest ditch. I have always admired Teniers’s* technique of allowing black to become white and white to grade into black: through gray. Neutral tones in painting, neutrality in politics, and let the Johns, Günthers, and Pierres go on goggling into the fog: ‘What is that? The moon or a streetlamp?’ ”

  However, these paradoxes rarely set foot outside the three-story cottage on Bayswater Road where the baron was now ensconced. He had deliberately chosen a house at some distance from rackety Charing Cross, with its waves upon waves of people. Behind the cottage were the wide and not too noisy streets of Paddington, while from the top-floor windows one could see, beyond the long wrought-iron railings, the silent walks of Kensington Gardens: in winter, the trees were festooned with cottony tufts of snow; in summer, under those same trees, the paths of saffron sand were dappled with shadows like inkblots.

  Once settled, Baron Munchausen had the small front garden dug up; in place of the parterre of patterned flowers and greensward running up to the cottage’s red bricks, he planted with his own hands the Turkey-bean seeds he had brought with him in a little antique box at the bottom of his portmanteau. After the first few waterings, the beans twined up the façade with supernatural speed, up and up. If at midday they were curling about the first floor, then by nightfall, when a hazy sickle moon cut through the gray-brown fog, the fine spirals of their green whorls had reached the windows of the third-floor study, where the baron was poring over the minute script in some old notebooks by the light of a green-shaded lamp. The beans went on twirling upward with their thread-like tendrils, obviously aiming for the sickle moon. But Munchausen gave the wanderers a stern look and, wagging an admonitory finger, said, “Again?”*

  The next morning dumbstruck passersby could only shake their heads as they contemplated the tremendous trellis that, having twirled right up to the roof, had suddenly sagged with its curly green pendants back down to the ground. From that day forth the house on Bayswater Road was known as Mad Bean Cottage.

  Munchausen’s daily round confirmed the words of a popular American author: “The world is managed by people who do about two hours work a day—that is, on the days when they work at all.”* On rising from his bed, the baron usually glanced through the morning papers, drank a cup of coffee mehr weiss,[1] and, having smoked his first pipe, exchanged his carpet slippers for a pair of pointed gaiters. Then he went out for an airing. To start, he went on foot: strolling through green-leaved Kensington from north gate to west. He liked to see the many-colored sunbeams gamboling along the paths, the sand castles, and the tiny tadpoles being read to by superannuated English misses from large-lettered picture books of fairy tales. Curving away to the left were the shimmering gray scales of the Serpentine. Off to the right, coming toward him through a filigree of branches, was the statue of Peter Pan who never existed, and, waiting at the west gate, a limousine. Johnny the chauffeur opens the door for the baron, who, as it clicks shut, invariably says, “To the most nonexistent of all.”

  Johnny: “Very good, sir.” The limousine swings around the railings of Kensington and Hyde Park, and, bearing left, adds four more wheels to the thousands of wheels gliding up glass- and stone-clad Piccadilly. Then eases along the Strand toward the Temple—towers swathed in fog above the ribs of roofs—and finally to the round dome of St. Paul’s. By the cathedral steps, Johnny again opens the door: “Here we are, sir.”

  The baron dispenses pennies to beggars on his way inside. Most often he visits the famous Whispering Gallery, where the faintest murmur of a word can be heard a hundred feet away; but sometimes he stands before the majestic marble of the Wellington Monument. Here there is always a gaggle of tourists gawping now at the capitals’ acanthus curls, now at the canopy’s tassels, now at the letters carved in stone. But this is not what interests Munchausen. Beckoning to a lay brother, he points to a pair of allegorical figures.*

  “What is that?”

  “A true representation of Truth and Falsehood, sir.”

  “And which one of them is Truth?” The baron squints.

  “If I may say so, sir, that one.”

  “The last time, as I recall, you said that one was Falsehood.” The baron winks, arching his right eyebrow. The lay brother, long accustomed to this visitor’s caprices, knows that now he must look not at Truth and not at Falsehood, but at the silver shilling glinting between the rich man’s fingers, and then back gratefully away and disappear. Munchausen emerges from St. Paul’s with a serene, almost joyful expression. Then, one foot on the running board of his motorcar, he invariably declares, “Whenever you go to God, he is never at home. We shall try others.”

  The baron gives an address, and Johnny turns the wheel either to the right, toward Paternoster Row, or to the left, toward the bustle of Fleet Street,* shier of words all over the world; from here London’s twenty-mile radiuses—now this one, now that—fan away beneath the whoosh of the limousine’s wheels.

  After paying two or three calls, the baron nods to Johnny: “Home.” They usually drive back by way of the squalid East End. The grimy houses resemble compressed fog, and the man with his head thrown back on the limousine’s leather cushions reflects that only one thing in this world will never be winnowed away by the winds: squalor.

  At Mad Bean Cottage reporters are already waiting, pencils poised. Munchausen patiently and graciously answers all questions.

  “My opinion of parliamentarism? Certainly. Only yesterday I finished calculating the amount of muscle power required to raise and lower the tongues of all the orators in England: using a rate of three opponents to one speaker, taking the Upper and Lower Houses, if we multiply the number of annual sessions by the number of years (from 1265 to 1920), adding all factions, committees, and subcommittees, then convert all of this into foot-poods and horsepowers, we obtain—just imagine!—an energy discharge sufficient to build two Cheops pyramids. What a majestic achievement. Just think! And yet the socialists will insist that we never do any physical labor.

  “My battle plan? In the social sphere? Extremely simple. To the point of primitivism. Even African savages have put it into words. Yes indeed: they have a waterfall at Lake Victoria; i
ts racket and roar can be heard for miles around; as you approach you see a gigantic cloud of watery dust—from sky to earth. The savages called this Mosi-oa-Tunya,* which means ‘smoke that roars.’ So there you have it.”

  “Have you ever been there, sir?” inquires a reporter.

  “I have been to what has never been, which is significantly farther. As a rule, I consider—are you taking this down?—I consider only two powers real: racket and reason. And if they were ever to join forces, why then. . . . But let us end on that note.”

  The baron rises to his feet; the reporters put away their notebooks and take their leave.

  Then the manservant announces: Luncheon is served. Munchausen goes down to the dining room. Among the many dishes there are always his favorite roast ducklings. Having eaten his fill, the baron passes into the study and settles into a deep armchair; while the manservant fusses at his outstretched feet, replacing gaiters with down slippers, the baron, his kindly eyes half closed, gazes in sated reverie out the window at the London rain streaking the park’s green landscape. Now comes the hour known at Mad Bean Cottage as the hour of postprandial aphorisms. In the doorway, stepping soundlessly, appears a prim miss. She pulls the little table with the typewriter out of its corner and applies her fingers to the keys. Munchausen does not immediately begin to dictate: first he sucks at length on his pipe, shifting it from one corner of his mouth to the other, as if considering out of which corner to smoke and which to speak. The baron smokes in an amazing way: first come swirling dove-colored spheroids, then curling around them, like Saturn’s transparent rings—now to the right, now to the left—slow smoky coils.

  “Now then. An old Limburger cheese pities no one, but still it cries.

  “Before the oyster can form an opinion of the lemon’s smell, it has been eaten.”

  The typist’s ears are hidden under a straight red bob; she sits with her back to the aphorisms and her eyes on the slanting lines of rain, but her fingers tap at the keys, the rain taps at the panes, and the dictation continues until the baron, knocking the ashes out of his pipe, says, “Thank you. Tomorrow—as usual.”

  He tries to get up, but drowsiness has made his body heavy, his thoughts foggy—and reality, along with the soundlessly stepping red-haired miss, is slipping out the door.

  Behind his closed eyelids visions stream: a dreamed automobile is ferrying him through dreamed streets, strangely peopleless and mute; without having once honked the horn, Johnny stops the whoosh of wheels by the colonnade of St. Paul’s. Munchausen has already lowered a foot onto the running board when suddenly the cathedral comes to life: its head under its gigantic round hat swoops down, butting the air with its cross. Arching its ridged back, the monster, all of its bell clappers clacking, shouts, “Sir, how can I turn into Saul without turning around?”* Quick-witted Johnny starts the engine and with a hard turn of the wheel sheers away; but the monstrosity, lugging its colossal stone trunk on twelve gigantic columns, comes crashing after. The gearbox, gnashing its teeth, flings the needle to full speed. But the fleet-columned monster is coming closer and closer. The car careers down a narrow street in the East End. The cathedral tries to wedge in after, thrusting an angular stone shoulder into the crack-like bystreet. Now Munchausen, bouncing up from his seat, shouts to the hundreds of square eyes stretching away to right and left, “Hey there! Look lively, don’t let it in!” The houses instantly obey, moving their windows toward the windows opposite and cutting the cathedral off. With a sigh of relief the baron sinks back among the cushions only to see turned toward him Johnny’s deathly pale face: “What’ve you done? We’ll be killed!” And indeed, only now does the baron see that the houses in the squalid East End are row houses; soldered together, bricks inside bricks, they form a solid phalanx divided only by numbers: as soon as the brick boxes behind have come together, the ones ahead must do the same—the street’s walls are slowly closing in, threatening to flatten the speeding automobile and the people in it; the car’s axles keep grinding against the walls—faster!—ahead is the light of a public square; but too late—the gigantic flattener has caught the feebly whirring motor in a vise of many-storied boxes, its steel fenders and body crackle like the wing covers of an insect crunching underfoot. With a sharp kick Munchausen knocks out the window frame bearing down on his right and leaps inside the house. But luck has deserted poor Johnny, pinioned between two windows—wall collides with wall—his short shriek is lost in the crash of bricks against bricks, then all is quiet. And suddenly from behind: “You’ll have to pay for that broken glass, mister.” Munchausen turns around—he is in a shabby, but neatly kept room; in the middle is a plain deal table laid with piping bowls of soup before which sit a middle-aged man in shirtsleeves, a gaunt woman with flushed cheeks, and two little boys on a bench. Legs adangle, spoons stuck in their mouths, the boys stare wide-eyed at the visitant. “And I should warn you, the price of glass has gone up,” the man goes on, stirring the contents of his bowl. “Tom, pull up a chair for the mister, he might as well sit down.”

  But Munchausen has no thought of sitting down. “How can you sit there when Saul has turned into Paul, when the street is gone and there is nothing left?”

  The man, to the baron’s surprise, is not surprised. “If you add nothing to nothing, it still makes nothing. Someone with nowhere to go doesn’t need a street. Eat up, boys, before it gets cold.”

  The baron, as if another wall were bearing down on him, backs away to the door, knocking over the extra chair, and hurries down the stairs to find: a square yard inside four walls. “What if these are like those?” He ducks through a low gateway: another square inside four close walls; a lower and narrower gateway—and again a square inside even closer walls. “Confounded chessboard,” a frightened Munchausen whispers, then sees in the middle of the square, on an enormous round leg, its black varnished mane bristling: a chess knight. Without wasting a moment, he jumps onto the horse’s high neck; the horse twitches its wooden ears, and Munchausen, gripping the slippery varnish with his knees, feels the one-legged chessman crouch down, then jump forward, again forward and sideways, once more forward, forward and sideways; the ground now falls away, now strikes the horse’s round heel with its swinging steeples and roofs; but the felt-shod heel—Munchausen remembers this well—gallops furiously on: squares flicker past, then patchwork fields and checkerboard cities—more and more—forward, forward, sideways and forward; the round heel pounds now grass, now stone, now black earth. The wind whistling in the baron’s ears dies down, the horse’s jumps grow shorter and slower—now over a flat snowy field whose drifts exude cold; the black horse, baring its teeth, makes one more jump and a jump and suddenly stops in the middle of the icy plain, felt-shod foot frozen to the snow. What to do? Munchausen tries to urge the horse on. “Kt. g8–f6; f6–d5, damn, d5–b6,” he cries, recalling the zigzag of Alekhine’s defense.* In vain! The knight is played out: the wooden jade retires. Munchausen weeps with fury and frustration, but his tears freeze to his lashes; one cannot withstand this cold for even a second. Rubbing his ears with his palms, he trudges on—forward, forward and sideways, and again forward, forward and sideways—searching for the tiniest speck on the smooth snow-white cloth covering the vast, round, horizon-fringed table. And suddenly he sees, away in the distance, rippling like a faint shadow, a nimble string of pointed Gothic letters, a sort of prickly centipede. Next Munchausen catches sight of the individual letters and reads—his own name. He is stunned. Meanwhile, the eighteen-letter BARON VON MUNCHAUSEN is losing no time: bending its syllables, it slithers toward a frontier post that has popped up out of the ground: on the post is a board, on the board are symbols. Munchausen, barely tearing his soles away from the ground to which they have frozen, runs after his escaping name. But his name has already reached the post and barrier raising red and white stripes over the white plain; it turns around to glimpse its pursuer—is he far behind? At that same moment—Munchausen sees this clearly—the barrier swings swiftly down: the red and
white stripes strike the eighth letter, and his name, like a snake cloven in two, is left writhing in pain: MUNCHAUSEN on that side of the post, BARONVON on this. Standing up on its ink-bleeding N, poor BARONVON rushes this way and that, not knowing what to do. Munchausen’s eyes fly from the letters in the snow to the symbols on the frontier post: USSR. He stands there for a minute, mouth agape, then thinks: Leave your name and run. But the soles of his shoes have again frozen to the snow. He tries to wrest his right foot, then tugs his left—suddenly the four frontier letters bestir themselves. Terrified, Munchausen jumps out of his shoes and bounds over the snow’s icy crust in just his socks; the cold nips at his heels, in despair he rushes this way and that and . . . wakes up.

  His right slipper has come off, and his heel is resting on a cool square of waxed parquet. Rain is pattering on the study window, but its fine streaks are sheathed in darkness. The cuckoo on the chimneypiece cries seven times. Baron von Munchausen reaches for his little bell.

  Mad Bean Cottage now lights its lamps and prepares to receive the evening guests. Downstairs the knocker knocks and knocks again at the oaken door: First to arrive is a stock-market king, followed a minute later by a diplomatic ace. Next is an elderly lady addicted to spiritualism. When the door is finally darkened by the drooping mustache of the Labor Party leader, Munchausen gets up to greet the knave,* clucking like a lucky cardplayer:

  “Royal flush! Come and join our game. You are just the man we need.”

  But besides the much-needed man, there now arrives a former minister without portfolio, whom the cozy cottage welcomes, for all that, with no less warmth and cordiality.