The Return of Munchausen Read online

The guests exchange the latest news, forgetting neither bedchambers nor Parliament; they speculate about forthcoming appointments, about events in China; the baron talks to the minister without portfolio about a certain portfolio without minister, while the lady spiritualist recounts, “Yesterday, at the Pytchleys’, we summoned the spirit of Li Hung Chang:* ‘Spirit, if you are here, knock once; if not, knock twice.’ And just imagine, Li knocked twice.”

  Just then downstairs the door knocker knocks twice.

  “Can that really be Li?” The baron leaps up, ready to greet the ghost.

  But standing in the doorway is his manservant.

  “His Holiness the Bishop of Northumberland.”

  A minute later a beringed hand is blessing all present.

  The conversation resumes. The manservant hands around bread and butter, tea in porcelain cups, and liqueur in small glasses. For a while words whirl from mouth to mouth and then His Holiness, pushing teacup aside, asks the baron to tell them a story. With the lady’s permission Munchausen lights his pipe and, over its wheezing bowl, launches into one of his adventures. His listeners are all ears, and right away he begins to bend them: first around the edges, then along the auricular cartilage, inward and inward, until they curl up like autumn leaves and, ear by ear, softly and unrustlingly, flutter to the floor. But now his disciplined manservant, who has appeared behind the guests’ backs with dustpan and brush, quietly sweeps up the ears and carries them out.

  “This happened during my last sojourn in Rome,” the baron’s voice wafts the whorls of smoke. “One fresh autumn morning I descended the steps of St. Peter’s, crossed the piazza embraced by Bernini’s colonnades, and turned left down the narrow Borgo Sant’Angelo. If you have ever been there, then you must recall the dusty windows full of antichità[2] and the dingy little commission shops whose owners, upon receiving something of yours and a few silver soldi, promise to return it the following week without the soldi, but with a papal blessing. As the blessing’s presence in the thing is invisible, these commissions are carried out briskly and always on time. Here one may also acquire for a small price an amulet, a snake’s tooth to ward off fever, a coral jettatura against the evil eye, and various ashes—from Saint Francis to Saint Januarius, inclusive—poured neatly into little paper packets. I turned into one of those shops and asked for the ashes of Saint Nobody.* The shop owner ran his fingers over the paper packets: ‘Perhaps signore would be satisfied with Saint Ursula?’ I shook my head. ‘I could oblige signore with Saint Pacheco: extremely rare ashes.’ I repeated my request: ‘Der heilige Niemand.’[3] The shop owner was, evidently, an honest man. He threw up his hands and sadly confessed that he had no such ashes. I was very nearly out the door when my eye fell upon an object in the corner, on a shelf: a tiny black box with yellow wisps of matted flax poking out from under its half-open lid. ‘What is that?’ I asked, turning around to the counter. The ashman’s obliging fingers produced the ware at once. It turned out to be a partly burned piece of flax from the coronation of Pius X.* As we all know, during the investiture of a new pope, a piece of flax is set alight over his tonsure to the sacramental words Sic transit gloria mundi.[4] The shop owner, whom I had no reason to disbelieve, swore to me that during the performance of that ceremony, just as the sacramental words were being said over Pius, a sudden gust of wind had carried off this piece of flax, which he, a collector of rare objects, had managed to acquire for a certain sum. ‘You may see for yourself, signore,’ he opened the little box, ‘the flax is singed and has a burnt smell.’ Indeed it had. I asked the price. He named a round number. I halved it. He came down, I went up, and the little box of papal flax wound up in my pocket.

  “Two hours later I was on the train to Genoa.* I, you see, did not want to miss the next Christian Socialist congress, due to take place in that city’s Palazzo Rosso: for lovers of impracticabilities—and I count myself one—gatherings of this sort can be instructive. The windows in my carriage were open to the damp sea air; closer to Genoa, we passed through a series of tunnels, stuffiness relieved by drafts, and I caught cold. During the very first Christian Socialist session I felt positively ill. Curative measures were in order. I happened to put my hand in my pocket and find the little box, at which point I recollected that cotton or—if you have none—flax inserted in the ears is a radical remedy for colds. I opened the black lid and stuffed a bit of the papal flax in either ear. And right away. . . . Oh, if you only knew what happened! The speakers went on speaking, as before the flax; their lips moved, articulating phrases, but not a single sound, except the ticking of my watch, reached my ears. I could not understand it: if I was deaf to words, then why not to the ticking of a timepiece? If the flax in my ears muffled sounds, if it weakened my hearing, why were loud voices softer than the barely audible mechanism of a watch? Discomfited, I walked out of the hall, past soundlessly speaking mouths, and was happily amazed when, outside once more and barely down the palace steps, I suddenly heard through my flax: ‘Mancia.’[5] The word came from an old woman in rags. The flax’s inhibitory effect had clearly ceased. She held out a grimy palm, but I, anxious to test my conclusion, rushed back into the assembly hall. I was quick, but my conclusion was quicker: again I saw moving lips, articulating nothing but silence. What the devil! (Forgive me, Your Holiness, I take that devil back.) What could this mean? I formed hypothesis after hypothesis, then suddenly remembered that the flax in my ears was special sacramental flax against smoke and all gloria mundi; nothing ephemeral, no worldly glory could pass through it. Undoubtedly, that was so. I had not overpaid the ashman from the Borgo Sant’Angelo: but then why was it that speeches by adepts of Christian socialism became mired in the flax and could not penetrate my hearing?

  “Deep in onerous thought, I returned to my hotel room. For the next session, I decided to refine my filter separating Christians from pseudo-Christians and repelling all worldly vanity. My reasoning went as follows: If not a single sinful word could permeate the hallowed flax, if such words always got stuck in the dense fibers, what would happen if those dry and stiff fibers were made somewhat slippery? What would happen, quite naturally, is this: The words, given their slowness and crudeness (they consist of air, after all), would still get stuck in the slippery flax, whereas the thoughts they concealed, owing to their subtlety and etherealness, would most likely slip through the slippery strands and leap into my hearing. I took the bits of flax out of my ears and inspected them: both were coated with a rather dirty residue. Left, no doubt, by the speeches. I cleaned off that verbatim report, so to speak, and, before replacing the bits of flax in my ears, dipped each in a spoonful of fat, ordinary goose fat melted over a candle. My watch reminded me that the congress was about to resume. Passing through the lobby, I heard faint voices coming from the assembly hall: the session had already begun. I half opened the door and cocked my flax-caulked ears: a fine-looking man in a proper frock coat buttoned up to his chin stood at the lectern smiling unctuously and swearing lustily. In bewilderment, I surveyed the object of his abuse: the audience was listening reverently, hundreds of heads nodded approval in time to the insults raining down on them. Now and then the speaker was interrupted by applause and shouts of ‘Cretin!,’ ‘Lickspittle!,’ ‘Hypocrite!,’ ‘Scoundrel!’ In response he clasped his hands to his chest and bowed. Unable to bear it any longer, I stopped my ears. Or rather, I unstopped them: the speaker was discussing the congress’s contributions to the struggle against class struggle. From all sides came cries of ‘Bravo!,’ ‘Isn’t that the truth!,’ and ‘How right you are!’ Only now did I understand that the few grams of flax pressed inside my tiny box were worth a good philosophical method. I decided to filter the entire world through my deglorifying flax. I drew up a schedule of experiments and departed that night on an express bound for. . . .”

  The story continues. The cuckoo cries eleven times, then twelve, and only long after midnight does Munchausen’s pipe knock out its ashes, while the baron, having finished his story, sees his guests to t
he front hall. His workday is done. And around Mad Bean Cottage, more and more spirals weave, casting their lines wider and wider with every evening: their fine tendrils have already curled past La Manche, the better to reach the earth’s most distant meridians. The baron’s aphorisms, he knows this, are on lecterns in both houses of Parliament, next to the agenda and the verbatim report. The stories and old anecdotes, begun by the slow bluish smoke of his pipe, swirl around Mad Bean Cottage like smoky mists, slithering up under all ceilings, from mouth to mouth, and into unhearing ears. Slapping upstairs in his slippers to his warm bed, the baron smiles vaguely and mumbles, “Munchausen sleeps, but not his cause.”*

  1. More white: coffee with milk. (German)

  2. Antiquities. (Italian)

  3. Saint Nobody. (German)

  4. Thus passes the glory of the world. (Latin)

  5. Alms. (Italian)

  3. KANT’S COEVAL*

  THOUGH Baron von Munchausen preferred slippers to gaiters and leisure to work, he soon had to give up his postprandial snooze and stay-at-home life. The smoke from his old pipe was easily dispersed with the palm of his hand, but the roar “made” by that smoke was swelling with the abandon of ocean breakers. The telephonic ear, which had hung peacefully from its metal hook in the baron’s study, now fidgeted incessantly on its stand. The door knocker knocked without respite at the oaken door, telegrams and letters poured in from all parts, staring up at Munchausen with their round postmarks. Among them the baron’s absently skimming eyes came across an elegant invitation printed on card stock in old-fashioned script: a group of admirers requested the honor of Baron Hieronymus von Munchausen’s presence at a fete to celebrate the bicentennial of the esteemed baron’s career. The Anniversary Committee. Splendid Hotel. Date and hour.

  The formal rooms of the Splendid Hotel glittered with electric lights innumerable. The plate-glass entrance door, soundlessly revolving, admitted more and more guests. The round central hall had been draped with the Munchausen coat of arms: along the shield’s heraldic bend five ducks flew—bill, tail, bill, tail, bill—threaded on a string; from under the last tail, in roman letters, streamed the motto: MENDACE VERITAS.[1]

  Seated at long tables forming an Old Slavonic M were women in décolleté and men in full dress—members of the diplomatic corps, prominent columnists, philanthropists, and financiers. Champagne glasses had already clinked many times and rapturous cheers flown up to the ceiling after the corks when the baron rose to respond.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, surveying the now-silent tables, “it says in the Gospel: ‘In the beginning was the Word.’ That means: Any deed must be begun with words. I said as much at the last international peace conference,* and I take the liberty of repeating myself on the present occasion. We Munchausens have always faithfully served fiction: my ancestor Heino embarked with Frederick II on a Crusade,* and a descendant of mine joined the Liberal Party. What can one say against that? History, meanwhile, brought us—myself and Kant—into the world at the same time. As this distinguished gathering no doubt knows, Kant and I are almost the same age, and it would be wrong at this celebration in my honor not to mention his name. Of course, I do have my differences with the creator of the Critique of Pure Reason. Where Kant says: ‘I know only what is introduced by me into my experience,’* I, Munchausen, say, ‘I introduce; let others try to know what I have introduced, if they have experience enough to do so.’ But on the whole, our thoughts have often coincided. Thus when I saw a platoon of Versaillais take up rifles and level them at unarmed Communards (this was by the walls of Père-Lachaise),* I could not help but recall an aphorism coined by the old man of Königsberg: ‘Man is the ultimate purpose for man and should not be anything but the ultimate purpose.’* In one of his witty plays, Mr. Bernard Shaw”—the baron turned toward an end of the flower-trimmed M—“maintains that we do not live forever only because we do not know how to wish for our immortality.* But I—and Mr. Shaw will forgive me—have come much closer to the secret of immortality: I need not myself wish to prolong my life to infinity; it is enough that others wish me, Munchausen, a long life. Indeed, it is owing to your wishes,” the baron’s voice trembled, “that I have set out on the path of Methuselah.* Yes, ladies and gentlemen, now you must not object. In your hands you hold not only glasses of champagne; you have opened a savings account for me in Being. Today from that account I have withdrawn two hundred. Henceforth it shall be as you please: maintain the account or close it. In essence, you have only to shake me out of your pupils and I shall be as poor as Nothing itself.”

  But these last words were washed away by a wave of applause, crystal tinkled against crystal as dozens of palms sought out that of the honoree; he barely managed to return all the smiles, to bow and express his thanks. Then tables were pushed against walls, violins and castanets struck up a fox-trot, and the baron, accompanied by several silvery pates, proceeded past the dancing pairs to the smoking room. They drew up chairs in a snug circle, and a diplomatic official, leaning toward the baron’s ear, made him a confidential offer. This moment, as will be seen, was portentous. In response to this offer Munchausen’s eyebrows rose, while the forefinger with the moonstone half tickled his ear, as if trying to test the words to the touch. Moving closer still, the official named a number. Munchausen hesitated. The official appended a zero to the number. Munchausen still hesitated. Finally, coming out of his quandary, he squinted at the moonstone’s dimly glinting oval and said, “I sojourned in those latitudes some hundred and fifty years ago, and I do not know, truly. . . . You have jogged the pendulum—it is oscillating between yes and no. Of course, I am not a man one can frighten or knock out of the saddle, so to speak. The experience of my first journey to that nation of barbarians just named by you, sir, afforded ample material for judgments both about them and about me. Incidentally, not counting a few minor publications, this material has never seen the light of day.* My acquaintance with Russia took place during the reign of my late friend the empress Catherine the Great.* However, I stray from the matter at hand.”

  The diplomatic official, correctly calculating his chances, made a sign to the others, whose faces shone with rapt enthusiasm.

  “Here, here!”

  “It would be so interesting to hear.”

  “I am all ears.”

  “We are listening.”

  An underling, swallowtails flying, ran to the door and motioned to the dancers; the fox-trot betook itself to a more distant hall. The baron began:

  “As our diligence approached the frontier of that astonishing country, the landscape changed abruptly. This side of the frontier post lush trees bloomed; that side, snowy wastes stretched as far as the eye could see. While the horses were being changed, we traded our light riding cloaks for fur coats. Then the barrier rose and. . . . But I shall not tell you about the tunes that froze up in our postilion’s horn, or about my horse dangling from a church steeple, or many other adventures. Any cultivated person knows these stories no worse than his wallet or, shall we say, his prayers. Instead we shall stop the wheels of the diligence at the entrance to that barbarous nation’s northern capital, Petersburg.

  “Here I must tell you that an earlier diligence had delivered to the city of Saint Peter a philosopher not unknown in his day, one Denis Diderot:* he was, to my mind, a most intolerable scribbler of philosophemes, a petit bourgeois parvenu, and of a clearly materialistic bent to boot. I, as you know, have never suffered and do not suffer materialists, persons fond of reminding one—apropos and not so—that sweet-smelling ambergris is in fact the excrement of a sperm whale,* while the fresh-cut flowers in which a lovely girl has hidden her face are in fact a blooming bunch of genitalia. Who needs that silly in fact? I am at a loss to conjecture. But to return. We were both received at court: Diderot and I. I must admit that at first the empress appeared to favor—if you can imagine it—that ill-mannered up-start: in perpetual breach of etiquette, Diderot might strut back and forth in front of her nose, interrupt her,
and even, in the heat of argument, slap her on the knee.* Catherine, smiling graciously, listened to all his nonsensical plans:* to eradicate drunkenness in Russia, to fight bribe-taking, to reform manufacturing and trade, to rationalize fisheries on the White Sea. I remained in the shadows, calmly awaiting my chance. No sooner had that driveler in ink-spattered dress clothes set about enlarging fisheries than I too turned from plans to action: from local hunters I acquired several trap-caught foxes and began, in the walled backyard of the country house where I then dwelt, my own experiments—mentioned in my memoirs, if you recall—in the forcible eviction of foxes from their skins.* Everything went on swimmingly, with no one the wiser. While Diderot was busy trying to catch fish from a frozen sea, I presented myself to the empress, by now somewhat disenchanted with her favorite, and requested the honor of her presence at a demonstration that might revolutionize the fur trade. On the appointed day and hour, the empress and her court arrived in my backyard. Four strapping footmen with whips and a fox tied by its tail to a post were at the ready. At a signal from me, the whips went to work till the fox, having jerked this way and that, jumped out of its skin—straight into the arms of a waiting fifth footman. Anyone who has read Darwin, gentlemen, knows the extraordinary adaptability of animals to their surroundings. Having jumped out into the bitter cold, the bald fox instantly began to grow a new coat which, though thin at first, thickened—right before our eyes—into a fine new pelt; the poor thing stopped shivering only to find itself, alas, tied to the post for a fresh flogging. And so on it went—just imagine—until there were seven pelts, and the fox finally jumped, so to speak, out of life. I had the carrion taken away, then laid the seven pelts out on the snow and, bowing down, said, ‘Seven hundred percent pure profit!’ The empress found this highly amusing and allowed me to kiss her hand. I was then asked to make a written report on methods and prospects for the fur trade, which I did on the spot. Having marked my report ‘wary goot,’ Her Majesty, in her own hand, crossed out every ‘fox’ and all ‘foxes,’ replacing these with a ‘person’ and ‘people,’ respectively. At the bottom she added: ‘As amended. Catherine.’ An original mind, don’t you think?”