The Return of Munchausen Read online

  The baron ran his eyes around the circle of smiles and went on.

  “After that Monsieur Diderot’s nose was distinctly out of joint, as if it had got jammed in his snuffbox an instant before the delicious whiff. The Paris sage, accustomed to a hail-fellow hand from both the truth and the tsarina, was now left with just the truth. Society entirely fitting for such a parvenu, ha-ha! The poor man hadn’t the means to take himself off home, so had to sell—for a few hundred livres—his library: it was acquired by the empress.* She received me the very next day: I presented Her Majesty with a copybook full of my travels and adventures. Upon reading, she exclaimed, ‘This is worth whole libraries!’ I was granted an estate and one hundred thousand serfs. Wishing to escape from the adulation at court and certain circumstances of a more delicate nature, on which I shall not comment except to note that I am not overly fond of corpulent women,* I set off to inspect my new possessions.

  “The Russian landscape, I must tell you, is strange: in the midst of a field, like mushrooms under caps, a clutch of huts appears with roofs askew and chimneyless stoves; peasants pass into and out of these huts through the stovepipe, along with the smoke; towering over their wells, who knows why, are long sweep barriers, though often far from roads; their bathhouses, unlike the hovels they inhabit, are huge affairs of seven stories, or ‘shelves.’ But I digress.

  “Wandering that foreign land I often recalled my native Bodenwerder: the pointed tile roofs like circumflex accents, the old graven mottos half effaced on whitewashed walls. Nostalgia compelled me to restlessly roam the hummocky bogs and reedy thickets with a rifle over my shoulder, if only to kill time. However, my game pouch was never empty, and soon my renown as a hunter—mentioned in my memoirs, but why repeat what any schoolboy knows by heart—had spread from the White Sea to the Black. Instead of snipes and partridges, I soon found myself hunting Turks. Russia, you see, had declared war on Turkey,* and now I, having hung up my hunting rifle, had to take into these very hands, figuratively speaking, two hundred thousand guns, not counting the field marshal’s baton which, given my former relations with the tsarina, I felt I could hardly refuse. After the very first engagement we saw nothing but our enemies’ backs. At the battle on the Danube I captured one thousand, no, two thousand cannons, more cannons than we knew what to do with—whiling away our leisure in the field, we took potshots with them at passing sparrows. During one such lull in the fighting, I was called away from headquarters to the capital, where I was to be decorated with the Order of Basil the Blessed,* a confection of fourteen golden crosses encrusted with diamonds. The verst* posts flashed past my eyes faster than the spokes of my curricle’s* wheels, which, now and then, I craned out of my seat to see. Racing into the capital on smoking axles, I bid the driver slow the horses so that I might tip my tricorne to the welcoming crowds on our way to the palace. Bowing right and left, I noticed that these Russians were none of them wearing hats. At first this struck me as a natural expression of their feelings for my triumphant self, but even after the official ceremonies were over, there they still stood, despite the cold wind from the sea, with bare heads. This struck me as somewhat strange, but there was no time for questions. Again the versts flashed past—and soon I saw the even ranks of my armies formed up to greet their leader. On coming closer, I saw that they too were hatless. ‘Cover your heads!’ I commanded, but—a thousand devils!—my command went unheeded. ‘What does this mean?’ I turned, incensed, to my aide-de-camp. ‘It means,’ he said, touching trembling fingers to his own uncovered head, ‘that we trounced the enemy at the drop of a hat, of all our hats, Your Most High Excell—’

  “That night a sudden idea woke me under the mantle of my field marshal’s tent. I rose, dressed, and, without waking my orderlies, slipped away to the line of foreposts, whereupon two short words—password and watchword—opened the way for me to the Turkish camp. The Turks were still busy extricating themselves from the waist-deep heaps of hats, so I reached the gates of Constantinople unhindered, but there too everything was buried and behatted, right up to the rooftops! On arriving at the sultan’s palace, I gave my name and received an immediate audience. My scheme was extremely simple: to buy up all the hats bedeviling soldiers, residents, roads, and paths. Sultan Mahmud did not know himself what to do with this embarrassment of hats and I was able to buy them for a song. By now autumn had turned to winter, and the still-hatless Russian populace was freezing, catching cold, grumbling, threatening to rebel and ring in a new Time of Troubles.* The government could not rely even on the worthies: the senators’ bald pates were the first to freeze and their fervent love for the throne was cooling by the day. So I loaded ships and caravans with my hats and sent them through neutral countries to myriad-headed Russia. Trade was extremely brisk: the lower the mercury fell in thermometers, the higher hat prices climbed.

  “Soon millions of hats had returned to their rightful heads and I was the richest man in war- and indemnities-ravaged Turkey. By now the sultan and I were as thick as thieves and I had decided to invest my capital in rebuilding his country. However, palace intrigues obliged the sultan, his harem, and myself to change residence: we moved to Baghdad, a city rich if not in gold and silver, then in tales and legends. Again I began to long for my faraway Bodenwerder which, though wretched, was dear to my heart. When I asked my crowned friend to allow me to return home, he, tears trickling into his beard, said he would not survive the separation. Well then, wishing to shorten as far as possible those inevitable separations—for I too could not live without paying occasional visits to the ancestral aerie of my forefathers—I decided to connect Bodenwerder and Baghdad with parallel tracks of steel. Thus arose my project—implemented only much later, alas—for a Baghdad railway. We were just about to begin work, but—”

  The baron suddenly interrupted his story and fell silent, eyes fixed on the shimmering moonstone on the index finger of his right hand.

  “But why did you stop halfway?” burst from someone’s lips.

  “Because”—the baron turned to the voice—“at the time railways, you see, had not yet been invented. As simple as that.”

  Faint laughter ran around the circle. But the baron remained serious. Leaning toward the diplomatic official, he nudged the man’s knee and said, “My memories have overwhelmed me. All right. I will go. As they say in Moscow: ‘When a Russian is at death’s door, a German feels fit as a fiddle.’* Ha-ha!”

  And raising his voice to meet the ears craning from all sides, the baron added: “Yes, our heraldic duck has never yet folded its wings.”

  Now there ensued a shaking of hands and shuffling of feet. A minute later the porter by the revolving glass panes at the entrance to the Splendid Hotel was shouting, “Baron von Munchausen’s motorcar!”

  A door clicked shut, a siren rent the air, and the leather cushions, gently swaying, sailed off into the glorious night brilliant with stars and streetlights.

  1. Truth in lies. (Latin)

  4. IN PARTES INFIDELIUM

  OFFER and acceptance had been duly concluded. The baron was leaving for the Land of the Soviets as a correspondent for two or three of the most influential newspapers delivering political credo in millions of copies to the outermost meridians of the British Empire. Munchausen had to preserve the strictest incognito, owing to which the quantity of top hats showing black under the windows of his private car was extremely limited, while the Kodaks and interviews had been dispensed with altogether. A moment before the departing whistle, the baron appeared on the car’s open platform sporting a worn gray cap, a gleaming leather jacket under flared topcoat, and boots with accordion pleats. This costume elicited nods of approval from the top hats, and only the Bishop of Northumberland, come to catch perhaps his last glimpse ever of the baron, sighed and said, “In partes infidelium, cum Deo.[1] Amen.”

  A diplomatic official hoisted himself up onto the step and made a sign to Munchausen, who bent down.

  “My dear baron, do not joke with the perlustrators,* si
gn your letters with an assumed name, something like—”

  The baron nodded. “I understand: ‘Zinoviev’* or—”

  The train, buffers clanking, jerked forward. The official was scooped up by his elbows; top hats were tipped; the curtain in the sailing-away window was drawn—and the not-finished sentence along with its not-finished speaker started off.

  Dover. La Manche. Again the curtained window slid past droning railway platforms; again kilometers were subtracted from kilometers.

  Only one man on the entire Continent knew the day and hour when Munchausen would pass through Berlin. That was Ernst Unding. But the letter sent to the poet from London did not immediately find him. The cycle of sonnets on which he was then at work might have been a crown of thorns fumbling his brain; it paid him not in pfennigs, but in sleepless nights. After much futile wrangling with hunger, Unding had had to accept the proposal of a cosmetics concern called Veritas to act as their agent, traveling to cities and towns around Germany. The London letter chased after its addressee for days on end, amassing postmarks, before finally catching him up in the city of Insterburg on the Königsberg–Eydtkuhnen line, some thirty kilometers from the border. It arrived just in time. Checking the numbers in his guidebook against the information in the letter, Unding easily deduced that Munchausen’s train from Berlin would pass through Insterburg that evening at half past nine. His pocket watch showed eight fifty. Afraid of being late, Unding dressed for the station. At the time stated, the Berlin express rolled up to the platform. Unding quickly passed down the length of the train—from locomotive to caboose and back—glancing in all the windows: no Munchausen. A minute later the train had unsheathed the tracks. Puzzled, Unding went off to inquire: Was that the right train and when was the next? Yes, came the reply; the next train to the border would not arrive for two hours and some minutes. Unding hesitated: business required him to catch the ten o’clock to Königsberg; he already had his ticket. He fiddled with the cardboard rectangle and turned it in. Seated on a bench inside the station, he began following the hour hand on the wall with his eyes. He clearly pictured the approaching reunion. A car window would drop down and out would come Munchausen’s hand—the long bony fingers with the moon glint on the index; their palms would meet and he, Unding, would say that even if there were no other reality in the world besides this handshake, he. . . . Through the wall he heard a rumbling: the express. Unding shook off his thoughts and rushed out onto the platform: the advancing lights of a locomotive, hissing brakes. Again he passed down the length of the train, to the headlight, and back to the red carbuncle at the tail end: not one window dropped down, no one’s voice called, no one’s hand reached out to meet his. Copper banged against copper—and again the rails were bare. The poet Unding stood a long while on the nighttime platform, pondering the situation. It was perfectly clear: Munchausen had taken a different route.

  Next morning, sitting in a cheap hotel room in Königsberg, Unding jotted down some verses about a train, forty or fifty car-years long, loaded with life; the years, clanking against one another, race up steep hills and around sharp bends; lackadaisical signals switch them from track to track; the blood and emerald stars of horoscopes prophesy death and prosperity, until some senseless catastrophe smashes all the couplings of years with years and hurls them helter-skelter down an embankment.

  After that, to use Unding’s images, the days of an entire year churned past, buffers clanking, and now, as the next was advancing with “1923” scrawled above a still-sealed door, Munchausen’s name, which had disappeared from the world press, suddenly reappeared on the front pages of papers in England and America. As a result, their enormous circulations became more gigantic still. And not only their circulations: the eyes of those who snapped up reports by Baron Munchausen invariably widened, as though his communications contained atropine. Only one pair of eyes, inside red-rimmed lids fringed with prickly lashes, narrowed their pupils on seeing Munchausen’s byline and twitched an eyebrow. To whom they belonged, those two mistrustful eyes, one need hardly say.

  1. To the land of the unbelievers, God be with you. (Latin)

  5. THE DEVIL IN A DROSHKY

  MEANWHILE the multiplying lines of Munchauseniads went on flinging his again-flickering name from candle to candle, as saltpeter threads will fling fire, and soon the entire world press, tangled in tinsel and wire-ribbon flashes, was clad like a Christmas tree in small yellow tongues. A week went by, another week, a month, and the baron’s name began to feel cramped in newspaper columns: leaping out of newssheets, it slithered up playbill pillars and rippled down from illuminated signs—over the asphalt, the brick, and the flat bottoms of clouds. The playbills announced: Baron von Munchausen, who has just returned from the Land of the Soviets, will give an account of his journey in the grand hall of the Royal Society of London. The box office was mobbed, but only the chosen entered the old building in Piccadilly.*

  At the hour promised on the playbills, Munchausen materialized at the lectern: his lips were still calmly pursed, but the sharp Adam’s apple between the wings of his starched collar was bobbing like a cork barely resisting the pressure of champagne. Thunderous and protracted applause from the packed hall forced the baron to bow his head and wait. Finally, the applause died away. He glanced around: by his elbow stood a tumbler and a carafe of water; to his left was the screen for the magic lantern; leaning against the screen was a varnished pointer resembling an over-long marshal’s baton. And craning forward on all hands—from the right, the left, and in front—were hundreds upon hundreds of ears; even the marble busts of Newton* and Cook,* now leaning out of their niches, looked entirely alert. It was to them that Baron Hieronymus von Munchausen addressed his opening remarks.

  1

  If Captain Cook once set off in search of savages only to be eaten by them, then the winds that filled my sails were patently more merciful. As you can see, ladies and gentlemen, I am alive and well (slight flutter in the hall). The great British mathematician (Munchausen gestured toward Newton) watched the fall of an apple that had broken away from a branch and summed up the movement of a spheroid called Earth, that gigantic apple that had broken away from the Sun. Listening on nighttime street corners in Moscow to a revolutionary song sung by one and all about a little apple,* I tried to understand where it had rolled off to, that little apple. Or rather, where it had wound up. But to the facts. Starting off for the land where everyone from commissars to cooks runs the state,* I decided to avoid by hook or by crook the Russian customs; I had with me, not only in my head, but in my jacket pocket, words not meant for inspection. Before reaching Eydtkuhnen* I took no steps. But once my train had passed through a tiny buffer state* and its own buffers were nearing the frontier of the RSFSR,[1] I decided to effect a change: from rail to air. As you no doubt know, ladies and gentlemen, in my salad days I could break in not only wild horses, but flying cannonballs.* Not counting the contents of my pockets, I had no baggage to speak of, so soon reached one of the guard towers with its muzzles trained on the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Upon learning who I was from my papers, the kindly commandant, whose name began with a “Pshtsh,” agreed to put at my complete disposal an eighteen-inch steel suitcase. We proceeded to a concrete platform on which towered, its long straight trunk sticking up in air, a steel-gray monstrosity. At a signal from the commandant, the gun crew began packing me on my way: the breechblock opened, a cart rolled up with my conical suitcase, steel clicked against steel, and the commandant saluted: “The baggage is loaded, the passenger will take his place.” Now that enormous piece of ordnance, like an elephant after the peanut a child has poked through the bars, lowered its long trunk. I leapt up onto the edge and peered into the cavity: mustn’t miss my chance. Then the metal-plated cavity climbed back up into the air and Pshtsh gave the command: “Ready fuse zero-zero-zero. Aim Herr Baron at the RSFSR. Fire!” I shut my eyes and jumped. Was I already there? But when I opened my eyes I saw that I was sitting under the steel elephant, surrounde
d by all those smiling Pshtshes. Yes, I had at once to admit that you cannot outrun technology. Even phantasms cannot outstrip it: a modern-day missile is not as easy to bestride as the old clumsy cast-iron bomb. Indeed, it was only after two failed attempts that I finally managed to straddle the humming steel. For some ten seconds the wind whistled in my ears, trying to blow me off the missile; but I am an excellent horseman and gripped its round overheated sides with my knees until a jolt against the ground arrested my flight. This jolt was so powerful that I bounced up like a ball, then down, then up again, until I found myself sitting on the ground. Looking about me, I saw that the spent missile had, fortunately, banged into a haystack standing in a bog. True, the stack had been flattened into mounds, but those mounds, like springs, had softened the blow and saved me not only from death, but from so much as a bruise.

  So then, I was over the border. I sprang to my feet and ran my eyes around the horizon. A flat, unsown field. A low ceiling of dark clouds, supported only somewhere in the distance by a dozen columns of smoke. “A village,” thought I, bending my steps toward the smoke. Soon houses too were poking up out of the ground. Upon coming within earshot of the village, I saw human figures moving from house to house, but did not call to them. The sun and I, having completed our trajectories, were both ready to drop. In that lonely little village lamps flickered to life, the smell of burnt meat singed my nostrils, and long black shadows crept toward me. Slowing my step involuntarily, I asked myself: Ought the main dish rush to dinner? My situation was tricky: there was no one to ask, no one with whom to consult. Another man in my place would have lost his head, but I had not come to the Land of the Soviets for advice and after a moment’s reflection I knew just what to do.