The Return of Munchausen

by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

  As it happens, my boots had been made over from my old hunting boots, which possessed certain singularities. Many years ago when I lost my favorite hound—she appears in my memoirs*—I decided not to burden my heart with new attachments, whose loss would lead to new sorrows, and took to hunting without a dog. A dog, you see, can easily be replaced with a well-trained pair of boots. Indeed. And since the futile memories of my late hound had been joined by an old rheumatic pain that prevented me wading through swamps, I, with a patience and tenacity typical of all Munchausens, set about training my hunting boots. In the end I achieved favorable results, and my solitary walks with a gun over my shoulder usually went like this: on reaching a boggy place full of game birds, I would take off my boots, stand them with toes pointing in the right direction, and say, “Seek! Seek!” My boots would stride from hummock to hummock, their leather rustling against the reeds, and rouse the game. As for me, seated on some dry patch, I had only to pull the trigger. The birds dropped straight into my boots. Then a brief “Fetch!” and my trained boots would trot back and meekly receive their master’s heels.

  And so it went now: I pulled off my boots, stood them with toes pointing toward the village, and—“Seek!” My boots, restive after several days shut up in a train, marched quickly off toward the lights. They advanced with their ear-loops pricked up, now straining ahead, now crouching down on their accordion pleats, with the look of cautious and experienced scouts. I watched them as far as the village. But then something unforeseen happened: a group of people noticed the boots coming toward them and, screaming with horror, scattered in confusion. It was then the idea struck me: here I was in a country of superstitious know-nothings, and if a pair of boots could terrify this village, the next, and the one beyond that, then off we would go, my boots and I, driving before us panic-stricken herds of ignorant peasantry which, wiping out cities in their path, infecting the masses and multitudes with their ancient Cimmerian horror,* pillaging huts and palaces alike, would surge past the Urals. Then I would pull my boots back on by their ear-loops and send a radiogram from, say, Krasnokokshaisk: TOOK RUSSIA WITH MY BARE FEET. NO REINFORCEMENTS NECESSARY.

  Expanding on my success, I got up, ready to deploy my stratagem to the end, even at the cost of calluses to my heels. But the situation had abruptly changed: the village in retreat from my boots had suddenly become a wild horde armed with pikestaffs and pitchforks, bucketing back for a counterattack. My boots made to turn tail, but too late. The bellowing horde, crossing itself with hundreds of hands and brandishing as many pitchforks, had surrounded them. Then the din died down. I could not see what was happening inside the ring of people. Creeping up as close as I could to my captured boots, I heard several voices arguing, but these soon yielded to the slow cadences of an old man. Having heard him out, everyone went away, everyone but the old man, who kicked off his bast shoes and began unhurriedly pulling on my boots. Hiding in the high grasses, I waited until he had finished. First I whistled softly (at the sound of my voice, the boots turned in my direction), then I shouted, “Fetch!” The old man wanted to go home, but no such luck: holding his decrepit legs fast, my boots began marching him in the opposite direction. Grabbing at bushes and grasses, the old man tried to stop his legs, but my faithful boots kept walking back to their master. The poor wretch saw he was no match for such a strong adversary and lay down flat on his back. But the boots, forcing his knees to bend, went on dragging his body over the ground until the abductor lay outstretched before me. I do firmly believe, ladies and gentlemen, that sooner or later everything nationalized will return to its rightful owners, as my boots returned to me. That is exactly what I said to the prostrate old man. I also told him he should be ashamed, at his hoary age, of trading God for socialism. Seized with holy horror, he yanked off my boots and ran, foot wrappings* flying, all the way back to the village. Presently all the villagers came out to greet me in a religious procession with bread and salt,* kneeling in prayer as church bells tolled. I accepted the invitation of these kind country folk and stopped for the night. While I slept, the rumor about me, ever wakeful, went around the neighboring hamlets. By morning an enormous crowd of complainants and petitioners had gathered under my window. I listened to all their entreaties and refused no one. The inhabitants of one small village, for example, asked me to resolve a longstanding dispute that had split them into two hostile camps. The rub was that one half of the village worked as carriers, the other half as farmers. But the civil war* had reduced the number of horses. Harness the horses to the carts, and the farmers would have to drag their plows themselves; harness them to the plows, and the carriers would have to pull their carts themselves. My memoirs helped me to solve this difficult case: I ordered a saw to be brought and had the horses sawed, one by one, in two,* owing to which their numbers doubled. The front legs were harnessed to carts, the hind legs to plows, and matters began to improve. Thus I fought horselessness. Had the Soviet government adopted my point of view in this and other spheres of the national economy, it might have avoided years of ruination and impoverishment. (A rustle of applause through the hall.) The peasants did not know how to thank me. They gave me one of the two-legged horses. I saddled it and continued on my way, tending toward the nearest railway station.

  2

  The peasants had warned me of the dangers near railroad tracks where, on a dark night, one could easily fall into the hands of bandits.* Had I not lost my way on the impassable Russian roads, I would have reached the station before dusk. But the tangled cart tracks spun me around until nightfall. My weary half-horse was picking its way on its two hooves when I heard the fast-approaching clatter of many horses. A band! I applied my spurs, but you cannot gallop away from four-legged horses on a two-legged one. Soon I was surrounded: I reached for my sword only to remember that I had left it in Berlin, in my wardrobe, on Alexanderplatz. The bandits circled closer: now I reached for the back of my head, intending to pull myself out of this unsuitable society by my pigtail (as I once pulled myself out of a swamp),* but—damn it!—my fingers found only a shorn nape. Alas, I would have to surrender. And I did. But these bandits did me not the slightest harm, treating me instead with cordiality, almost as one of their own. That night they elected me their ataman.[2] Inasmuch as this all took place in the pitch-dark, I do not know what governed these people, perhaps instinct.

  Gritting my teeth, I had to comply: people are kind so long as you do not contradict them. For example, our relations, ladies and gentlemen, are based on my not contradicting you. You say that I exist. Very well, we will not argue. But if you were to say. . . . Then again, let us return to the events. I am not an ambitious man, and the title of ataman hardly flattered me: most every day I suggested that my men overthrow me, switch to a republican form of government, and banish me, at least to Moscow. In the end the band agreed to let me go if I paid a ransom: in banknotes or good advice, as I pleased. Well then, having thought a minute, I drew up a plan to rationalize brigandage. As everyone knows, in that ruined country the position of the hardworking highwayman is extremely troublesome and not to be envied. By day he must hide in the forests for fear of meeting Red Army rifles, and only on moonless nights may he engage in transferring valuables, so to speak, in pocketing stray coins as an entomologist nets butterflies. By the same token, all moonlit nights are without profit. Well, on just such a night flooded with the moon’s silvery light, I took my bandits to the verge of a forest, lined them up, all thirty mouths to the moon, and ordered them to blow on that heavenly body. These men had enviable lungs (the Russian people develop their lungs by blowing on their samovars): at these concerted gusts of breath, the moon winked, stuck out its green tongues, and went out. Caught unawares by the moonlessness, wagons and wayfarers fell into our hands.

  A few more exercises of this sort, and my gang no longer needed an instructor. This explains the spate of eclipses in recent years and other mysterious occurrences in the firmament: their cause lies, if I may say so here, in that sanctuary of s
cience, in that forest near the Russian frontier. My friend Albert Einstein, whom I neglected to warn in advance, jumped to conclusions concerning these celestial anomalies.* But what can be explained economically (and here Marx was right) requires no astronomical calculations; in searching for the cause, rather than ransack the stars, one should look right here, underfoot, on earth. And if in years to come, despite what I have said, anyone should wish to write about the “unextinguished moon,”* let him beware of meeting me, Munchausen, for I shall expose him as a liar.

  •

  The speaker now paused for a moment and inclined the crystal carafe at his elbow toward the tumbler; the hush in the hall was such that even in the last rows one could hear the water gurgling in the spout.

  3

  Thirty rifles saluted me at the hour of my farewell. Leaving the forest verge behind, I set off toward the locomotive whistles that now and then oriented me in that tangled clew of country roads. At length I reached a small station lost in the flatlands and began waiting for the train to Moscow. The platform was heaped with sacks and bundles, by which and on which people were sitting and lying, waiting, as I was, for the train. The wait was long and tedious. The clean-shaven face of the man next to me—his sack was empty (so I thought at first), but tied with three knots—had grown a red beard by the time the much looked for whorl of smoke appeared on the horizon. The train was inching along at the speed of an earthworm, and I feared it might, in the manner of an earthworm, disappear into the earth, leaving nothing behind but a trail of gray smoke.

  Many of those present in this hall may find this notion of mine strange, but to me, a sanguine sort, everything slow, measured, and long-drawn-out has always seemed imaginary, unreal, and perhaps that is why Russia, unhurrying, ever in slow motion, switched from second hands to hour hands, afforded me a whole host of ghostlinesses and hallucinatory sensations. Seated in the train waiting for the signal to depart, I again found myself next to the red-bearded man with the empty sack over his shoulder. True, this emptiness now clinked against a wooden bunk.

  “What do you have there?” I could not help but ask.

  “An awl in a sack.”[3]

  “You think you can sell it?”

  “Of course. There’s a demand for it in Moscow.”

  This cheered me. My ware, you see, was of roughly the same sort.* And then the train started, lifting my mood still higher. But not for long. That confounded earthworm stopped at every crosstie, as if each crosstie were a station. My fellow passengers, however, expressed no surprise, as if this were only natural. Toward evening we finally reached the next small station. Wishing to stretch my legs, I strolled down the length of the train to the smokestack. It was spewing fistfuls of red grains into the earth-black night: in their light I saw that the firebox was filled not with coal and not with wood, but with piles of books. Astonished at this strange state of bibliophilic affairs, I waited for the train’s starting jolt to wake my neighbor, then put more questions to him. Other passengers broke into our conversation, and soon much had become clear to me—including the reason for our jolting progress from crosstie to crosstie.

  “You see,” they began explaining on all hands, “our engine-driver, a professor of the greatest erudition, refuses to throw a single book into the firebox until he has read it from cover to cover, and thus we must advance log by log, or rather book by book, until we—”

  “But how can this be?” I sputtered. “We must make a complaint! They must get rid of him and give us another engine-driver.”

  “Another one?” Alarmed necks craned from all bunks. “But there’s no telling what kind we’d get: the engine-driver on the next line over reads nothing but Anti-Dühring.* He hurls all books, heaps at a time, into the firebox until it’s white-hot and the train at full speed. But should he, God forbid, come across Anti-Dühring, he’s blind to all else . . . and has another wreck. Certainly not, we don’t need another engine-driver; this one at least knows that haste makes waste. We may inch along, but we do advance. Ask for ‘another,’ and in no time we’ll be hanging upside down from an embankment, station stop not Moscow, but Heavenly Kingdom.”

  I did not argue. Instead I added another nota bene to those already hidden in my notebook: On arriving in Moscow, I must find out how long the supplies of Russian literature would last.

  4

  We were nearing the Moscow Station and I had already taken hold of the door handle when the switchman unfurled a red Soviet flag, which in their country means: WAY CLOSED. Thus in full view of Moscow, with its thousands of belfries cast up to heaven, we had to cool our heels for a good hour until the switch allowed us to approach the platform.

  The first thing that caught my eye was a notice on the station wall: Health Commissar Semashko was asking, for some reason, that he not be nibbled.* At this I raised my eyebrows and indeed I did not lower them during my entire sojourn in Moscow. Prepared for extraordinary things, my heart pounding, I now entered that city built on blood and mystery.

  Our European tales of the Soviet capital paint it as a topsy-turvy city where houses are built from the roof down, where people walk with their half soles in the clouds and cross themselves with their left hand, where the first are always last (in lines, for example), where the official paper Pravda (Truth) is somehow the reverse, and so on and so forth—one cannot remember them all—but they are all untrue. In Moscow, houses are not built from roof to foundation (nor are they built from foundation to roof), people cross themselves with neither their left hand nor their right, and as for whether they have the ground or the clouds under their half soles, I do not know: Muscovites walk about with no soles at all. Indeed, hunger and penury accost one on all sides in thousands of outstretched palms. Everything has been eaten, including the onion domes; for a while people tried eating their hats, but this disordered their digestion. Food shops—when I arrived—had been boarded up, but around their painted signboards festive with hams and garlands of sausages, framed with festoons of radishes, around the models of golden pretzels and boars’ heads, crowds gathered to feast their eyes. More prosperous Muscovites, who could afford to hire an artist, honored the culinary traditions of old. At dinner, for the first course, they would serve a Dutch-school still life depicting all sorts of comestibles, and for dessert, Christmas-tree decorations (various fruits) made of papier-mâché. The shortages extended even to goods: shop shelves displayed almost nothing but dust. It is comical now to recall that when I needed a sword stick, an ordinary sword stick (the sidewalks there are full of pits and hollows), there was not a single double-edged sword stick to be found: I had to content myself with a single-edged one. Or another example: When a Muscovite driven to despair by the shortages of goods tried to hang himself, the rope turned out to be made of sand: instead of death, he had to limit himself to a few bruises. Outrageous!

  Internal disagreements during my sojourn in the capital were further exacerbated by the general ruination and poverty. One day, walking past a succession of gray houses the color of cobwebs, I stopped to admire a mansion that stood out with its fresh gleaming paint and glazed windows. But when chance took me to that very same house the very next day, I saw that the paint had cracked and the walls sagged, while the street in front was buried under huge chunks of stucco that had fallen away from the façade as well as broken glass.

  “What went on in that house?” I asked a passerby gingerly picking his way and trying not to cut his bare feet on the glass.

  “A discussion.”

  “Well, and after that?”

  “After that the leader of the opposition left, slamming the door behind him. That’s all.”

  “Nonsense,” said a second man coming toward us. “On his way out, he pinched his finger in the door. The point is—”

  “The point is,” the first man, now limping, broke in gloomily, “that because of your questions I have cut my foot.”

  The two men turned their backs and stalked off in opposite directions, leaving me utterly bewilde
red.

  •

  Munchausen pressed a button. Light was replaced by darkness, and on the screen’s matte square there trembled the blurry, then clear duplicate contours of the twice-photographed house: before and after.

  Through some heads in the hall there threaded an association: old, half-forgotten photographs of the Martinique earthquake.* But before that memory could become conscious, the button had snapped the lights back on and Munchausen was again speaking, not allowing attentions to wander.

  5

  If you look at Moscow from a bird’s-eye view, you will see: a stone spider in the center—the Kremlin, peering out of four wide-open archways at the web of streets it has woven, their gray threads, as in any web, stretching away radially, attaching themselves to distant gates; the radiuses are laced with short crossbars, the bystreets; in some places, these have knitted into long arcs forming boulevard rings and embankments; in other places, the ends of the spidery threads have been torn away by the wind—the cul-de-sacs; and winding through this web, its fractured body caught in the rigid embrace of bridges, is a dark blue caterpillar, the river. But now allow the bird to alight on a Moscow roof, and me to take a seat in a horse-drawn cab.

  “Where to?” the cabby asks, roused by a tap on the shoulder.

  “Tabachikhinsky Lane.”

  “Only a billion, your Lordship.”*

  The driver lashes his half-dead nag, the cab plods from cobble to cobble, and we, having taken the hump of a bridge, trundle down into the tangle of Zamoskvorechye* lanes. In one of these lanes we find a tiny house with squinting windows and creaky porch.