“Fine, in a couple of days.”
“Excuse me,” I sputtered, “in a couple of days yesterday will not be yesterday, but, how do you call it?”
“Three times yesterday,” the little window replied. But then the man behind me in line advised, “Write ‘four times yesterday.’ To be on the safe side. They won’t print it before then.”
“But how can I do that?” Now I was completely confused. “I don’t need three times yesterday or nine times yesterday, I need plain yesterday and I am telling you this in plain Russian—”
“Well, if you must have plain yesterday,” the little window shot back, “you should have placed your notice on the third. That’s the rule.”
“But how—” I nearly burst out, but knew I would only be wasting my time. I decided to take a different tack. Turning over in my mind the names of institutions and persons to whom I might apply, I remembered the Association for the Study of Last Year’s Snow. A telephone call, a brief conversation, and soon a horse-drawn cab was conveying me to the association’s archives. The cab cut across Moscow on a diagonal and passed through a city gate. Beyond the city, some distance from the dusty summer road, the red roof of the archives loomed, half hidden behind a high stone wall. We drove up to the gate. I gave the rusty bellpull a tug. In reply there was a long dead hush. Another tug. Through the stone wall I heard slowly approaching steps. But how strange: the ground under those steps crunched and crackled. What could it be? Finally I heard the rusty whine of a key, and the hammered-copper gate cracked open. I was dumb-struck: July snow. Yes indeed. Inside the high stone wall, having lingered for several months, was winter. Long icicles depended from the bare branches, while the unkempt vegetable patches encircling the archives’ dilapidated building were buried under drifts of snow and a brittle frozen crust. An old servant, gnarled and wizened, led me slowly down a path to the porch through air thick with soft white flakes fluttering soundlessly to the ground. I did not ask, for I knew: this was last year’s snow.
The head of the Department of Yesterdays—a bald gentleman, eyes glazed with dark blue glass—had been alerted as to my visit, so greeted me most cordially.
“It happens, it happens.” He smiled. “One man lets an instant slip by, another his entire life. But apply to us for your diem perdidi[5] and you will find that we, like the biblical Ruth gleaning ears of corn dropped by the sickle,* gather up all that is reaped and spent. We waste nothing: not a single second that has ticked by. Ruth gathers up Rus,[6] ha! Here you are—take your yesterday.”
He handed me a neatly numbered little box the color of cobwebs. I opened the lid: inside, swaddled in cotton wool and bristling with fidgety second hands, my yesterday tossed sleepily. I did not know how to express my thanks.
The dark blue glasses suggested showing me the Ruth-Rus archives, but I, afraid of again losing what I had lost, made my excuses and hurried to the door. Flakes of last year’s snow saw me to the gate. Completely white, I let myself out. The summer sun melted my snowy mantle in a trice and dried my clothes. I sprang into the waiting cab.
“To the station!”
The cabman flicked the reins, and we started off. I somehow could not believe in the reality of what had just happened, and although time is invisible, my eyes kept searching for proof. Then suddenly, glancing at a street clock, I saw the hour hand jerk backward: from six to five, from five to four, and so on. A newsboy came bounding up.
“Extra! Extra! Read all about it!”
Touching the cabman’s jacket, I stopped him so as to exchange a coin for a paper. With pounding heart I opened the sheet folded in four: thank God—printed in plain letters under the nameplate was yesterday’s date. And on we raced.
Now I could calmly regard the street streaming away from under the wheel rims. There was yesterday’s little boy: yesterday’s wind had overturned his tray of fruit jellies, and he was again rinsing the sweets in a puddle and replacing them on the tray. And there was that drunk slumped against a playbill pillar, an accordion between his jumping elbows: “Eh, little apple with leaves either side, I’d surely love you, but fear the great divide . . .” I knew that now the pillar would turn, dropping singer and song in the dirt. I looked away. In essence, that “eternal return”* about which Nietzsche theorized deserves if not criticism, then yawns.
Finally we reached the station. I was again standing on the platform. There was my train; it backed slowly in and wheezed to a halt. For me, a conditional corpse, there was a special boxcar made of rough red-painted boards: a storeroom on wheels; in chalk over the door: EXTREMELY PERISHABLE PERS.; above the words green pine branches. On the gloomy side, but it couldn’t be helped: I presented myself for loading. The sliding door shuddered open. Sitting in complete darkness, I could hear them sealing my boxcar shut.*
And then . . . and then two days’ journey in that dark cell—time enough to consider all that I had seen and heard, to winnow the husk from the grain and come to final conclusions. But with your permission, ladies and gentlemen, all of that for now shall remain sealed. I have finished.
•
Baron Munchausen made a bow and was about to walk off the stage when a standing ovation stopped him. The walls of London’s Royal Society had never heard such a racket and roar: thousands of palms pounding palms and all mouths shouting one and the same name: Munchausen!
1. Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic (Russia under Communist rule).
2. Leader.
3. Part of a Russian proverb meaning “the truth will out”: You can’t hide the truth (or an awl in a sack).
4. Moscow. (Russian)
5. Lost day. (Latin)
6. Russia.
6. THE THEORY OF IMPROBABILITY
THE BARON was a man fairly inured to the ways of fame. Inasmuch as fame is made of words, he knew to only half listen to it while politely posing for the cameras’ glass eyes, half smiling, half answering, extending now three fingers, now four, now two, lest his hand swell from all the handshakes. At Mad Bean Cottage his man-servant knew to empty the wastepaper basket every two hours since letters, telegrams, and radiograms rained down with the persistence of the London rain.
But even his seasoned ability to deal with fame could not save Munchausen this time from a certain feeling of weariness and surfeit. Every day certificates poured in from every sort of academy and university making him a corresponding member or a doctor of philosophy; the American Journalists Association elected him their president; on the baron’s longish torso there was no longer room for more medals, which had to be pinned to places less fitting. From the Spanish king he received an exquisite tongue of gold studded with diamonds, and from an heir to the Russian throne a bronze medal inscribed: FOR SAVING THE PERISHING.
A committee was formed to collect donations for a statue of Hieronymus Munchausen; coins rolled in from all parts—and soon a London square saw the ceremonial laying of the first stone.
The baron rarely found time to commune with his old pipe, the typewriter keys waited in vain to tap out postprandial aphorisms: Munchausen was engaged in work of a more serious and important nature. His lecture, which had been picked up by newspapers around the world, was fast growing into a book over which he labored day and night, often refusing food and sleep. True, the occasional reporter who slipped into the house through some keyhole did manage to stop Munchausen’s pen. Invariably civil, he would turn an angry face on the truckling interloper:
“Ten seconds. My stopwatch has started. I am counting: one, two. . . .”
The flummoxed reporter would throw out the first question that came to mind, such as: “Of what sections should an authoritative newspaper consist?”
In a sixth of a second came the reply: “Of two: the formal and the fawning. Eight, nine, ten. It has been a pleasure.”
Standing on the sidewalk, the reporter would read and reread the scrawled line, not knowing what to do with it.
Indeed, as even habitués of Mad Bean Cottage had begun to notice, the b
aron was not his genial self. At the same time, his behavior betrayed certain oddnesses that no one had noticed before.
The first oddness made itself known on that memorable day when the baron’s three-cornered hat, threadbare waistcoat, sword, and pigtail were borne triumphantly through the streets of London on cushions of gold brocade to the strains of thundering orchestras and singing clergy. The parade, which began at Guildhall, was supposed to pass by Munchausen’s house then swing around toward Westminster Abbey under whose arches, beside the holiest relics of old England, the baron’s sword, waistcoat, and tricorne would be laid to immortal rest.
Friends had conspired to keep all preparations for this festivity a secret from Munchausen. These same friends (including the Bishop of Northumberland) had been happily anticipating the effect of their magnificent surprise on the very kind and obliging baron. But a cruel disappointment was in store: upon hearing the clamor of the approaching procession and singing clergy, Munchausen padded to the window in his slippers and looked out, trying to understand what was the matter. Below, he saw floating slowly by, among the swaying crowd, cushions of brocade, and on those cushions—what the devil!—his own waistcoat, pigtail, sword, and tricorne. The crowd’s joyful roar soared up to greet the baron, but he, taking a step back, turned around and saw the Bishop of Northumberland, who had just tiptoed into the room.
“Where are they going?” the baron asked hoarsely.
Beaming and rubbing his hands together, the bishop replied, “To the shrines of Westminster. Indeed, not every king—”
But now there occurred something unexpected, unbecoming, and unforeseen by ceremonial etiquette. Turning suddenly purple, Munchausen removed his right slipper and flung it at the exultant crowd: the slipper described a parabola then tumbled down among the gonfalons and glittering brocades, coming to earth like a missile in the middle of an expanding funnel of fast-retreating feet.
“Perhaps,” the baron bellowed out the window at the now silent crowd, “you would also like my chamber pot!”
Thousands of frightened faces looked up at the open window only to see it slam shut. The discomfited bishop slipped out the door. The masters of ceremonies bent over backwards trying to restore order, but since the end of the parade, around a bend in the street, kept pressing on the head, the procession continued of its own momentum. Meanwhile, the choir sang out of tune and off-key, the fussing gonfalons pitched this way and that, and the celebration paled and soured.
The evening papers covered the event in cautious language, skirting or suppressing the regrettable fact of the unforeseen slipper missile. But this oddness in the baron’s behavior was only the first in a series that caused Londoners’ souls to run the gamut of emotion: the keynote was delight, the mediant bewilderment, the octave indignation.
The procession dispersed, Bayswater Road emptied, and the man who had banished delight from a thousand heads paced from corner to corner, furiously muttering to himself, then sat down at his desk and began crossing out whole paragraphs and pages of his manuscript. He had calmed down only a little when he set about his second oddness: two hours after the relics had been settled in Westminster, the abbey’s chief custodian received a hand-delivered letter engraved with the von Munchausen coat of arms. In words sharp and terse, the letter demanded the immediate return of the expropriated waistcoat to its rightful owner. “I sincerely hope,” the letter ended, “that the United Kingdom of Great Britain and both Indies does not wish to enrich itself by depriving a poor man of his everyday clothes.”
The custodian, utterly perplexed, turned for advice to the vicar, the vicar told the father treasurer, the treasurer. . . . In a word, London had not yet lit its lamps before the odious words leapt over the abbey’s crenellated wall, slid down telephone lines, and rustled in instruments, preparing to dive inside the coils of a transatlantic cable. The atmosphere was turning tense. Shortly before midnight the order came down from on high: “Pursuant to the written request of foreign subject Munchausen, revoke all rights and privileges assumed by relic No.”—there followed a number—“and return said relic to the abovenamed foreigner.”
Next morning not a single reporter dared go near the cottage on Bayswater Road, not counting Jim Chilchur, a staffer at a third-rate rag to which all doors were closed in perpetuity. Chilchur did not have money for the bus, so always began his morning route from Oxford Street to Moscow Road earlier than others and covered it on foot. Today, as usual, he was striding down the long camber of Bayswater Road, glancing at the gates of Kensington Gardens. His head, drawn into his shoulders by the morning chill, was solving a mathematical problem: if from the pence saved every day on bus fare one subtracted the pence required to amortize one’s falling-apart shoes, then by what number of days must one multiply the difference so as to obtain the twelve shillings fifty pence needed to buy a new pair of gaiters? This was something like Newton’s famous problem involving cows in a meadow—the cows graze the grass unceasingly, but meanwhile the grass continues to grow—and so engrossed was Chilchur in solving this difficult puzzle that he did not at first notice someone’s furtive tug at his right sleeve, putting a stop to his steps and numbers. Actually, not someone’s: looking over his shoulder, Jim Chilchur saw not a soul, yet someone’s tenacious fingers would not let go of the button on his cuff. Chilchur jerked his hand away, and a long green spiral came trailing after, still clinging with its tendrils to his hand, caught as if in a spring trap. The reporter raised his eyes, saw a wall entirely covered with green curlicues, and realized that he was standing in front of Mad Bean Cottage. At that same instant the front door swung open; an old footman looked out and asked amiably, “Are you a reporter?”
“Ye-es. . . . Your beans—”
“The baron will see you.” The footman bowed, opening the door wider.
Jim Chilchur was so stunned by this invitation he failed to notice that it had made the mad bean unhook its tendrils. Wobbly legs carried him up the stairs to a hall: the footman had already opened the door to the study where the baron was rising to greet the baffled reporter. An obliging armchair slid up from behind, knocking into Chilchur’s knees and forcing him to sit down, while a question fired point-blank caused his fingers to jump from pocket to pocket in search of pencil and paper.
“Forgotten your pad?” The baron smiled. “Do not trouble yourself: this little notebook will do just as well. You mustn’t thank me. A pencil? It has already done its work: asked the questions and answered them. You see, you wish to know—forgive me, your name . . . pleased to meet you—so then, you wish to know, Mr. Chilchur, why Munchausen needs his waistcoat. Isn’t that so? Well, in your hands you hold documentary proof that this waistcoat is needed not by me. You, no doubt, are in a hurry. So am I.”
Jim Chilchur dashed out into the street in a state of such joyful stupefaction he did not notice the mischievous stirrings in the morning wind of the long green tendrils entwining the cottage like gossamer snakes.
A special edition of the venal rag for which Chilchur worked cost five pence at ten that morning; by midday people were paying a shilling; and by two o’clock it could not be had even for half a pound. It contained news of the relics—more than enough to draw millions of eyes to a sensational “interview” that had turned the matter of the waistcoat inside out, so to speak. Munchausen’s pen, it emerged, had been guided not by a desire to wound the British lion, not at all, but by a decision to give the prickly five-pointed star a lesson in generosity. A conditional corpse, he was expressing an access of rather lively gratitude by donating his two-hundred-year-old waistcoat to the Scientists Welfare Commission* of the USSR. “The American Relief Administration,”* the baron ended the interview by saying, “will not, I think, refuse to dispatch my textile for presentation to the very poorest of young Russian scientists.”
This gesture was so magnanimous and Christian (in the best sense of the word) that some newspapers refused to believe it. But Chilchur’s rag had documentary proof, a photograph of which show
ed the baron’s sloping script and dispelled the last doubts. Munchausen’s fame, capital that he had seemed anxious to squander, suddenly increased, amassing countless round teardrops, which clung to eyelashes like tiny zeroes to the oblique stroke signifying %. The Daily Mail raved about this ever young heart donating all seventy- two beats a minute to the good of humanity. The Times said that the very kind Baron Munchausen had revived the image of the Dickensian eccentric, who even in his kindly deeds contrives to be a bit of a kook. A priest in the Chapel Royal at St. James’s preached a sermon about the widow’s mite,* while grand Pall Mall, which as we know leads to Buckingham Palace, rolled out its asphalt carpet for Munchausen: in short, the baron was to be granted an audience with the king. But now we come to the third oddness, which. . . . Then again, let’s begin at the beginning.
Baron Munchausen and Mr. Wilkie Dowly, their armchairs drawn together, were conversing in the study of the cottage on Bayswater Road. The sun in the windows was shining so uncommonly brightly for that city of fogs that even the trumpet emerging from the elderly professor’s ear shimmered with giddy glints.
“In an hour you are to appear—” Dowly made to push back his armchair.
But the baron’s fingers restrained him.
“One hour is three thousand six hundred tick-tocks on the part of a pendulum clock. Will you not allow me to share with you, Mr. Dowly, as an indisputable authority in the field of mathematics, a doubt of mine, a thought oscillating between two numbers?”
The ear trumpet drew nearer the baron, indicating a readiness to listen. After a minute’s pause Munchausen went on:
“I am, of course, a dilettante in mathematics. But I have always been extremely interested in the so-called theory of probability, its development and practical conclusions, to which many of your profound and detailed treatises are devoted, my worthy Mr. Dowly. My first question is: Does the theory of probability not lead us to a theory of errors?”
The Return of Munchausen Page 10