The Return of Munchausen

by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

  The trumpet nodded: Yes.

  “Then my question is: What if the theory of errors, applied to the theory of probability, should declare it an error? I mean to say that the symbolic snake biting its own tail may even choke on it—isn’t that true?—in which case cause is devoured by effect, and the theory of probability turns out to be improbable, if only the theory of errors does not turn out to be erroneous.”

  Rippling over Mr. Dowly’s forehead, as over the surface of water into which one has thrown a stone, came wrinkles.

  “But permit me, Bernoulli’s theorem—”*

  “My meaning precisely. Bernoulli’s idea may be formulated thus: The greater the number of trials, the greater the exactness of the calculated probability. The difference m/n−p becomes indeterminately small. That is, as the number of events becomes greater and greater than one, the oscillation of the numbers’ pendulum diminishes, the thing supposed becomes the thing proven, the theory of probability assumes a firm mathematical shape and practical existence: in other words, the numbers and the facts coincide. Have I stated his law of large numbers correctly?”

  Mr. Dowly bit his lip. “If we exclude your somewhat bizarre terminology, then I would not object.”

  “Excellent! Now then, the number of ‘events’ or trials has only to exceed one for Bernoulli to appear, for his theorem of large numbers and the theory of probability to be set in motion. But let the number of events become slightly stooped, become less than one, and just as surely you will see: Munchausen with his counter-theorem, a law of events that never happened, of expectations never fulfilled, wheels whirling in the opposite direction, and a theory of improbability going full tilt. You have dropped your trumpet, sir. Here you are.”

  But the aged mathematician was already knocking his long black aural appendage against the arm of his chair, his words against the nonsense.

  “But have you taken into account, my dear Mr. Munchausen, the fact that the theory of probability uses whole numbers, assigning each event a value of one? Like all dilettantes fighting for mathematical symbols, you make them overly abstract; you wish to be more mathematical than the mathematician. Substantive reality, which consists of actions (mine, yours, whosesoever you like), knows no event with a value of less than one. We are real people, in a real world: we either act or do not act; events either happen or do not happen. I repeat: The theory of probability uses only whole numbers, one and numbers divisible by one.”

  “In that case,” Munchausen enunciated into the appendage now returned to his guest’s ear, “in that case, the facts and the numbers diverge: they must bow and part ways. You say, ‘Events either happen or do not happen.’ Whereas I maintain that events always only half happen. You offer me your whole numbers. But what have they, those whole numbers, to do with a not-whole being, a so-called person? People are fractions passing themselves off as ones, raising themselves up with words. But a fraction standing on tiptoes is still not a whole number, not a one; and the acts of a fraction are all fractional, all events in the world of the not-whole are not whole. Only the goals of the not-whole are whole, and those goals, please note, are never achieved because your theory of probability, mumbling something about the coincidence of an expected event with an event that has happened, is not fit for our world of improbabilities, where the expected never comes to pass, where vows say one thing and facts another, where life is forever promising to begin tomorrow. Mathematicians, who denote success with a p and failure with a q, understand less about their symbols than the silly cuckoo, which always predicts the same thing for everyone: q—q.”[1]

  By now the elderly mathematician, his trumpet fixed on the baron’s words, was breathing hard through his nose and furiously clicking his false teeth.

  “But if I may say so, sir, you are throwing the world out with our numbers. No more, no less. Your . . . eh-eh . . . metaphysics, were they to become widespread, would turn into an intellectual disaster. You cross out all numbers, save zero. But I say: Show greater loyalty to existence. A gentleman must recognize reality as real, otherwise he . . . well, I don’t know how to put it. . . . These walls, you see, these streets, London, the ground, the world, are not the ash that I flick with the tap of a finger from the tip of my cigar. This is far more serious, and I am amazed, sir—”

  “And I am amazed that you can accuse me of disrespect toward your houses and walls: after all, it is only my innate courtesy that compels me to walk not through them, but past them. Your streets are for me as field roads, your palaces and churches as grass over which I might easily stride did I not respect the rules that have Londonized the world: NO PICKING TRADITIONS—IDEAS NOT ALLOWED—KEEP OFF THE HOLIES. Do tell me, my dear Mr. Dowly, why legless people should bother bargaining for my seven-leagued boots?* Far simpler and cheaper would be, before taking even one step, to consider those steps.”

  For a minute silence drove a wedge into the conversation, then the old professor said, “All this is not without its diverting aspects. But no more than that. The walls stand where they stood, the facts as well. And even the ash from my cigar has not disappeared; it is right here—in this ashtray. You deliberately speak in broad terms, my dear Mr. Munchausen, so as to avoid the narrow and cramped facts into which your theory of improbability will not possibly fit: for the feet of an ichthyosaur, Cinderella’s glass slippers, ha-ha, would be, you must agree, a bit tight. Your theory of improbability, forgive me, rests on metaphors, whereas our theory of probability is the result of having worked with material of the most concrete kind. Give me even one living example, and I will gladly—”

  “Certainly, from one of your monographs, Mr. Dowly. You write: ‘If one takes a marble from a box containing only black and white ones, then one can predict with a certain percentage of probability that that marble will be, say, white, and with complete confidence that it will not be red.’ But have you and I in our lives, Mr. Dowly, not run up against an extraordinary case when, from a box containing only blacks and whites, the hand of history—to the discomfiture of all—drew . . . a red?”

  “More metaphors!” the professor fumed. “But we have gone on too long: the hour of your audience is approaching. I fear you will not have time to give me even one concrete example, even one improbability, having confined yourself to pure theory.”

  “You never know,” said Munchausen, half rising as his guest un-bent his own stiff knees. From below, through the thickness of the walls, came the rumble of a motorcar being brought around to the front. Also from below came the sound of footsteps climbing the stairs, the manservant on his way to say it was time to go.

  “You never know,” Munchausen repeated, merry eyes squinting at Dowly. “Tell me, what act on the part of a man due in twenty minutes to meet the king would you agree to call the most improbable?”

  “If he were—” Wilkie Dowly was on the point of replying, but then the manservant appeared in the doorway.

  “Very well. Tell Johnny I shall be right down. Now then, Mr. Dowly. I am all ears. You were saying, ‘If he were. . . .’ ”

  “Why yes. If he (you are speaking, of course, of yourself, sir), if he were, at the very hour, or rather minute of his audience, to turn his back on the king—”

  “Mr. Dowly”—Munchausen leaned into the ear trumpet’s bell—“will you give me your word as a gentleman not to tell a soul about the little thing I shall now produce from my vest pocket?”

  “You may rest assured. Not a single soul.”

  The baron’s moonstone dove into his vest pocket and flashed forth: between thumb and forefinger, now nearing Dowly’s frightened eyes, was the yellow pasteboard of a railway ticket.

  “Be so kind as to check the symbols: the train is at four nineteen, the audience is at four twenty. By the way, you know London better than I, tell me: Is it possible to walk out onto the platform at Charing Cross without turning one’s back on Buckingham Palace?”

  “But that would be most imp—”

  “Improbable, you mean to say? My wor
thy Mr. Dowly, in order to carry out one more plan I shall require one more improbability, one on which I am firmly counting. Bring your trumpet a little closer—that’s it. And that improbability is this: that the man who has given his word shall keep it. Is that not true, sir?”

  Such was the third oddness: Munchausen had managed to dodge a swipe of the British lion’s powerful paw. The journey from London to Dover is a mere two hours. Then again, how hard could it be for a man who had slipped through the five beams of a star to elude five claws?

  1. In Russian, the Latin letter q is pronounced “koo.”

  7. THE HERMIT OF BODENWERDER

  AT FOUR twenty-two the king knit his brows. At four twenty-three the palace master of ceremonies rushed to the telephone and rang Bayswater Road: the man at Mad Bean Cottage said the baron was on his way. The master of ceremonies ordered the clocks turned back five minutes and the doors from the private apartments to the throne room opened. At four twenty-five the palace walls began to shiver with murmurs of “Shocking!” At four thirty the king shrugged a furious shoulder and turned on his heel, while the master of ceremonies, catching the monarch’s gaze, announced to the courtiers that the audience had been canceled.

  But too late: the king had been made to wait! If punctuality is the politeness of kings, then punctuality with respect to kings is a sacred duty. Ten centuries of history had crashed down in ten minutes: the king had waited. Even the executioners who lopped off the heads of English kings did not dare to be a second late; their ax struck on the stroke of the old clock in the Tower. And suddenly . . . some foreign chatterbox. A German agent who fraternized with Moscow Bolsheviks. . . . Ten cumbrous centuries pitched and plunged, picking up gravestones the better to strike, while ten merry minutes, legs dangling from an hour hand, rapped out: Late—wait—wait.

  The rumor that Munchausen had been abducted on the way from his cottage to the palace by a gang of communists was quashed within hours. Johnny, the chauffeur, testified that he had driven the baron to the station himself for the four nineteen train. The baron’s house was searched, but nothing suspicious, save a left slipper missing its mate, was found. The venerable Wilkie Dowly, closeted with the baron not half an hour before the lèse majesté (maid’s testimony), was also questioned, but he comported himself like an accomplice. Asked again and again whether he had or had not known, he invariably replied, “I gave my word, not a word more.” The theory of improbability, as if to celebrate its triumph, put the blameless mathematician in prison where he soon died, of either old age or chagrin.

  Work on the statue of Baron Hieronymus von Munchausen came, of course, to an immediate halt, and in the middle of a vast London square, surrounded by whirling wheels and hooting motorcar horns, an empty pedestal was left to loom, reminding certain people with good memories of Munchausen’s story about his last day in Moscow.

  The British press reacted briskly, if briefly, to the back that had shown its shoulder blades to the king; the whole herd of literary slop buckets sloshed with this latest scandal, only to slosh the next day with the next latest scandal. Jim Chilchur got his new pair of gaiters, but that was all: his career was hopelessly lost. Newton’s cows had gobbled all the flowers of his hopes along with the algebraic grass.

  Meantime Baron Munchausen, who had reached the Continent, was whirling along the weavings of railway filaments like a spider whose web has been torn asunder. The policeman on duty that night at the corner of Friedrichstrasse and Unter den Linden saw the baron’s automobile race past in the direction of Alexanderplatz. But by noon the next day, when news of the baron’s unexpected arrival had spread through the city, the porter at the house on Alexanderplatz was replying to all calls: “Come and gone.”

  That same morning a functionary on duty at the ministry had received a packet addressed in Munchausen’s familiar hand. The functionary gave the packet to his chief. Though this functionary was not an indiscreet sort, he still could not resist telling two or three people about the strange return address on the envelope: “Someplace, Somewhere, Beyond the Seven Seas.”

  A day later a Berlin acquaintance of the baron, returning from Hanover to the capital, saw what he took to be Munchausen’s face in the window of a westbound train stopped at an intermediate station. The Berliner raised his bowler hat, but then the windows opposite floated past, and the bowler, unacknowledged, returned in a bewildered zigzag to its owner’s temples.

  Several months passed. The fields had been close shorn. The summer dust had been pinned to the earth by the rains. And the flocks of cranes that not long ago had cut across the sky from south to north like crooked boomerangs had now fallen back—closing the circle—to the south. The name of the mysteriously disappeared baron made a great stir at first, then less of one, before fading away altogether. Fame is like a sound thrown at the mountains: a succession of echoes, pauses more and more prolonged, a last dull distant reverberation—and again the stony silence pressing its gigantic crags of ears to some new sound. Munchausen’s admirers and venerators were now venerating and worshiping someone else. His friends. . . . But didn’t the great Stagirite say, “My friends, there is no friendship in this world!”* One should note that he could complain of this state of affairs only to . . . his friends. This psychological antinomy* is mentioned here only so that the reader will not be surprised on learning that one autumn morning the poet Ernst Unding received a letter signed: “Munchausen.”

  Unding’s fingers trembled slightly as he reread the scant lines brought him by the narrow sealed envelope. The baron begged the poet not to refuse him “a last meeting with a last person.” There followed an address that, the baron suggested, the poet should memorize and then destroy.

  Unding might well have mistrusted the words from the narrow envelope: he still remembered the empty station platform and the trains going past. But as it happens, he counted his marks earned working for Veritas and left Berlin that same evening on a train bound for Hanover.

  As instructed by the letter, Unding, who had thrashed about all night on the car’s hard bunk, alighted two or three stations before Hanover. The little village was still asleep; only its roosters, in eager rivalry, were calling out the dawn. Upon reaching the last house—again he had to refer to the letter—he must stop, knock, and ask for Michael Heinz. In response to his knock, a man’s head poked out. On hearing the name, he asked no more questions and said, “All right. I’m coming.”

  Then from the fenced-in yard came the sound of hooves and wheels. A minute later the gates creaked open—a country conveyance trundled out onto the road and proffered its iron footboard to the visitor.

  The first streak of daybreak was etched on the horizon. Michael jogged the horses; splashing through pools, the wheels proceeded at right angles to the dawn. Unding fumbled in his side pocket and felt—next to the envelope’s prickly corners—a notebook folded in half. He smiled self-consciously, but proudly, as poets will when asked to read their verses. The road ran on through bare fields, then swept up over a hill. The rising sun dazzled Unding’s eyes: looking away to the left, he saw a rank of four-armed windmills waving hospitably, but Michael tugged the right rein and the carriage, turning its rear wheels to the windmills, jounced down a side road toward the blue-gray shimmer of a pond. A bridge clattered under the wheel rims, a stagger of ducks started quacking and scattered before the hooves, and Michael, gesturing with his long whip toward two or three yellow-tile roofs visible above the double embrace of trees and stone coping, said: “Bodenwerder.”

  The gates stood wide to welcome Unding. Trudging toward him down the park’s main avenue, gripping a walking stick and dragging one leg, came an old, hunched steward. Bowing low, he invited Unding to follow him:

  “The baron is unwell. He is waiting for you in the library.”

  Barely containing his impatience, the poet restrained his muscles and adjusted his pace to the old man’s dilatory hobble. They advanced beneath a fantastic weave of branches. The trees stood close together, carpeti
ng the morning avenue with long black shadows. Finally, steward and guest reached the stone steps leading to the house. While the steward hunted for the keys, Unding glanced at the ancient façade, now cracked and sagging: either side of the door, in Gothic letters of gray-yellow stucco half effaced by the rains, were mottos. On the right: BUY NEITHER RED NOR WHITE; SAY NEITHER YES NOR NO. On the left: THE MAN WHO BUILT ME IS NOT ALIVE; THE MAN WHO LIVES IN ME IS AWAITED BY THE NOT-LIVING.

  The floorboards, creaking underfoot, led them past a whimsical forest of deer antlers growing out of one wall in branching horizontals. Over a tangled arabesque of carpets, guest and steward plodded past a series of darkened portraits dimly lighted by narrow windows. Finally, a spiral staircase quickly set the poet’s steps spinning, up to the musty smell of moldering books: Unding found himself in a long and dusky chamber with a lancet window at the far end. The walls were crowded with cabinets and shelves; one sensed that one had only to take away the books stacked up to the ceiling, and it, deprived of those supports, would sink down, flattening as it went: worktable, armchairs and those in them.

  But at the moment the armchairs were empty: sitting back on his heels, Munchausen was arranging some little white squares on the floor. Absorbed in his work, the skirts of his old dressing gown grazing the carpet, he did not hear Unding’s footsteps. The poet came closer:

  “My dear baron, what are you doing?”

  Munchausen got quickly to his feet, whisking the little squares off his knees; their palms met in a firm and long handshake.

  “Well, well. Here you are at last! You wonder what I am doing? I am bidding the alphabet farewell. It is time.”

  Only now did Unding notice that the little squares scattered about the carpet’s design were the makings of an ordinary alphabet, pieces of pasteboard each emblazoned in black with a Greek letter. One of these remained in the baron’s fingers.