The Return of Munchausen

by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

  “Do you not find, my good Unding, that omega—its strange shape—recalls a bubble on duck feet? Look here a minute.” Munchausen held the little square out to his guest. “Sadly enough, this is the only letter that remains to me of the entire alphabet. I insulted these letters, and they deserted me, as mice will desert an untenanted house. Indeed. Any schoolchild, by putting these letters together, may learn to join worlds with worlds. But for me these symbols have lost all meaning. I must grit my teeth and wait for that slimy bubble on duck feet, stepping soundlessly, to steal up from behind and. . . .”

  Munchausen tossed the omega on the table and fell silent. Unding, unprepared for such a speech, looked in alarm at his host: his unshaven cheeks were hollow; an Adam’s apple like a sharp triangle gashed the line of his neck; from under the fitful pen stroke of his brows, sunk to the bottom of his eye sockets, centuries stared; the straw-colored hand curled about his prickly knee had the look of a desiccated leaf; even the moonstone on the forefinger had lost its lambency and luster.

  For a minute there was silence. Then somewhere by the wall a spring wheezed. Guest and host turned toward the sound: a bronze cuckoo peeped out from behind the clockface and cried nine times. The triangular Adam’s apple stirred.

  “That silly bird pities me,” the baron remarked. “Amusing, isn’t it? To my omega it suggests joining its ‘koo’ (q), the letter by which mathematicians denote failure* (when the actual result does not coincide with the one expected). But I do not need this bird’s gift: I long ago left behind that little world where failure goes before success, where joy is in suffering and the resurrection in death itself. Cuckoo, keep your q—for it is your only worldly possession, not counting the spring that serves you for a soul. No, Unding my friend, the clockface wheel, turning its two spokes, must sooner or later run against a stone—and crack!”

  “But that’s just it!” The poet half rose. “Our images have converged, and if you will allow. . . .”

  Unding’s hand slipped into his jacket pocket. But Munchausen’s eyes were gazing absently past him, while around his mouth peevish creases twitched. The pages of the notebook crackling under the poet’s fingers never left their hideaway. Only now did Unding see that, to a person bidding the alphabet farewell, all those letters forming stanzas and meanings were futile and belated. His palm returned to the arm of his chair. He understood that the only art required of him was the art of listening.

  A wind ruffled the yellow leaves, tapping the window at times with a branch; from under the now silent cuckoo came the pendulum’s measured clacket. The baron lifted his head:

  “Perhaps you are tired from your journey?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Well I am tired. Though there has been no journey, save tramping about a triangle: Berlin—London—Berlin—Bodenwerder—London—Berlin—Bodenwerder. That is all. Perhaps the absence of Moscow from my route surprises you?”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “Excellent: I knew you would catch my meaning at once. For though our views on poetics may differ, we both know this: One cannot turn to face one’s ‘I’ without showing one’s back to one’s ‘not-I.’ And I, of course, would not be Munchausen were I to think of looking for Moscow . . . in Moscow. For people, meaning consists of certain realities that they may enter and exit, having left the key with the porter. Whereas I have always known only creations: before entering a house, I must build it. Thus in accepting my assignment to the USSR, I received a moral visa for every country in the world, except the USSR. And so I set off for my old, quiet Bodenwerder, for this place here—for the hush and bookshelves among which I might calmly conceive and build my MSSR.[1] Having slipped away from all eyes, I wove myself into a close and muffling cocoon so that then, when my hour came, I might break out of it and throw my gaudy dust into the air over the gray dust of the earth. But for purposes of refining this metaphor, the wings of a bat will better adhere to the imagination than those of a butterfly. You of course know the experiment: into a dark room strung with a string maze arrayed with little bells, you release a bat. No matter how the bat swoops about, slashing the gloom with its wings, not a single bell tinkles—the wings always elude the strings, wise instinct threads their spiral flight through the maze, shielding the bat from jolts against not-air.

  “And so I released my imagination into that dark and empty (for me) fourletterdom: USSR. Swooping about from symbol to symbol, its wings seemed not to catch even once on reality; my phantasms glided past the facts until there began to appear an imaginary country, a world plucked from my own Munchausenian eye, which was, in my view, not a whit worse or more lackluster than the world that squeezes inside our eyes from without with its rays.

  “I worked with a passion, happily anticipating the effect of my swaying tower of inventions, piled one on top of another, when it crashed down on the heads of my listeners and readers. Oh, how the jaws of London gapers would drop, how they would gawp at the green spirals of my beans as I wove their minds into the many- colored spirals of my phantasms.

  “Only one circumstance muddled my images and weakened my composition: now as always, in preparing to impress my phantasmagorisms on other people’s brains, I had to find the exact slant from sublime invention to vulgar lies, the one pitch accessible to eyes in blinkers, to turbid sixteen-candlepower thinking, to short-radius imaginations. As always, I had to muddy my colors, blunt my sharp edges, and prime my canvas with the daily ravings from popular newssheets, keeping only my ducks. At any rate, when I had finished composing my Russia that little spiral staircase returned me to people. The result of my lectures you know.

  “Again I was surrounded by staring eyes, by ears cocked to catch my every word, by palms outstretched for a handshake, a handout or an autograph. The long-simmering resentment of an artist forced for two hundred years in succession to debase his art rose up in me this time with particular violence. When would these solicitous beings understand, I wondered, that my existence was no more than a courtesy? When would they see, and would they ever, that my pure inventions had come into the world for gasps and smiles, not blood and dirt?* So it always is with you on earth, my dear Unding: minor mystifiers, all those Macphersons, Mérimées, and Chattertons* who mix their wine with water, fantasy with fact, are declared geniuses, whereas I, a master of pure, unadulterated phantasms, am defamed as a frivolous liar and windbag. That’s right. Now you must not contradict me. I know that only children in nurseries believe that old fool Munchausen. Then again only children understood Christ. Why are you silent? Or do you disdain to argue with a muddleheaded man muddled in his own muddles? There you have it, the earth’s bitter payment: for myriads of words—silence.”

  Unding sought out the baron’s eyes with his own and gently stroked the old man’s withered knuckles: the moonstone on the hooked forefinger suddenly glinted dully and faintly. Munchausen recovered his rapid breath and went on:

  “Forgive an old man. His bile. But now it will be easier for you to understand the resentment I felt then and the terrible nervous strain. The slightest shock would have been enough. . . . Indeed that shock was not long in coming. You recollect our conversation in Berlin when I, pointing to the pegs in my wardrobe—”

  “Predicted,” Unding joined in, “that sooner or later your waistcoat, pigtail, and sword would make their way on cushions of brocade to Westminster Abbey.”

  “Precisely. So you may imagine my amazement when, on opening the window one confounded morning, I saw all those castoffs, plucked from their pegs and placed on brocade, floating above the heads of a huge crowd toward Westminster. For the first time in two hundred years I had told the truth. My cheeks flushed with shame and my ears were suddenly ringing, as though the bat’s wing had caught on a string with its tinkling bell. Ha! My phantasms had banged into facts. This shock so took me aback that it was some time before I could collect myself. Those fools clamoring in the street understood, of course, nothing. It is a wonder their priests did not canonize my slipper an
d entomb it in their reliquary.

  “I spent the remainder of the day poring over draft pages of my book devoted to the USSR. Now, however, it struck me that here and there I had sinned against falsehood; I crossed out many lines. But having once suspected myself of truthfulness, I could not calm down; in every word there seemed to lurk some truth. Toward evening I pushed the butchered manuscript aside and sank into uneasy reflection: Did this mean that I had fallen ill with the truth? Did this mean that that dreadful and shameful morbus veritatis,[2] leading to either martyrdom or madness, had stolen into my brain too? Even if this attack were brief and not virulent, all those Pascals, Brunos, and Newtons had also begun with trifles, only to suffer thereafter from . . . ugh . . . acute chronic hypotheses non fingo.[3] *

  “After two or three days of hesitating, I made up my mind to throw off this muddle of conjecture and doubt: I would compare my portrait with the original, the country extracted from the split of my pen with the genuine article contained within real borders. I left London and returned here, to my seclusion. On the way I stopped for only a few hours in Berlin: to liquidate my diplomacy and ensure that I would be left in peace. I renounced all my special powers and enclosed a letter to my contractors saying that, should they even attempt to disclose my whereabouts, I would disclose their secrets. Now I had no worry: they would not allow me to be found. Indeed, the number of curiosity seekers seems to drop every day: my fame, like the Munchausen duck, has folded its wings, never to spread them again.

  “I then had to auscultate my ailing manuscript and set about its treatment. With the help of several intermediaries I entered into a correspondence with Moscow; I managed to obtain their books and newspapers. Using these I made a comparative study of domestic Russia and émigré Russia, whose press and literature we all have at hand. Intending to systematically correct my manuscript, I decided to deal with those passages where my story and reality ran parallel as a musician deals with parallel fifths* in a score.

  “Little by little material from Moscow began to arrive and accrue; that faraway there flung hundreds of envelopes right here.” Munchausen pointed to a shadowy corner of the library where stood an antique escritoire, its back to the book spines, its slender legs bowed, as if beneath some onerous burden. “Yes, hundreds of envelopes, every one of which, the moment its mouth was torn open, began saying such extraordinary things that . . . but perhaps you think I am exaggerating? Alas, my illness has robbed me of even that joy. See for yourself. Now then.”

  With Unding trailing behind, Munchausen crossed over to the escritoire and opened its slanting lid. A heap of opened envelopes showed white; through their postage-stamp windows peered tiny men in Red Army helmets and workers’ blouses. Munchausen’s fingers rummaged the pile and abstracted a letter at random. Then a second and a third, another and another. Inky lines flickered before Unding’s eyes. Munchausen’s long fingernail, springing from sheet to sheet, entrained the poet’s attention.

  “Now then, this, for example: ‘Genosse[4] Munchausen, In reply to your question about the famine on the Volga,* I hasten to reassure you: the information contained in your lecture is not so much incorrect as incomplete. The reality, I would venture to say, somewhat surpa—’ How do you like that? Or this: ‘Dear Colleague, I did not realize that the extinguished Tale of the Unextinguished Moon echoed a fact that took place with you on your way from the border to Moscow.* It is now clear to me that the author of that seasonably extinguished tale was misleading readers concerning the source of his story and that the whole truth—from beginning to end—belongs to you, and only you. . . . Allow me, as one writer to another—’ What fantastic stupidity! I could never have concocted a tale like that. Or this: ‘. . . about that empty pedestal, it does exist.* Only no Munchausen, allow me to report, ever stood on it, although a papiermâché Tsar Alexander* did sit on it for three or four days before they climbed him down with ropes, and where there was nothing, now there’s nothing again, and nobody knows if there’ll be anything else. There was an inscription about a “—berator,” I saw it with my own eyes, only now, because of the construction, it’s been painted over. But do you really doubt—’ and so on. This one is even better.” Munchausen’s fingernail skimmed over the lines. “Finished? And this. I would never have guessed! No. You must tell me what this means: either I have gone mad, or—”

  Unding just managed to jerk his fingers away—the lid banged shut, and the baron’s slippers slapped wrathfully back to his armchair. The poet turned around to see Munchausen sitting with his face hidden in his palms. There was a long pause before the two returned to words.

  “The books by their émigrés were my undoing. When I sat down to concoct my story of Moscow’s bushels and prophet,* I did not know there were people who could so easily out-Munchausen Munchausen and mock that washed-up fibber. I do not envy them, but I am sad, as an old tree may be sad when it has lost its leaves and is dying, pressed on all sides by lush, young woods.

  “But enough of lyricism. I might have gone on with my revisions, but I had had enough. I saw that facts by and large had become phantasms, and phantasms facts, and the darkness around that laboratory bat was tinkling with thousands of little bells; around every shock of wing against string, around every word, every pen stroke, was chiming chuckling air. I hear it still. Both in waking and dreaming hours. No, no. I have had my fill. Throw open the darkness and set the bird free: why go on torturing it now the experiment is ruined?

  “You, no doubt, are annoyed with me. You wonder why you have come hundreds of kilometers to see an old curmudgeon of no use to you or to himself, why—”

  “If only you knew, dear teacher, how essential you are to me, you would not speak that way!”

  Munchausen righted his ring, about to slip around his withered finger, and seemed to smile at some memory.

  “Then again, I did not summon you, my illness did. I would never have guessed that one day I would bare my soul like some old trollop through the grille of a confessional, that I would allow the truth into my speech. Did you know that my favorite book as a child was a German collection of marvels and legends ascribed in the Middle Ages to a certain Saint Nobody? Wise and good der heilige Niemand was the first saint to whom I addressed my childish prayers. In his colorful stories about the nonexistent, everything was different, otherwise. And when I, a boy of ten, recast his Otherwise and tried to acquaint my playfellows and school friends with his mysterious country of nonexistences, they called me a liar. In defending Saint Nobody, I met not only with jeers, but with fists. However, der heilige Niemand rewarded me a hundredfold; having taken away one world, he gave me a hundred hundred others. People, you see, are cheated of their share of the world: they are given only one for all of them. The poor souls live shut up always in their one and only world, whereas I, in my youth, was given a whole host of worlds—for me alone. In my worlds time went more quickly and space was more spacious. Lucretius Carus* once asked: If a slinger stands at the edge of the world and shoots a stone, where will it fall: on the boundary or beyond the boundary? I answered that question a thousand times, for my sling always shot beyond the bounds of the existent. I lived in the boundless realm of imagination. To me the debates of philosophers, grabbing the truth out of each other’s hands, resembled a fight among beggars over a single coin. Those unfortunate men could not do otherwise: if everything is equal to itself, if the past cannot be remade, if every object has one objective meaning, and thinking is harnessed to cognition, then there is no way out, except through the truth. Oh, how silly all those scholars seemed to me, those unifiers and fathomers. They were searching for ‘one in many’ and not finding it, whereas I could find many in one. They closed tight the doors of consciousnesses, whereas I flung them wide to nothingness, which is indeed everything. I withdrew from the struggle for existence (which makes sense only in a dark and meager world where there isn’t enough existence to go around) so as to join the struggle for nonexistence: I created not yet created worlds, lighted and
doused suns, ripped up old orbits, and traced new paths in the universe; I did not discover new countries, oh no, I invented them. In that complex game of phantasms against facts played on a chess-board divided into squares by lines of longitude and latitude, I particularly loved that moment (denoted by chess players with a colon) when, having waited my turn, I swept a fact away with a phantasm, replaced the existent with the nonexistent. Always and invariably my phantasms won—always and invariably, that is, until I chanced upon the country about which one cannot lie.*

  “Indeed, I found that flat square between black and white waters* populated with such countless meanings, reconciling in themselves so many irreconcilabilities, extending over such impossible distances, and advancing such extraordinary facts, that my phantasms could only try to catch up. Yes, the Country About Which One Cannot Lie! I could never have guessed that that gigantic red queen would break through my line of pawns and upset the entire game. I remember the queen withstood attacks from almost all my pieces. Finally, my heart pounding in triumph, I pounced with a pawn, and out she went; but before my lips could break into a smile, I saw that my pawn, suddenly colossal and deeply blushing, had turned into that just discarded queen. Such things happen only in dreams: drawn into this nightmare, I grasped my knight’s bristling mane, made a zigzag jump, and again knocked the queen off the board. I heard her gigantic crenellations crash to the ground, and then out of nowhere, there she was again, her bloody battlements towering over the lattice of meridians.* I castled and captured her with my rook; again came the crash, again the transformation. Enraged, I struck that accursed queen an oblique blow with my bishop—in vain! And then I saw that my squares were empty and my king was in check, whereas the indestructible red queen was where she was, straddling the open lines of her star. The moment has come when I have nothing left with which to make a move: all my phantasms are played out. But I do not think of resigning. In this game, given the scale on which we conduct it, if one has nothing left to play, one has one’s self. I tried this once before—when I took hold of my pigtail and pulled myself out of that hummocky swamp. So then—I will play myself: the played-out player cannot do otherwise, and my feet are none too firmly planted on the ground. But my chess clock is running out. It is time. Please leave me, my friend. If indeed you are my friend.”