The Fantastical Adventures of Leutenlieb of the House of Munchausen

by Shlomo Kalo

  They tried to lift me onto the shoulder of Vishnu by means of a "living ladder" – consisting of some two hundred Indians standing on one another’s shoulders, to garland me with verdant flowers, and endow me with various honorific and authentically Indian titles such as for example "Maharajah Vira Vishnu". They almost succeeded, and would have done had it not been for a steadfast friend whom I encountered in my hour of need.

  MAHARISHI — CIRRUS-CLOUD

  This dear and highly erudite individual was a guru renowned throughout the Indian subcontinent, in Ceylon and Tibet, in Upper Armenia, and in certain corners of the western world. His prestigious name, Maharishi Cirrus-Cloud, was forever on the lips of his millions of devotees, spoken with awe and reverence. This eminent man foresaw in time the danger inherent in the awarding of honorific titles, and like me, he made haste to get the remedy in first.

  Maharishi Cirrus-Cloud invited me into his well-appointed cave, furnished with Persian carpets wall to wall and floor to ceiling. It was a deep and sinuous cave. His enlightened suggestion was that I should stay with him a whole month, until the furor over the title had died down, and the masses, led by their obsessive dignitaries, had called off the search for me. Their intentions were indeed noble and pure, but as we all know there is nothing like noble and pure intentions for paving the way to Hell.

  I was happy to accept his generous offers and I lived for a whole month in his spacious cave, constructed in the rustic-elegant style, where a portion of sesame, consisting of a dozen seeds grown without chemical fertilizer and pesticides, and a dried date, made up the daily food ration. And because the great guru, Maharishi Cirrus-Cloud, imposed a strict rule of silence on himself for the duration of that month, I was left in total seclusion. But one fine day, my good friend turned to me and, in clear and incontrovertible breach of his vow of silence, warned me of the dangers of incurring the wrath of Shiva, according to whom there is no greater sin on the face of the earth than idleness, and anyone guilty of this sin is liable to be punished by the changing of his sex – the most serious of all the penalties known in Hindu mythology. And he offered, with unbounded generosity of heart, as a way of rescuing me in time from the clutches of idleness and sparing me from the fate of turning into a female, or at best a hermaphrodite – to teach me some unique breathing exercises, known only to him.

  I accepted with blessings and thanks, and the very next morning, before the sunrise, we began climbing to the top of the hill in the roots of which, deep down, his cave was situated, to practice special breathing exercises, which to that very day had been a secret known to no other man on earth. Within a relatively short time, even in terms of my exceptional talents and well-known gifts, I acquired for myself the ability to hold my breath for fifty-seven minutes continuously, and not long after that, I easily passed the three-hour mark. Which for him, of course, was child’s play.

  One evening, after a lavish meal of sesame seeds, teeming with fresh vitamins, original amino-acids and a long list of other treasures encased in a single seed, my friend revealed to me, as if imparting a secret to a loved and esteemed colleague, that once he put his own faith to the test and gave the order that he was to be buried alive forty meters under the ground – for a whole year. And sure enough, the group of pupils to whom he turned performed the task with joy, since whenever a command is given by a guru to an acolyte, the latter is obliged to rejoice in it, to prove that he has learned his lessons well and is steadfastly loyal to his master.

  When that year was up, when they dug down again to a depth of forty meters and found him at the bottom of the pit as they had left him a year before, and extricated him with a sophisticated apparatus of ropes and pulleys – he started breathing again as if he had never stopped. Only one hitch, of marginal importance at first sight, had emerged: a pair of hungry worms, tempted to believe that he had given up the ghost, had been impelled by their urgent need to explore his nostrils – each with the nostril of his choice. They suddenly found themselves in an environment of concentrated oxygen, which was too rich for their delicate systems, and killed them on the spot. My esteemed friend, the guru Maharishi Cirrus-Cloud, was greatly distressed by the fate of the foolish and unfortunate worms, and he composed a funeral hymn in their memory, the famous dirge "Two Worms" which is still heard regularly in India, Bangladesh and Tibet on days of national mourning, and interred their ashes in the same place where he had been buried, having constructed a splendid, almost regal, funeral pyre for them and organized a somber procession according to all the rules and rituals of the Hindus. About half the population of Bombay, some two million souls, took part in the procession. The other half of the population of the city, known as the Mother of India, likewise numbering some two million souls, declined to attend the obsequies, unable to cope with the burden of grief over the worms that had died in such tragic circumstances.

  The story touched my heart and impressed me deeply, and I expressed my clear and explicit desire to spend more time in his company, as it was clear to me that sorrow over the worms, whose deaths he had inadvertently caused, still preyed on his mind, and I did not intend to leave him alone in his nagging distress – not for a few more days at least.

  So I asked him, with all the respect and the admiration that I felt for him, to go on teaching me his remarkable skills, which I wanted to explore more deeply, and I told him that one moment spent in his company was worth an age spent in the company of ignorant laymen. He assented willingly and with a satisfaction that could not be concealed. It wasn’t often that he found a pupil as talented as me, and even if he didn’t put this into words, the expression on his face testified to it.

  So our studies continued.

  He quoted to me a few verses from the book of Patanjali Yoga: "Detachment is mastery of the self. Freedom from the longing for the seen or the heard. When out of knowledge of the Atman people stop desiring any kind of revelation of nature, then this is the highest form of detachment"; from the Buddhist Dhammapada: "Hatred is not cancelled out by hatred. Hatred is cancelled out by love – it is an eternal law", and from the Hindu Bhagavadgita: "…the man who rises above heat, cold, pleasure, pain – he is destined for eternal life" – verses which left their imprint deep in my consciousness. Noticing this, my friend suggested I make my way to the zone situated between Iran and Iraq, and if destiny and good fortune were on my side – I would join one of the spiritual masters residing in this exceptional place and learn from him something of use both to the soul and the body. And sure enough, without even a moment’s hesitation, I set about implementing his wise suggestion.

  I boarded an Australian steamship, crewed entirely by Sumatrans and with a Bulgarian skipper. He knew no language other than Bulgarian, and the others spoke nothing but a tribal dialect composed of shrieks like the sounds made by an angry crane, pitched in various musical keys. Morse code was of no use, nor was Braille, and the only effective method of communication was the vaunted international language of facial gestures and movements of the belly and the hands. And so it was that the ship made its way across the Indian Ocean in a series of broad zigzags, without recourse to maps or compass, and perhaps for this very reason – arrived on schedule in the Persian Gulf. There I took my leave of the crewmen and the captain, who surprised me with the emotional nature of their farewell, some even bursting into tears, and finally it was explained to me that captain and crew alike had come to the firm and unequivocal conclusion that I was bringing them luck, and each and every one of them was prepared to pay me a quarter of his salary, if only I would stay on board their ship. Of course I rejected this generous offer, not without appreciation of the highly developed intuition with which captain and crew were blessed, this being nothing other than the direct result of the strenuous daily exercise of the language of grimaces and gestures. And here we have the opportunity to put an idea before those scientists who are interested in these issues: the development of intuition to its highest levels by means of scientifically monitored contact between a
Bulgarian sea-captain and a crew of Sumatran origin.

  Years later I read about this ship, zigzagging across the seas of this planet of ours and coming across some remote island, not marked on any maps and not previously known, which finally turned out to be nothing other than the peak of a high mountain on the lost continent of Atlantis. Photographs of the crew and the captain, together and separately, were published in all the papers, with the gigantic, white and exceedingly multitudinous teeth of the Sumatrans gleaming against the background of their swarthy faces, and the thick beard of the Bulgarian captain, not to mention the hair of his head, never contaminated by water, falling down like icicles from the forehead and reaching the lips – masking completely the authoritative expression on his face.

  IF THE RIVER DRIES — I’M A TAP

  (Don’t try this at home!)

  In some Muslim township in the Persian Gulf I bought myself clothing appropriate for those times and places, put it on and mounted on an obedient mule – with muscles of stone and iron back – I set out towards those lofty heights between the Iranian and Iraqi borders, an area of land which to this day has not been given a name although its renown has spread to all corners of the world on account of the whirling of the Dervishes which has flourished there since the coming of Muhammad into the world and will continue to do so until the final and imminent collapse of the heretical western world.

  My beast had barely put one of her four hooves over the unmarked frontier-line, when I caught sight of some kind of turbulent male gathering, at the feet of a tall and steep cliff-face. I dismounted from my mule, and with none too steady tread, approached the men whose faces, tongues and hand-movements spoke eloquently of intense agitation. And not wanting to attract excess attention with my consummate self-control, something liable to be interpreted as provocation, a show of indifference or an expression of arrogance, with results impossible to predict – I mingled with the excited men, imitating their florid hand-movements and constantly changing visual grimaces, which were rhythmic and closely resembled the kind of physical exercises practiced in those days in exclusive schools in the west.

  I looked up to the heights, to the summit of the steep and lofty cliff, and there I discovered the cause of all this commotion: a goat had fallen from the top and was trying desperately, a pointless and futile effort, to cling on to some protuberance or huddle into a hollow depression in the rock – things that were not there and never had been: the surface of the cliff-face was as smooth as glass. The goat was about to tumble into the abyss and his fate, so it seemed, was sealed. So there was no time to be wasted in sterile speculations, assessment of the situation, of the value of the goat, of the distress likely to be felt by his owner, and so forth. Every thousandth of a second could determine the fate of the goat, slithering down from the summit of that smooth cliff-face.

  In the twinkling of an eye, even before the distraught onlookers had registered my presence, I pulled from their heads the colorful bandanas – worn tarbush-style – and allowing them no time for the expression of indignant objections to my apparent impertinence, tied bandana to bandana with a firm sailor’s knot which I had learned in leisure time with the Bulgarian skipper, thus producing a rope of considerable length, and having tied a stone to one end to act as a weight, with an expert movement, I hurled it at the goat as he tumbled towards the abyss, catching the animal at the last possible nano-second. The weighted rope wrapped around him, and so, as all his four legs were trussed together, I plucked him off the cliff-face and towards me. When I removed the improvised rope from the unfortunate and still timorous goat, he thanked me with a brief and quavering bleat, somewhat lacking in confidence. Scores of men who had witnessed the episode from start to finish stood open-mouthed with amazement, blended with a hint of the gratitude which is traditional in these parts, and willingly expressed, in the presence of any miracle-worker. Meanwhile, I contrived to separate the bandanas one from another and return them to their owners with a single agile movement, making no mistakes and not, perish the thought, putting any bandana on a head to which it did not belong. And then I was the recipient of loud and prolonged applause, expressed in original and local style in the form of a gypsy dance around me, with daggers flaunted menacingly before my eyes and impassioned yells which all but deafened me and could be likened to the blare of the trumpet which will waken the dead on the forthcoming Day of Judgment. In addition to this I was also treated to expressions of the most sincere and spontaneous affection, and the sense of sublime brotherhood which is the distinguishing feature of the local population and in which they have no rivals anywhere in the world: repeated and unrelenting blows landing on my shoulders and chest, sometimes on my neck, and mistakenly – on my head. There was a moment, and I remember it well, when I imagined I had lost my sense of hearing entirely, and my consciousness along with it. And this would have happened were it not for the outstanding qualities with which I was endowed: a head more resilient to natural blows of all kinds than the head of any German philosopher, and a sense of hearing hardened by the operas of Wagner and thus quite capable of enduring the ordeal of the mad thundering of thousands of guns opening fire simultaneously, in the war that came to an end not long ago.

  Anyway, I would be deviating from the truth (which I’m not in the habit of doing) if I declared that I managed to face all the manifestations of this spontaneous and unpredictable event with the resourceful lightness of touch which is an outstanding feature of my well-crafted personality. Admittedly, the broad smile did not shift from my face, but for some time I had stopped feeling my shoulders and my chest, as if they had been anaesthetized for an operation, and although I could perceive them they were strange to me, not belonging to my body, usually so strong. And it is possible that this broad smile of mine would have been the last of my broad smiles, so characteristic of me, and my fascinating story would never have reached your ears – if a strange figure had not suddenly appeared, a man of indeterminate age, in strange pantaloons and a striped nightshirt, barefoot and yet austere of expression, with an air of innate authority. The green stare of his eyes was penetrating and as sharp as a laser – so it seemed that wherever it alighted, fire would flare or a hole would be bored, down to the blazing heart of the globe and even beyond.

  The commotion around me, which as previously stated, arose only from the need to give suitable expression in the most tangible way to noble sentiments like brotherhood and friendship, stopped at once. I exploited the Heavensent respite, and with a desperate internal effort I tried to restore my sense of hearing to a functioning state, however flawed or partial this functioning might be – likewise the feeling in my chest, shoulders, back, neck, head… and here I was helped by my celebrated personality, accepting no compromise and acknowledging no fatigue, and the prodigious effort invested bore fruit, and within a few seconds I began feeling myself and becoming convinced I was indeed me and not one of my ancestors, buried in the family vault somewhere in the heart of faraway Europe. But before I managed to put everything back into working order, psyched-up and ready for action, gleaming and well-lubricated, like the chariot of Louis XIV, the man in the striped nightshirt opened his mouth and uttered a number of sounds which I didn’t take in, and I doubt I would have understood if I had taken them in. In immediate response to his words all present fell submissively to their knees at the bare feet of the speaker, and presented him with the goat, which in the meantime had regained something of the frisky and mischievous spirit with which nature had endowed him, revealing, with incessant bleating, emphatic satisfaction and incomparable contentment with the portentous situation into which he had been propelled.

  Soon it became clear to me that the charismatic barefooted man was none other than the famous Dervish, Iftheriverdries Imatap, whose renown has spread worldwide and whose name is revered in the west as well, and that the goat, just now saved from the certain fracturing of limbs and from ignominious death in the gloomy depths of the abyss, belonged to him and was the only beast
he possessed – a kind of "poor man’s goat", to paraphrase the famous story told in the Holy Scriptures, of King David and Uriah the Hittite. With the aid of a translator who knew a little of the Tamil language (there are some English words in it) and expressive movements of the limbs, it was conveyed to me that the Dervish Sheikh, Iftheriverdries Imatap, in person, saw fit to thank me from the bottom of his heart for the fortitude and resourcefulness, the mental and manual dexterity which I had demonstrated beyond any doubt and most of all – for the act of charity which would surely earn me a prolonged sojourn in Muhammad’s Paradise, where I could enjoy myself to my heart’s content with an endless supply of lissome belly-dancers, free of charge. So I bowed low and thanked him too, feeling I had good reason to be grateful to him, by the same means and in the same language. And the translator smiled at me time after time, and nodded his head in full agreement. I accompanied my words with some moves of torso and limbs in the style of modern ballet, and this made a favorable impression on all the spectators, who tried to repeat the joyful cacophony which was such a favorite of theirs, but the Dervish no less renowned than Iftheriverdries Imatap – the (erroneously named) Ismail Imatap – silenced them at once, lifting his stern gaze to the skies above. A few white clouds drifted across that deep firmament, a presage of peace and sublime ease in which there is a kind of enjoyment for its own sake, and they didn’t even pretend that the commotion in progress far below them aroused any interest in their hearts.

  The interpreter called out something else to me, and when the message failed to get through he began prancing around me with some impetuous and really quite impressive dance-steps, from which I deduced that I was invited to a solemn banquet in the hut belonging to the esteemed Sheikh.