A Perfect Vacuum

by Stanisław Lem

  The life of the court community is so patent a forgery, and a clumsy one at that, it is such a piece of unauthenticity, that at least the more clearheaded of the people, those who came later to Parisia, as well as all who with their own eyes saw the origination of the pseudo-monarch and the pseudo-princes, cannot—even for a minute—have any doubt in this regard. And therefore, particularly in its early days, the kingdom resembles, as it were, a person schizophrenically split in two: one speaks one way at the palace audiences and balls, especially in the vicinity of Taudlitz, and quite another way in the absence of the monarch and his three confidants, who ensure in a most ruthless manner (with torture, even) the continuation of the imposed game. And it is a game decked out in rare splendor, bathed in a glitter now not false, for a stream of caravan supplies, paid for with hard currency, has in the space of twenty months raised castle walls, covered them with frescoes and Gobelins, dressed the parquet floors with elegant carpeting, set out endless pieces of furniture, mirrors, gilt clocks, commodes, built secret doors and hiding places in the walls, alcoves, pergolas, terraces, encircled the castle with an enormous, magnificent park, and, beyond, with a palisade and a moat. Every German is an overseer and keeps the Indian slaves under thumb (it is by Indian sweat and toil that the artificial kingdom comes into being); he parades attired like a true seventeenth-century knight, but wears on his gold belt a military handgun of the “Parabellum” make, the final argument in all disputes between feudal capital and labor.

  But the monarch and his confidants slowly, and at the same time systematically, eliminate from their surroundings every manifestation, every sign that would immediately unmask the fictitiousness of the court and the kingdom. So first a special language comes into use; in it may be worded any news that makes its way—roundabout, to be sure—in from the outside world, such as the possibility that the “nation” may be threatened by intervention on the part of the Argentine government; meanwhile these wordings, conveyed to the King by his high officials, dare not lay bare—that is, state point-blank—the unsovereignty of the monarch and the throne. Argentina, for example, is always called “Spain” and treated as a neighboring country. Gradually they all become so much at home inside their artificial skins, and learn to move about so naturally in splendid robes, to wield the sword and the tongue with such address, that the lie sinks deeper—into the very warp and woof of this fabric, this living picture. The picture remains a humbug, but a humbug now that throbs with the blood of authentic desires, hatreds, quarrels, rivalries; for at the unreal court are hatched real intrigues, courtiers strive to undo others, to draw nearer the throne over the bodies of their rivals, that they may receive from the hands of the King the high ranks and honors of the toppled; therefore the innuendo, the cup of poison, the informer’s whisper, the dagger, begin their hidden, altogether genuine work; yet only so much of the monarchistic and feudal element continues to inhere in all of this as Taudlitz, the new Louis XVI, is able to breathe into it from his own dream of absolute power, a dream dramatized by a pack of former SS men.

  Taudlitz believes that somewhere in Germany lives his nephew, the last of the line, Bertrand Gülsenhirn, whose age was thirteen at the time of the fall of Germany. To seek out this youth (now twenty-one) Louis XVI sends the Due de Rohan, or Johann Wieland, the only “intellectual” among his men, for Wieland had been a physician in the Waffen SS and had carried out, in the camp at Mauthausen, “scientific studies.” The scene where the King entrusts the Due with the secret mission to find the boy and bring him to the court as the Infante is among the finest in the novel. First the monarch is gracious enough to explain how he is much troubled by his own childlessness, out of consideration for the good of the throne, that is, the succession; these opening phrases help him continue in this vein; the insane savor of the scene lies in this, that now the King cannot admit even to himself that he is not a real king. He does not, in fact, know French, but, employing German, which prevails at court, he maintains—as does everyone after him, when the subject arises—that it is French he is speaking, seventeenth-century French.

  This is not madness, for madness would be—now—to admit to Germanness, even if only in language; Germany does not exist, inasmuch as France’s only neighbor is Spain (that is, Argentina)! Anyone who dares utter words in German, letting it be understood that he is speaking thus, stands in peril of his life: from the conversation between the Archbishop of Paris and the Due de Salignac (Vol. I, p. 311), it may be inferred that the Prince de Chartreuse, beheaded for “high treason,” in reality had drunkenly called the palace not simply a “whorehouse,” but a “German whorehouse.” Nota bene: the abundance of French names in the novel, which bear a striking similarity to the names of cognacs and wines—take, for example, the “Marquis Châteauneuf du Pape,” the master of ceremonies!—undoubtedly derives from the fact (though nowhere does the author say it) that in the brain of Taudlitz there clamor, for readily understandable reasons, far more names of liquors and liqueurs than those of the French aristocracy.

  In addressing his emissary, then, Taudlitz speaks as he imagines King Louis might speak to a trusted agent being sent on such a mission. He does not tell Monsieur le Due to put aside his sham apparel, but, on the contrary, to “disguise himself as an Englishman or a Dutchman,” which simply means to try for a normal, up-to-date appearance. The word “up-to-date,” however, may not be uttered—it belongs among those expressions that would dangerously weaken the fiction of the kingdom. Even dollars are called, always, “thalers.”

  Provided with a considerable amount of ready money, Wieland goes to Rio, where the commercial agent of the “court” operates; after acquiring good false identity papers, Taudlitz’s emissary sails for Europe. The book passes in silence over the peregrinations of his search. We know only that they are crowned with success after eleven months, and the novel, in its actual form, characteristically opens with the second conversation between Wieland and the young Gülsenhirn, who is working as a waiter in a large Hamburg hotel. Bertrand (he will be allowed to keep the name: it has, in the opinion of his uncle Taudlitz, a good ring) is first told only of his millionaire uncle who is prepared to adopt him as a son, and for Bertrand this is reason enough to leave his job and go off with Wieland. The journey of this curious pair serves as an introduction to the novel and performs its function brilliantly, because we have here a moving forward in space which at the same time is, as it were, a retreating back into historical time: the travelers change from a transcontinental jet to a train, later to an automobile, from the automobile to a horse-drawn wagon, and finally cover the last 145 miles on horseback.

  As Bertrand’s clothes wear out piece by piece, his spare things “vanish,” and in their place appear archaic garments, providently supplied and laid out for such occasions by Wieland; meanwhile, the latter is turning into the Due de Rohan. This metamorphosis is by no means Machiavellian; it takes place, from stopping point to stopping point, with strange simplicity. One gathers (later on, this is confirmed) that Wieland has gone through such costume changes (only not quite in these installments) numerous times as the factotum envoy of Taudlitz. And so, while Wieland, who embarked for Europe as Mr. Heinz Karl Muller, becomes the armed and mounted Due de Rohan, an analogous transformation—at least externally—is undergone by Bertrand.

  Bertrand is flabbergasted, stupefied. He is going to his uncle, the owner—so he has been informed—of a vast estate; he has forsaken the life of a waiter to become heir to millions, and now they lead him into the circle of some costume comedy or farce he cannot comprehend. The instructions Wieland-Miil-ler-de Rohan gives him on the way only serve to increase the muddle in his head. Sometimes it seems to him that his companion is merely pulling his leg; sometimes, that he is leading him to his doom, or on the other hand that he, Bertrand, is being let in on some unimaginable skulduggery, whose entirety cannot be revealed all at once. There will be moments in which he will feel he has gone mad. The instructions, of course, never call a thing by it
s name; this instinctive wisdom is the common property of the court.

  “You must,” de Rohan tells him, “observe the formalities your uncle requires” (“your uncle,” then “His Lordship,” finally “His Highness”!); “his name is ‘Louis,’ not ‘Siegfried’—it is not permitted ever to say the latter. He has put it aside—such is his will!” declares Muller, becoming le due. “His estate” is altered to “his latifundium,” then to “his realm”; thus Bertrand, little by little, during the long days spent in the saddle, riding through the jungle, and then, in the final hours, inside a gilded sedan chair borne by eight naked, muscular mestizos, and observing from its window a retinue of mounted knights in casques—thus Bertrand is convinced of the truth of the words of his enigmatic companion. Then he shifts his suspicions of insanity from himself to the companion and places all his hope on the meeting with his uncle, whom, however, he hardly remembers—he saw him last as a nine-year-old boy. But the meeting is the center of a magnificent, impressive celebration, which represents an amalgam of all the ceremonies, rituals, and customs Taudlitz was able to recall. So the choir sings and silver fanfares are played, the King enters in his crown, but first the footmen cry drawlingly, “The King! The King!” as they open the carved double doors; Taudlitz is surrounded by twelve “Peers of the Realm” (which he borrowed by error, from the wrong source), and the sublime moment arrives—Louis greets his nephew with the sign of the cross, names him his Infante, and permits him to kiss his ring, his hand, and his scepter. But when they are alone together at breakfast, where they are waited on by Indians in tails, with a marvelous panorama spread out before them from the heights of the castle down to the park and its sparkling, spouting rows of fountains, Bertrand, looking upon that splendor, and again upon the distant belt of jungle that surrounds the entire estate with its glimmering of cruel green, simply cannot find the courage to ask his uncle anything. When the latter gently admonishes him to speak, Bertrand begins: “Your Majesty...” “Yes, that is the way ... higher reasons require it ... my welfare lies in this, and yours...” kindly says to him the former SS Gruppenführer in the crown.

  The unusualness of this book stems from the fact that it unites elements that would appear to be totally irreconcilable. Either something is authentic or it is unauthentic, it is either false or true, make-believe or spontaneous life; yet here we are faced with a prevaricated truth and an authentic fake, hence a thing that is at once the truth and a lie. Had the courtiers of old Taudlitz merely played their roles, stammering out their conned lines, we would have had before us a lifeless puppet pageant; but they assimilated the form, each in his own way growing into it, and have grown so at home with it over the years that when, shortly after Bertrand’s arrival, they begin conspiring against Taudlitz, they are unable entirely to shake off the imposed patterns, so that the conspiracy itself is also a grotesque potpourri of psychologies, like a layer cake with jelly, lumps of dough, macaroni, and the corpses of mice that have choked to death on the nuts. For it was an authentic passion, an honest lust for ruling, that the Gruppenführer clothed in a conglomeration of garbled memories pertaining to the history of the French Louis, a history taken thirdhand—from penny dreadfuls and dime novels. At the beginning he did not insist on obedience to his mania—he could not—but simply paid for it, and during that time had to pretend not to hear what the former chauffeurs, noncoms, and sentries of the SS were saying about him, and about the whole “production,” behind his back; but he possessed enough sense to bear it all patiently until the moment when finally it became easy for him to achieve discipline through fear, compulsion, torture; that was also when dollars, hitherto the only lure, became “thalers”...

  This primitive phase (in a manner of speaking, the prehistory of the kingdom) is shown in the novel only in snatches of incidental conversation, and it should be kept in mind that for such references to the past one can pay dearly. The action begins in Europe, when an unknown emissary wins the confidence of the young waiter Bertrand, but it is only in the second part of the novel that the narrative allows us to figure out what, until then, we were struggling to reconstruct. Obviously, to have former MPs, camp guards, camp doctors, the drivers and the gunners of the SS panzer division Grossdeutschland, as courtiers, nobles, and priests of the court of Louis XVI, is as ghastly and insane a hash, a mismatching of roles, as ever there could be. On the other hand, they are not so much playing well-defined roles poorly—for such roles never existed—as they are doing their best, in their own way, often moronically, to cope with a difficult task, since they can do nothing else.... That which was false in its very inception is now played by them falsely and dully; the result should therefore be a miscellany that turns the book into a pile of nonsense.

  However, it is not that way at all. Those Hitlerite butchers may once have felt ridiculous wriggling into the cardinal’s scarlet, the bishop’s violet, and gilt plates of armor, but then they felt less ridiculous—for it was amusing—taking prostitutes from seaport brothels and renaming them consorts (in the case of the secular lords) or princesses and countess-concubines (in the case of the priesthood of King Louis). And these roles captured the fancy of the prostitutes themselves; immersed in spurious stateliness, each such creature luxuriated and put on airs, but at the same time would improve herself, emulating whatever ideal of the great lady she was capable of imagining. Thus the passages of the novel where the former thugs in ecclesiastical hats and lace throat-ruffles are given the floor are simply incredible exhibitions of the author’s psychological skill. The wretches derive from their positions a pleasure alien to true aristocrats, for it is enhanced twofold by what might be most simply described as an ennobling or outright legalizing of crime. A scoundrel consumes the fruits of evil with the greatest delight only when he does so in the majesty of the law; the professionals in concentration-camp sadism are provided a distinct satisfaction by the possibility of repeating more than one of the old practices now in the aura and glory of the court’s splendor, in its light, which seems to magnify every filthy act. It is for this reason that, while doing disgraceful things, they all of them, now of their own free will, try, at least in their words, not to step out of character, out of the bishop’s or the prince’s role. For thus they are able to disgrace as well the whole majestic symbolism of those high honors with which they have bedecked themselves. This is why, too, the slow-witted among them, such as Mehrer, envy the Due de Rohan, who can so adroitly justify his weakness for abusing Indian children, who has turned the torturing of them into an activity in all respects “courtly,” that is to say, to the highest degree seemly. (Note, by the way, that the Indians are routinely called “Negroes,” for Negroes as slaves are “in better taste.”)

  We can understand, too, Wieland’s (the Due de Rohan’s) exertions to obtain the cardinal’s hat: this is now the only thing he lacks; it will enable him to play his degenerate little games as one of God’s vicars on earth. But Taudlitz denies him the privilege, as if aware of the chasm of villainy that lies behind this ambition of Wieland’s. Because Taudlitz, in that game, fancies differently: he does not wish to be conscious of both the present eminence and the old past of the Schutzstaffeln, because he has “another dream, another myth”; he craves the royal purple in earnest and therefore spurns with true indignation the Wieland method of exploiting the situation. The author’s mastery lies in showing the extraordinary variety of human knavishness, that wealth, that multifariousness of evil which cannot be reduced to any single, simple formula. For Taudlitz is not one whit “better” than Wieland; he is merely taken up with something else, for he aspires to an impossible—for a total—transfiguration. Hence his “puritanism,” which his closest associates hold so much against him.

  As for the courtiers, we have seen that they strove to be courtiers indeed—for different reasons.... But later, when ten of them took to plotting against the monarch-Gruppenführer, with the idea of robbing him of his chest full of dollars and of murdering him besides, they nonetheless re
gretted having to part with the senatorial chairs, titles, decorations, distinctions, and thus found themselves in a true quandary. They did not want to cut the old man’s throat and flee with the loot; they did not and yet they did; and it was not merely the matter of appearances that interfered with their plotting. There were moments now when they themselves believed in the possibility of their eminence, for that possibility answered their needs to the highest degree. What hampered them the most (and this is madness indeed, but perfectly logical, psychologically consistent) was no longer the recognition, in the form of memory, that they were not what they pretended to be, but the arbitrary cruelty of Taudlitz-as-monarch: had not the monarch been so much—every inch—the SS Gruppenführer, had he not made it so very clear to them—silently!—that they were his creatures, existing by the act of his will and momentary favor, then the France of the Angevins in the Argentine interior would definitely have proven more stable, viable. And so, in truth, the actors now held against the impresario of the show ... his insufficient authenticity. That band of thieves desired to be plus monarchique than the monarch himself would allow.

  Of course, they were in error, for they could not compare themselves, in these roles, with the true, better authenticity of a magnificent court; unable to raise themselves befittingly to the level of the roles, they nevertheless made those roles their own, and brought life to them; each put into his own what he had and could, what his heart dictated. There is no affectation or stiltedness here; we see, after all, and more than once, how these dues address their duchesses, how the Marquis de Beaujolais (the onetime Hans Wehrholz) pounds his spouse and how he throws up to her her whorish past. In such scenes the aim of the writer is to make credible that which seems so incredible when only summarized. True, the wretches sometimes weary of the performances they must give, but what tops everything are those who play the high clergy of the Roman Catholic Church.