The Fantastical Adventures of Leutenlieb of the House of Munchausen

by Shlomo Kalo

  The three of them fled for their lives, in the process wetting their baggy and not particularly fashionable trousers, marking the track of their flight on the dusty paving-stones in three damp zigzag lines.

  Hemingway saw what had happened, climbed down from the ambulance and shook me warmly by the hand. And he made the casual comment that if I had succeeded in giving him some kind of signal of the danger threatening him – he would have moved the ambulance and not let those "fascist bastards" endanger the life of the artist of the Twentieth Century. I smiled at him, realizing that everything he had seen me do, including those signals, to him were just background material for his future creations. And what greater compliment could anyone ask for?

  One way or the other – I guaranteed to the reading public around the world the enjoyment of "For Whom the Bell Tolls", "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and "The Old Man and the Sea", and some years later I spared the judges of the Nobel Prize for Literature a headache – the recipient of the prize was an obvious choice.

  Of all those involved in this small incident only one, as it turned out, remembered me – the urchin whose cheek I slapped. Rommel was his name and in due course he would be a general in that army that was destined to unleash bestial inhumanity upon the world, for long years of darkness. He and his two friends, future generals likewise, Guderian the one and Goering the other, had come to Spain on a secret mission – to test a particular brand of fragmentation grenade. As it turned out, the grenades were tested, not by them but by me, and they proved to be less than entirely effective garbage-shifters.

  Rommel never forgot the slap, and within his circle of intimate friends he admitted that every time he was reminded of it he had a seizure of panic – and an urgent need to run to the bathroom, for no logical reason that he could fathom. General Montgomery, who drove him out of the Libyan Desert in World War Two, knew all about this from the sterling reports of British spies of German extraction. He fitted out a whole squadron of aircraft with loudspeakers, emitting, with all the precision of which the British are capable, the sound of a resounding slap, and the pilots were instructed to turn up the volume while swooping low over Rommel’s headquarters. These sounds set the general’s Hottentot mind reeling. He lost all his powers of concentration, trembled from head to foot, wetted his pants and issued contradictory orders – hence his defeat at the hands of Montgomery, who was capable of deriving the maximum benefit from an ingenious educational concept originating with me. In the end – Rommel took his own life since he could not come to terms with the fact that he had been slapped by one who claimed, claims and always will claim that the blood flowing in his veins is the blood of King David. Montgomery crushed the "Desert Fox", Rommel, proving the truth of the old maxim that "Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad."

  THE FLYING DUTCHMAN

  I traveled from Spain to India via the Cape of Good Hope, on a Portuguese ship crewed by men who for some reason seemed tense in the extreme, with anxious looks in their eyes. I tried to get them to talk, to uncover the reasons behind this and study the whole issue in depth, but they preferred to evade me with silent, sour-apologetic smiles – the only thing they were capable of expressing in English. For my part, I hadn’t heard a syllable of Portuguese spoken at the time when I boarded that clumsy vessel. Incidentally, the voyage was a pleasant surprise, the ship gliding nimbly and easily over the brooding waves of an angry ocean. As for the Portuguese language, I picked it up to the extent that I needed it, in other words – I was capable of translating that characteristic smile from English into pure Portuguese with commendable accuracy. And indeed, as it turned out, its meaning was not the same as the decidedly English meaning: instead of sour-apologetic the smile turned in its Portuguese version to tolerant-frightened. In some sense I found this provocative – in direct contradiction of my thoroughly equable nature, the nature of aristocrats and patricians. In the interests of accuracy and truth I have to confess that the sequence of events was influenced not simply by a feeling of provocation, but rather by anger, by genuine wrath. Anyway, I asked for an interview with the captain, who had a Spanish stepmother from whom he inherited a number of mournful lullabies about devils and ghosts and moonless nights – a veritable thesaurus of the Spanish language, rich in rhyme.

  So I arrived for that interview, wearing my smartest First World War uniform – with a colonel’s gleaming stars on my shoulder.

  When I first appeared in the doorway of his cabin, the captain seemed perplexed. He snapped to attention and saluted me, his free hand hidden stubbornly behind his back.

  I exploited the amenable atmosphere and demanded to know, in a forceful linguistic medley that included among other things, juicy English syllables, evasive French tones, a Spanish lilt, a Yiddish-German sneeze and a number of barks in pure German – what was the reason for the dejected mood that had descended on all the members of the crew, without exception, including none other than the captain himself. And here I saw fit to add conclusive proof to my words, pointing with unmistakable emphasis at the unshaven face of my Portuguese interlocutor, he of the Spanish stepmother, apparently, and at the flat, half-empty rum bottle which he was trying in vain to hide from my acute eye behind his broad back.

  You could say the captain was stunned, traumatized. In any case – he was close to a total and decisive breakdown.

  Finally – he put the flat, half-empty rum bottle down on the polished table top, for some reason changing hands and saluting this time with his left, which previously had been busy hiding the bottle. Both his hands – the one saluting and the one clasped to his lean body, shook as if the man had Parkinson’s. And when he tired of saluting, the unshaven captain tried to mollify me with a faltering Spanish rhyme taken from one of those notoriously gruesome lullabies – something about a fearful ghost and malicious demon, who appeared not long ago before the oldest of the sailors, and he has an arm missing, which is the distinguishing feature of the "Flying Dutchman", and he is the unequivocal and indubitable portent of some terrible disaster that is bound to strike our ship.

  In the same peremptory tone I demanded to see the weather reports received by telegraph over the past twenty-four hours, from the meteorological service based at the Cape of Good Hope. He handed them over obediently, with the kind of clumsiness that invites both scorn and sympathy, like a child who has been naughty, and knows it too, and is doing everything he possibly can to earn forgiveness and indulgence from the adult who is about to punish him.

  I looked at the last cable, translated from Morse to the international Q-code and it immediately became clear to me that the weather was fine and stable and there was no risk of disturbance from any quarter, certainly no prospect of a storm, a fairly common occurrence in these parts. The Pacific Ocean sent warm greetings to its Atlantic neighbor, with light winds of love, almost, and promised to collaborate with all the seafarers who for one reason or another, in this season, headed in that direction. The Atlantic Ocean for its part gratefully accepted the solemn assurances of its Pacific neighbor and stopped blowing its mutinous winds in any direction, thus paralyzing the grand ships with the voluminous white sails, at the same time opening a way to broad satisfaction and arrogance of mind blended with schadenfreude, among the executives of the shipping companies, who changed the profile of their feminine ships, preening themselves with economical sails – to the male profile, oozing dignity and resolution, of ships powered by steam.

  There could be no doubt this was a case of utterly childish superstition, which no intelligent and cultivated person, scion of the mechanized Twentieth Century, should be prepared to tolerate, let alone come to terms with.

  So it was obvious to me that from every angle and perspective it was my sacred obligation to defend the progress that people of my generation had achieved with so much hard work, with the sacrifice of innumerable victims, by the most rigorous of means, standing valiantly against the dark reactionary forces of the Inquisition, and those other lethal plagues – the
Popery of the past and the Freudianism of the present.

  Without losing precious time, I flung the up-to-date weather reports from the meteorological station on the Cape of Good Hope into the captain’s unshaven face, a face which reacted to this decidedly courteous gesture with a change of expression from one extreme to the other: from fear-dejection-indolence to a wide-awake look of utter bemusement and something resembling hurt feelings.

  I thumped the highly polished surface of the table with my clenched fist, one blow and then another until all the papers, along with the ancient quill-pen and the fountain-pen beside it – were sent flying in every possible direction, and in the same breath I supplemented the blows of my fist with a howl in that impressive linguistic medley which called to mind some kind of new language for seriously ravenous cannibals.

  The Portuguese was speechless.

  So as we stood in the stifling cabin, a few minutes of enforced silence passed by.

  Finally, I spoke again in my own way and in accordance with my nature and my authentic character, in an elegantly courteous style, with well-honed words invariably touching on the essential point. All this – in pure Spanish which the esteemed captain, who had sobered up from the effects of the rum and was alarmed to the marrow of his bones, had the good grace to understand:

  "When this ghostly apparition, destructive demon, laughable harbinger of disaster, alias the ‘Flying Dutchman’ – next puts in an appearance – call me and I shall settle accounts with him once and for all!" And on declaring this I gave the polished table a shove towards the lean, flat stomach of my interlocutor, and to this day I don’t know whether he withstood my onslaught honorably, or collapsed on the spot, like a clumsy skittle in the game of bowling in which I excelled not long ago on one of the more picturesque Greek islands.

  Anyway, I slammed the door behind me and walked straight ahead as if on parade, at a uniform pace, turning to right or left on encountering obstacles and executing smart "About-turn" when I reached the guard-rail, not particularly high one.

  The episode with the captain passed off, as it turned out, without serious consequences. I wasn’t challenged to a duel, although I prepared a speech for use in the event of being challenged, denouncing unequivocally the follies of "mutual warfare", from the time it was invented to this very day. I also intended to fire a few exhibition pistol-shots, splicing the tail of one of the rats which used to peer out occasionally from the capacious pockets of the first mate. It is possible that I was indeed challenged to a duel, but my total incomprehension of the Portuguese language foiled any attempt to inform me of the fact. Why do I say this? About two hours after the episode, loud knocking was heard on the door of my cabin. I opened up. Before me stood two members of the crew, holding straw boaters in their hands, calloused fingers nervously fidgeting with them – and incessantly intoning soft Portuguese sounds, and sentences that repeated themselves, over and over again. There was no doubt in my mind that the monotonous phrases reverberating in my ears were accurate quotations from the Holy Scriptures, but they did not deign to notify me of the name of the book, or the number of the chapter, to say nothing of the number of the verse. In my eyes, and in my ears too, the whole thing was like a sealed book.

  The monotonous quoting, in which a clear note of reverence could be discerned, continued to flow for almost a whole hour, until it became clear to both sides that it was turning into a kind of interminable invocation. Then, as a way of putting a dignified end to an embarrassing incident – I ceremoniously slammed the door in the faces of the quoters.

  Silence reigned in my cabin.

  I peered out through the round window and no longer saw anyone or the shadow of anyone. Indeed, in the meantime darkness had fallen and the skies were lowering, with no stars visible and no moon rising. The vessel continued on its way, buffeted by breaking waves that were mounting ever higher, invisible but for the white surf fringing their crests, glimpsed at intervals. The breakers soared to the height of a medium-sized skyscraper, and the vessel, rising and pitching on the heaving swell, called to mind the Ark of Noah, helpless in the face of the overwhelming might of the Flood.

  The meteorological station on the Cape of Good Hope had erred in its calculations or interpreted them incorrectly, or the captain, in his confused state, had given me the reports for the previous month, or the decipherment of the Morse had been amateurish and incompetent, turning everything upside down… all these were reasonable possibilities which should be looked into – when time allowed.

  In the meantime the ship was, mostly if not entirely, at the mercy of the whims of the storm which had sprung up suddenly and now occupied all of the blank empty space between sky and sea, lashing the heavy darkness with the awesome whips of lightning and deafening the sailors with the peals of thunder, and adding to this the unbridled howling of the myriad winds, rising from their slumbers in the depths of Sheol. I have to confess that until this very moment I never experienced the like of this, although an appreciable segment of my life has been spent on the heaving decks of ships, sailing-boats of all kinds and modern steamers… and it seems likely, and the facts will yet bear this out, that in the future I am bound to continue experiencing all the caprices of Neptune… in the heart of the seas or on the shores of the five continents of this world, where we shall go on living, you as well as me, until the end of all generations.

  And before these portentous thoughts – all of their honorable intention being to provide the remedy in advance of the blow – had time to pass through my ingenious mind, tensed and alert as ever – the door of the cabin in which I was sitting opened to its full width… and here is the place to point out that this was a thick door, made of steel like the doors of the famous safes of the Bank of England, and the doors of the equally renowned safes of Rockefeller, the greatest steel safe enthusiast of those times. Not only this – the door of my cabin was locked, with all nine bolts in place, like the doors mentioned above. But, as I say, it swung open before me to its full width, by a miracle, which to this day I still can’t account for, and framed in the doorway, against the background of the heavy and opaque darkness of the night and to the sound of the ear-splitting shrieks of the storm, still raging, and silhouetted by the pale flashes of lightning – the figure of a bedraggled sailor appeared. For some reason, impelled perhaps by the robust sense of humor typical of mariners, he wore on his head a mask in the form of a skull, and in one hand he held a sword of ancient type, two-edged and with short and broad blade, well-polished. His other hand, for some reason, he had chosen to disguise as an amputee’s stump, and he deserved all the praise in the world for the artistic skill with which this was done. I was genuinely puzzled at that moment, wondering how he had managed to fold the rest of his arm away and out of sight. Furthermore, the end of the supposed "stump" was dribbling heavy drops of blood from time to time on the wet and slippery deck. This kind of hemorrhage is quite easily faked – a rubber ball filled with ketchup, a prestigious and recent invention in those times, concealed and squeezed in the armpit and connected to the "amputated" limb by a tube.

  The man was obviously deranged. You only had to look at him to be sure of this. He stood and went on standing on the slippery deck, exposed to the violence of the storm and wearing clothes that were not at all waterproof – old-fashioned stuff borrowed from the dressing-up cupboard, trying to add humor to the gleaming skull-mask carried on his neck, without outstanding success.

  "You’re crazy!" I called out to him, and stepping forward with two parade-style paces, as after all I was still wearing my colonel’s uniform, I grabbed him by the wrist of the hand holding the short sword and with a vigorous and authoritative movement, the kind that there’s no point trying to resist – I pulled him inside, out of the stormy night, with its lightning and thunder and torrential rain. I sat him down in the comfortable armchair beside my modestly proportioned table and at once poured him a cup of hot invigorating tea, from the English thermos that accompanies me on all my travels. />
  He gaped open-mouthed, or rather, the skull-mask gaped, exposing a dark and cavernous hole with barely a tooth left in it. I put this down to the skill of the disguise, which in the case of this bedraggled individual knew no bounds at all.

  "That’s enough of the clever stuff!" I declared in pure Spanish, which all the Portuguese understand but pretend they don’t for nationalistic reasons. "And you can put down that ridiculous sword," I added in the same peremptory tone, brooking no disagreement, "and if you like, take off that false arm of yours as well. Drink some of this tea, before you catch a severe cold! As you know, you won’t find any doctors in these parts and a cold could easily turn to pneumonia – and who knows where that would end? Have you no concern for your young life, not to mention your family, waiting for you in Lisbon?"

  The man with the skull-mask still stood open-mouthed, utterly motionless, showing no inclination or intention to reveal any human spirit, a trait characteristic of inhabitants of the sandy shores of the Mediterranean, since time immemorial to the present, differing in a thousand and one ways from those residing by the lofty cliffs of the Atlantic Ocean.

  The longer he stood there facing me as if struck dumb, the clearer became my conviction that only quick and vigorous action could save the maniac from real mortal danger. So without further delay I took the ridiculous sword from his hand – ridiculous but dangerous all the same, in itself and in the hands of a dolt like him – and put into the hand that was now free, sheathed in a black leather glove, worn with age, the cup of strong and fragrant, fortifying tea and commanded: