We swallow it, like the foam from a mug, before it has done swirling and settled inside our pipe bowl. The imaginations of men with stubby cigars in their teeth are equally stunted. Permit me. . . .”

The baron got up and crossed over to an antique wardrobe. A little key clinked, the heavy carved doors creaked open—and Unding, following after with his eyes and the gleam of his cigar, saw poking out from behind the baron’s long thin back on the wardrobe’s wooden pegs: an old embroidered waistcoat of a kind not worn in over a century; a long sword in a battered sheath; a curved tobacco pipe in a beaded case; and a straggly pigtail minus its powder, but still with the bow.

The baron took the pipe from its peg and, having inspected it, resumed his seat. A minute later his Adam’s apple jumped out of his collar as he sucked in his cheeks to meet the smoke streaming up from the chibouk into his nostrils.

“We understand still less about fogs,” the baron went on between puffs, “metaphysical ones for a start. Incidentally, Unding, you did well to look in today: Tomorrow I intend to pay a visit to the London fogs. And to those who inhabit them. Yes, the albescent veils rising from the Thames can unshape shapes, shroud landscapes and worldviews, shade facts, and . . . in a word, I am off to London.”

Unding’s shoulders bristled.

“You do Berlin a disservice, baron. We too have mastered a few things: ersatzes,* for instance, and the metaphysics of fictionalism—”*

Munchausen broke in: “We shall not revive that old debate. Older, incidentally, than you think. Some hundred years ago Tieck and I sat up all night disputing about this—in other terms, true, but does that alter the gist? He was seated, as you are now, on my right. Knocking the ashes out of his pipe, he threatened to smite reality with dreams and blow it asunder. I reminded him that even shopkeepers have dreams, and that a rope, though in moonlight it resemble a snake, cannot bite.* With Fichte,* on the other hand, I argued far less. ‘Doctor,’ said I to the philosopher, ‘now that “not-I” has jumped out of “I,” it had better look back more often at its whence.’ In reply, Herr Johann smiled politely.”

“Allow me to smile not so politely, baron. That stands up to criticism no better than a dandelion clock to the wind. My ‘I’ is not waiting for ‘not-I’ to look back at it. Rather it turns away from all nots. As it was taught. My memory does not go back centuries,”—Unding nodded to his host—“but I do remember our first meeting, five weeks ago, as if it were today. A small marbled tabletop, the chance proximity of two pairs of eyes and two mugs of beer. I sat sipping mine, while you never brought the glass to your lips, only nodding now and then to the waiter, who replaced the undrunk mug with another, which also went undrunk. When tipsiness had slightly misted my mind, I asked you what it was you needed from glass and beer since you did not drink. ‘I am interested in the bursting bubbles,’ you said, ‘and when they have all burst, I must order a fresh dollop of foam. Every man amuses himself after his fashion; what pleases me about this swill is its counterfeitness, its surrogateness.’ And with a shrug of your shoulders you eyed me—I must remind you, Munchausen—as if I too had been a bubble stuck to the rim of your mug.”

“You bear grudges.”

“I bear many things in mind: still spinning in my brain is the colorful carousel that began turning right there, by two tangent mugs. We crossed continents and oceans together at a speed greater than the earth’s rotation. And when I, batted about like a tennis ball, from country to country, from past to future and back to the past, happened to drop out of the game and ask, ‘Who are you and how can a single lifetime have sufficed for so many wanderings?’—you, with a courteous bow, told me your name. Counterfeit beer makes for a counterfeit and confusing intoxication, realities burst like bubbles and phantasms slip in to take their place. Is that shake of your head ironic? You know, Munchausen—just between us—as a poet I am ready to believe that you are you, but as a sensible person—”

The jangle of a telephone bell bored into the conversation. Munchausen reached for the instrument with a long thin hand whose index finger wore an oval moonstone.

“Hello! Who is speaking? Ah, it’s you, Mr.