Ambassador. Yes, of course. I will be with you in an hour.”

The receiver returned to its metal cradle.

“My dear Unding, that a poet should acknowledge my existence flatters me exceedingly. But even were you to cease to believe in me, Hieronymus von Munchausen, diplomats would not. You raise your eyebrows: you wonder why? Because to them I am indispensable. That is all there is to it. Existence de jure, from their point of view, is not a whit worse than existence de facto. As you can see, there is far more poetry in diplomatic pacts than in all your valueless verses.”

“You’re joking.”

“Not at all: life, like any ware, is subject to supply and demand. Have newspapers and wars not taught you that? The state of the political stock exchange is such that I may count not only on life, but on flourishing good health. Do not hasten, my friend, to reckon me a ghost and place me on a library shelf. Do not.”

“Well”—the poet grinned, eyeing his tall and angular interlocutor—“if shares in the Munchauseniad are going up, then I, perhaps, am ready to speculate on the rise in prices: up to and including existence. But what interests me is the specific how. I do of course recognize a certain diffusion between fact and fiction, the reality in ‘I’ and the reality in ‘not-I’; but even so, how is it possible that we can sit here and converse without aid of an aural and visual hallucination? I need to know that. If the word ‘friend,’ given me by you, means anything at all, then. . . .”

Munchausen seemed to hesitate.

“A confession? That would be more in the style of Saint Augustine* than Baron Munchausen. But if you insist. . . . Only allow me to escape here and there—I cannot do otherwise—from the trammels of truth into free phantasms. So then, to begin: Picture a gigantic clockface of the centuries, the tip of its black hand moving from division to division, from date to date; straddling the tip of that hand, one may discern sailing by below: 1789, 1830, 1848, 1871,* and on, and on. Indeed, my head still reels from the racing years. Now imagine, my good friend, your humble servant gripping with his knees that same clock hand suspended over the changing years (and everything in them) as he whirls around the clockface of time. Incidentally, the pegs in my wardrobe, which I forgot to lock, will help you to see my then self more clearly and particularly: my pigtail, my waistcoat, and my sword, suspended over the clockface, jouncing about with the jolts. The jolts of clock hand against numbers become more and more violent: at 1789 I squeeze my knees harder; at 1871 I have to grip the clock hand with both my arms and my legs; but by 1914 the numbers’ shocks have become unbearable; banging into 1917 and 1918, I lose my balance and go tumbling head over heels, down.

“Coming toward me through the air I see the mottles—obscure at first, then more distinct—of oceans and continents. I stretch out a hand, seeking support: air, nothing but air. Suddenly I feel a blow to my palms, I clench my fingers, and in my hands I have a steeple—imagine that—an ordinary church steeple. A few feet above my head is a weathercock. I shinny up. A gentle breeze is batting the weathercock this way and that—and I may calmly behold the earth spread out beneath my soles some twenty or thirty yards below: radial patterns of paths, flights of marble steps, clipped columns of trees, translucent hyperboles of fountain jets—it all seems somehow familiar,* seen not for the first time. I slide down the steeple and, coming to rest on a chimney pot, survey the scene: Versailles, but of course! Versailles, and I am on the roof of the Trianon. But how to get down? The springy billows of smoke bounding past my back suggest a simple and easy means. I remind you: if now I have solidified, so to speak, and amassed a certain weight, then on that first inaugural day I was not much heavier than smoke. I plunged into the smoky flows, like a diver into water and, gently sinking, found myself by and by at the bottom, that is, casting metaphors aside, in a fireplace—exactly like this one.” A patent-leather pump poked the cast-iron fender inside which the flames had gone out.