But neither “-chen” nor “-lein” stuck. Then, listening to the rhythm of his footsteps, he began turning assonances and rhythms over in his mind, a familiar exercise that reduced his external world to the radius of his fedora—and a mute keyboard of words began fidgeting its keys.

The shock of someone’s shoulder against his shoulder upset a line: Dropping rhymes, the poet raised his eyes and looked around. He had gone well past his entrance. Suddenly he felt—like heavy weights tied to his knees—his exhaustion. Unding mulled the irksome sum: two times two hundred made a dead loss of four hundred steps—his only reward.

Ernst Unding was hardly a regular reader of the morning papers. But after his parting conversation with Munchausen, he happened to see a three-line item about a member of the diplomatic corps, Baron von M., having left on the express—on some mysterious errand—for London. Then a week later the large type of a dispatch announced the successful agency in influential English circles of von M. The name’s remaining letters seemed to have vanished in the London fog. Unding put the paper aside with a smile. Further reports went past him: he caught cold and took to his bed where he lay oblivious of events for five or six weeks. When he had recovered strength enough to creep to the casement and open it, he met a sunny blast of spring air. From below, ricocheting off walls, came the rivalrous voices of newspaper boys. Leaning over the sill, Unding caught first the end, then the beginning, then the whole cry:

“Extra! Extra! Baron Munchausen on Karl Marx!”

“Munchausen on . . .”

The wind began to blow. The convalescent closed the window and, breathing hard, let himself down into a chair. His lips articulated the soundless words: “Here we go.”

•

Meanwhile, Baron Munchausen, safely arrived in London, was being received, as he put it, with extreme solicitude by the local fogs. The fogs served him humbly and faithfully. He could fill heads full of them more deftly than an expert milkmaid decanting her ware into canisters.

“Horses and voters,” the baron liked to say among friends, “if you do not put blinkers on them, they will throw you into the nearest ditch. I have always admired Teniers’s* technique of allowing black to become white and white to grade into black: through gray. Neutral tones in painting, neutrality in politics, and let the Johns, Günthers, and Pierres go on goggling into the fog: ‘What is that? The moon or a streetlamp?’ ”

However, these paradoxes rarely set foot outside the three-story cottage on Bayswater Road where the baron was now ensconced. He had deliberately chosen a house at some distance from rackety Charing Cross, with its waves upon waves of people. Behind the cottage were the wide and not too noisy streets of Paddington, while from the top-floor windows one could see, beyond the long wrought-iron railings, the silent walks of Kensington Gardens: in winter, the trees were festooned with cottony tufts of snow; in summer, under those same trees, the paths of saffron sand were dappled with shadows like inkblots.

Once settled, Baron Munchausen had the small front garden dug up; in place of the parterre of patterned flowers and greensward running up to the cottage’s red bricks, he planted with his own hands the Turkey-bean seeds he had brought with him in a little antique box at the bottom of his portmanteau. After the first few waterings, the beans twined up the façade with supernatural speed, up and up. If at midday they were curling about the first floor, then by nightfall, when a hazy sickle moon cut through the gray-brown fog, the fine spirals of their green whorls had reached the windows of the third-floor study, where the baron was poring over the minute script in some old notebooks by the light of a green-shaded lamp. The beans went on twirling upward with their thread-like tendrils, obviously aiming for the sickle moon. But Munchausen gave the wanderers a stern look and, wagging an admonitory finger, said, “Again?”*

The next morning dumbstruck passersby could only shake their heads as they contemplated the tremendous trellis that, having twirled right up to the roof, had suddenly sagged with its curly green pendants back down to the ground. From that day forth the house on Bayswater Road was known as Mad Bean Cottage.

Munchausen’s daily round confirmed the words of a popular American author: “The world is managed by people who do about two hours work a day—that is, on the days when they work at all.”* On rising from his bed, the baron usually glanced through the morning papers, drank a cup of coffee mehr weiss,[1] and, having smoked his first pipe, exchanged his carpet slippers for a pair of pointed gaiters. Then he went out for an airing. To start, he went on foot: strolling through green-leaved Kensington from north gate to west. He liked to see the many-colored sunbeams gamboling along the paths, the sand castles, and the tiny tadpoles being read to by superannuated English misses from large-lettered picture books of fairy tales. Curving away to the left were the shimmering gray scales of the Serpentine.