Free A Perfect Vacuum by Stanislaw Lem Page B

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