Overnight to Many Different Cities_The Palace at Four A.M.

The Palace at Four A.M.

My fathers kingdom was and is, all authorities agree, large. To walk border to border east-west, the traveler must budget no less than seventeen days. Its name is Ho, the Confucian term for harmony. Confucianism was an interest of the first ruler (a strange taste in our part of the world), and when hed cleared his expanse of field and forest of his enemies, two centuries ago, he indulged himself in an hommage to the great Chinese thinker, much to the merriment of some of our staider neighbors, whose domains were proper Luftlunds and Dolphinlunds. We have an economy based upon truffles, in which our forests are spectacularly rich, and electricity, which we were exporting when other countries still read by kerosene lamp. Our army is the best in the region, every man a colonel -- the subtle secret of my fathers rule, if the truth be known. In this land every priest is a bishop, every ambulance-chaser a robed justice, every peasant a corporation and every street-corner shouter Kant himself. My fathers genius was to promote his subjects, male and female, across the board, ceaselessly; the people of Ho warm themselves forever in the sun of Achievement. I was the only man in the kingdom who thought himself a donkey.

-- from the Autobiography

I am writing to you, Hannahbella, from a distant country. I daresay you remember it well. The King encloses the opening pages of his autobiography. He is most curious as to what your response to them will be. He has labored mightily over their composition, working without food, without sleep, for many days and nights.

The King has not been, in these months, in the best of spirits. He has read your article and declares himself to be very much impressed by it. He begs you, prior to publication in this country, to do him the great favor of changing the phrase "two disinterested and impartial arbiters" on page thirty-one to "malign elements under the ideological sway of still more malign elements." Otherwise, he is delighted. He asks me to tell you that your touch is as adroit as ever.

Early in the autobiography (as you see; we encounter the words: "My mother the Queen made a mirror pie, a splendid thing the size of a poker table. . ." The King wishes to know if poker tables are in use in faraway lands, and whether the reader in such places would comprehend the dimensions of the pie. He continues: ". . . in which reflections from the kitchen chandelier exploded when the crew rolled it from the oven. We were kneeling side-by-side, peering into the depths of a new-made mirror pie, when my mother said to me, or rather her celestial image said to my dark, heavy-haired one, Get out. I cannot bear to look upon your donkey face again. "

The King wishes to know, Hannahbella, whether this passage seems to you tainted by self-pity, or is, rather, suitably dispassionate.

He walks up and down the small room next to his bedchamber, singing your praises. The decree having to do with your banishment will be rescinded, he says, the moment you agree to change the phrase "two disinterested and impartial arbiters" to "malign elements," etc. This I urge you to do with all speed.

The King has not been at his best. Peace, he says, is an unnatural condition. The country is prosperous, yes, and he understands that the people value peace, that they prefer to spin out their destinies in placid, undisturbed fashion. But his destiny, he says, is to alter the map of the world. He is considering several new wars, small ones, he says, small but interesting, complex, dicey, even. He would very much like to consult with you about them. He asks you to change, on page forty-four of your article, the phrase "egregious usurpations" to "symbols of benign transformation." Please initial the change on the proofs, so that historians will not accuse us of bowdlerization.

Your attention is called to the passage in the pages I send which runs as follows: "I walked out of the castle at dusk, not even the joy of a new sunrise to console me, my shaving kit with its dozen razors (although I shaved a dozen times a day, the head was still a donkeys) banging against the Walther .22 in my rucksack. After a time I was suddenly quite tired. I lay down under a hedge by the side of the road. One of the bushes above me had a shred of black cloth tied to it, a sign, in our country, that the place was haunted (but my heads enough to frighten any ghost)." Do you remember that shred of black cloth, Hannahbella? "I ate a slice of my mothers spinach pie and considered my situation. My princeliness would win me an evening, perhaps a fortnight, at this or that nobles castle in the vicinity, but my experience of visiting had taught me that neither royal blood nor novelty of aspect prevailed for long against a hosts natural preference for folk with heads much like his own. Should I en-zoo myself? Volunteer for a traveling circus? Attempt the stage? The question was most vexing.

"I had not wiped the last crumbs of the spinach pie from my whiskers when something lay down beside me, under the hedge.

" Whats this? I said.

" Soft, said the new arrival, dont be afraid, I am a bogle, let me abide here for the night, your back is warm and thats a mercy.

" Whats a bogle? I asked, immediately fetched, for the creature was small, not at all frightening to look upon and clad in female flesh, something I do not hold in low esteem.

" A bogle, said the tiny one, with precision, is not a black dog.