Imperium (11 page)

Had someone from the capital come, he would have had to interrogate Makeli, for young Makeli, his honor salvaged by Aueckens’s death, was a witness to the episode—but nothing, absolutely nothing, is to be learned from him. The boy’s love for his master, August Engelhardt, grew ad infinitum thereafter, however, and the evening reading sessions, which had been canceled due to the sodomite’s short visit, were now finally resumed. There was indeed no shortage whatsoever of interesting books—after Dickens, it was time for the spirited tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann.

VIII

Only once more did Engelhardt leave the Bismarck Archipelago before everything went down the drain, so to speak. He had begun to consider the possibility of no longer paying his debts because he of course had to begin rejecting the complex, pernicious structure of the capitalist system somewhere. A pen friend from Heidelberg who led the more-than-gloomy existence of a completely impoverished adjunct scholar at that famous university confided in him that there was a young German man quite near Engelhardt who had set about translating into reality a similar—at least intellectually related—world of thought, someone living on a Pacific island, too, emulating the anorexia mirabilis of one Blessed Columba of Rieti who ingested no nourishment, none at all, except the golden light of the sun. The person in question lived on the Fiji Islands, and wasn’t that just a stone’s throw away, and wouldn’t Engelhardt like to visit there one day?

Well, now, highly interesting, Engelhardt thought, putting aside the letter and opening a somewhat dated but still quite usable atlas; Fiji lay as far away from the protectorate as Australia, albeit not in a southerly, but in an easterly direction. One would perhaps be able to travel by way of the New Hebrides. As his fingers traced the route across the blue-inked expanse of the Pacific Ocean, he shoved his right thumb into his mouth and sucked on it, unawares. This quirk had been driven out of him with heavy beatings when he was a child, and he had discovered it for himself again,
herkos odonton
, as the tried-and-true expedient of a technique of meditation known only to him. Whenever he sank into a void within himself, sucking his thumb allowed him to block out the environment almost completely, indeed, to withdraw to such a degree that he was protected from each and every irritation surging onto the shores of his consciousness as if from a voracious moth by a particularly finely woven mosquito net.

And so he put on his lap-lap, filled a sack with coconuts, sailed over to Herbertsh
ö
he, and inquired after the arrival of the French mail boat to Port Vila, which coincidentally, as if his journey were indeed part of some cosmic plan, was to reach New Pomerania the next day (the Messageries Maritimes ran this route only twice per year exactly). He borrowed the fare for the cheapest ticket from the postmaster, who was always well disposed toward him, and embarked the following day, barefoot, on the
G
é
rard de Nerval
, unrolling his coir mat on the quarterdeck in the very same manner as those natives who, bashful and almost invisible, had to undertake a voyage aboard the great ships of the white men. His intention to slip aboard the
G
é
rard de Nerval
secretly so as not to have to touch any more impure money he had quickly discarded.

The few Frenchmen who did not completely ignore him thought him an artist wallowing in primitivism, a German version of their Gauguin, ergo a thoroughly laughable figure who—and here it became apparent that the Gallic petit bourgeois was capable of displaying greater tolerance than his dark, Teutonic counterpart hailing from the other side of the Rhine—nevertheless had a raison d’
ê
tre, even if it were only to see the crusty old burgher validated (that is to say, themselves). Frenchmen per se sympathized quite instinctively with figures at the margins of society. Even if they feared innovation, insofar as it heralded a superior culture and the concomitant obsolescence of their own mediocrity, they did not necessarily stand inimically opposed to it, but instead regarded it with expectance, amusement, and by all means with curiosity, too. The French might have been glaring snobs in their autistic elegance, but since their culture defined itself through language, through
la francophonie
, and not as in Germany through the mythical rustlings of affinity by blood, they appeared more heterogeneous than the Germans, for whom there were no shades of difference, no nuances, few gradations of tone.

Engelhardt did not even do them the favor of dining in the salons, instead waiting until darkness fell and then consuming a few coconuts from his sack. Afterward, he lay lengthwise in a corner of the quarterdeck, looked out onto the expansive black-green sea mirroring the moonlight, and, after a few hours of monotonous staring, gave himself over to his dreams, which had recently seemed to him ever more menacing and eerie.

Thus he did not hear the songs of the passengers who sent champagne-heavy chansons drifting off across the Pacific Ocean deep into the night, indeed almost until daybreak; on the festively lit
G
é
rard de Nerval
, the drinking was even more rampant than it had been once on the
Prinz Waldemar
. The only intoxicant running through Engelhardt’s body, though, was that milky-clear virginal honey, that opal squeezed into liquid form,
Cocos nucifera
. And if he had long ago decided never again to allow himself to be inspirited by alcohol, the coconut milk put him in such a state of arousal that he seemed to perceive, even while sleeping, that his blood was being successively replaced by said coconut milk. Indeed, it seemed to him as if it were no longer red, animal lifeblood streaming through his veins, but the fundamentally more highly developed vegetal nectar of his ideal fruit, which would one day enable him to transcend his current stage of evolution. It cannot be said with certainty whether his diet or even his increasing loneliness was to be regarded as the cause of his gradually budding psychological disorder; at the very least, however, the exclusive consumption of coconuts exacerbated an irritability that had always existed in him, an unrest in the face of certain, putatively unalterable, vexing external circumstances.

Now, while Engelhardt was traveling eastward on the French steamer, it was decided, after a very brief discussion over in Herbertsh
ö
he, to dismantle the capital of German New Guinea and rebuild it not twelve miles farther up the coast, still in Blanche Bay, at a place called Rabaul, in close proximity to the volcano. The entrance to the harbor was in danger of filling up with sand sooner or later, there perhaps being some undersea current that washed tons of silt into the bay every day. At any rate, Herbertsh
ö
he ceased to exist from one day to the next. Arrangements were made to carry all the buildings through the jungle; they had been neatly disassembled, piled in stacks of planks and boxes of nails, and furnished with precise blueprints for reconstruction. An antlike procedure orchestrated conscientiously by Hahl’s deputy played out between the old and new capital, a busy coming and going during which two indigenous porters were struck and killed by falling trees and one unfortunate soul was bitten on the bare foot by a death adder because he had not wanted to drop an antique piece of furniture he was to carry through the jungle to Rabaul. The German ladies drove with the lone automobile. Everything was rebuilt nimbly and with great care just as it had stood in Herbertsh
ö
he: the two hotels, the governor’s residence, the trading posts, the piers. Even a glorious new wooden church, which looked exactly as the one just dismantled (except for a portrait of Kaiser Wilhelm II, hung mistakenly with his face to the wall), was erected and quickly consecrated by the local pastor. Emma’s Villa Gunantambu, too, was relocated to Rabaul; still, many were initially unable to grow accustomed to going down Chinatownward to the left rather than right, and they missed trees that had stood in particular places—indeed, it was exceedingly disorienting.

En route, Engelhardt very nearly ran into Christian Sl
ü
tter, with whom he had once played chess in the Hotel F
ü
rst Bismarck in Herbertsh
ö
he. After the
G
é
rard de Nerval
had moored in Port Vila and Engelhardt had transferred himself onto a British postal ship bound for the Fiji Islands, Sl
ü
tter, though it was not really consistent with his character (or perhaps precisely for that reason), had brawled in front of a dive with an American Baptist who had rudely kicked aside a native standing in his way. The preacher had been a snake-eyed six-footer in a dark, heavily stained robe with hands like steam hammers. One punch hit Sl
ü
tter in the face on the left, one on the right. Dazed, he sailed to the ground. It was nothing to speak of, just a brawl like any other in a harbor town, but for the fact that the man of God, in a flying rage, drew from his boot a stiletto to stick into the belly of the groaning German lying on the ground. Just then, an iron rod came whistling from the side; the native whom Sl
ü
tter had wanted to defend had stepped in, picked it up off the ground, and swung it around for all he was worth; it caught the Yankee behind his right ear. Sl
ü
tter escaped the tumult by crawling behind a building and waiting until the local gendarmes who had come running had withdrawn again, hauling off the native offender. In the meantime, Sl
ü
tter had dragged into his hideout the irrefutable proof of guilt, that fatal iron with the bloody clumps of the preacher’s hair, lain himself down on it, and had then fallen asleep, exhausted, where we shall let him be for the moment, until he surfaces again.

At first glance, the little town of Suva on Fiji resembled Herbertsh
ö
he (or rather its new likeness, Rabaul), though it was populated by hustlers, drunkards, pirates, Methodists, beachcombers, and other unsavory characters who had chosen this little British colony Fiji, from all the islands in the Pacific Ocean, as the place to make their trouble—God alone knows why.

The light-eater and practitioner of prana, Erich Mittenzwey from Berlin, had meanwhile settled on a nameless neighboring Fijian isle—he had been receiving pilgrims and disciples for months—and when Engelhardt alighted there, it seemed to him as if he were looking in a fun-house mirror at his own future colony of cocovores. He was bidden welcome, and, in the fallacious assumption that he was likely a devotee of Mittenzwey’s, he was assigned a place to sleep in one of the rattan huts that had been erected by the dozen along the little bay. Everything seemed strictly organized and arranged in the German manner; Engelhardt watched with amazement as a young man swept the beach, lost in thought.

Mittenzwey himself, not especially emaciated, made his appearance after midday; he took a seat on a throne-like structure fashioned of bamboo, disrobed except for a kerchief-sized cloth that covered his private parts, and under various contortions that Engelhardt interpreted as freely improvised yogic poses began to open his mouth wide, snapping like a carp so as to absorb sunlight into his person. The small crowd of pilgrims sitting at his feet marveled, and they threw themselves to the ground, imitating him, attempting to drink the sunbeams. Engelhardt, who felt a fathomless fury rise up in him, took a seat in the sand next to a young Indian (Mittenzwey had again disappeared into his hut) and asked him what exactly was going on here.

Well, for over half a year, the fakir Mittenzwey had ingested neither food nor water—only the essence of light. This had been common practice in Europe during the Middle Ages, but Mittenzwey had refined the discipline with Indian philosophy here on the Fiji Islands, which were populated in large part by descendants of the wage laborers who had immigrated from northern India. In principle, the point was to store up prana, that stuff that surrounds us, by means of certain breathing techniques: in short, to transform ether into nutrients. It of course required a maximum of concentration and willpower, not everyone would be successful, one needed to enter a trance using certain meditative techniques acquired over many years for the world spirit (which conveniently rode on the light rays) to begin to permeate the body. Yes, and in order to pay homage to him, one brought the master gifts of money, watches, and jewelry, which he stored openly in his hut to visualize for himself at all times the transience of the world and its vain frippery.

Engelhardt had heard enough; he hadn’t come across such skulduggery in ages. He arose, walked up the beach to Mittenzwey’s dwelling, shoved the rattan curtain aside without knocking or otherwise announcing himself, and entered that most sacred sanctuary of the Berlin fakir. Mittenzwey and a dark-skinned elder Indian were sitting at a little table and shot up like children caught red-handed, sweeping into the corner, aghast, the various bowls with rice, fruits, and chicken drumsticks; then the two collapsed in a heap. Mittenzwey resignedly buried his forehead in his hands, the Indian stood up and wiped his mouth, and at this moment Engelhardt realized that it was Govindarajan who stood before him, the treacherous Tamil who had once, years ago, lured him into a dark den on the island of Ceylon and then robbed him of his money.

During the brief moment of mutual recognition, Mittenzwey fell to his knees; the German must not betray them to his disciples, for heaven’s sake, it looked worse than it really was, they had without a doubt displayed fraudulent intentions, but no one had been forced to give them their valuables, this had simply begun one morning, then the arriving devotees had brought more and more presents, and giving them back had become impossible, plain and simple. Then Mittenzwey offered Engelhardt two handfuls of jewelry and valuable watches from a chest hastily pulled up and opened, and Govindarajan asked what sort of odd splotches Engelhardt had there, down on his legs.