Imperium (13 page)

The next morning had sprung up bright and clear over the craggy volcanic range of Blanche Bay; at one stroke, it had become day, and by six-thirty in the morning it was already as hot as the inside of a German bakery. Eight black men had heaved the piano aboard the little launch that normally ran between the capital and Mioko, and while the remaining clouds from the waning night vaporized in the morning sun, L
ü
tzow boarded the ship he had personally rented, sweating out the liqueurs he had been treated to the previous evening, and sailed over to Kabakon with crapulous nerves and a trembling hand on the wobbly moored piano that he intended to present to Engelhardt as a dowry.

Now a series of gay, unburdened days really did begin. L
ü
tzow, who always carried a tuning fork with him in his luggage, immediately set himself to the task of liberating the piano—which had been towed by the natives into the library (they had unceremoniously removed a wooden side wall from the house and then simply nailed it back to the house’s corner posts)—from the discordant notes that had emanated from it for years. He initiated the instrument’s healing process by striking the pure A on his fork and stooping down deep into the innards of the action; he felt about an out-of-tune piano as a painter would a palette lacking the colors red and blue.

Lying naked on the veranda, Engelhardt, who was enjoying his daily sunbath, listened with a smile to the singly struck notes drifting outside and to L
ü
tzow, who cheerily whistled all the while. He felt a great and profound respect for artists and their abilities; the fact that he had never been able to muster up either the talent or the discipline to create something like real art provoked a feeling that almost bordered on envy. While squinting his eyes at the horizon, he pondered whether his stay on Kabakon might not indeed be regarded as a work of art. Suddenly the thought occurred to him that possibly he himself was his own artistic artifact and that perhaps the paintings and sculptures exhibited in museums or the performances of famous operas constituted a completely outmoded conception of art—indeed, that only through his, Engelhardt’s, existence was the divide between art and life bridged. He smiled again, dispatching this delectable, solipsistic fancy into a secret and remote corner of his edifice of ideas, sat up, and opened a coconut while inspecting the wounds on his legs, which, oozing, had grown ever larger in recent weeks. Dabbing the spots in question first with coconut milk, later with salt water, and then with an iodine tincture, he soon forgot about them.

Engelhardt and L
ü
tzow, who quickly developed a heartfelt affinity for each other without mentioning it, explored the isle together, visited the islanders’ villages, and took part as honored guests in all sorts of festivities and dance presentations. In return, a chief and his children were permitted to visit the two Germans in their house—for Engelhardt had decided that L
ü
tzow would immediately move into his home and need not, as the unfortunate Aueckens had, complete a probationary period over in the rattan hut—and, under the watchful gaze of young Makeli, witness there the piano playing with which the new arrival delighted those present.

L
ü
tzow’s slender hands were observed attentively. They danced back and forth on the cracked ivory keys, managing to elicit the most glorious cascades of sound from the now exquisitely tuned instrument. The chief insisted on stepping up to the piano during the performance itself and depressing individual keys with his pinkie (for this finger seemed to him the most elegant), the sound of which, however, resulted in considerable dissonance within the overall structure of the compositions L
ü
tzow had chosen to perform. But it was all the same to them! Engelhardt and L
ü
tzow laughed and were happy not to be in Rabaul, but among people whose untrained ears might have been unable to distinguish Liszt from Satie, but who nevertheless felt music to be something of extraordinary beauty.

Makeli, whose German skills were making unusual progress (Engelhardt now read every evening from B
ü
chner’s
Lenz
, and after that from Keller’s
Green Henry
), reported to them that over in his village the chief had arranged for a life-sized piano to be constructed for him from rattan, and in the village square, under the starry night sky, accompanied by the humming of hundreds of cicadas, he had begun theatrically imitating L
ü
tzow’s hand movements on the rattan keyboard (which had been painted in black and white with charcoals and chalk paste) while ardently singing, quite melodiously and almost wholly impromptu.

In those days, however, Makeli also told of a hole in the jungle, a pit twenty feet deep wreathed with sharpened bamboo stakes, at the bottom of which venomous snakes writhed: cobras and the like, vipers, too—even an ancient death adder lived down there in the damp darkness. For generations, the hole had been excavated at a location that was taboo for the tribe to approach. Only the chief and his deputy, as well as a healer who spoke in tongues, were permitted to stand at the edge of the depression and look down inside. Now and again, Makeli said, they would throw a morsel of bristled pig down, very rarely a live dog.

L
ü
tzow’s numerous sicknesses, meanwhile, were blown away as if by a tropical breeze. His joints neither pained him, nor did he feel that aggressive pressure behind his eyes that had accompanied him for years in Germany and that he, resignedly, had understood as a permanent part of himself. Sniffles and asthmatic attacks no longer cropped up. He was, admittedly, not yet capable of walking around totally naked like his host Engelhardt, but he climbed the trunks of palms at least as nimbly as Makeli to bring down the coconut fruits; breaking them open on stones and separating the shell from the meat with a coconut rasper was enjoyable daily work for him. He fell so in love with the coconut that, shortly after his arrival, he began living off it exclusively.

Engelhardt felt only a minimal speck of envy. Oh, no, he was quite extraordinarily proud of his new arrival, and together they now wrote letters to various vegetarian publications in Germany in which they extolled the nuts: the fruits consumed in the morning, shortly before sunrise, differed so greatly in taste, they wrote, from those broken open in the afternoon that it was as if one were comparing apples and bananas. The nuts of February bore absolutely nothing in common with those picked in April; one might as well compare wheat bran and spinach. They lost themselves in ever more complicated hymns of praise to their sustenance of choice, ending the letters with the suggestion that they now experienced the milk and the meat of the coconuts synesthetically: some nuts reminded them of the festive, mournful sound of Mahler’s symphonies, others of the entire blue color spectrum; others, in turn, felt angular on the palate, heart-shaped, or even octagonal.

The relevant newspapers at home published these letters all too gladly. L
ü
tzow’s descriptions of having established a naked Communist utopia under palm trees while subduing the apparent libertinage with the benevolent morality of the tropical sun’s salubrious glow and the incomparably succulent and practical coconut—one ought to visit quickly since one was healed of every disease of civilization in Engelhardt’s Order of the Sun—mesmerized certain circles. The
Berliner Illustrirte
even published a caricature under the headline
Der Kokosnu
ß
apostel
that showed a very muscular Engelhardt clothed only in a palm frond, a scepter in one hand, in the other an orb in the shape of a coconut, black people dressed in the European manner worshipping at his feet. The famous musician’s letters, which first appeared in
Der Naturarzt
and
Vegetarische Warte
, were now reprinted widely, albeit with introductory commentaries that the rather well-known Berlin musician Max L
ü
tzow had gone off the deep end and followed a lunatic into the South Seas, and hereinafter, if you please, was the epistolary proof.

After reading this free advertising, quite a few salvation-seekers started toward German New Guinea: passages on ships were booked, Engelhardt’s booklet
A Carefree Future
was unexpectedly reprinted one, two, and even three times, and various grocers in the Reich were urged to please stock fresh coconuts. For a brief time, a popular song in which a clever melody was accompanied by witty lyrics circulated throughout Berlin; children and youngsters sang that ditty about coconuts, man-eaters, and naked Germans in the schoolyards of the capital until one was no longer safe from the obtrusively catchy tune—not in streetcars, nor before the opera houses, nor in the reception halls of the ministries. But the fuss vanished just as quickly as it had come; the carousel of fads turned too fast, and
Cocos nucifera
was replaced by excessive consumption of cocaine; one season later, hot, aerated maize, called
popcorn
, was all the rage. Meanwhile, visitors were already en route to the Pacific protectorate and, once docked in Rabaul and spat out by the respective Imperial Post ship, were standing around more or less destitute.

Hotel Director Hellwig sent those hoping for cheap accommodation over to the Hotel Deutscher Hof, whose director, an Alsatian who was usually heavily intoxicated by eight in the morning, in turn sent them back to Hellwig straightaway, a loaded revolver in his hand. And so the bizarre, half-naked throng, who hadn’t understood at all that Rabaul was not Kabakon, camped in the meadows of the little town and on the beach of Blanche Bay. Under sailing tarps they had hung up between palm trees they slept, covered only in towels, defenseless against the swirling swarms of mosquitoes that lusted after their sweet European blood. Fever pounced on them; after one month, the little clinic was out of quinine powder; in the second, the first visitor died without ever having laid eyes on Kabakon. He was buried next to Heinrich Aueckens, whose plain, unadorned grave no one had made an effort to prettify with fresh flowers. And with every steamship, one or two new unsuspecting souls came and joined the troupe—such that soon nearly two dozen young Germans were living in direst poverty at the edge of the town.

Governor Hahl, now fully healed from the blackwater fever, back in the new capital Rabaul, and worried that a new slum district populated by Germans was forming on his watch, walked with physicians Wind and Hagen down to the new arrivals (the meadows had been given up in favor of a campsite on the beach over which a light sea breeze wafted) to have a serious chat with them. There, in the marsh of sandy sludge at ebb tide, between hermit crabs and mangroves, the doctors and the governor were met with an appalling, almost pagan sight; the heavily emaciated young people loitered listlessly in the shadows of shredded tarps, the ends of which blew back and forth; some were buck-naked; it smelled vaguely of human feces that hadn’t been carried completely out to sea by the daily tide; others had fallen asleep, exhausted, while reading anarchist treatises; still others spooned white, slimy meat from halved coconuts into mouths rimmed by unkempt beards.

The representatives of civilization stood among them in light-colored suits. Hahl, who was unable to fend off a certain intellectual sympathy for the young people (on the return voyage from Singapore, along with a French-language volume of Mallarm
é
’s poetry and the scores of several Bach cantatas, he had in fact internalized Engelhardt’s
A Carefree Future
), immediately directed the physicians to attend to the worst cases, to have them washed with freshwater and admitted to the little clinic. If beds were no longer available there, they must requisition rooms for the rest of that sad lot in the two hotels, which were mostly empty. And so it happened that Hotel Director Hellwig saw himself unable to refuse Governor Hahl his request to quarter a good dozen of the wastrels in the fastidiously cleaned rooms of the Hotel F
ü
rst Bismarck, cursing himself for not having accommodated those scoundrels two months ago; at least then they would not have been sick and dirty. When afterward the rest of the young people were placed in the rival Hotel Deutscher Hof, its owner fled into his administrative chambers, locked the door from inside, and got so drunk off the contents of a crate of Dutch gin that he was not seen again for three weeks perhaps.

An emissary was dispatched to Engelhardt from the governor’s office to Kabakon, carrying the message in a rattan bag that he should report to the capital for a discussion in good time. Since his missionary work had apparently borne overripe fruit, though no one in Rabaul knew what to do with the newly arrived salvation-seekers, the question was whether he might be prepared to defray the expenses his private mythology had incurred, primarily for lodging (all this in Hahl’s honestly friendly tone, drafted without a trace of irony). At this, Engelhardt lapsed into a state of lethargy; proclamations from official channels that did not work to his advantage were so crippling that he was no longer capable of action of any kind. He handed the letter to L
ü
tzow, who skimmed it and then shouted, Good gracious, but this is all quite splendid—they’d sail over to Rabaul together, pay the hotel bills, and fetch the unfortunate souls over to Kabakon, who had, after all, traveled to the protectorate on his account. They would thus be able to admit several new adepts into the Order of the Sun at one stroke; and wasn’t this ultimately his, Engelhardt’s, mission—the effective dissemination of his wonderful idea?

Engelhardt scratched himself pensively on one of the now-open wounds on his shin and shoved his thumb in his mouth. Although he had written a multitude of advertising letters and sent them all over the world, he hadn’t, to be honest, ever reckoned with the fact that a fair number of unknown persons would actually set out to visit him. Sure, a handful of friends and like-minded people, perhaps, but Hahl had written in his letter of a good twenty-five men and women. Engelhardt was unsure how to deal with them (indeed, they weren’t happy black islanders who would let themselves be impressed by something as completely ephemeral as
mana
) and was unsure whether they would accept his authority or whether they would unmask him, reveal him as that which he took himself to be in the secret chambers of his heart, known only to him: a repressed phony. He was certainly glad, though, that L
ü
tzow was with him and encouraged him. Alone, he would have simply holed up and ignored the letter and all the consequences that arose from it with his own peculiar cowardice.