Imperium (18 page)

After having finished the work on the man-pits, Engelhardt had returned home and begun smearing black streaks all over the inner and outer walls of his house (and on the pages of perhaps a good dozen of his books) with pieces of charcoal, then he had sat down on the floor and proceeded to cut off the thumb of his right hand with the pair of scissors. Cauterizing the maimed hand with a flame, he had stored the severed thumb in a coconut shell filled with salt and walked outside and down the stairs onto the beach to wait for the arrival of the launch, the smoke of which had been visible on the horizon for a while now. It is low tide, it will likely rain soon, then again perhaps not.

Having just leapt from the launch, Sl
ü
tter wades straight toward the beach through the almost hip-high sea, deliberately ignoring the little waves breaking on his back, although their force sends him stumbling once or twice. He has slung the revolver over his chest in a holster and forced himself into an automation of mind that prohibits him from seeing Engelhardt—sitting there in the sand, bearded, naked, shriveled—as a human being.

The latter raises his left hand in greeting (concealing the other, maimed one behind his back), suddenly recognizing Sl
ü
tter as the man with whom he played chess one afternoon years ago (until the
solus rex
), the only person at that time who treated him with anything resembling respectful normality. Other faces now rise up before him abruptly, Hahl, Nagel, Govindarajan, Hellwig, L
ü
tzow, Mittenzwey, Halsey, Otto, Aueckens, every one of them eager to humiliate him, indeed, to destroy him with their diseased nature corroded with self-interest, and Engelhardt drops facedown into the sand, and he worships the visitor as if he, Engelhardt, were a Muhammadan bowing reverently toward Mecca.

He is so happy and thankful that that one honorable man is now seeking him out, yes, it’s as if his magical effacement of Swedenborg’s books had wrought this very miracle. With the nine fingers of his hands, he digs in the wet sand before him, despite the infernally tingling thumb stump; Sl
ü
tter, yes, that was his name,
Captain
Sl
ü
tter, absurd that Providence would send him this man of all people, he ardently hopes that Sl
ü
tter has received his captain’s license by now, that everything is squared away, as the sailor says, before it all goes to hell, haha, perhaps he even captains his own ship, he is tickled beyond all measure, alas, he cannot offer him anything, he has been living for, well, for how many years exactly?, quite exclusively off coconuts. (Can Sl
ü
tter tell by looking at him that he’s lying? No, that is completely impossible.) Groveling and with a wet, bleached beard, he lies there stretched out in the sandy ooze, his legs covered in the yellowish black bruises of leprosy, as if he had been repeatedly and cruelly beaten with blunt objects.

Sl
ü
tter hastens to help him up and is shocked at his extremely light weight; it’s as if he were holding a fragile little child in his arms or a dying old man whose skin feels leathery and brittle, like a lizard’s. He notices that Engelhardt’s ears stick out sharply from his skull, they, too, fragile and transparent, as if made of paper—and a strong feeling of pity overwhelms him. He puts his arm around Engelhardt’s shoulders in support, accompanies him back to his house near the palm trees over there, and in doing so forgets that he has come to shoot him.

Twilit dimness reigns in the interior of the dwelling, thin rays of sunlight pierce through cracks in the wall, slicing every which way through the room. There is a coy stink of rotting fruit. Sl
ü
tter, whose eyes only slowly grow accustomed to this, does not immediately see the young native boy sitting with a smile in the library on a rough-hewn chair. It is Makeli, who is playing with the scissors. Where are all these flies coming from? There are hundreds of them. Sl
ü
tter is about to push open the drawn shutters as Engelhardt, mumbling incoherently, tampers with a bookshelf as if looking for something. Sl
ü
tter pours a glass of water from an earthenware jug, sniffs it, grimaces, and puts it back down; the water exudes a putrid, moldy odor.

Tugging at his beard, Engelhardt begins to lament that not a living soul is working on the plantation anymore, these lazy simpletons have all returned to their villages, the ill-mannered Tolai chief has probably ordered that he be denied their service, after everything he’s done for them, this is the thanks he gets, only young Makeli here has stayed with him, although he can’t go back to his village anymore anyway since he’s become a real German who speaks fluent German, they don’t want him there anymore, and why would they, he most recently read him the second part of
Faust
, Poe, and even the harrowing ending of Ibsen’s
Ghosts
. Engelhardt bursts into tears, he begins to twitch, his whole body is shaking. Makeli cannot help but sneer and puts his hands over his mouth. Sl
ü
tter sees that the boy is missing a middle and an index finger.

The captain, who senses a vague but still distinctly immediate danger in the room, suggests they might go over and inspect the plantations, at which Engelhardt instantly ceases to cry and exclaims that this is an excellent idea, Makeli and Sl
ü
tter ought to go ahead, nature will speak to them outside, he will come after them presently, he just has to nibble on something quickly since he feels so endlessly weak. Sl
ü
tter and the native boy step out into the blinding sunlight.

Engelhardt really does want to explain himself to his guest, he wants to convey to him everything he has realized, really everything, but now the proper moment has passed. And so he keeps mumbling to himself, pacing back and forth in his dwelling: even Nietzsche ate his own excretions toward the end, after his breakdown in Turin, it’s the great circle, the M
ö
bius strip, the wheel of fire, the Kalachakra—only Nietzsche in his benightedness wasn’t able to think the matter through to its conclusion, he never had to experience these continuous years of hunger; Engelhardt is here among unfortunate cannibals who have evolved away from their natural, God-given instinct, dissuaded from it by the missionaries’ blather, yet everything is actually so incredibly simple; it is not the coconut that is the actual sustenance of man, but man himself. The original man of the Golden Age lived off other men, ergo, the one who becomes godlike, the one who returns to Elysium refers to himself as:
God-eater
.
Devourer of God
. And Engelhardt reaches for the coconut shell wherein he has kept his severed thumb, carefully brushes off the salt, and bites into it, crunching the bone to pieces with his teeth.

The tops of the palms sway, tousled and scruffy in the light wind of the afternoon. A bird of paradise trots back into the underbrush when it sees the two coming. Makeli shows Sl
ü
tter the places where the coconuts were once harvested. Now of course no one cares about them anymore. It is a shame what’s happening, but the mind-set, indeed, the unshakable attitude of his people is just like that. They simply leave everything where it lies, there is no responsibility, they are like children who grow weary of a toy. Sl
ü
tter marvels at young Makeli, who has become German to such a degree that he judges his race as a colonial official might. And here, the coconuts, that’s what Engelhardt has been living off this whole time? Nothing else? And the young man?

Makeli smiles coyly. The bearded white man in his uniform with the pistol is quite obviously not a bad man, not a monster as that Mr. Hobbes, in his
Leviathan
, showed man in general to be, but he is still an intruder, and like every intruder a danger. He, Makeli, drove away the musician, but it took a year, and he cannot wait so long for this one here.

Sl
ü
tter walks over to a palm, touches its trunk, lost in thought, and looks out onto the ocean. He sees Engelhardt approaching from some distance. Sl
ü
tter and Makeli are to come along, he, Engelhardt, has something interesting to show them in the jungle, he says, gesturing toward a clearing. They go in together, Engelhardt humming a cheerful melody and mincing before them—as his naked buttocks, reduced by malnourishment to something resembling cowpats, flap slackly back and forth—until they reach a spot that seems familiar to him; he drifts off to the left of the beaten path and indicates to Sl
ü
tter that he ought to please walk in front. Makeli lets him by and begins to giggle uncontrollably.

Suspecting that he is in grave mortal danger, Sl
ü
tter draws his revolver and declares that he has been sent to kill Engelhardt; they have, shall we say, grown weary of him over in the capital. But he has no intention whatsoever of doing it. Sl
ü
tter points the revolver upward and shoots several times into the air. An earsplitting arpeggio of fluttering birds, complaining macaques, and hissing lizards fills the jungle. Engelhardt and Makeli stand frozen in place.

At this moment, Engelhardt sees twilight racing down upon him though it is still as bright as day. He sees the fading traces of the stars, he is standing on a wooded hill quite close to a city that has been abandoned for countless eons, the double moon rises orange-red and sallow on the horizon, that cozy little twin star of the
harmonia caelestis
; he believes himself to be in Arcadia and suddenly knows that his enigmatic vision has never been Kabakon, but the tapestry of his dreamworld, revolving and expanding into infinity. His certainty is the retching he feels in the face of his own birth. Highly developed species on other planets, he now knows, always behave like predators.

Engelhardt embraces his erstwhile murderer, kisses and caresses his hands, assuring him over and over again how thankful he is to him, something has now gotten sorted out in his head again, this wonderful clemency is an expression of cosmic destiny, indeed, his gratitude is an inexhaustible and immeasurable Fibonacci sequence. He’s thrown out his Swedenborg, as a matter of fact. Crossed out and thrown out. Everything has to go. Bergson is the only one whom one might still be able to read, although he, too, has disqualified himself on account of his Judaism. And the cowardly order to murder him? Hahl probably gave it, Hahl being a Jew as well, he expected nothing else from this people, in all likelihood Hahl blackmailed him, hadn’t he, Sl
ü
tter should just admit as much, there’s no shame in it, this sordid governor-philosopher is an insidious crook for whom every means is justified to see his disgusting aims achieved.

It’s true, Engelhardt had unexpectedly turned into an anti-Semite; like most of his contemporaries, like all members of his race, he had sooner or later come to see in the existence of the Jews a scapegoat, tried and true, for each and every wrong suffered. The nervous breakdown wreaked on him by the leprosy had little to do with this; there was no causal correlation between his disease-induced irritability and that hatred of the Jews. Nonetheless, it blusters forth jauntily out of him: how much blame the people of Moses had brought upon themselves in his eyes; the philosophical machinations by certain charlatans that had made this or that mistaken path possible in the first place; that there had been conspiracies against him at the highest level, indeed, it was a Zionist plot that had been hatched, the King of England was involved, Hahl, Queen Emma (to whom he still owes a gigantic sum of money, he recalls angrily), and others; that the whole miserable failure of his blessed utopia could be chalked up to those who held the reins in their greedy hands, those hands gnarled by Mammon beyond all human recognition.

During this insane harangue by Engelhardt, young Makeli creeps off unnoticed. He has had enough of the white men and their lunacy and this island. Two fingers he’s sacrificed, and now he’s had it. He wraps a cloth around his loins, points the prow of one of the sailing canoes toward Rabaul, and as he leaves Kabakon, he knows that it is forever, and he cannot help but weep.

Sl
ü
tter likewise turns his back on the furiously seething Engelhardt, walks wordlessly to the beach, and marches back out through the surging waves to the launch. He was unable to kill the poor lunatic obsessed with the canard of a Jewish global conspiracy, that’s just the way it is, and Hahl will have to swallow it, and if he intends to take Pandora away from him, then Sl
ü
tter can potentially offer him something else, his own life perhaps.

But the girl is of course not behaving as Sl
ü
tter would have liked; as if he could just have frozen her in the everlasting present, immutable until the end of all times. While Sl
ü
tter is on Kabakon, she remembers Apirana’s offer on the
Jeddah
and asks him if he will tattoo the story of the storm in pictures, he can do it however he wants, preferably on her back, there’s lots of room there, and afterward Sl
ü
tter can’t do anything about it either way.

She takes off her dress and underwear and lays herself naked, facedown on the forecastle of the freighter, and as swallows dart up and down, high in the gloriously blue sky, Apirana prepares the traditional bone needles, gives her a piece of rope to bite down on, and begins to punch the tips dipped in black ink into the skin of the young girl’s back.

As if he were a dark Pygmalion, he runs his skilled hand in rehearsal over the places he intends to draw menacing black clouds, gruesome krakens emerging from the troughs. The frigate birds that signaled the end of the hurricane will go on the right toward the shoulder, to the left down near the sacrum their little threatened ship, on it, in miniature, so tiny that they are barely perceptible, Pandora herself, Apirana, November, and Sl
ü
tter. And finally, in the middle, between the shoulder blades trembling under his gentle touch, the storm itself: figment of a fantastic monstrosity from prehistoric times, baring sharp-edged teeth, writhing fiercely and tremendously, the monster scoops deluges of water from the ocean with its scaly paws to make the ill-fated
Jeddah
keel over.