Imperium (2 page)

After having adjudged all other foodstuffs unclean by process of elimination, Engelhardt had abruptly stumbled upon the fruit of the coconut palm. No other possibility existed;
Cocos nucifera
was, as Engelhardt had realized on his own, the proverbial crown of creation; it was the fruit of Yggdrasil, world-tree. It grew at the highest point of the palm, facing the sun and our luminous lord God; it gave us water, milk, coconut oil, and nutritious pulp; unique in nature, it provided humankind with the element selenium; from its fibers one wove mats, roofs, and ropes; from its trunk one built furniture and entire houses; from its pit one produced oil to drive away the darkness and to anoint the skin; even the hollowed-out, empty shell made an excellent vessel from which one could manufacture bowls, spoons, tankards, indeed even buttons; burning the empty shell, finally, was not only far superior to burning traditional firewood, but was also an excellent means of keeping away mosquitoes and flies with its smoke; in short, the coconut was perfect. Whosoever subsisted solely on it would become godly, would become immortal. August Engelhardt’s most fervent wish, his destiny in fact, was to establish a colony of cocovores. He viewed himself at once as a prophet and a missionary. For this reason did he sail to the South Seas, which had lured infinitely many dreamers with its siren song of paradise.

Beneath its belching smokestack, the
Prinz Waldemar
maintained its ramrod-straight course toward Herbertsh
ö
he. And while great tubs of leftover food were dumped twice daily into the sea from the quarterdeck, to the south the dark coast of Kaiser-Wilhelmsland drew past, the Finisterre Range, as Engelhardt’s map had read forebodingly, and the unexplored, dangerous lands that lay beyond, where no German had yet set foot. One hundred thousand million coconut palms were growing there. Engelhardt had not been at all prepared for the almost painful beauty of this southern sea; sunbeams pierced the clouds in luminous shafts, and every evening peaceful mildness descended upon the coastlines and their terraced mountain chains, which extended, one after the other, into infinity in the sugary purple light of dusk.

A gentleman in a white tropical suit and pince-nez approached him, one who though corpulent did not seem quite as obtuse as his colleagues, and Engelhardt was momentarily seized by that almost pathological shyness that always possessed him whenever he met people who were completely convinced of the justness of their actions and existence. Did Engelhardt know what the recliner was called in which he and the other passengers dozed away their afternoons on deck? Engelhardt said no without a word, lowering his head to express his intention of immersing himself again in Schlickeysen, but the planter who was now introducing himself with a minuscule bow as Mr. Hartmut Otto came another step closer, as if he needed to confide an exceptionally important secret. Because of its extendable wooden leg rests, the deck chair was called, Engelhardt ought to sit down for this, please, the
Bombay fornicator
.

Engelhardt didn’t quite understand and, moreover, found labored jokes of a carnal nature coarse, though he considered the sexual act something wholly natural, something absolutely ordained by God, not a part of a repressed, falsely understood manly discipline. He refrained from mentioning this, however, but gave the planter a somewhat baffled and scrutinizing look. Now it was up to Mr. Otto, as it were, to backpedal and, with a rapid succession of wiping hand gestures, to enumerate his dealings in the German protectorate. Let’s forget it, he said, taking a seat on the lower part of the recliner with aplomb while loosening his shirt collar, which had grown slightly damp from humidity and perspiration. He was, he reported while artfully twirling the ends of his mustachio skyward with his fingers, on the hunt for
Paradisaeidae
, birds of paradise, whose feathers, Otto ought to know, currently fetched
astronomical
prices in the drawing rooms of the New World, from New York to Buenos Aires. Did the birds have to lose their lives in the process? Engelhardt now wanted to know, for he saw that Otto had made himself comfortable, leaving no further possibility of undertaking evasive action toward his book. Ideally,
nota bene
, the plumes were harvested from the animals while they were alive—certainly there were traders who’d merely have gathered up those decorative adornments that had fallen out onto the jungle floor from the rump of mature birds of paradise; but he, Otto, put no stock in such methods. Rather, the plumes must display traces of blood at the lower end of the quill, as a seal of quality, so to speak, and if they did not, he wouldn’t buy them. Engelhardt grimaced—he easily became queasy—then the midday bell was ringing, and Otto took hold of his arm gently and firmly; but now he really must do him the honor of dining with him.

Hartmut Otto was a moral person in the actual meaning of the term, even if his civility had sprung from the preceding century and he couldn’t muster much understanding for the new age now dawning, the protagonist of which would be August Engelhardt. To be sure, the bird hunter had read progressive scientists, like Alfred Russel Wallace, Lamarck, and Darwin, indeed with a certain meticulousness, especially their taxonomic essays, but he not only lacked faith in modernity as a cumulative process; he was also incapable of recognizing and accepting a radical spirit (as Wallace and Darwin had been, for instance), should he encounter him in person, perchance on a sea voyage, as he had just now. Engelhardt’s vegetarianism, as we shall soon see, was anathema enough to Otto.

Engelhardt begrudgingly allowed himself to be led to dine in the first-class salon. There—where one sat in heavy neo-Gothic chairs, the seat backs of which were stuffed with horsehair, while resting one’s gaze on gilt-framed reproductions of Dutch masters—upon Otto’s signal to the Malaysian steward, he was served, quite contrary to Engelhardt’s usual daily eating habits, a plate of steaming spaetzle and a pork chop with a sumptuous brown gravy. Engelhardt looked with bald revulsion upon the piece of meat sitting there before him in its bed of noodles, its edges an iridescent blue.

Otto, who was essentially a good-natured man, thought his counterpart was probably intimidated, since Engelhardt, as a second-class passenger, didn’t know how he would pay for what was for him an extravagant midday repast, and he invited him to eat of the pork chop, yes, by all means, please, it was his treat, to which Engelhardt, politely but with the firmness of his (and Schopenhauer’s, and Emerson’s) conscience replied, no, thank you, he was an avowed vegetarian in general and a frugivore in particular, and might he perhaps request a green salad, not dressed, without salt and pepper.

The bird dealer paused, replaced the knife and fork he had already been holding over his plate to its right and left, chuckled, dabbed at his upper lip and mustachio with his napkin, and then burst into a barking, bleating, even snorting fit of laughter. Tears sprang from his eyes. First his napkin sailed to the floor, then a plate shattered, and all the while Otto repeated the words
salad
and
frugivore
again and again, turning a purplish red as if he were about to asphyxiate. While those at the neighboring table leapt up to rid him, with sweeping blows to the back, of what they supposed was a piece of bone lodged in his trachea, August Engelhardt sat across from him looking at the floor, waggling the sandal laced to his left ankle with manic swiftness. A Chinese cook came running from the galley, a dripping whisk still in his hand.

Two parties formed and began to argue most vigorously. Engelhardt heard a few bits clearly amid the tumult; they concerned his, Engelhardt’s, right to refuse the consumption of meat. What’s more, they spoke of savages—if one may even still call them that, said one of the plantation owners. Had things gotten so bad now that a German in the protectorate was no longer permitted to distinguish a wog from a Rhinelander? Yet we ought to be happy, another said, to have vegetable products listed on the menu, especially as large parts of our merry island empire have long since returned to anthropophagy after we so arduously weaned the savages off it with Draconian measures.
Oh, nonsense! Old hat!
came the opposing shout. And yet, and yet—only four months ago they ate a padre over on Tumleo among the Steyler Missionary Sisters. The body parts of the man of God that weren’t consumed immediately were pickled, shipped up the coast, and sold in the Dutch East Indies.

Engelhardt’s sense of shame threatened to overwhelm him. He went pale, then red, and made moves to rise and quit this contemptuous salon. He smoothed the napkin before him on the table and gave his thanks to Hartmut Otto quietly, almost inaudibly, without a trace of irony. His thin upper arm seized rudely by a plantation owner seeking to prevent him from leaving, he nevertheless managed to pry himself free with a brusque jerk of his shoulders, traversed the room in a few paces, and opened the salon door leading directly out on deck. There he paused, agitated, and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. And while he inhaled the muggy tropical air and exhaled it again, pondering whether he ought not perhaps cling to the wall of the promenade deck only to discard this thought immediately as sissy, a deep, deep loneliness, far more unfathomable than he had ever felt it in his native Franconia, finally took possession of him. He had ended up here among horrible people, among loveless, crude barbarians.

He slept poorly that night. A long way off, a thunderstorm drew past the
Prinz Waldemar
, and the erratic convulsions of sheet lightning, following some random rhythm, plunged the steamship again and again into a ghostly, pallid snow-white. While tossing and turning in his clammy sheets, glimpsing above him on the ceiling in half-awake moments of fright, oddly enough, the contours of England, he finally fell into a deeper sleep—the storm could still be heard only as very distant, deep rumbling—and dreamed of a cultic temple, erected beneath the faintly shining evening sun upon the beach of a windless Baltic Sea, illuminated by Viking torches stuck in the sand. A burial was taking place there; stalwart Norsemen stood watch at the temple, children whose blond hair had been braided into wreaths played quietly at their feet on flutes of bone, the raft on which the dead man lay in repose was shoved out to sea in the gloaming, and a giant of a man, standing up to his waist in the water, ignited the kindling, after which it drifted, slowly and mournfully, gradually catching fire, northward toward Hyperborea.

Early the next morning, as the steamship sailed into Blanche Bay amid glistening sunlight, merry band music, and the loud tooting of her siren, Engelhardt was standing at the bulwarks, slightly disheveled, still sensing in his bones that wondrous, uncanny dream from the night before, the content of which was becoming ever more nebulous the closer they got to land. It is likely he suspected that the two ships, the modern steamship and the pagan burial raft, were entangled with one another in meaning and significance; yet this morning he found himself not at all in the mood to draw conclusions from that dream about his own departure from home, which, while not hasty, had, quite embarrassingly, borne the seal of cudgeling Prussian police brutality. Well, he thought, he wasn’t going to die here on these green shores.

Sensing within himself an almost feline readiness to pounce, he observed all aflutter the approaching dry land. So this was it, his Zion. Here in this terra incognita he would settle, from this spot on the globe his presence would be projected. He ran upstairs and down, aquiver, turned around again abruptly upon reaching the quarterdeck, where several gentlemen who were inebriated yet again at breakfast—the vile bird dealer Otto was not among them—had raised their glasses and shouted to him cheerfully that he ought to let bygones be bygones, they wished to be friends again, and after all, one must stick together among Germans in the protectorate, et cetera. Ignoring these louts, he surveyed the stately sweep of the coastline, keeping watch for inlets, irregularities, elevations.

Palms as tall as houses thrust upward from the steaming bush of New Pomerania. Blue haze rose from the wooded slopes; here and there one could make out glades, and in them solitary grass huts. A macaque shrieked wretchedly. A gathering gray cloud front briefly blocked the sun and then let it shine forth once more. Engelhardt’s fingers drummed one or two impatient marches; again the tooting ship’s siren sounded. The cone of a volcano only half covered by trees pushed its way into view. All of a sudden red droplets spattered onto the white-painted balustrade, and he was seized with fright. It was blood dripping from his nose, and he had to race belowdecks, groping his way carefully down the ladders into the diffuse light of the steel corridors, lie on his back in his cabin’s berth, and, with closed, throbbing eyelids, press a slowly reddening bedsheet over his face. From a jug covered by a towel he poured himself some fruit juice into a glass and drank it down in thirsty gulps.

Meanwhile, all of Herbertsh
ö
he had gathered; it was the first week of September. They stood on wooden gangplanks, freshly combed, shaven, and furnished with new collars, awaiting what were no longer the most recent newspapers from Berlin; the beer that would remain iced now only a short while, and which was uncapped immediately—the first cases were hardly unloaded—and passed around bottle by bottle; the dozens of letters from home; and of course the newcomers: soldiers of fortune and adventurers, returning planters, the occasional researchers, ornithologists, and mineralogists, the destitute noblemen chased away from their impounded estates, the crazies, the flotsam and jetsam of the German Empire.

Engelhardt was standing in his cabin, at the porthole of the emptying steamship, to be precise, looking out through the double-paned glass onto Herbertsh
ö
he. The nosebleed had ceased as suddenly as it had begun. He wasn’t secure in his footing and leaned against the bulkhead of his cabin somewhat stooped, his cheek grazing the gauzy curtain fabric; in the pocket of his robe, he clasped the pencil stump with the fingers of his right hand. The sun shone through the porthole with tremendous strength. When the wispy cloth of the curtain touched him once more, he began to cry. He was overcome, his knees quaked, he felt as if the very last drop of his bravery had been sucked from his bones by means of some kind of contraption, and now the scaffolding that had once been held together solely by the glue of courage was buckling.