Imperium (6 page)

The first hut was erected according to the manner of the natives. Makeli appeared now, too, for the first time, a perhaps thirteen-year-old boy who came trudging through the mangroves sometime in the afternoon, timidly but obstinately, walked onto Engelhardt’s white-sand stage, and was never seen to budge from his side again. Six men came and showed him how to intertwine palm leaves with one another to weave a roof and walls. They gave him fruits, and he quenched his thirst; they gave him a lap-lap, he stripped naked, they cloaked his belly with it, and tied off the ends below his navel; the sun stabbed down from the sky with merciless vehemence; soon his shoulders were burnt red.

Makeli chose the place where the hut was to stand; a clearing was cut from the shore into the bush, some corner posts were rammed into the exposed marshy soil, which had first been dried for a few hours in the sun by removing the overstory, and the mats of palm fronds that had been created in the meantime were now woven together. Engelhardt, whose shyness had made him seem so unfit for life in our world, but which among these savages seemed whisked away by a fresh, jocose breeze, eagerly took part in the collective wattling. Now and again, he ran down to the shore and scooped cooling ocean water onto his burning shoulders with both hands. Small children would run with him then, throwing themselves naked and screeching and grinning before him into the surges, and Engelhardt laughed with them.

The first night, he lay on the sand floor he himself had shoveled into the hut on top of the marshy, still slightly wet clay ground and decided after some unpleasant tossing and turning that henceforth he would sleep elevated on a bedstead or a wicker cot. The sand may have been soft, but it trickled into his ear if he made himself comfortable on his side in the fetal position. On the other hand, if he lay on his back, he found the back of his head and the long hair underneath scratched by the sand in the most aggravating manner (the heat and humidity had crumbled his hair band into disintegrating bits). And he had scarcely calmed himself, saying nothing more could be done tonight to make sleep more bearable, and tomorrow morning we’ll see how a bed can be built—he was drifting off to sleep, smiling almost contentedly about his own Buddhist-seeming indifference to discomfort—when he became aware of hundreds of mosquitoes that had chosen to punish his skin with extremely painful bites. For a long while he slapped at them in the dark helplessly and pitifully and then set fire to a coir mat. Its heavy emission of smoke successfully drove the mosquitoes from his hut but made him cough with such unbridled force, while at the same time bringing stifling tears to his burning eyes, that he buried his face in a sand pit and, enraged, awaited the hour at which first sunlight would finally break through the holes in the fringy rattan walls.

The following late afternoon he recalled the mosquito nets brought along from Herbertsh
ö
he, unpacked one from its cardboard container, unfolded it, and hung it with great circumspection from the walls and ceiling of his rattan hut. A small rip that resulted from the process he mended with two or three skillful sutures. Then he tentatively lay down beneath it, smiling at his unyieldingness; someone else might have considered leaving. He harbored the greatest fear of the fever and ardently hoped he had not been bitten last night by an infected insect; on the other hand, that was simply the price one had to pay here. In Germany, there were few diseases whose course brought about such horrific repercussions; instead, one had to suffer an infestation of the mind, an inner, incurable rottenness, the corrosive power of which was capable of eating through the soul like a cancerous ulcer.

Now, one cannot avoid saying that the inhabitants of Kabakon knew nothing whatsoever of the fact that the little island on which they had lived for as long as anyone could remember suddenly no longer belonged to them but to the young
witeman
whom they had amicably taken in at the behest of the agent Botkin, for whom they built a hut, and to whom they had brought fruit. And at the outset it was by no means Engelhardt’s intention to conduct himself like an especially stern island king; but, returning to his hut one afternoon from an exploratory walk around the two wooded hills, he chanced upon the following scene.

There, in a glade, a boy had ensnared a pitch-black piglet, which he was dragging around by its tail. A young man joined him, raising a heavy wooden club, and sending it hurtling down with a crack onto the animal’s head; the pig immediately collapsed dead with an abject squeal. Then three or four black women attacked it, opening the pig’s belly with a sharp shard, throwing the entrails to the side, and expertly scraping out the innards.

Engelhardt, who imagined himself on the one hand to be lord over the isle and thus over the doings of its inhabitants as well, but who on the other hand intended to countenance the natives’ customs, gallantly intervened, snatching the shiv from the woman carrying the cutting implement, and sending it flying into the bush. In so doing, he slipped on a piece of intestine and fell belly-first into the sandy puddle of blood. That, as it happened, was his salvation, because instead of letting the same fate as the pig befall the lanky
witeman
(the fellow with the club had already taken a step forward), everyone in the glade began to laugh their heads off at Engelhardt’s capriole. The latter stood up, besmirched with blood from head to toe, rubbing the dark red sand from his eyes, and the native with the club lowered his weapon, took Engelhardt’s hand in his with a laugh, slapped the German on the back companionably, and henceforth it was clear that the slaughtering of animals would take place on the other side of the little island. Engelhardt was, the natives told one another, a greater
witeman
than they thought; he had shown courage in intervening, even if they didn’t quite understand why he didn’t want them to kill and gut pigs. Engelhardt, they agreed among themselves, possessed the magic
mana
, and thus he was allowed to remain on Kabakon as long as he saw fit.

The next morning, nearly forty men stood before Engelhardt’s hut and indicated in a hodgepodge of Kuanua, German Creole, and pidgin that they intended to work for the German man. They wished to be in his employ and collect the coconuts from the trees and process them. Engelhardt stood atop a piece of driftwood and stated in a pantomimic speech that he was no missionary, heavens, no, that he looked much forward to their industriousness, that he would pay them punctually, that the coconut and the palm tree were sacred, and that he intended to subsist from it alone. For that reason he would suffer no meat in his vicinity and would ask of his workers (here he paused for a moment—was he perhaps going too far?), at least while they were working on his plantation, not to eat pork or chicken. The men nodded sagely, especially as the consumption of these animals was reserved for the yearly feasts and as they only chewed on yams during the day anyway, if need be drinking from a few coconuts like Engelhardt himself. Were eggs perhaps allowed? one of the men wanted to know. Another inquired about smoking. And might they be permitted to drink liquor? Engelhardt replied readily, and it seemed to him as if his new workers thought the whole matter an amusing game. Jumping down from the tree trunk, he said that was enough queries for now, and his islanders immediately appeared to accept the authority with which he had impressed upon them the Kabakonian policies that would govern them henceforth.

With one stroke, Engelhardt seemed to have conquered his fear, the fear of uncertainty, his fear of not having enough money or sustenance, of what his fellow man thought of him, the fear that he would seem ridiculous, his fear of loneliness, his fear of not being loved or of doing the wrong thing—all this had fallen away from him as the clothing he no longer wore or was capable of wearing, since the trousers and shirts (even the lap-lap he now doffed on his walks along the beach, hesitatingly at first, then with ever greater naturalness) seemed to him symbols of an outmoded outside world long since grown weary. He lived in immaculate, splendid isolation. No one took even the slightest notice of his nakedness. Since the incident with the piglet, they respected him, offered him a friendly good morning when they encountered him in the forest, and treated him like one of their own. He in fact did bear the magical
mana
within his tender breast.

Together with young Makeli, he roamed naked across the island, only a sack over his shoulder, and the indigenous boy showed Engelhardt the locations that were
tabu
for him: mostly ancestral burial grounds or certain glades. They shook the bristly palm trunks until enough fruits had fallen down. One needed only bend over to harvest these treasures! Makeli showed him how to lever one’s way up the trunk into the treetop by means of a coir rope slung around one’s waist, a knife in one’s adept hands, to get to all the delectable nuts that hadn’t been felled by jiggling alone.

After nightfall, he sat down with Makeli on the sandy floor of his hut and read to the boy from a book by the sparse light of a coconut-oil lamp, and although the latter understood almost nothing at first, he still harkened attentively to the foreign sound of the words that took shape, through Engelhardt’s lips as he mouthed them, from the gently turned pages of the book; it was a German translation of Dickens’s
Great Expectations
, and gradually the young islander seemed to grow accustomed to the foreign language and long for those hours, every evening, of being read to.

Makeli had listened to a preacher reading from a German Bible many times before, to be sure, but this was something quite different, for Engelhardt’s utterances were more mellifluous, friendlier, and sweeter, and he picked up this or that word; more than anything else he seemed to like the descriptions of the house belonging to the crotchety spinster Miss Havisham, who, in her cobwebbed bedroom, sat like a primordial, misanthropic spider, receiving visitors with a sullen look. The boy tried to understand; after a few weeks of listening, through his repetition of some words in German Creole and his own translation of others into pidgin, terse German sentences began to form on his tongue.

Yet this was play and amusement—for their part, the natives worked with enormous efficiency; the nuts were collected with large trap baskets, cut into slices, and dried in the sun on timbered racks, protected by a rain shelter made of palm fronds, then, in a prehistoric-seeming mill consisting of little more than roughly hewn boulders, squeezed into oil, which was finally funneled into wooden barrels and taken to Herbertsh
ö
he by Engelhardt’s fleet of sailing canoes. There it was refined through filtering and heat and poured into bottles that Engelhardt had borrowed from the ubiquitous Forsayth & Company. Now and again, a freighter anchored off the white breakers at the arch of the reef and took aboard the unprocessed copra. Engelhardt paid his employees punctually, as promised. Initially, they demanded that he disburse their wages in cowrie shells or tobacco; later, when they learned what all could be had in Herbertsh
ö
he, it had to be in marks. So as not to have to hide German currency on his isle, he issued them simple promissory notes that he signed and urged them to redeem in the capital. And every two months he traveled over himself in his lap-lap and, amid the disapproving looks of the planters dressed in white and their wives, paid his employees’ debts.

IV

When was it that our friend first surfaced in the ocean of consciousness? All too little is known about him; within the narrative current, people and events flash by like fleet fish sparkling brightly underwater and Engelhardt flanks them as if he were one of those little creatures called
Labrichthyini
that clean the skin of other, larger predatory fish by freeing them from parasites and debris.

We see him, again on a train, for instance, but now traveling from—just a moment—Nuremberg to Munich; he’s back there, standing third class, his slender hand, rather sinewy already for his young age, resting on a walking stick.

The old century draws to an unbelievably rapid close (the new century may also have begun already); it’s almost autumn, Engelhardt is wearing, as he does everywhere in Germany when he isn’t naked, a long pale cotton tunic and woven footwear with a Roman aspect, though not fashioned from animal leather. His hair, worn down on both sides of his face, reaches to his sternum; over his arm he’s carrying a wicker basket with apples and pamphlets in it. Children riding along in the train are afraid of him, hide on the platform between cars of the second and third class, watching him; they laugh at him. One of the braver ones chucks a piece of sausage at him but misses. Mumbling absentmindedly, Engelhardt reads in a timetable the names of the provincial towns, familiar to him still from childhood, and then gazes again straight out onto the Bavarian landscape racing past; today is some sort of holiday, the country stations they speed through are all merrily flagged with black, white, and red pennants, the less martial pale blue of his homeland flying in between. Engelhardt is not someone interested in politics; the great upheavals carpeting the German Reich in recent months leave him completely cold. He has been keeping himself too far removed from society and its capricious vagaries and political fads. It is not he who is alien to the world, but the world that has become a stranger to him.

Having arrived in midmorning Munich, he visits his comrade Gustaf Nagel in Schwabing; long-haired, they stroll across the late-summer Odeonsplatz shrouded in linen amid the clamorous ridicule of the city folk. A besabered gendarme briefly considers whether he ought to arrest them, but then quickly decides against it, not wanting to let his glass of after-work beer go flat on account of additional paperwork.

The Feldherrnhalle, that Florentine parody off yonder, scarcely dignified by a glance, stands admonishingly, indeed almost slyly, in Munich’s spectral summer light. In just a few short years, the time for it to play a leading part in the great Theater of Darkness will finally come. Flags with the Hindu sun cross will festoon it impressively and then, climbing the three or four steps to the stage, a squat vegetarian, an absurd black toothbrush mustache under his nose, will … oh, let’s just wait for it to commence somberly (in Aeolian minor), that Great German Death Symphony. It might be comical to watch, were unimaginable cruelty not to ensue: bones, excreta, smoke.