Imperium (7 page)

Unaware of all this, Nagel and Engelhardt sun their legs and thighs in the English Garden, tunics hiked up, encircled for a while by the buzzing of sleepy bees; afterward, they travel out together to Murnau, south of Munich’s gates, and there seek out—it’s getting to be evening—a farmer friend of theirs who has gotten it into his square head to carry out his farm work naked the whole sweet summer long. Mahogany-brown, he stands before them at the fence, hatless, muscles bulging, extending his manly paw to greet the two slight, learned youths. Although it’s already September, they take off their tunics, take a seat at the simple wooden table in front of the farmstead; the farmer’s good wife brings her husband bread, fat, and ham, and apples and grapes for the two visitors, her naked breasts swaying like heavy gourds over the table as she sets it. A shy, slender milkmaid, likewise nude, joins them at the farmer’s invitation. Our friend lays down a few pamphlets; they take pleasure in the solidarity of sun worshippers, eating of the fruit. An oriole sings happily in the tree above them.

Presently, Engelhardt speaks of the coconut, which of course neither the peasant, nor his wife, nor the farm girl has ever tasted or seen. He tells of the idea of encircling the globe with coconut colonies, rising from his seat (his almost pathological shyness vanishes when he champions his cause as an orator before sympathetic ears), speaking of the sacred duty of one day paying homage to the sun, naked, in the Temple of Palms. Only here—and he gestures around himself with outstretched arms—it will not work, unfortunately: too long the inhospitable winter, too narrow the minds of the Philistines, too loud the machines of the factories. Engelhardt climbs from the bench onto the table and down again, exclaiming his credo that only those lands in eternal sunlight will survive and, in them, only those people who allow the salutary and beneficent rays of the daystar to caress skin and head, unfettered by clothing. These brothers and sisters here have made a promising start, he says, but they really must now sell their farm and follow him, leaving Bavaria as Moses left Egypt of old and booking passage on a ship to the equator.

Is it to be Mexico or perhaps even Africa? Nagel wants to know while the peasant couple prepare more sandwiches, listening attentively. Engelhardt is, Nagel notes, obsessed with his ideas; they are like a little demon that has seized hold of him, tearing with a row of pointy teeth. He wonders for a moment if Engelhardt is still quite right in the head. Mexico—no, no, it has to be the South Seas, only there can and will it begin. High into the white and blue sky, he jabs his index finger; down onto the wooden table hammers Engelhardt’s slender little fist. Although the dazzling sfumato of his mindscape is served up with great demagogic skill, little, it would seem, stays with the honest peasant couple; the serpentine paths of Engelhardtian fancy wend too wildly.

Later at night, in the haystacks where it smells of the dust of the long summer, Nagel and Engelhardt lie next to one another, discussing at a whisper, forging plans and discarding them again, and Nagel realizes just how much he appreciates his friend and how much more radically than his own Engelhardt’s thoughts push out into the world. A cat moans above in the darkness of the timbers. Nagel seriously considers following his friend to the colonies: factors in favor would include that the ridicule poured out over him daily, endured for endless years, threatens to crush his soul slowly; that he has begun to doubt the integrity of his actions; and that Engelhardt, along with his obsessiveness, seems to him a leader who by virtue of his brilliance is capable of guiding him, Nagel, out of the dull wasteland that is Germany and into a bright, moral, pure pasture, not just metaphorically, but
in realitas
. On the other hand, however—and Nagel’s anima already beholds the portals of the land of Nod—he is also too lazy, plain and simple, to betake himself around the globe to create a new Germany at the back of beyond. No, he muses just before the realm of shades welcomes him, he will henceforth write his name in lowercase, eschewing capitalization entirely, will always write everything small, like this: gustaf nagel. That will be his revolution. And then sleep comes.

August Engelhardt is now seen again, far to the north, traveling toward Berlin; he has parted ways with Gustaf Nagel at the Munich central station, each having clasped the other’s forearms in heartfelt fellowship. Nagel is still advising him to make the journey to Prussia
per pedes
for ideological reasons, but Engelhardt replies that he must save time since he still has so much planned in the South Seas, and should his friend change his mind again, he will always and most sincerely be welcome.

Engelhardt, who is traversing the empire in express trains, likewise changes his mind just outside of Berlin, bypasses that gigantic, monstrous anthill, and boards a train to Danzig, sleeping on wooden benches, patiently awaiting connections, changing trains again, over and over, arrives in K
ö
nigsberg and Tilsit, and travels northwest again, toward Prussian Lithuania.

There, spat out by the train in East Prussia’s Memel, shouldering his bindle, he walks through the groves of birch trees blown through by the north wind, quitting the dull brick town, buys currants and mushrooms from a Russian babushka who crosses herself, taking him in his penitential robe for a Molokan apostate of Orthodoxy, sights the spare, milky-white wooden church marking the edge of the lagoon over there, marches in a southerly direction toward that spit of land, wondering as he rambles whether perhaps the German soul might come from this place, here, from this infinitely melancholy, sixty-mile-long, sunlit strand of dunes where he undresses, at first somewhat timidly, then with increasing confidence, placing his robe and his sandals in a depression in the sand (it is now early evening), and, concealing his nakedness from a couple of summering vacationers dressed in fine white cloth who are sauntering at some distance (he the editor of
Simplicissimus
, slight ironic twist to the mouth under the groomed mustache, gesticulating; she a freethinking daughter of a mathematician, nodding to him in agreement, in a dress of her own design), stares out onto the Baltic Sea long after the couple disappear and darkness descends, letting the plan to travel forever and for all time to the German overseas territories in the Pacific Ocean, never to return, ripen slowly in his mind, like a small child who has proceeded to build an immense castle out of colorful little wooden blocks. A gentle and somber Lithuanian melody drifts across the shoal, unapproachable like the stars flashing wanly in the firmament and yet immeasurably familiar, sweet, and homey:
Wuchsen einst f
ü
nf junge M
ä
dchen schlank und sch
ö
n am Memelstrand. Sing, sing was geschah? Keines den Brautkranz wand. Keines den Brautkranz wand.

In the morning, three policemen with sabers come and cement Engelhardt’s decision. In Memel the previous evening, the editor, who had indeed seen the nudist on the beach, filed a complaint with the police. There is a long-haired vagabond lying about the sandbars, stark-naked, scarcely two miles south down the strip of dunes. The editor deftly maneuvered his betrothed around the delinquent at some distance, distracting her at the crucial moment by showing her a flock of migratory birds or some such thing on the horizon, and yes, it is indeed a thing of outrage; one ought to arrest him; no, he did not seem drunk.

Engelhardt awakens, peeps out of the wind-sheltered hollow he had dug for himself that night, and sees three pairs of boots standing before him, uniform trousers tucked into them; the slight chill of the summer night is still in him, a tattered blanket is tossed down and the order given, in the gruffest commanding tone, tinged with Lithuanian, to follow them to Memel; the vagabond is being placed under arrest, offending public decency being the very least they intended to charge him with.

One of the gendarmes (he isn’t the brightest) places his booted foot in front of Engelhardt—who has barely had time to pull himself together, wrap himself in the scratchy army blanket, and stand up—causing him to stumble and fall face-first into the sand again. Wicked laughter. Actually, they are all three not the brightest sort. As he is lying before them on the ground, an animalistic and cruel desire to humiliate infects them (for they are officious German subjects), and they begin kicking him and working him over with their fists; the ringleader strikes him on the back with the pommel of his saber since Engelhardt has curled up into a ball to escape the blows. He seeks refuge in white-frothy, buzzing unconsciousness.

After they’ve dunked him in the cleansing sea—suddenly and rather dimly aware that what they are doing is quite wrong and that Engelhardt isn’t moving anymore—they comb his disheveled hair, wipe the still-flowing blood from his mouth and nostrils, dress him in the smock and sandals they’ve found not far from the sandy hollow, and take him (he’s half carried, half walking on his own) to the police station in Memel, where, accused of vagrancy and immorality, he spends what might be deemed a quite agonizing night on a hard wooden bench, surveying for hours the deepest corners of the detention cell’s ceiling with one eye (the other eye is swollen shut).

The editor and his bride left for Munich by daybreak, the incident nearly forgotten already; they are sitting across from one another in the dining car of the adjoining wagon-lit; railroad-induced stains from a bottle of Trollinger, ordered in a moment of airy mischief, have splotched the tablecloth with purple hue. The conversation isn’t quite flowing, be it from fatigue or perhaps from an already anticipated sense of the boredom that will set in after years of marriage. With a mild lack of enthusiasm, the editor’s gaze tracks left, out through the darkening pane of train glass, which grows more and more mirrorlike by the minute, onto the fading East Prussian plain, and he suddenly becomes aware of the almost boyishly slender shoulders of the naked young man lying on the beach yesterday, and he recognizes at this moment the actual reason he lodged a complaint, and that his whole future life will be, must be, covered over in painful self-deception, the immensity of which will discolor everything until his dying day—the still-unborn children, the work (for several novels are ripening within him), the still-amused relationship to the ideal of his own bourgeois sensibility, and the now-nascent revulsion at those hands there, folded in elegant calm on the dining car table, of his patiently smiling fianc
é
e, who in turn will persist in decades of ignorance, though her propensity to behave and dress with a certain unwomanliness might have given the young girl, perhaps even now at the outset of their relationship, an indication vis-
à
-vis the actual proclivities of her betrothed.

On the afternoon of the following day, August Engelhardt is released. A delegation of activists did not balk at the long journey from Danzig, among them a solicitor licensed by the Imperial Court of Justice, who, obtaining entry to the detention cell, casts but one glance at Engelhardt and his wounds and immediately roars into the ears of the Memel constables a philippic recited in a furious stentorian voice: they should count themselves fortunate if they still hold a job this evening and are not in fetters, dishonored, and forever stripped of their uniforms, on their way to the dungeons of a special police purgatory (wherever this might be).

The completely overwhelmed gendarmes flit nervously through the office, variously colored papers and carbon copies waft about, the constable who first tripped Engelhardt on the beach even salutes the solicitor most humbly as if he were His Majesty the Kaiser himself. They hurry to release Engelhardt immediately, and the activists almost carry him on their hands out of the Memel police station, shouting,
Vivat!
,
Freedom!
, and
Down with violence!

A crowd of townsfolk gathers in the market square—there are perhaps fifty or sixty of them, though their number seems somewhat higher than it is in reality—while the report of the hermit’s abuse is passed from ear to ear, altered slightly with each further telling, so that ultimately the news goes around that a Catholic priest passing through from Avignon was tortured at the mercy of the local police and that the mayor, who has since come running, was in fact already in Tilsit requesting relief and replacement for the now-intolerable Memel constabulary.

Engelhardt is maneuvered into a first-class compartment of the Prussian State Railways. There they bed him on cooling sheets, two down pillows are thrust under his head, and after he refuses with a gesture of mild revulsion the fresh cow’s milk that the doctor on board considerately hands him, he is given a half pint of unfiltered apple juice to drink, while a likable and, in her own way, even quite charming Frisian female activist (in a starched gown bulging over her tremendous bosom) pats the back of his slackened hand. She smells, it seems to Engelhardt, of mild cheese rind, but perhaps it’s just the spurned, jittery glass of milk over in the corner of the compartment, in the convex opacity of which nothing at all is reflected. I do not believe he has ever truly loved anyone.

Berlin is groaning under a high pressure system that has lasted now for weeks on end and, beginning down in the Ottoman Empire, pushing up through Central Europe, has blanketed the city so stiflingly that a populace mutinying against the heat hijacks ice-cream carts, wet handkerchiefs are worn on heads, and fire engines have been commandeered and sent to the Zoological Garden to hose down the animals howling from heat and thirst. When Engelhardt’s train from Danzig arrives at Schlesischer Bahnhof, though, it is as if a needle were inserted in a balloon: within minutes, the flaying heat bursts, towering clouds gather, piling themselves over the city, and instantly it pours and dumps down in unimaginable, outrageous floods. Streams of water tumble down in cascades, the rain in places so impenetrable that it links building fronts on adjacent street corners like a solid aquatic wall; muslin umbrellas are of precious little use here. People drape themselves in black-rubberized rain capes (all the caoutchouc required for the varnish is imported from the brutish slave plantations of the Belgian Congo) and proceed, like crows strutting aslant, against the pelting rain now blowing sideways, now pouring down from above, now pushing from behind.