Imperium

by Christian Kracht

  Engelhardt—and neither he nor Max Lützow knows this—has likewise caught leprosy, and this disease, whose Old Testament nimbus obscures the simple reality that it is primarily a nervous disorder, causes certain addled reactions within Engelhardt’s person, which is already deranged from several years of his unhealthy diet. Dr. Wind, over in the Rabaul area, was of course quite right in his own way.

  Now, it would probably be overstating things to say that Engelhardt’s psyche had drunk from the river Lethe, on whose shores it had long been resting, gazing at its own reflection, sinking into the most profound cosmic forgetfulness about why he had ever come here in the first place. The truth looks much more mundane; the farther he removes himself from the community of man, the more outlandish his behavior and relationship to it grows. He is thrown back into an atavistic mental state that expresses itself in a premonition of total loss of control: the bottles with Kabakon Oil piling up in Rabaul are consigned to oblivion, copra production has halted, the pages of his beloved books curl in the tropical humidity because they are no longer regularly set out to air in the sunshine, yes, even the flowers around his house, which he had tended before with nurturing love, have become overgrown and are in danger of being strangled by creepers. Yes, it is as if he has become the old spinster Miss Havisham, who stolidly awaits that great, all-consuming conflagration that might finally deliver her.

  And what of the leprosy? The ostensible epicenter of infection lay somewhere within the perfect fifth formed by the C and G keys on Lützow’s piano, where a scab loosened from the Tolai chief’s leprous finger remained, which Engelhardt a short time later took for his own and, as a matter of routine and reflex, stuck in his mouth without bearing in mind or imagining that there were several bleeding spots in his oral cavity and on the gums, so-called canker sores. In truth, our friend had been infected years before, of course.

  XI

  So while Engelhardt persists in furious, paralyzed, inflamed derangement on Kabakon (a neurologist would have diagnosed severe paranoia) and Max Lützow, a genuine lump in his throat, chugs toward Rabaul feeling cheerful and relieved in spite of everything, Captain Christian Slütter, standing on the bridge of the Jeddah (which essentially consists of a crooked steel structure open astern), rounds a spit of land jutting bottle-green into Blanche Bay and sights first the smoking cone of the volcano and then the little German town spreading out so tidily before him. He recalls with a smile his last stay, when he still did not possess a captain’s license, and—running his hand through the blond beard (which is already showing several white hairs, which before, during the visit a few years back, were present only subcutaneously)—moves the crank of the chadburn up to half ahead. Stuck in the inside pocket of Slütter’s white, dirty, always half-wet captain’s jacket is a letter received in Apia from Governor Hahl, and in it the request to report to the new capital Rabaul for a discussion about eliminating a small but pressing problem.

  The blustering has been replaced by a glassy, picture-book sea, the sun appears, he sticks a moist cigarette between his lips and hums a little melody known only to him. Looking at the whole scene stretched out before him, and himself in it, he is reminded of perusing decades-old albums and the gradually fading photographs in them. It’s as if one had seen it this way once before, exactly like this, only now the outer world and oneself have changed, while the album has not—it still radiates intensely out of the past, which in reality lasts forever, while the present, by contrast, consumes itself in fractions of a second. Slütter draws on his cigarette and is forced to laugh because his brain absolutely cannot wrap itself around these paradoxical lines of thought. If you snatch at it, the thought goes poof; if you ambush it, it fades at the moment of insight. Only his own death, he thinks, is predestined; even now this event is inscribed in the future, he only lacks its coordinates, its precise calibration in space and time.

  On the freighter, besides Apirana, a Maori with imposing facial tattoos he hired in New Caledonia as an experienced seaman, and Mr. November, the stoker, there’s also the young girl Pandora. Slütter picked her up in Sydney; she more or less bumped into him after he’d slept off his opium dreams, smoking as he does twice yearly in Sydney’s Chinatown, and had staggered back down to his freighter that afternoon. He’d turned the corner to the quay on Darling Harbour, slightly off-kilter; there, between magnificent barques and whitewashed liners, had lain the Jeddah, that ugly, beloved freighter of indeterminate color, peppered in barnacles. And as soon as he had sized up her quarterdeck and the already smoking funnel, bleary-eyed, and tossed his kit bag to a coolie, there was Pandora standing before him, barefoot, red-haired, maybe twelve, maybe fourteen, a little eyebrow raised deftly, a bag slung over her slender shoulder with several pencils and a Hawaiian quilt in it.

  With an almost imperceptible nod, she had indicated the four policemen approaching from some distance down the quay and more emphatically than piteously begged him, please, to hide her or take her aboard his ship, it being at any rate imperative that she hide from the menacingly approaching constables. Slütter hadn’t hesitated for a moment and took her, past the indifferent looks of the Maori, belowdecks into the captain’s cabin of the Jeddah, put a blanket over her and his index finger to his lips, then went to the bridge, gave the order to put to sea, and ordered Mr. November to hoist the Imperial merchant flag astern, whereupon the Jeddah, belying her battered exterior, had quite spiritedly and briskly made her way from Sydney Harbour out into the open sea.

  Pandora sleeps in the cabin for a long time; she sleeps until the coast of New South Wales has long since disappeared from the horizon and the ocean under the Jeddah has taken on an inky blue color, and when she awakens and toddles on deck, brushes the bright red, uncombed hair out of her face right and left, and Slütter abandons the helm, she goes and stands beside him and tenderly leans her slender head against the tails of his dirty white captain’s jacket. It is then that Slütter knows he will never demand an explanation for why she has fled aboard his ship or ask her who she is.

  The sea is forgiving; at the thought of the ocean, some imagine murder, but he feels an infinitely tender, nostalgically tinged affection for a time when Earth was still devoid of people. In this he is perhaps not unlike Engelhardt, but his ideas and dreams never show him a world other than our own, he sees no future race spreading out and no new order arising, but only and always: the sea that with blood-warm, organic imperturbability inundates churches, cities, countries, whole continents.

  Is Slütter perhaps deeply in love with Pandora? Or does he see himself too clearly in the role of fatherly protector to allow himself to appreciate Pandora as a young woman whenever she slinks across the upper deck in the afternoon like a disinterested, ginger-colored cat? In any case, he intends to drop her off in German Samoa, but nothing will come of that because when the Jeddah sails into Apia Bay and she sees the Union Jack hoisted on the roof of a trading post, she throws herself down before him screaming and crying and bludgeoning the iron deck with her tiny fists so fiercely that her hands tear open on the sides, bleeding, all the while secretly squinting upward with her pretty eyes to see whether her disgraceful antics are laid on too thick. But Slütter’s heart is soft like caoutchouc, and he instructs November and Apirana to have the cognac crates unloaded. He takes aboard the pans (and some crates of crabmeat in tins) and comforts the girl by stroking her hair and telling her she may remain on the Jeddah up until New Pomerania.

  The Maori bandages Pandora’s hands, November (whose clothes and skin are covered with layers of ever-darkening soot) loads coal, and a short time later—they are back on the high seas—the storm appears before them, slate-gray, forbidding, and with the intensity of an enormous beast. Mountains of clouds swell up within minutes, their interior illuminated whitish yellow by the convulsive fireworks of a thunderstorm. The compass needle on the bridge begins whirring around anarchically in the glass circle; towering breakers propel the freighter forward as if it were merely made of cardboard; fr
om the top of a crest, it rushes down into the next wave trough and then back up again such that even Apirana gets queasy. As if he were a reborn real-life Queequeg, the Maori ties himself with a rope to the bulwark nearest the bridge in order to shout the correct course to Slütter with all his might, a course which he foresees more precisely than a compass ever could—he has his ancestors’ secret affinity for navigation and seafaring. To both, however, it increasingly seems as if the Jeddah is about to capsize at any moment. Slütter feels tears of fury well up in him that taste like iron.

  But Mr. November is working like a demon down in the darkness of the hull; scoop by steady scoop of coal lands in the orange-glowing furnace under the boiler. From time to time he tosses the spade aside and yanks at the regulators and valves of the infernal machineries, only then to immediately resume shoveling; this goes on hour after hour. Fire is his métier; it is not just a battle against the hurricane that November is fighting there in the engine room, but an almost primeval struggle against nature itself; it is the ancient insurrection of a demiurge who, in defiance of the elemental chaos, raises the iron shovel one hundred thousand times against the impertinence of cosmic disorder.

  Pandora, who has never undertaken such a voyage, sits cowering and shivering with fear in one corner of Slütter’s cabin. Every time another bottle shatters or an instrument hurtles toward the opposite wall, she howls in the certainty that the last hour of her short life has come. She senses how the monstrous sea threatens to dash the freighter to pieces; it is the notion of the immense amount of water outside that causes her mortal fear, those mile-deep abysses beneath her, the thought of the eyeless, tasseled, slimy creatures down below in the eternal murk. And Slütter, who cannot leave the bridge under any circumstances, sends Apirana in his place down to the cabin; he is to hold her tight in his arms and caress her head while singing a gentle Maori song.

  The storm lasts two days and three nights, in the course of which Apirana, November, and Slütter imbibe jet-black, sugared coffee by the quart, though otherwise take no food, and when the weather finally breaks, it is as if a high fever were departing an oppressed body; an oblique column of light rams through the ashen cloud front, the world sighs with relief, the sea becalms itself, and exhausted frigate birds alight on the abused forecastle of the Jeddah. Stray breakers still spray up the sides of the hull, but praise God it’s over. Pandora clambers out of the cabin on deck and sits down on a tightly frapped crate of tins, drawing up her bare legs without a word of greeting but aware of having emerged victorious from an epic trial by fire, letting her hair blow in the salty wind.

  Her tears are not held against her; even Mr. November, who has ascended from the depths of the freighter and is washing the soot from his face and hands in a bucket dropped into the sea, forces a fleeting, laconic smile as he passes by her; no glue binds people together as tightly as mortal danger jointly endured. And in the brief moment his face lights up, one can manage to guess at the real November, a sensitive, handsome, somber man trying to conceal some long-past sadness from himself forever.

  Slütter examines the cargo; nothing has been washed into the ocean except a small crate of frying pans. It is unclear to him why Australian tins of crabmeat have been ordered in the protectorate when the most delectable crabs can be had fresh from the ocean. He shrugs, smokes a cigarette, and steers the Jeddah unswervingly northwest. Around one o’clock in the afternoon he sights another ship, the Karaboudjian. It is also a freighter, but on a southerly course, toward Darwin. He radios with the Marconi device, but there is no reply, and he calls Pandora to see if she might open a few cans and heat up the contents for them. Soon the Jeddah is trailing invisible, alluringly aromatic billows of scent behind it.

  While they eat together, Apirana offers to tattoo the girl, to inscribe her skin forever with the history of the storm they’ve sailed through, but Slütter will have none of this and forbids it, unable to bear seeing her outer shell, her pale epidermis, pierced with needles. The Maori shrugs; it means nothing to him, aside from the knowledge that this part of the chronicle of the course of the world, to which every person is entitled, will not be readable on the young girl. And he descends into the engine room to bring November a plate of steaming crabmeat.

  It is a curious love that binds these two. Pandora has unconditionally selected Slütter as master of her fate, and he seems to have gained a certain single-mindedness through her that he did not think himself capable of. He suddenly feels himself to be, to the extent this is even possible, a more profound person; he now no longer views the sea as an extinguishing, all-purifying element, but rather is beginning to comprehend Pandora’s fear of its depths. He understands why he as an individual may be a part of everything, but is still, in the totality of things, more negligible than a little chunk of coral that over millions of years is ground into ephemeral sand on the utmost periphery of cosmic perception. In these moments, Slütter takes a wary step closer to death.

  And finally, almost like a dog beaten and crippled that furtively slinks off under a bridge to let its wounds heal, the Jeddah sails into Blanche Bay. No one is waiting on the quay for its arrival, waving. No one hurries to welcome the battered boat into Rabaul’s harbor. Standing on the bridge, Slütter gives instructions regarding the anchor and the moorings, which are carried out halfheartedly by Apirana and Mr. November, while Pandora, after ascertaining that no British police detachment is waiting for her, leaps off onto the wooden landing pier in a bright dress and runs barefoot, past the bobbing launches, straight toward the governor’s residence, whose whitewashed façade she espied while they were still entering the bay. Halfway there, she stoops to pick flowers, and a few islander children join her shyly. From a distance, it looks as if they are playing together; Pandora forgets why she has come ashore.

  November likewise disembarks to find a representative of the trading post that ordered the cargo on the Jeddah. The visit to Rabaul after the storm has something quite anticlimactic about it, and it is all the same to Slütter if someone takes an interest in the frying pans or not. He watches Pandora from over there and knows that he will lose her again—never before has something been important to him, no one has ever had power over him; indeed, he thinks, he himself allowed that red-haired child to make him not only vulnerable but mortal.

  He idly buttons up his captain’s jacket and grabs his cap to walk over to the governor’s residence. He has banished to the farthest reaches of his consciousness his mistrust of authority because he has heard that Hahl, the local governor, is a very decent, levelheaded man. Nevertheless, he cannot shake the feeling that his fate will now increasingly be influenced by others; everything is slipping from his grasp, as in a game of chess, the unavoidable loss of which becomes exponentially more apparent after the third or fourth move—just the other way around, of course, as if it were possible to divine the form of the old tree already present within the seed. He smiles en passant at Pandora, who has sat down on the lawn with the native children, and when she doesn’t smile back, indeed, when she doesn’t even look up at him, he closes his eyes and keeps going.

  The prevailing view that time is an inexorable stream in which everything has its precise beginning and its clearly defined course has also grown entrenched in Slütter’s thinking; and yet, as is made plain to him in many a lucid moment, it’s more that the end is in fact certain—not the perennial present that will lead us there. The perfidious, inconceivable now meanders like an ectoplasmic swirl, out of every nook and cranny, and flows uncontrollably, like a gas, into every direction of existence, disregarding the irrevocable uniqueness of every one of its moments, including the following one:

  Captain Slütter punctually presents himself for his appointment with the governor, declines the glass of beer offered with two slightly raised hands, and sits down gingerly as if he suspects that something crucial, something thoroughly unpleasant, will follow. Hahl clears his throat and asks if he might get right to the point, please. He knows, of course, that Slütt
er is no wayward beachcomber, one of those white reprobates who people the Pacific and live from hand to mouth. But there are certain circumstances that necessitate measures that must be taken, so to speak, outside the law. And someone like Slütter (Hahl stands up abruptly while saying this), who lives betwixt and between, has no family (he couldn’t, of course, Slütter thinks, know anything about Pandora), cruises around back and forth for years in the Pacific Ocean owing to his love of freedom, which Hahl respects greatly, by the way, but which prevents the captain from feeling at home anywhere longer than necessary—someone like him must handle a trifle for Hahl, please, one which may not be morally irreproachable, but which is utterly essential.

  To wit: August Engelhardt, whom Slütter met several years ago in the old capital Herbertshöhe, has become somewhat of a liability; there have been deliberations for some time, he is heavily in debt now, his island doesn’t belong to him at all, the plantation is overgrown, it’s quite clear that he’s gone insane, Hahl has looked upon the whole matter rather indulgently for years, but now, to make it quick and easy (he is kneading his hands behind his back the whole time), he would ask Slütter, since Hahl is responsible as the ultimate legal authority here, to sail over to Kabakon, shoot the coconut apostle dead, burn his corpse, and scatter the ashes into the sea. He is offering him two thousand marks to do this, from a secret war chest for which he is solely responsible. There is no evidence of it and no obligation to balance accounts, Slütter need neither confirm receipt of the money nor pay any fiscal courtesy calls to the German Reich. Hahl merely requires a willing man who can fire one or two shots and afterward leave the protectorate.