Imperium: A Fiction of the South Seas

by Christian Kracht

  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 Herbertshöhe 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 Herbertshöhe. 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.

  II

  It was in Port Said, half an eternity ago (in reality just a few weeks earlier)—when his eleven overseas crates with one thousand two hundred books had been mistakenly unloaded and he fancied them lost, never to be seen again—that he had last wept, one or two almost saltless tears, out of desperation and the vague feeling that for the first time his courage was now truly failing him. After searching in vain for the harbormaster, he used his time to post to a good friend in Frankfurt a letter that he had written while still in the Mediterranean—he had wrapped it in a cotton cloth to protect it from the damp—and drank unsweetened peppermint
tea on the terrace at Simon Arzt’s for an hour and a half while a silent Nubian, with a white napkin, dried glasses that refracted the shimmering canal in the dazzling desert light.

  All of Thoreau, Tolstoy, Stirner, Lamarck, Hobbes, Swedenborg, too, Madame Blavatsky and the theosophists—everything gone, everything lost. Alas, perhaps it was better this way, all that pointless thought, poof, shipped off somewhere else. Sullen, he made his way again to the pier and to his ship to Ceylon. The idea occurred to him that one ought to hand out a few piasters among the stevedores, so Engelhardt dug into his tunic pockets and addressed a seaman whose ethnicity (Greek? Portuguese? Mexican? Armenian?) was indecipherable due to a regrettable one-sided facial paralysis. He gave him the money and heard the man fold the bills together while smacking his lips. But, but, please, effendi, his books were over there! They apologized to him and without further ado loaded the crates on board again; it had been a misunderstanding, they had made a silly mistake, supposing Herbertshöhe to be somewhere else, on the coast of German East Africa. Engelhardt’s letter to his friend, wherein he wrote of contamination by Europe and of the Garden of Eden, turned up, insufficiently stamped, in the office of Port Said’s French postal service; there it was laid aside, ultimately, to its eternal rest. In a receptacle for such envelopes, underneath a table, it gathered dust and was buried by other letters. After many years, the course of which spanned one or two world wars, it was baled and strung together with others in a hefty bundle by a Coptic wastepaper merchant and chauffeured in a donkey cart out to a squalid hut at the fringes of the Sinai Desert—which, however, Engelhardt, whose ship was sailing to Ceylon that very evening with him and his book crates aboard, was never to discover.

  In Colombo, there were two luxurious grand hotels: the Galle Face, situated on the edge of a large maidan, and the Mount Lavinia, erected on a hill somewhat outside of and to the south of the city. Engelhardt, who would otherwise have certainly headed to more modest lodgings, had decided that he should indulge himself for once in Ceylon, and boarded a rickshaw after giving a liveried boy several annas, so that he might look after the whereabouts and custody of his baggage, which it had been necessary, yet again, to unload from the ship and store at the harbor. He made himself comfortable on the extraordinarily wide seat and wished to be conveyed to the Galle Face Hotel at a leisurely pace. But it went too quickly! The bare feet of the little old Ceylonese man slapped onomatopoeically and monotonously on the street before and below him; Engelhardt wondered whether the rickshaw wallah was running so fast because the asphalt was so hot, or whether the velocity was, so to speak, one of the expectations of passengers who wanted to arrive at their destination rapidly. He leaned down to touch the little man on the shoulder and communicate to him that he need not hurry so on his account, please, but the fellow did not understand him and even accelerated his pace, which is why, after finally arriving in front of the grand hotel, he collapsed beside the rickshaw, drenched in sweat and gasping for breath.

  The liveried porter, a burly Sikh with a magnificent white beard, came running, blanketed the poor rickshaw wallah with reproachful curses, took Engelhardt’s hand luggage from him with dozens of apologies, and, tossing a coin at the feet of the poor old man lying in the street, steered our friend into the cool and cavernous reception hall, where, with a practiced movement of his flattened hand, he rang a silver bell that had been affixed to the reception desk for this very purpose.

  Engelhardt slept long and dreamlessly in a large white room. A modern electric fan hummed on the ceiling above him; now and again a gecko somewhere in the room chirped its bleating courtship song and then shot its tongue at a bug it had been approaching slyly, millimeter by millimeter. Around four in the morning, the window shutters rattled, a wind sprang up, and it rained for an hour. But Engelhardt heard nothing. Lying on his back, profoundly at ease, he slumbered away on the freshly starched sheets, hands folded on his chest. His long hair, liberated before bedtime from the practical hair band that tied it back during the day, encircled the head resting on the white pillow in dark blond waves as if he were Wagner’s sleeping young Siegfried.

  On the following day, in the compartment of the awfully sluggish train to Kandy, on the way to the old royal city of Ceylon, a Tamil gentleman sat opposite to him; his blue-black skin stood in peculiar contrast to the snow-white tufts of hair that jutted out from his ears as if they were woolly cauliflower rosettes attached to his head, right and left. The soporifically slow journey wound through shady coconut groves and emerald rice paddies. The gentleman wore a black suit and a high white collar that lent him the dignity of a magistrate or a state solicitor. Engelhardt was reading an amusing book (Dickens) as one switchback after another passed before the window and the view looked out onto gently sloping fields of tea—tea that grew in walkable furrows, from which protruded colorfully dressed, dark-skinned tea-picking women, green-filled baskets on their backs.

  The gentleman had addressed him with a question, and Engelhardt, holding the page of the book he had just read with a wetted thumb and forefinger, asked him politely to repeat it, as the gentleman’s English was accented with a melody and tonality so foreign that Engelhardt would have better understood an Australian, even a Texan, but this venerable Tamil? Almost not at all. While the afternoon dust danced through the open train window, they conversed as well as they were able—they had made an agreement to employ the idiom both used purely as a mediating language deliberately and slowly—about the relics of the Holy Lord Buddha and, in particular, for Engelhardt soon steered the conversation in that direction, about the coconut.

  With soft gestures, the gentleman declared that, as a Tamil, he was beholden to Hinduism, but according to the sacred text of the Bhagavata Purana, the Buddha was one of the avatars of Vishnu, the twenty-fourth, to be precise, and for that reason—and here he introduced himself briskly as Mr. K. V. Govindarajan with a handshake that Engelhardt found pleasantly dry and firm—he was on the way to Kandy to view the tooth of the Buddha that was venerated there in a temple shrine. The relic at issue was the dens caninus, the upper left eyetooth. Govindarajan daintily raised a lip with the tip of his dark ring finger and graphically pointed out the location of the tooth in question; Engelhardt peered into the bone-white dentition embedded in perfectly healthy pink gums and mentally shuddered with a sensation of warm contentedness. His interlocutor’s plain, unhurried, and yet touchingly emotive means of expression filled him with an intense feeling of sudden intimacy.

  All at once, he reached for Govindarajan’s hand and asked him outright whether he was a vegetarian. But of course, certainly, came the answer, he himself and his family had been subsisting for years on fruits alone. Engelhardt was scarcely capable of grasping the coincidence of this encounter. Across from him in the compartment sat not only a brother in spirit, a like-minded soul, but a man whose subsistence placed him on par with God. Were not the dark races centuries ahead of the white race? And didn’t Hinduism, the highest expression of which was vegetarianism, i.e., love, constitute a force in the fabric of the universe, wouldn’t its all-encompassing, lucid rustlings one day outshine like a blinding comet those nations upon which Christianity had bestowed a charitable love that excluded animals from its purview? Hadn’t Rousseau and Burnett, following the vegetarian Plutarch, and as an overdue response to Hobbes’s Leviathan, claimed that the primordial instinct inherent in mankind was the renunciation of meat? And hadn’t Engelhardt’s dreadful Uncle Kuno tried to make the consumption of ham more palatable to him as a young boy by rolling a pink cigar for him from the thin flaps of pig meat as he laughed and smirked, then sticking it into his young mouth, and holding a match to the protruding end, just for the fun of it? And, finally, wasn’t the killing of animals, which is to say the preparation of meat and the nourishment of man with animal substances, really the preliminary stage of anthropophagy?

  Engelhardt’s knowledge of English was sometimes not entirely sufficient to formulate such questions exactly—and yet they h
ad to come out; where he lacked the abstract terms, he made do with clouds of ideas painted into the air, with comets whose traces he drew through the sunlit compartment with his finger.

  Engelhardt asked his new travel friend whether he had heard of Swami Vivekananda. And when the latter said no, he unpacked from his valise several pamphlets, which he timidly laid out beside himself on the compartment seat. They were the writings of that selfsame swami, who had recently caused a furor in the New World by virtue of his unusual ideas and rhetorical talents. There, too, mimeographed and stitched together with a ribbon (the Franconian adhesive binding had disintegrated back in the southern Red Sea, near Aden, on account of intense exposure to heat), was his own treatise, the contents of which heralded the healing power of cocovorism, though unfortunately in German, such that Engelhardt might point to the volume as an object without, however, being able to articulate for his new friend the thoughts therein, which were considerably more skillfully phrased in written form.

  And yet he did not wish to leave it untried; with some effort he paraphrased the fundamental notion in his text that man was the animal likeness of God and that the fruit of the coconut, in turn, which of all plants most resembled the human head (he was referring to the shape and hairs of the nut), was the vegetal likeness of God. It also grew, nota bene, closest to the heavens and the sun, high above atop the palm tree. Govindarajan nodded in assent and, as they passed through a small country station without stopping, was about to cite a relevant passage from the Bhagavata Purana (this was not the only sacred text he had had to memorize in his years of youth at the venerable University of Madras), when he resolved instead simply to continue nodding and let his interlocutor finish speaking in order, then, to note, with a certain gravitas he now deemed appropriate, that man, were he to subsist solely from the divine coconut, would not only be a cocovore, but also by definition a theophage. This he let resound for a moment in silence and then uttered the expression again into the stillness of midmorning, which was punctuated only by the clicking of the tracks: God-eater. Devourer of God.