Imperium: A Fiction of the South Seas

by Christian Kracht

  En route, Engelhardt very nearly ran into Christian Slütter, with whom he had once played chess in the Hotel Fürst Bismarck in Herbertshöhe. After the Gérard de Nerval had moored in Port Vila and Engelhardt had transferred himself onto a British postal ship bound for the Fiji Islands, Slütter, though it was not really consistent with his character (or perhaps precisely for that reason), had brawled in front of a dive with an American Baptist who had rudely kicked aside a native standing in his way. The preacher had been a snake-eyed six-footer in a dark, heavily stained robe with hands like steam hammers. One punch hit Slütter in the face on the left, one on the right. Dazed, he sailed to the ground. It was nothing to speak of, just a brawl like any other in a harbor town, but for the fact that the man of God, in a flying rage, drew from his boot a stiletto to stick into the belly of the groaning German lying on the ground. Just then, an iron rod came whistling from the side; the native whom Slütter had wanted to defend had stepped in, picked it up off the ground, and swung it around for all he was worth; it caught the Yankee behind his right ear. Slütter escaped the tumult by crawling behind a building and waiting until the local gendarmes who had come running had withdrawn again, hauling off the native offender. In the meantime, Slütter had dragged into his hideout the irrefutable proof of guilt, that fatal iron with the bloody clumps of the preacher’s hair, lain himself down on it, and had then fallen asleep, exhausted, where we shall let him be for the moment, until he surfaces again.

  At first glance, the little town of Suva on Fiji resembled Herbertshöhe (or rather its new likeness, Rabaul), though it was populated by hustlers, drunkards, pirates, Methodists, beachcombers, and other unsavory characters who had chosen this little British colony Fiji, from all the islands in the Pacific Ocean, as the place to make their trouble—God alone knows why.

  The light-eater and practitioner of prana, Erich Mittenzwey from Berlin, had meanwhile settled on a nameless neighboring Fijian isle—he had been receiving pilgrims and disciples for months—and when Engelhardt alighted there, it seemed to him as if he were looking in a fun-house mirror at his own future colony of cocovores. He was bidden welcome, and, in the fallacious assumption that he was likely a devotee of Mittenzwey’s, he was assigned a place to sleep in one of the rattan huts that had been erected by the dozen along the little bay. Everything seemed strictly organized and arranged in the German manner; Engelhardt watched with amazement as a young man swept the beach, lost in thought.

  Mittenzwey himself, not especially emaciated, made his appearance after midday; he took a seat on a throne-like structure fashioned of bamboo, disrobed except for a kerchief-sized cloth that covered his private parts, and under various contortions that Engelhardt interpreted as freely improvised yogic poses began to open his mouth wide, snapping like a carp so as to absorb sunlight into his person. The small crowd of pilgrims sitting at his feet marveled, and they threw themselves to the ground, imitating him, attempting to drink the sunbeams. Engelhardt, who felt a fathomless fury rise up in him, took a seat in the sand next to a young Indian (Mittenzwey had again disappeared into his hut) and asked him what exactly was going on here.

  Well, for over half a year, the fakir Mittenzwey had ingested neither food nor water—only the essence of light. This had been common practice in Europe during the Middle Ages, but Mittenzwey had refined the discipline with Indian philosophy here on the Fiji Islands, which were populated in large part by descendants of the wage laborers who had immigrated from northern India. In principle, the point was to store up prana, that stuff that surrounds us, by means of certain breathing techniques: in short, to transform ether into nutrients. It of course required a maximum of concentration and willpower, not everyone would be successful, one needed to enter a trance using certain meditative techniques acquired over many years for the world spirit (which conveniently rode on the light rays) to begin to permeate the body. Yes, and in order to pay homage to him, one brought the master gifts of money, watches, and jewelry, which he stored openly in his hut to visualize for himself at all times the transience of the world and its vain frippery.

  Engelhardt had heard enough; he hadn’t come across such skulduggery in ages. He arose, walked up the beach to Mittenzwey’s dwelling, shoved the rattan curtain aside without knocking or otherwise announcing himself, and entered that most sacred sanctuary of the Berlin fakir. Mittenzwey and a dark-skinned elder Indian were sitting at a little table and shot up like children caught red-handed, sweeping into the corner, aghast, the various bowls with rice, fruits, and chicken drumsticks; then the two collapsed in a heap. Mittenzwey resignedly buried his forehead in his hands, the Indian stood up and wiped his mouth, and at this moment Engelhardt realized that it was Govindarajan who stood before him, the treacherous Tamil who had once, years ago, lured him into a dark den on the island of Ceylon and then robbed him of his money.

  During the brief moment of mutual recognition, Mittenzwey fell to his knees; the German must not betray them to his disciples, for heaven’s sake, it looked worse than it really was, they had without a doubt displayed fraudulent intentions, but no one had been forced to give them their valuables, this had simply begun one morning, then the arriving devotees had brought more and more presents, and giving them back had become impossible, plain and simple. Then Mittenzwey offered Engelhardt two handfuls of jewelry and valuable watches from a chest hastily pulled up and opened, and Govindarajan asked what sort of odd splotches Engelhardt had there, down on his legs.

  Ignoring as much as possible Govindarajan’s repulsive, smug visage and the precious objects so shamelessly offered, Engelhardt asked Mittenzwey what he really wanted to know: Was the whole practice of inhaling prana really only quackery, or was it in fact possible to ingest nothing but light? (The dishes strewn about the floor did rather suggest the former.) The Berlin fakir, who was, deep down, not a villainous person, replied meekly that he had tried fasting for approximately twenty-four hours and had very quickly reached the limits of his body. The worst thing, of course, had been the thirst, but he had known then with certainty that no one could live for months merely on the gifts of the sun.

  Oh, rubbish, Engelhardt practiced nothing less, he ate of the fruit of the sun, and had done so for years, he replied with satisfaction, and they could keep their schlock, he was not going to reveal anything, they were merely a sad sight to behold, the Tamil and Mittenzwey, but he now knew that henceforth not only would he have to surround himself solely with Pure Doctrine, he would also have to set about attracting devotees whom he could face on equal footing—he, who suffered from the fact that no one came to visit him on his own island, he who would have liked to have had a friend, a fellow utopian. But when he saw what sort of shoddy cretin Mittenzwey had at his side there, he knew that being alone would always be preferable to this Byzantine underhandedness, to this pathetic house of lies here on Fiji. Phooey, he said, and adieu, and then he stepped out without honoring that sad hoodlum Govindarajan with even so much as the thought of a glance. It wouldn’t have been acceptable to demand his money back from him since he had decided never to touch money again, even though he doubtless could well have used it to chip away at the mountain of debt he had amassed over in the protectorate.

  Govindarajan, who of course had spent the money many years ago, cackled like a malevolent goat, for he had indeed recognized the spots on Engelhardt’s legs. Then came a disparaging hand gesture; he whispered to Mittenzwey that one needn’t bother with that one there any longer, he was on his way to the underworld anyway, their lucky streak, however, was far from over, and he proceeded to tidy up the hut again, throwing the chicken bones and the rice into the fire pit and covering everything with ashes and sand, still smirking to himself.

  His thumb now in his mouth more often than he himself thought right, Engelhardt sailed back, this time as a stowaway on a German cruiser of the Imperial Navy, the SMS Cormoran, which had taken on coal and freshwater in Suva Harbor. He had hidden himself in one of the lifeboats covered in tarpaulin and taken
a few coconuts with him to ward off hunger and thirst. He passed his water by urinating into an empty coconut shell, which he then slung at night through the slightly tented tarpaulin on the seaward side, far out into the darkness of the ocean. To be sure, not all that much would have happened to him had he been discovered—it was a German ship, after all—but in those days it did happen that boat crews from other nations were not especially gingerly in their treatment of stowaways—Frenchmen, Russians, and Japanese tossed the unfortunate souls overboard without a second thought, as if one were in the middle of that most crude eighteenth century and not in our conscientious twentieth. Engelhardt was forced to think of the poor bastards floating on the ocean’s surface watching their respective ships sail away, death by thirst or exhaustion imminent, without even the faintest hope, thousands upon thousands of miles of ruthless sea all around, and a shudder came over him, and he shoved his thumb ever more firmly in his mouth.

  After two weeks of a completely uneventful, sunlit voyage, the Cormoran anchored in Blanche Bay, and Engelhardt quit his safe hideout, satisfied with the success of his gratis excursion. In the general bustle of the warship’s arrival, he mingled with the crowd on the jetty and suddenly took a powerful fright when he noticed that he was not in his trusted Herbertshöhe at all, but that the houses, palms, and avenues seemed to have been displaced in an extremely jarring way. He grew so disoriented that he felt as if he were going to faint and a gigantic force were sucking him into a tiny hole where he would then be disassembled into atoms.

  Stumbling, he shoved his way past the white-clad onlookers, their facial features swimming before him. There was the church, my goodness, only it was standing the wrong way around. He tore at his beard with both hands. Over there was the Imperial Post Office, but across the way the Forsayth trading post that had still been there a few weeks ago was missing, while now, damn it, it was standing next to the Hotel Fürst Bismarck.

  Beseechingly, he approached this or that passerby: Please would someone tell him what had happened here? But they evaded him; the sight of this obviously deranged long-haired man dressed in only a lap-lap was too bizarre. Hotel Director Hellwig, who was strolling toward the governor’s residence conversing with an officer from the Cormoran, gave a start at the sight of the severely emaciated owner of the Kabakon plantation who was flailing about like a grotesque revenant in the middle of the avenue. He left the officer where he was and tried to explain to Engelhardt that the city had been relocated—Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, hadn’t anyone told him?—but the latter could only stare at the hotel owner’s missing ear, as if there, from that cartilaginous atavism, could be divined the place into which his grip on reality had gradually vanished. He produced not a single German word, but in a continuous stammer, and finally speaking in tongues, abandoned Hellwig, who in fact felt rather sorry for the little fellow, and walked down to the beach to look for his sailing canoe, which would bring him back to his own sanity-restoring island.

  IX

  In the middle of the fourth or fifth year, an out-of-tune piano came to Kabakon, as had been hoped for so long ago. It came in the nurturing company of a man who had announced himself in three letters, each arriving shortly after the one before it, with exalted and anointed formulations: Max Lützow, violin and piano virtuoso from Berlin, director of the Lützow Orchestra (which had been named for the blond-haired rake), ladies’ man, though of course the last bit was not in the letters.

  Lützow was burned out, which is to say, washed up; he was tired of civilization and carried with him a terrifying assemblage of half-imagined sicknesses of which he had unreservedly made use in order to cloak the malaise of his everyday German life in a shroud of hypochondria. He suffered by turns, depending on weather conditions and how he was feeling, from asthma, rheumatism, whooping cough, migraines, ennui, chills, anemia, consumption, tinnitus, osteoporosis, back pain, worms, sensitivity to direct sunlight, and chronic rhinitis.

  Lützow was of course perfectly healthy, as every specialist in Berlin had been telling him for years, and so, for want of a medical confirmation of his escalating symptoms, visible only to himself, he had undergone a series of newfangled cures, chief among them hypnosis. When the costly visits to Charlottenburg’s mesmerists yielded few results—indeed, gave him neither relief nor special insight into the causes of his alternating ailments—he had even undertaken a trip to Vienna at the recommendation of a Jewish cellist friend of his to ask Dr. Sigmund Freud, who practiced there in the Ninth District, to dissect his brain, so to speak, in an evaluation.

  But the latter had turned him away after a very short conversation; the Berlin musician’s minor hysteria had seemed too pitiful and uninteresting to the famous neurologist, and so the former, on the very same evening that he arrived in Vienna, was sitting on the train back to Berlin, mentally putting a checkmark next to Dr. Freud’s name, and resolving to become a vegetarian immediately, since the suffering of animals in slaughterhouses seemed to resonate morphologically, more or less through the intake of food, deep within the echo chamber of his own body.

  Lützow tossed the ham sandwich purchased from the train station buffet out the window of the departing train, sank into an unsettled twilight sleep due to the steady clatter of the railway, and, having changed trains in Prague and arrived in the early evening in Berlin, immediately obtained for himself in a bookstore at the Zoological Garden a whole crate of freethinking, contemporary literature on the topic of vegetarianism. Included in it—Lützow was immediately ensnared as a bee buzzing astray that lands in sticky resin—was the treatise with the euphonious title A Carefree Future. The bookseller had mumbled something about New Guinea, and right away Lützow had appeared at the Berlin branch of Norddeutscher Lloyd and, in a thoroughly euphoric state of mind accompanied by the promise of offbeat escapades, purchased a ticket to the South Seas.

  Engelhardt, who was just then finally cutting his toenails after many months of their sun-induced growth (for this he used paper scissors a great deal too large for the purpose, which he had bought from the Herbertshöhe postmaster for the outrageous sum of one mark eighty-five pfennigs)—they had grown out several inches from his feet such that he had tripped several times on exposed tree roots and larger conches—was sitting on the little wooden staircase that led up to his veranda and observing with bemused curiosity the contortions of the indigenous men, dripping with sweat, who endeavored to heave the piano from the steam launch onto two canoes and bring it to the shore of his bay without getting their feet wet. They were toiling quite dexterously, but the weight of the instrument was too large for the canoes, which almost put the bobbing boats in danger of capsizing. Max Lützow stood among the men—gesticulating, shirtless, his head bright red—and conducted the preposterous process of unloading the piano.

  While Engelhardt was still quickly going over the middle toe of his left foot with the scissors (he nibbled off his fingernails; this was the only animal protein he ingested from time to time, and we would simply forgive him this little form of auto-anthropophagy and let it go entirely unmentioned if it didn’t prematurely bespeak a certain symbolic significance), the men finally pulled and dragged the piano up onto the beach, its feet now digging into the wet sand, leaving deep furrows that reminded Engelhardt of the trail of a giant tortoise that has left the protective sea to lay her eggs.

  He discarded this thought, which seemed to him in the moment of thinking it curiously indecent, laid the expensive scissors at the outer edge of the shell- and driftwood-bedecked veranda, covered his loins with the waistcloth that had previously served him as a receptacle for the clipped toenails (upon sight of the virtuoso, whom he awaited with joyful skepticism, he forbade himself his secret habit, likely borne of boredom, of using his collected toenails as a source of nutrition, too), and walked down to the shore, his right arm stretched aloft, to greet his guest from Germany, who had by then sunk into the sand, weary and depleted. In the meantime, a shadow crept around the house and, with a quick, sure hand, stole
the scissors flashing there in the sunlight—it’s to be assumed that it was Makeli.

  Lützow’s arrival had caused quite a stir in Rabaul, especially among the few German women who expected from the prominent musician at the very least a revitalization of their soirees, which were characterized by boredom, catty remarks, and the same conversations repeated ad infinitum—or at best the possibility of a little flirting. Evening after evening, the handsome young Berliner in his white flannels was more lugged than bidden to the German Club’s piano—in order to entertain those planters and their wives convened there with a repertoire culled from clichés of fashionable music. They demanded of him maudlin standards, and he played everything as desired on the horrible-sounding instrument, including Donizetti and Mascagni and above all that gooey Bizet.

  It had quickly gotten around, however, that Lützow intended to settle on Kabakon with August Engelhardt, which led to a rise in esteem for Engelhardt and a simultaneous drop in esteem for Lützow. They tried to dissuade him with all possible means. That fellow over on his isle was out of his mind; he lived—it could hardly be believed, they told him—by turns from nuts and flowers and was naked all day long. Mentioning this fact nevertheless led to a slight flush among the women, which they attempted to camouflage by theatrically wagging their fans. From their bosoms rose the scents of tuberoses, verbena, and musk, which diffused like invisible ground fogs and wafted fragrantly, pregnant with insinuation, through the salons of the club. But he really must stay here in Rabaul, where it was fun and civilized—in the next few months, they were even expecting a Marconi device, and couldn’t he just play Carmen once more, just one more time?