Imperium

by Christian Kracht

  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.

  The city is one large construction zone; holes as deep as a man hinder orderly passage, and these are now filling with brackish water, to boot. Siberian traders sell their soggy bric-a-brac at Alexanderplatz, where there’s also extremely inexpensive bratwurst to be had, consisting mainly of meat scraps and moldy flour, that disintegrates immediately in the rain. The tram, creaking and throwing sparks, shoves past decent citizens, who jump onto the footstep to avoid the most severe showers of all; everywhere, dripping iron cranes strain heavenward. This, then, is Berlin, a mediocre, slovenly, provincial town, carelessly erected in the sands of Brandenburg, masquerading as an imperial capital.

  After learning that Silvio Gesell, whom he wanted to consult here in Berlin on founding a moneyless vegetarian community, has since emigrated to Argentina, Engelhardt escapes the small throng of his liberators in the bustle of Schlesischer Bahnhof, leaps into a horse-drawn bus, and disposes of the bandages that have robbed him of half his sight. He can see again, very well, actually, in spite of the rain. And his resolve is steeled: what he will do is say adieu forever to this poisoned, vulgar, cruel, hedonistic society rotting from the inside out, a society whose sole occupation consists in amassing useless things, slaughtering animals, and exterminating the soul.

  A few stops later, at Alexanderplatz, a soaked Berliner is leaning against the wall of a building and eating—chewing, mesmerized—one of those bland bratwursts. The whole wretchedness of his people is written on his face. The unctuous, indifferent desolation, the gray lament of his bristly-cut hair, the oily specks of sausage between his crude fingers—one day he’ll be painted like that, the German. Engelhardt, just as hypnotized, fixes him in his gaze as the omnibus rattles past through the wall of water. For a second it is as if a fiercely bright beam of light joins the two, one enlightened and one subordinate.

  V

  Now that we have endeavored to tell of our poor friend’s past, we will skip a few short years, like an untiring, lofty seabird for whom crossing the time zones of our globe is of no consequence whatsoever, indeed, who neither notices nor reflects upon them, and visit August Engelhardt again where we left him a few pages ago: walking stark-naked on the beach—on his own beach, mind you—stooping here and there to collect an especially lovely shell and slip it into a wicker basket he has thrown over his shoulder.

  The Time Statute of the German Empire, which was passed a good decade ago in Berlin and aptly went into effect on April 1 shortly before the turn of the century, ensured that a uniform hour could be read from the clocks of His Imperial Majesty’s German subjects throughout the entire motherland. In the colonies, meanwhile, one told time according to the respective world time zone, while on the isle of Kabakon, in a sense, a time outside of time prevailed. Which is to say Engelhardt’s clock, which he had placed on a piece of driftwood serving as a night table and wound with considerable regularity by means of a little key, had gone into arrears, temporally speaking, due to a single grain of sand; the granule had made itself comfortable within the clock between the spring and one of the hundred whirring cogs and, since it consisted of hard, pulverized corallite, was inducing a minute deceleration in the progression of Kabakonian time.

  To be sure, Engelhardt did not notice this fact right away, nor even after a few days; in fact, a few years had to pass on Kabakon before the effect of the grain of sand made itself felt. The retardation was such that the clock did not lose even one second per day, and yet something gnawed and ate at Engelhardt, who expected something like a secure footing in space from a correct indication of time. He thought himself in the ethereal, cosmic present—should he have to forsake it, that would mean for him stepping out of time, which is to say, going mad.

  That in faraway Switzerland another young vegetarian working in a patent office was compiling the theoretical underpinnings for his dissertation at precisely that moment, the contents of which but a few years later would turn upside down not only all of mankind’s previous knowledge, but to a certain extent also the viewpoint from which one perceived the world and this knowledge, and even time, was unknown to Engelhardt.

  When he contemplated whether his clock might not be running more slowly—it just seemed to him that way since he of course could not draw any comparisons to genuine, real time (the pendulum clock in the governor’s residence over in Herbertshöhe, which one might look to as the standard time for the protectorate, had stopped due to the negligence of the staff while Hahl was convalescing in Singapore)—he suddenly had the feeling he was going to fall backward; a painful, nagging twinge in the left upper arm stabbed into him, just near the heart,
as if a stroke were actually felling him at his young age. He distinctly saw the clock ticking away, his by-now-finished rattan cot, and the mosquito net attached above it with a coir rope. He was already falling into time when there appeared before his eyes, at first hazily, then in downright razor-sharp focus, not only the canary-yellow and violet painted walls of his childhood nursery, but the perfumed manifestation of his mother, bending over him with the tip of her tongue stuck out in worry and working over his hot forehead with an iced cotton cloth. His mother could not only be seen; she could in fact be felt, as if she were not long dead but present and infinite in the extreme—the boundless love that he felt for her was indeed a cosmic, a divine sensation.

  With gentle and calming words, his mother led him out onto the terrace of his parents’ home, and he became aware of the rosebushes that grew down in the garden exuding their heavy scent. It was the middle of the night. The summer crickets were putting on their somniferous night concert when his mother gestured toward the sky to show him that enormous wheel of fire rotating above in the inky firmament. To the child it looked like a savagely hungry, insatiable mouth devouring everything.

  Trembling with fear, he closed his eyes to the monstrous, burning portent, hiding his face in his mother’s bosom, the cozy fullness of which instantly sent him falling deeper, which is to say, further up, the current of time, until he came to lie in a perambulator, immobile, as his infant body was not able to turn or stretch out its little hands. And yet they were able to feel the embroidered blanket with which he had been tucked in; in fact, he discerned the pale blue checkered pattern of a baby bonnet at the edge of his field of vision and saw above him the infinite forkings of a summery cherry tree under which someone had pushed the pram at midday. He heard ringing laughter, glasses clinked together, the barking of a dachshund. A pink blossom, marbled somewhat with midnight blue at the edges, glided down slowly and came to rest gently on his little face.

  Unexpectedly, the queasy feeling that his body was floating overcame him. It was even earlier now. A soft surface that engulfed him, then the not-unpleasant impression that he was being drawn across pumice, over a whole volcanic expanse made of this very rock; for hours he floated a few inches above that expanse as if he were a helium balloon about to burst because of the rough surface of the stone, but then which laboriously manages to get free; there was a precipice, a pulling, a dragging. Finally he fell downward, a catastrophic plunge toward the earth, as if he himself were that blossom that had drifted down from the treetop. Then he awoke.

  VI

  During his stay on his island, Engelhardt had not only lost several pounds, but had also grown wiry and muscular; his skin was now a rich dark brown, and his hair and beard, which he slathered with coconut oil every morning, had become bright blond and golden from sun and salt. Pursuant to his instructions, the oil his employees squeezed on Kabakon was bottled in half-liter flasks on the mainland and given an appealing label designed by the Herbertshöhe postmaster, which showed Engelhardt’s somewhat touched-up, bearded profile. (The alternative—providing from the congealed oil the base ingredient for Palmin cooking fat and the margarine much in demand in Germany—was completely out of the question for him, for ethical reasons; he would most certainly not supply his countrymen with vegetable oil in which to sizzle their Sunday beefsteak.)

  The oil-refining process Engelhardt paid for out of pocket (or rather on credit from Queen Emma, who was still, more or less, smiling inscrutably), a somewhat doubled advance payment; one day that Kabakon Oil, which already lay stacked in the Forsayth trading post packed in dozens of wooden crates, would surely find a buyer.

  To this end, Engelhardt had established several very promising contacts in Australia, notwithstanding the fact that the letters he dispatched to Darwin, Cairns, and Sydney, as befell mailed advertisements all over the world, were briefly skimmed, then stacked, cut down the middle, and reused as coarse toilet paper; his letters in particular were employed in the staff privy of the accountant’s office at a copper and bauxite mine not far from Cairns.

  The writings that told of the therapeutic, thoroughly beneficial, and diverse possible applications of his Kabakon Coconut Oil, in Engelhardt’s quite literary but somewhat awkward English, served the visitors to that Australian toilet only to a limited extent as entertaining reading while they did their business, as they had been perforated, cut, and separated at precisely those areas that would have enabled an unhindered read in complete sentences. Reassembled and reread with the hundreds of similar mailed advertisements, they no longer made any sense, of course. Thus, his letters wandered: scanned fleetingly, bereft of meaning, wadded up, and smeared with filth, they landed in a seepage pit on that gigantic, almost uninhabited continent to the south, which Engelhardt once visited with friendly intentions during the time remaining for him in the protectorate, but whose soldierly and coarse, mostly drunken inhabitants so disgusted him that after only a week and a half he boarded a mail steamer to return to New Pomerania.

  The humiliating ends that befell his brochures remained concealed from Engelhardt. Had he found out, he would scarcely have decamped for Cairns; nor was he able to anticipate anything of the great calamity later to be dubbed the First World War. So it was only a premonition that afflicted him as he sauntered through the alleys of that Queensland gold mining town.

  The following had happened to him: the wooden door of a public house had been pushed open, and a bearded colored man, a Pacific islander obviously, had fallen backward onto the dirt road, uttering a dull, grunting cry. The black man rolled over on his stomach in anguish and crawled toward Engelhardt; a throng of white Australians followed him out of the pub, whereupon he was cruelly beset with kicks until he could hardly ward off their brutal blows any further. He came to rest before Engelhardt with arm outstretched, bleeding and coughing and motionless. Recalling that he himself had once been so beaten, on that beach in East Prussia, Engelhardt knelt down and tried to lift the victim by the shoulders, but the white men, intoxicated nearly to the point of dehumanization, shoved him back brusquely, screaming, Nigger lover! and other despicable words.

  One ought not treat a human being like that, Engelhardt said, growing furious, and all at once he sprouted wings of courage, and he stood up straight, a slight, rickety figure against six or seven rough gold panners. One now noticed his German accent, called him dirty Hun, and raised his fists to pummel him as well. Another held him back, saying that there would be war between Edward and the Kaiser soon enough anyway, and we’ll teach ’em manners then, those bastard Germans. Finally, bawling out patriotic songs, they withdrew to the counter of the canteen bar whose publican, as was customary in those days in Australia, had diluted the brandy with gunpowder and cayenne pepper, to enhance the effect of the alcohol on the one hand and, on the other, to mask the repulsive taste of his hooch with a false, fiery note.

  Aha, Engelhardt thought to himself. And, after putting a few shillings into the wounded colored man’s still-outstretched hand, he made his way back to the boardinghouse room on the second floor of a clothier’s, lay down on his bed with a sigh, and ruminated on the encounter. Could it not be that the subjects of His Britannic Majesty would one day annex the German protectorate just like that, were the war they had just prophesied to him, Engelhardt, actually to occur? Kaiser-Wilhelmsland, New Pomerania, and the smaller islands were defended by a mere handful of German soldiers, and it was precisely the extraordinary remoteness and irrelevance of the colony that had to seem tempting to a bellicose people, as the British doubtless were—much like raspberry cake would be to a hungry child. Engelhardt was, please note, unable to sense anything of the gigantic conflagration that would cover the globe a few years later, but from then on his senses were sharpened, his image of the British and young Australia altered forever by the encounter in Cairns: Would the sea become an Anglo-Saxon Pacific, would he be left to do as he pleased, on his Kabakon? Hardly. Wouldn’t the little isle instead be annexed as well and his workers
henceforth required to slave at his coconut palms for the English king? Then that free, that German, paradise would be finished.

  While he was thinking this, next door, virtually tête-à-tête with him and separated only by a thin sheet of plywood that served as a divider for the boardinghouse rooms, lay a young man who was not dissimilar to Engelhardt in habitus and countenance, likewise keenly contemplating, though his thoughts at the moment did not revolve around a potential war between the German Reich and Great Britain, but around yeast paste. Halsey was a Seventh-day Adventist and baker, hailed from the United States, also had a rather slight build, and was developing ways to popularize natural foods. He had ended up in Australia because the Christian-Adventist company for which he worked had dispatched him there to sideline him, on the one hand (for he was somewhat of an oddball), and, on the other, to give him the opportunity to prove himself by running riot, so to speak, over the sixth continent. Could be, his masters in the far-off state of Michigan thought, could be that young Halsey will make something of himself down there among the kangaroos.