Imperium: A Fiction of the South Seas

by Christian Kracht

  Villa Gunantambu, Mrs. Forsayth’s wooden palace, lay a few minutes’ walk from the forlorn placard marking the city limits of Herbertshöhe. She herself sat on the veranda, a colorfully embroidered linen shawl draped around her slender, handsomely shaped shoulders, and had air fanned at her by means of a complicated mechanical contraption. A naked little boy sat on the lawn and blew soap bubbles that landed on Engelhardt’s shoulders, where, wearily and unspectacularly, like a metaphor en miniature invoked by a second-class novelist, they breathed their last brief, soapy breath.

  And so he stepped onto the veranda, introduced himself, and bowed. Mrs. Forsayth, though a half-caste, spoke excellent, one might even say overly perfect, German. Cold tea was served, with pastries and tiny little cubes of mangosteen on toothpicks, of which Engelhardt took a few mouthfuls so as not to come across as impolite. Silence. Then, primarily to get conversation going—for one look at the gaunt young man was enough for her to classify him as a shy fellow who had turned his back on life somewhat—Mrs. Forsayth pointed out the casuarina trees growing adjacent to her wooden palace, thickly festooned with fruit bats that dangled like cocoons from the leafless boughs and occasionally flailed about with their patagia, screeching. During high heat, she declared, fixing her gaze sternly on Engelhardt, the animals urinated over their own wings, and the evaporative cold produced by flapping then provided the desired cooling effect. Engelhardt cleared his throat and smiled awkwardly, an indefinable tone of discord rattling forth from his gullet.

  Mrs. Forsayth intimidated him. She was, after all, despite being long past fifty and corpulent, a highly attractive woman who knew how to complement her flattering facial expressions most arrestingly with scant but resolute movements. It may well be that Engelhardt allowed himself to be overawed (and indeed, the businesswoman Emma Forsayth would not have been sitting there were she not thrice as shrewd as her male colleagues), for he hemmed and hawed a bit, haltingly mentioned the correspondence with Governor Hahl, and then outlined his plan to harvest the fruits of the coconut palm and trade in the by-products, which is to say, not just in copra; he also wanted to produce oils and creams and send them off, attractively labeled, back into the Reich. He even envisioned inventing a shampoo; he described the fragrant coconut essence in the hair of ladies in fine Berlin societies, in his reasoning furtively bearing in mind that, in the end, Mrs. Forsayth was perhaps just a woman who occasionally longed to return to places not lacking in opera houses, hackneys, and luxuriously perfumed sitz baths with constant hot water. In addition and above all, he added, he had come to German New Guinea to establish a kind of commune that would pay homage to the coconut.

  Queen Emma ignored Engelhardt’s last sentence, which in any case was declaimed rather more inaudibly than his plans for the economic exploitation of Cocos nucifera. And the flattering words about coconut shampoo did not impress her in the least. So he wished to buy a plantation? She had exactly the thing for him. A little island! Yet wouldn’t Engelhardt perhaps first want to explore the interior and think about whether he might like a larger-scale plantation there, albeit in a hard-to-reach location? Depending on the weather, a four- or five-day journey away, that is, around sixty miles from Herbertshöhe as the crow flies, there was a coconut planting of some twenty-five hundred acres whose owner—indeed, one must needs state it without hesitation—had gone mad and doused himself, his family, and three black employees with pitch and set them alight. That plantation could be had, considering its size, for nearly nothing, since the planter’s will, written in a state of complete mental barbarism, could not be validated (Kill them all could be read in it) and the estate thus passed to the German Reich, and in particular to the firm Forsayth & Company, the director of which was sitting here before him.

  The island Kabakon, she continued, had only one hundred eighty-five acres of coconut palms, although it had the advantage of being located but a few nautical miles away from Herbertshöhe somewhat to the north in the Neu-Lauenburg archipelago. An island would be both manageably sized and easy to cultivate. One needed only harvest and process the coconuts. One might then transport the yield by boat and offer it for sale in Herbertshöhe, avoiding the arduous and dangerous path through the jungle that the haul would have to travel from the large inland plantation. Anyway, what an island, she rhapsodized: every year, the inhabitants of Kabakon sent a canoe out to sea laden with cowries and adorned with green leaves to compensate the fish for their relatives caught the previous year. And there was a charming tradition at weddings: a coconut was broken open over the heads of the couple and the coconut milk spilled out over them. The isle cost forty thousand marks, as did the gigantic plantation in the interior. Engelhardt exhaled audibly.

  Now, she could give him these two quotes, but he ought to have a look at both, please, and then decide. She likely knew that she had not only made the decision easy for him, but forced it with a steady hand—the plantation of the fellow gone mad was cheaper many times over but tainted for him with such bad kismet on account of her description of its circumstances that Engelhardt would choose the island Kabakon. In the end, she was a businesswoman, and if this young eccentric—for she had certainly heard that Engelhardt wanted to found an order of coconut-eaters, and Governor Hahl had of course reported on him already, too—wanted to leave his money with her, then so be it. Besides, well, she liked him, liked how he sat there, bearded, ascetic, with his impossible hair and those aqua-colored eyes, skinny as a sparrow.

  She couldn’t help thinking of a visit to Italy many years ago; it was as if she had already seen Engelhardt there before, but where? Yes! Of course! That was it! In the work of the Florentine master Fra Angelico, in his depictions of the savior Jesus Christ as martyr. Engelhardt was the spitting image of the Redeemer in those portraits. She smiled blithely and for a few seconds sank away into that golden, long-bygone afternoon after the visit to the church of San Marco, into that discreet tryst at the little pensione not far from the Arno.

  As a nearly unbelievable coincidence would have it, Engelhardt had in fact also been in Florence at that very same time. After the obligatory visit to the Santa Croce, he had wanted to climb up to San Miniato al Monte, but since the dismal poverty of the Italians beyond the city gate of Porta Romana rattled him—he saw heavyset, leather-aproned butchers with their cleavers, hacking into pieces of meat riddled with yellow fat; people were throwing excrement out of their windows into the Via Romana at night, as if still in the depths of the Dark Ages—had sought a shortcut through the Boboli Gardens and sat there on a stone bench to rest, slipped off his sandals, and then languorously stretched out his feet. Somewhere unseen, an amateur had been practicing the trombone. On the hills beyond the city, cypresses shot abruptly into the hyper-blue sky like black flames.

  Sitting across the way on this side of the gravel path had been a gaunt, ascetic-seeming man wearing a small pair of steel spectacles, whose visage the Florentine Easter sun had already burnt a deep nut-brown hue; he had been reading from a book and was, please note, not an Italian, but likely a Swede or a Norwegian. Each had seen the other; the novelist—for that was what he probably was, and not a Scandinavian, but a Swabian—had sized the young bearded man up with interest, before deciding not to address him, although the gentleman who had been so appraised seemed to hope he would. And then both had gone their separate ways, Engelhardt up to San Miniato al Monte and the Swabian writer off to a simple tavern in the San Niccolò district, where, ensconced in a cool corner, he had ordered a piece of cured ham and a quarter liter of blood-red Valpolicella, continued work on a manuscript with the somewhat plain title Gertrud, and quickly forgotten the young man.

  Engelhardt finished his tea, glancing at the thin, precious Chinese porcelain of the cup in his hand and the rich woman smiling obligingly there on the canapé before him, and heard the word Kabakon whispered ever so softly in his mind. He placed the cup back onto the tray carefully and said he would take the island, sight unseen; he would pay sixteen thousand marks in ca
sh, borrowing the rest, if she wouldn’t mind, against his own production. Queen Emma did not deliberate for long; here a wispy little Jesus was coming to her wanting to pay sixteen thousand marks for a worthless islet without haggling and, on top of that, pledged to sign over his entire yield to her for two years—a quick, rough approximation—and all this for a little piece of land she had inveigled from a Tolai chief for two old rifles, a crate of axes, two sails, and thirty pigs. She offered her hand rather entrancingly, without getting up; Engelhardt took it, and they shook in agreement.

  A contract was drawn up, copies were sent back and forth between Villa Gunantambu and the Hotel Fürst Bismarck, secretly perused by Hotel Director Hellwig (who quite inappropriately stuck his red-veined nose and his single ear into everything), signed by Engelhardt, and adorned with an inky blue thumbprint. Long walks were taken, several jars of iodine, three mosquito nets, and two steel axes were purchased, and arrangements were made to send his crates of books after him; otherwise, Engelhardt took nothing over from this prosaic world into his own.

  The sun shone, oh, how it shone. The passage over to Mioko with the steam launch proceeded quickly and without incident. Upon arrival there, a taciturn German-Russian agent named Botkin gestured with his thumb toward a sailing canoe hoisted up onto the beach and at the ready, and revealed to Engelhardt that it was his, take it, he owned three of them, even. Two natives came along; no one said a word. Engelhardt stripped off his sandals and knee socks, taking a seat on the rear bench, and in a single forward movement they cruised to Kabakon under a full sail that billowed magnificently in the east wind. Flying fish accompanied the canoe, leaping parabolas of silver. He tasted the salty ocean air, wiggled his naked big toes back and forth, and swore to himself, smiling, not to put his sandals back on anytime soon. After a good half hour, the green outlines of his isle appeared on the horizon. One of the men pointed over toward it with the stump of his arm and looked back over his shoulder with a smile, his perfect white teeth showing, two tightly closed rows of ivory.

  To own one’s own island on which the coconut grew and flourished in the wild! It had not yet fully penetrated Engelhardt’s consciousness, but now as the little boat glided from the open ocean into the calmer, transparent waters of a small bay, the brightly conjured shore of which was lined with majestically soaring palms, his heart began fluttering up and down like an excited sparrow. My goodness, he thought, this was now really his! All this!

  He leapt from canoe into water, waded the last few yards to the shore, and fell to his knees in the sand, so overcome was he; and for the black men in the boat and the few natives who had found their way to the beach with a certain phlegmatic curiosity (one of them even wore a bone fragment in his lower lip, as though he were parodying himself and his race), it looked as if a pious man of God were praying there before them; it might remind us civilized peoples of a depiction of the landing of the conquistador Hernán Cortés on the virginal shore of San Juan de Ulúa, perhaps painted by turns—if this were even possible—by El Greco and Gauguin, each of whom, with an expressive, jagged stroke of the brush, once more conferred upon the kneeling conqueror Engelhardt the ascetic features of Jesus Christ.

  Thus, the seizure of the island Kabakon by our friend looked quite different depending on the viewpoint from which one observed the scenario and who one actually was. This splitting of reality into various components was, however, one of the chief characteristics of the age in which Engelhardt’s story takes place. To wit: modernity had dawned; poets suddenly wrote fragmented lines; grating and atonal music, which to unschooled ears merely sounded horrible, was premiered before audiences who shook their baffled heads, was pressed into records and reproduced, not to mention the invention of the cinematograph, which was able to render our reality exactly as tangible and temporally congruent as it occurred; it was as if it were possible to cut a slice of the present and preserve it in perpetuity between the perforations of a strip of celluloid.

  All this, however, did not move Engelhardt; he was on his way toward withdrawing not only from modernity dawning the world over, but altogether from what we non-Gnostics denote as progress, as, well, civilization. Engelhardt took a decisive step forward onto the shore; in reality, it was a step back into a barbarism most exquisite.

  The first hut was erected according to the manner of the natives. Makeli appeared now, too, for the first time, a perhaps thirteen-year-old boy who came trudging through the mangroves sometime in the afternoon, timidly but obstinately, walked onto Engelhardt’s white-sand stage, and was never seen to budge from his side again. Six men came and showed him how to intertwine palm leaves with one another to weave a roof and walls. They gave him fruits, and he quenched his thirst; they gave him a lap-lap, he stripped naked, they cloaked his belly with it, and tied off the ends below his navel; the sun stabbed down from the sky with merciless vehemence; soon his shoulders were burnt red.

  Makeli chose the place where the hut was to stand; a clearing was cut from the shore into the bush, some corner posts were rammed into the exposed marshy soil, which had first been dried for a few hours in the sun by removing the overstory, and the mats of palm fronds that had been created in the meantime were now woven together. Engelhardt, whose shyness had made him seem so unfit for life in our world, but which among these savages seemed whisked away by a fresh, jocose breeze, eagerly took part in the collective wattling. Now and again, he ran down to the shore and scooped cooling ocean water onto his burning shoulders with both hands. Small children would run with him then, throwing themselves naked and screeching and grinning before him into the surges, and Engelhardt laughed with them.

  The first night, he lay on the sand floor he himself had shoveled into the hut on top of the marshy, still slightly wet clay ground and decided after some unpleasant tossing and turning that henceforth he would sleep elevated on a bedstead or a wicker cot. The sand may have been soft, but it trickled into his ear if he made himself comfortable on his side in the fetal position. On the other hand, if he lay on his back, he found the back of his head and the long hair underneath scratched by the sand in the most aggravating manner (the heat and humidity had crumbled his hair band into disintegrating bits). And he had scarcely calmed himself, saying nothing more could be done tonight to make sleep more bearable, and tomorrow morning we’ll see how a bed can be built—he was drifting off to sleep, smiling almost contentedly about his own Buddhist-seeming indifference to discomfort—when he became aware of hundreds of mosquitoes that had chosen to punish his skin with extremely painful bites. For a long while he slapped at them in the dark helplessly and pitifully and then set fire to a coir mat. Its heavy emission of smoke successfully drove the mosquitoes from his hut but made him cough with such unbridled force, while at the same time bringing stifling tears to his burning eyes, that he buried his face in a sand pit and, enraged, awaited the hour at which first sunlight would finally break through the holes in the fringy rattan walls.

  The following late afternoon he recalled the mosquito nets brought along from Herbertshöhe, unpacked one from its cardboard container, unfolded it, and hung it with great circumspection from the walls and ceiling of his rattan hut. A small rip that resulted from the process he mended with two or three skillful sutures. Then he tentatively lay down beneath it, smiling at his unyieldingness; someone else might have considered leaving. He harbored the greatest fear of the fever and ardently hoped he had not been bitten last night by an infected insect; on the other hand, that was simply the price one had to pay here. In Germany, there were few diseases whose course brought about such horrific repercussions; instead, one had to suffer an infestation of the mind, an inner, incurable rottenness, the corrosive power of which was capable of eating through the soul like a cancerous ulcer.

  Now, one cannot avoid saying that the inhabitants of Kabakon knew nothing whatsoever of the fact that the little island on which they had lived for as long as anyone could remember suddenly no longer belonged to them but to the young witeman w
hom they had amicably taken in at the behest of the agent Botkin, for whom they built a hut, and to whom they had brought fruit. And at the outset it was by no means Engelhardt’s intention to conduct himself like an especially stern island king; but, returning to his hut one afternoon from an exploratory walk around the two wooded hills, he chanced upon the following scene.

  There, in a glade, a boy had ensnared a pitch-black piglet, which he was dragging around by its tail. A young man joined him, raising a heavy wooden club, and sending it hurtling down with a crack onto the animal’s head; the pig immediately collapsed dead with an abject squeal. Then three or four black women attacked it, opening the pig’s belly with a sharp shard, throwing the entrails to the side, and expertly scraping out the innards.

  Engelhardt, who imagined himself on the one hand to be lord over the isle and thus over the doings of its inhabitants as well, but who on the other hand intended to countenance the natives’ customs, gallantly intervened, snatching the shiv from the woman carrying the cutting implement, and sending it flying into the bush. In so doing, he slipped on a piece of intestine and fell belly-first into the sandy puddle of blood. That, as it happened, was his salvation, because instead of letting the same fate as the pig befall the lanky witeman (the fellow with the club had already taken a step forward), everyone in the glade began to laugh their heads off at Engelhardt’s capriole. The latter stood up, besmirched with blood from head to toe, rubbing the dark red sand from his eyes, and the native with the club lowered his weapon, took Engelhardt’s hand in his with a laugh, slapped the German on the back companionably, and henceforth it was clear that the slaughtering of animals would take place on the other side of the little island. Engelhardt was, the natives told one another, a greater witeman than they thought; he had shown courage in intervening, even if they didn’t quite understand why he didn’t want them to kill and gut pigs. Engelhardt, they agreed among themselves, possessed the magic mana, and thus he was allowed to remain on Kabakon as long as he saw fit.