The next morning, nearly forty men stood before Engelhardt’s hut and indicated in a hodgepodge of Kuanua, German Creole, and pidgin that they intended to work for the German man. They wished to be in his employ and collect the coconuts from the trees and process them. Engelhardt stood atop a piece of driftwood and stated in a pantomimic speech that he was no missionary, heavens, no, that he looked much forward to their industriousness, that he would pay them punctually, that the coconut and the palm tree were sacred, and that he intended to subsist from it alone. For that reason he would suffer no meat in his vicinity and would ask of his workers (here he paused for a moment—was he perhaps going too far?), at least while they were working on his plantation, not to eat pork or chicken. The men nodded sagely, especially as the consumption of these animals was reserved for the yearly feasts and as they only chewed on yams during the day anyway, if need be drinking from a few coconuts like Engelhardt himself. Were eggs perhaps allowed? one of the men wanted to know. Another inquired about smoking. And might they be permitted to drink liquor? Engelhardt replied readily, and it seemed to him as if his new workers thought the whole matter an amusing game. Jumping down from the tree trunk, he said that was enough queries for now, and his islanders immediately appeared to accept the authority with which he had impressed upon them the Kabakonian policies that would govern them henceforth.
With one stroke, Engelhardt seemed to have conquered his fear, the fear of uncertainty, his fear of not having enough money or sustenance, of what his fellow man thought of him, the fear that he would seem ridiculous, his fear of loneliness, his fear of not being loved or of doing the wrong thing—all this had fallen away from him as the clothing he no longer wore or was capable of wearing, since the trousers and shirts (even the lap-lap he now doffed on his walks along the beach, hesitatingly at first, then with ever greater naturalness) seemed to him symbols of an outmoded outside world long since grown weary. He lived in immaculate, splendid isolation. No one took even the slightest notice of his nakedness. Since the incident with the piglet, they respected him, offered him a friendly good morning when they encountered him in the forest, and treated him like one of their own. He in fact did bear the magical mana within his tender breast.
Together with young Makeli, he roamed naked across the island, only a sack over his shoulder, and the indigenous boy showed Engelhardt the locations that were tabu for him: mostly ancestral burial grounds or certain glades. They shook the bristly palm trunks until enough fruits had fallen down. One needed only bend over to harvest these treasures! Makeli showed him how to lever one’s way up the trunk into the treetop by means of a coir rope slung around one’s waist, a knife in one’s adept hands, to get to all the delectable nuts that hadn’t been felled by jiggling alone.
After nightfall, he sat down with Makeli on the sandy floor of his hut and read to the boy from a book by the sparse light of a coconut-oil lamp, and although the latter understood almost nothing at first, he still harkened attentively to the foreign sound of the words that took shape, through Engelhardt’s lips as he mouthed them, from the gently turned pages of the book; it was a German translation of Dickens’s Great Expectations, and gradually the young islander seemed to grow accustomed to the foreign language and long for those hours, every evening, of being read to.
Makeli had listened to a preacher reading from a German Bible many times before, to be sure, but this was something quite different, for Engelhardt’s utterances were more mellifluous, friendlier, and sweeter, and he picked up this or that word; more than anything else he seemed to like the descriptions of the house belonging to the crotchety spinster Miss Havisham, who, in her cobwebbed bedroom, sat like a primordial, misanthropic spider, receiving visitors with a sullen look. The boy tried to understand; after a few weeks of listening, through his repetition of some words in German Creole and his own translation of others into pidgin, terse German sentences began to form on his tongue.
Yet this was play and amusement—for their part, the natives worked with enormous efficiency; the nuts were collected with large trap baskets, cut into slices, and dried in the sun on timbered racks, protected by a rain shelter made of palm fronds, then, in a prehistoric-seeming mill consisting of little more than roughly hewn boulders, squeezed into oil, which was finally funneled into wooden barrels and taken to Herbertshöhe by Engelhardt’s fleet of sailing canoes. There it was refined through filtering and heat and poured into bottles that Engelhardt had borrowed from the ubiquitous Forsayth & Company. Now and again, a freighter anchored off the white breakers at the arch of the reef and took aboard the unprocessed copra. Engelhardt paid his employees punctually, as promised. Initially, they demanded that he disburse their wages in cowrie shells or tobacco; later, when they learned what all could be had in Herbertshöhe, it had to be in marks. So as not to have to hide German currency on his isle, he issued them simple promissory notes that he signed and urged them to redeem in the capital. And every two months he traveled over himself in his lap-lap and, amid the disapproving looks of the planters dressed in white and their wives, paid his employees’ debts.
IV
When was it that our friend first surfaced in the ocean of consciousness? All too little is known about him; within the narrative current, people and events flash by like fleet fish sparkling brightly underwater and Engelhardt flanks them as if he were one of those little creatures called Labrichthyini that clean the skin of other, larger predatory fish by freeing them from parasites and debris.
We see him, again on a train, for instance, but now traveling from—just a moment—Nuremberg to Munich; he’s back there, standing third class, his slender hand, rather sinewy already for his young age, resting on a walking stick.
The old century draws to an unbelievably rapid close (the new century may also have begun already); it’s almost autumn, Engelhardt is wearing, as he does everywhere in Germany when he isn’t naked, a long pale cotton tunic and woven footwear with a Roman aspect, though not fashioned from animal leather. His hair, worn down on both sides of his face, reaches to his sternum; over his arm he’s carrying a wicker basket with apples and pamphlets in it. Children riding along in the train are afraid of him, hide on the platform between cars of the second and third class, watching him; they laugh at him. One of the braver ones chucks a piece of sausage at him but misses. Mumbling absentmindedly, Engelhardt reads in a timetable the names of the provincial towns, familiar to him still from childhood, and then gazes again straight out onto the Bavarian landscape racing past; today is some sort of holiday, the country stations they speed through are all merrily flagged with black, white, and red pennants, the less martial pale blue of his homeland flying in between. Engelhardt is not someone interested in politics; the great upheavals carpeting the German Reich in recent months leave him completely cold. He has been keeping himself too far removed from society and its capricious vagaries and political fads. It is not he who is alien to the world, but the world that has become a stranger to him.
Having arrived in midmorning Munich, he visits his comrade Gustaf Nagel in Schwabing; long-haired, they stroll across the late-summer Odeonsplatz shrouded in linen amid the clamorous ridicule of the city folk. A besabered gendarme briefly considers whether he ought to arrest them, but then quickly decides against it, not wanting to let his glass of after-work beer go flat on account of additional paperwork.
The Feldherrnhalle, that Florentine parody off yonder, scarcely dignified by a glance, stands admonishingly, indeed almost slyly, in Munich’s spectral summer light. In just a few short years, the time for it to play a leading part in the great Theater of Darkness will finally come. Flags with the Hindu sun cross will festoon it impressively and then, climbing the three or four steps to the stage, a squat vegetarian, an absurd black toothbrush mustache under his nose, will … oh, let’s just wait for it to commence somberly (in Aeolian minor), that Great German Death Symphony. It might be comical to watch, were unimaginable cruelty not to ensue: bones, excreta, smoke.
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sp; Unaware of all this, Nagel and Engelhardt sun their legs and thighs in the English Garden, tunics hiked up, encircled for a while by the buzzing of sleepy bees; afterward, they travel out together to Murnau, south of Munich’s gates, and there seek out—it’s getting to be evening—a farmer friend of theirs who has gotten it into his square head to carry out his farm work naked the whole sweet summer long. Mahogany-brown, he stands before them at the fence, hatless, muscles bulging, extending his manly paw to greet the two slight, learned youths. Although it’s already September, they take off their tunics, take a seat at the simple wooden table in front of the farmstead; the farmer’s good wife brings her husband bread, fat, and ham, and apples and grapes for the two visitors, her naked breasts swaying like heavy gourds over the table as she sets it. A shy, slender milkmaid, likewise nude, joins them at the farmer’s invitation. Our friend lays down a few pamphlets; they take pleasure in the solidarity of sun worshippers, eating of the fruit. An oriole sings happily in the tree above them.
Presently, Engelhardt speaks of the coconut, which of course neither the peasant, nor his wife, nor the farm girl has ever tasted or seen. He tells of the idea of encircling the globe with coconut colonies, rising from his seat (his almost pathological shyness vanishes when he champions his cause as an orator before sympathetic ears), speaking of the sacred duty of one day paying homage to the sun, naked, in the Temple of Palms. Only here—and he gestures around himself with outstretched arms—it will not work, unfortunately: too long the inhospitable winter, too narrow the minds of the Philistines, too loud the machines of the factories. Engelhardt climbs from the bench onto the table and down again, exclaiming his credo that only those lands in eternal sunlight will survive and, in them, only those people who allow the salutary and beneficent rays of the daystar to caress skin and head, unfettered by clothing. These brothers and sisters here have made a promising start, he says, but they really must now sell their farm and follow him, leaving Bavaria as Moses left Egypt of old and booking passage on a ship to the equator.
Is it to be Mexico or perhaps even Africa? Nagel wants to know while the peasant couple prepare more sandwiches, listening attentively. Engelhardt is, Nagel notes, obsessed with his ideas; they are like a little demon that has seized hold of him, tearing with a row of pointy teeth. He wonders for a moment if Engelhardt is still quite right in the head. Mexico—no, no, it has to be the South Seas, only there can and will it begin. High into the white and blue sky, he jabs his index finger; down onto the wooden table hammers Engelhardt’s slender little fist. Although the dazzling sfumato of his mindscape is served up with great demagogic skill, little, it would seem, stays with the honest peasant couple; the serpentine paths of Engelhardtian fancy wend too wildly.
Later at night, in the haystacks where it smells of the dust of the long summer, Nagel and Engelhardt lie next to one another, discussing at a whisper, forging plans and discarding them again, and Nagel realizes just how much he appreciates his friend and how much more radically than his own Engelhardt’s thoughts push out into the world. A cat moans above in the darkness of the timbers. Nagel seriously considers following his friend to the colonies: factors in favor would include that the ridicule poured out over him daily, endured for endless years, threatens to crush his soul slowly; that he has begun to doubt the integrity of his actions; and that Engelhardt, along with his obsessiveness, seems to him a leader who by virtue of his brilliance is capable of guiding him, Nagel, out of the dull wasteland that is Germany and into a bright, moral, pure pasture, not just metaphorically, but in realitas. On the other hand, however—and Nagel’s anima already beholds the portals of the land of Nod—he is also too lazy, plain and simple, to betake himself around the globe to create a new Germany at the back of beyond. No, he muses just before the realm of shades welcomes him, he will henceforth write his name in lowercase, eschewing capitalization entirely, will always write everything small, like this: gustaf nagel. That will be his revolution. And then sleep comes.
August Engelhardt is now seen again, far to the north, traveling toward Berlin; he has parted ways with Gustaf Nagel at the Munich central station, each having clasped the other’s forearms in heartfelt fellowship. Nagel is still advising him to make the journey to Prussia per pedes for ideological reasons, but Engelhardt replies that he must save time since he still has so much planned in the South Seas, and should his friend change his mind again, he will always and most sincerely be welcome.
Engelhardt, who is traversing the empire in express trains, likewise changes his mind just outside of Berlin, bypasses that gigantic, monstrous anthill, and boards a train to Danzig, sleeping on wooden benches, patiently awaiting connections, changing trains again, over and over, arrives in Königsberg and Tilsit, and travels northwest again, toward Prussian Lithuania.
There, spat out by the train in East Prussia’s Memel, shouldering his bindle, he walks through the groves of birch trees blown through by the north wind, quitting the dull brick town, buys currants and mushrooms from a Russian babushka who crosses herself, taking him in his penitential robe for a Molokan apostate of Orthodoxy, sights the spare, milky-white wooden church marking the edge of the lagoon over there, marches in a southerly direction toward that spit of land, wondering as he rambles whether perhaps the German soul might come from this place, here, from this infinitely melancholy, sixty-mile-long, sunlit strand of dunes where he undresses, at first somewhat timidly, then with increasing confidence, placing his robe and his sandals in a depression in the sand (it is now early evening), and, concealing his nakedness from a couple of summering vacationers dressed in fine white cloth who are sauntering at some distance (he the editor of Simplicissimus, slight ironic twist to the mouth under the groomed mustache, gesticulating; she a freethinking daughter of a mathematician, nodding to him in agreement, in a dress of her own design), stares out onto the Baltic Sea long after the couple disappear and darkness descends, letting the plan to travel forever and for all time to the German overseas territories in the Pacific Ocean, never to return, ripen slowly in his mind, like a small child who has proceeded to build an immense castle out of colorful little wooden blocks. A gentle and somber Lithuanian melody drifts across the shoal, unapproachable like the stars flashing wanly in the firmament and yet immeasurably familiar, sweet, and homey: Wuchsen einst fünf junge Mädchen schlank und schön am Memelstrand. Sing, sing was geschah? Keines den Brautkranz wand. Keines den Brautkranz wand.
In the morning, three policemen with sabers come and cement Engelhardt’s decision. In Memel the previous evening, the editor, who had indeed seen the nudist on the beach, filed a complaint with the police. There is a long-haired vagabond lying about the sandbars, stark-naked, scarcely two miles south down the strip of dunes. The editor deftly maneuvered his betrothed around the delinquent at some distance, distracting her at the crucial moment by showing her a flock of migratory birds or some such thing on the horizon, and yes, it is indeed a thing of outrage; one ought to arrest him; no, he did not seem drunk.
Engelhardt awakens, peeps out of the wind-sheltered hollow he had dug for himself that night, and sees three pairs of boots standing before him, uniform trousers tucked into them; the slight chill of the summer night is still in him, a tattered blanket is tossed down and the order given, in the gruffest commanding tone, tinged with Lithuanian, to follow them to Memel; the vagabond is being placed under arrest, offending public decency being the very least they intended to charge him with.
One of the gendarmes (he isn’t the brightest) places his booted foot in front of Engelhardt—who has barely had time to pull himself together, wrap himself in the scratchy army blanket, and stand up—causing him to stumble and fall face-first into the sand again. Wicked laughter. Actually, they are all three not the brightest sort. As he is lying before them on the ground, an animalistic and cruel desire to humiliate infects them (for they are officious German subjects), and they begin kicking him and working him over with their fists; the ringleader strikes him on the back with t
he pommel of his saber since Engelhardt has curled up into a ball to escape the blows. He seeks refuge in white-frothy, buzzing unconsciousness.
After they’ve dunked him in the cleansing sea—suddenly and rather dimly aware that what they are doing is quite wrong and that Engelhardt isn’t moving anymore—they comb his disheveled hair, wipe the still-flowing blood from his mouth and nostrils, dress him in the smock and sandals they’ve found not far from the sandy hollow, and take him (he’s half carried, half walking on his own) to the police station in Memel, where, accused of vagrancy and immorality, he spends what might be deemed a quite agonizing night on a hard wooden bench, surveying for hours the deepest corners of the detention cell’s ceiling with one eye (the other eye is swollen shut).
The editor and his bride left for Munich by daybreak, the incident nearly forgotten already; they are sitting across from one another in the dining car of the adjoining wagon-lit; railroad-induced stains from a bottle of Trollinger, ordered in a moment of airy mischief, have splotched the tablecloth with purple hue. The conversation isn’t quite flowing, be it from fatigue or perhaps from an already anticipated sense of the boredom that will set in after years of marriage. With a mild lack of enthusiasm, the editor’s gaze tracks left, out through the darkening pane of train glass, which grows more and more mirrorlike by the minute, onto the fading East Prussian plain, and he suddenly becomes aware of the almost boyishly slender shoulders of the naked young man lying on the beach yesterday, and he recognizes at this moment the actual reason he lodged a complaint, and that his whole future life will be, must be, covered over in painful self-deception, the immensity of which will discolor everything until his dying day—the still-unborn children, the work (for several novels are ripening within him), the still-amused relationship to the ideal of his own bourgeois sensibility, and the now-nascent revulsion at those hands there, folded in elegant calm on the dining car table, of his patiently smiling fiancée, who in turn will persist in decades of ignorance, though her propensity to behave and dress with a certain unwomanliness might have given the young girl, perhaps even now at the outset of their relationship, an indication vis-à-vis the actual proclivities of her betrothed.
Imperium: A Fiction of the South Seas Page 5
