Imperium: A Fiction of the South Seas

by Christian Kracht

  These rather bestial circumstances (which also dated back quite a while, in fact) cast a morbid shadow over Engelhardt’s existence in a paradise where everything was actually going according to his wishes; the first adept had arrived from Germany, the natives were not only pacified and turned halfway vegetarian, but also tempered with benevolence and a willingness to work. His crates of books, which had remained intact and undamaged by the humid adversities of numerous voyages, were brought to shore by the sailing canoes, finally unpacked, and his sacrosanct tomes were first stacked on their sides against the walls of his little house and then, by and by, following an exact alphanumeric system, ordered in modern-seeming shelves constructed specially for this purpose. Kabakon’s inhabitants said privately that Engelhardt possessed what they called mana (and what we Europeans sometimes know simply as mazel), and he was, for a short time, happy, plain and simple. The first dark clouds, however, were already advancing, and briskly at that, as we shall now see.

  It had sometimes seemed to him as a child that another world where everything had panned out differently in a bizarre, but wholly reasonable and compelling way existed alongside this one. Entire continents arose, alien and unfamiliar, from oceans unseen before, the trace of their coastlines running rough and unmapped over a planet illuminated by a double moon. On broad, uninhabited plains blanketed in soft wild grass, cities towered aloft steeply; their builders had never drawn upon the sequence of our architectural history, and the Gothic remained as unknown to them as the buildings of the Renaissance. Instead they followed their own completely alien aesthetic stipulations, which dictated that towers and walls, at breakneck heights, were to be built in such a way and no differently. Moored balloons in every conceivable shape and color peopled the skies over those cities, which for their part were brightened at night by colorful beacons. Gentle animals similar to our deer grazed before the gates without fear of being captured and eaten by the inhabitants. Only humans had never appeared to him, not once. Sometimes he still saw this world in his nightly dreams, and upon awakening, he yearned to return there with excruciating longing.

  In the morning, Engelhardt marched down the beach and, knocking theatrically at Aueckens’s palm-frond hut with raised knuckles, he woke his comrade-in-arms with the of course heavily German-accented words: In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined, on the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind. Aueckens started, rose naked from his bed of sand, rubbed the sleep from his eyes, cleared his throat laboriously, and, sweeping the intractable lock from his forehead, continued Tennyson’s famous poem: Then some one said, “We will return no more”; And all at once they sang, “Our island home is far beyond the wave; we will no longer roam.”

  Though touched by the solemn stanzas, they snorted with boyish laughter, clapped each other on the back in greeting, interjecting that one need only replace Lotos with Cocos, then both ran naked and huffing into the surf. Strangely enough, Aueckens grasped Engelhardt’s hand in the process; only reluctantly did the latter allow it, since he felt it to be disrespectful and false. In fact, Aueckens had expected he would be allowed to sleep in Engelhardt’s little house as a guest of the order; for now he was provided with the somewhat secluded palm-frond hut that had served our friend as his first lodgings on Kabakon. Engelhardt had decided on this arrangement after a conversation with Aueckens during a morning stroll on the beach in which Aueckens declared that, for him, part of freedom of spirit was also freedom of sexuality. How did he mean this? Engelhardt inquired. Well, the young visitor had answered, to put it bluntly, he was partial to love between men, he had tried it once with a Frisian farm girl, but quickly realized that he could venerate only the male body. The vegetarian Plutarch himself had understood love between men as an expression of the highest civilization; throughout history, odes to boys had been written, the Philistine reinterpretation of which could only be explained by a centuries-old prudery, and the very breach of this fact Aueckens had made his aim. Homosexuality was the intrinsic, the authentic state of man, his love of women, by contrast, an absurd erratum of nature.

  In August of last year, after an extended excursion through the Heligoland uplands where the seagulls floated motionlessly over the cliff near Hoyshörn like white stones in the wind, Aueckens had, while lounging in a teahouse, spotted a young man whose protruding ears, dark Cimmerian eyes, and peculiar paleness just did not seem to fit in. It was as if that appallingly thin schoolboy sitting with his uncle at a table and nibbling on a piece of rock candy were the most alien element imaginable in the composition of the island. This little stranger made him wild with lust, Aueckens reported to his mentor, Engelhardt, who in turn nodded sympathetically, while attempting with some difficulty to conceal from Aueckens his aversion toward such openly declaimed homosexuality.

  So at any rate, after Aueckens had intimated to him with looks and subtle nods that he ought to excuse himself from his uncle and follow him outside, the young man walked into the summer air, where, in reality, the following had transpired: The boy had taken but a few steps before Aueckens’s strong hands had pressed the slender shoulders of the young urbanite against the exterior wall of the teahouse and he had tried to stick his tongue in his ear while his hand had fumblingly made for the front of the boy’s trousers (like, the groped boy felt, a hairy, spiderlike insect). Repulsed, the boy had pushed him away with a brief yelp of indignation, and at this moment it had struck Aueckens that the aim of his amorous advances had emitted a strong odor.

  After the lad had fled back to his uncle in the inn, he, Aueckens, had known why; to wit, he had been a Jew, a hirsute, sallow, unwashed, Levantine emissary of things un-German (the so-described schoolboy, meanwhile, a vegetarian himself, wrote a card later that same day to his sister in Prague: his cough had gotten better at the ocean, his uncle was showing him the sights, now they were shipping off to Norderney, it was barren here, but impressive, the residents of the rocky island, however, coarse and mentally retarded).

  Engelhardt, scraping all the while with his toes in the sand, had listened to the story with increasing consternation. When Aueckens closed with the words that he had been rebuffed because his victim had been a Jew, Engelhardt tried to pick a scab from his shin and secretly ingest it (an incipient infection? or had he cut himself somewhere?) and then began yawning deeply, saying that they could chat more tomorrow.

  Later in bed he reflected on the matter. The sickle of the moon hung cheese-colored over the ocean. What a horribly disagreeable person this Aueckens was. Engelhardt did not share that emergent trend of demonizing the Semitic, which with his writings and turgid, strange music the dreadful Richard Wagner had if not initiated, then made socially acceptable everywhere. Our friend loved the music of Satie and Debussy and Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and Meyerbeer.

  What had triggered his quarrel with the nudist Richard Ungewitter, whose dubious treatise Aueckens had brought to him, had not been some misunderstanding, Engelhardt now remembered, but those very same hate-soaked allegations against the Jews, which worsened with every letter. Passing judgment on people on the basis of their race was to be strictly repudiated. Period, end of story. There was no discussion to be had about it. As a matter of fact, he had to get a piano. Thoughts circled like a child’s carousel. Only how would one keep sand from getting into the piano’s action? He hadn’t seen Makeli for some time; hopefully nothing had happened to him. A nightbird screeched. A demon blew into an ivory horn. The Scythian kings kept blind slaves whom they employed to process milk. There, in the land of Gog and Magog, wherefore darkness prevailed. Finally, as the morning was already dawning, the nightmare broke away, and Engelhardt fell into a gentle sleep under the veil of his mosquito net, which had trapped those phantasmagorias.

  Then that day looms, sunny and hot. We see both men walking naked on the beach. Engelhardt notices how Aueckens ogles him. He shows no inclination to avert his gaze from Engelhardt’s private parts. If Engelhardt runs ahead for a while, he feels Aueckens’s gaze resting on his
backside. He feels watched, penetrated, reduced to his sex. Henceforth Engelhardt wears the waistcloth again on their walks together, Aueckens goes nude, the conversation proceeds haltingly: no more Tennyson.

  We see the young Makeli roaming across the island with the thought of catching a magnificent green bird to give to Engelhardt, because his master, good old Makeli thinks, still seems so lonely in spite of the visitor from Germany. He is scouring the skies and the tops of the palm trees for the longed-for bird when, rather suddenly, the unpleasantly athletic, freckled Aueckens steps out of the copse on the right and grabs him, daubs a spot of lubricant from a bottle of Kabakon Coconut Oil brought for this purpose onto the tip of his erect penis with his thumb and index finger, and in a grove of palms rapes the boy, who shrieks like a wounded animal. Birds startle up, circle, cannot come to rest.

  We do not meet Aueckens again until he is dead, lying facedown on the ground and naked, with a shattered skull; some gelatinous brain matter has leaked out. Flies carouse on the still-lustrous wound at the back of his head, which simply will not dry—it seems as if it were still pulsing, as if a tiny bit of life had not yet been extinguished and were still present at that spot. Makeli is nowhere to be seen, Engelhardt but a shadow. By evening rain comes and washes away the blood.

  Whether Engelhardt beat the anti-Semite over the head with a coconut himself, or whether Aueckens, wandering in that same grove of palms where he had violated young Makeli, was accidentally struck dead by a falling fruit, or whether the native boy’s hand raised a stone in self-defense—this tends to vanish in the fog of narrative uncertainty. We can only be quite sure of the fact that by the impact of a hard round object, Aueckens found his way from this world to Ultima Thule, from the sun-drenched, palm-lined beach over into the cold, shadowy realm of ice. And since Aueckens, who had hardly sojourned in the protectorate for six weeks, was buried in the German Cemetery in Herbertshöhe quickly and without ceremony and was neither missed nor mourned, oblivion soon blanketed the fact that our friend may perhaps have committed a murder. Fatalities of such a kind simply happened in the colonies; in New Pomerania’s civil registry, a scant entry is to be found. A criminal investigation never occurred because the governor’s deputy decided a coconut plummeting down from a tree had hit Aueckens, thus making it an accident, and so he did not even dispatch a representative to Kabakon to investigate the matter.

  Had someone from the capital come, he would have had to interrogate Makeli, for young Makeli, his honor salvaged by Aueckens’s death, was a witness to the episode—but nothing, absolutely nothing, is to be learned from him. The boy’s love for his master, August Engelhardt, grew ad infinitum thereafter, however, and the evening reading sessions, which had been canceled due to the sodomite’s short visit, were now finally resumed. There was indeed no shortage whatsoever of interesting books—after Dickens, it was time for the spirited tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann.

  VIII

  Only once more did Engelhardt leave the Bismarck Archipelago before everything went down the drain, so to speak. He had begun to consider the possibility of no longer paying his debts because he of course had to begin rejecting the complex, pernicious structure of the capitalist system somewhere. A pen friend from Heidelberg who led the more-than-gloomy existence of a completely impoverished adjunct scholar at that famous university confided in him that there was a young German man quite near Engelhardt who had set about translating into reality a similar—at least intellectually related—world of thought, someone living on a Pacific island, too, emulating the anorexia mirabilis of one Blessed Columba of Rieti who ingested no nourishment, none at all, except the golden light of the sun. The person in question lived on the Fiji Islands, and wasn’t that just a stone’s throw away, and wouldn’t Engelhardt like to visit there one day?

  Well, now, highly interesting, Engelhardt thought, putting aside the letter and opening a somewhat dated but still quite usable atlas; Fiji lay as far away from the protectorate as Australia, albeit not in a southerly, but in an easterly direction. One would perhaps be able to travel by way of the New Hebrides. As his fingers traced the route across the blue-inked expanse of the Pacific Ocean, he shoved his right thumb into his mouth and sucked on it, unawares. This quirk had been driven out of him with heavy beatings when he was a child, and he had discovered it for himself again, herkos odonton, as the tried-and-true expedient of a technique of meditation known only to him. Whenever he sank into a void within himself, sucking his thumb allowed him to block out the environment almost completely, indeed, to withdraw to such a degree that he was protected from each and every irritation surging onto the shores of his consciousness as if from a voracious moth by a particularly finely woven mosquito net.

  And so he put on his lap-lap, filled a sack with coconuts, sailed over to Herbertshöhe, and inquired after the arrival of the French mail boat to Port Vila, which coincidentally, as if his journey were indeed part of some cosmic plan, was to reach New Pomerania the next day (the Messageries Maritimes ran this route only twice per year exactly). He borrowed the fare for the cheapest ticket from the postmaster, who was always well disposed toward him, and embarked the following day, barefoot, on the Gérard de Nerval, unrolling his coir mat on the quarterdeck in the very same manner as those natives who, bashful and almost invisible, had to undertake a voyage aboard the great ships of the white men. His intention to slip aboard the Gérard de Nerval secretly so as not to have to touch any more impure money he had quickly discarded.

  The few Frenchmen who did not completely ignore him thought him an artist wallowing in primitivism, a German version of their Gauguin, ergo a thoroughly laughable figure who—and here it became apparent that the Gallic petit bourgeois was capable of displaying greater tolerance than his dark, Teutonic counterpart hailing from the other side of the Rhine—nevertheless had a raison d’être, even if it were only to see the crusty old burgher validated (that is to say, themselves). Frenchmen per se sympathized quite instinctively with figures at the margins of society. Even if they feared innovation, insofar as it heralded a superior culture and the concomitant obsolescence of their own mediocrity, they did not necessarily stand inimically opposed to it, but instead regarded it with expectance, amusement, and by all means with curiosity, too. The French might have been glaring snobs in their autistic elegance, but since their culture defined itself through language, through la francophonie, and not as in Germany through the mythical rustlings of affinity by blood, they appeared more heterogeneous than the Germans, for whom there were no shades of difference, no nuances, few gradations of tone.

  Engelhardt did not even do them the favor of dining in the salons, instead waiting until darkness fell and then consuming a few coconuts from his sack. Afterward, he lay lengthwise in a corner of the quarterdeck, looked out onto the expansive black-green sea mirroring the moonlight, and, after a few hours of monotonous staring, gave himself over to his dreams, which had recently seemed to him ever more menacing and eerie.

  Thus he did not hear the songs of the passengers who sent champagne-heavy chansons drifting off across the Pacific Ocean deep into the night, indeed almost until daybreak; on the festively lit Gérard de Nerval, the drinking was even more rampant than it had been once on the Prinz Waldemar. The only intoxicant running through Engelhardt’s body, though, was that milky-clear virginal honey, that opal squeezed into liquid form, Cocos nucifera. And if he had long ago decided never again to allow himself to be inspirited by alcohol, the coconut milk put him in such a state of arousal that he seemed to perceive, even while sleeping, that his blood was being successively replaced by said coconut milk. Indeed, it seemed to him as if it were no longer red, animal lifeblood streaming through his veins, but the fundamentally more highly developed vegetal nectar of his ideal fruit, which would one day enable him to transcend his current stage of evolution. It cannot be said with certainty whether his diet or even his increasing loneliness was to be regarded as the cause of his gradually budding psychological disorder; at the very
least, however, the exclusive consumption of coconuts exacerbated an irritability that had always existed in him, an unrest in the face of certain, putatively unalterable, vexing external circumstances.

  Now, while Engelhardt was traveling eastward on the French steamer, it was decided, after a very brief discussion over in Herbertshöhe, to dismantle the capital of German New Guinea and rebuild it not twelve miles farther up the coast, still in Blanche Bay, at a place called Rabaul, in close proximity to the volcano. The entrance to the harbor was in danger of filling up with sand sooner or later, there perhaps being some undersea current that washed tons of silt into the bay every day. At any rate, Herbertshöhe ceased to exist from one day to the next. Arrangements were made to carry all the buildings through the jungle; they had been neatly disassembled, piled in stacks of planks and boxes of nails, and furnished with precise blueprints for reconstruction. An antlike procedure orchestrated conscientiously by Hahl’s deputy played out between the old and new capital, a busy coming and going during which two indigenous porters were struck and killed by falling trees and one unfortunate soul was bitten on the bare foot by a death adder because he had not wanted to drop an antique piece of furniture he was to carry through the jungle to Rabaul. The German ladies drove with the lone automobile. Everything was rebuilt nimbly and with great care just as it had stood in Herbertshöhe: the two hotels, the governor’s residence, the trading posts, the piers. Even a glorious new wooden church, which looked exactly as the one just dismantled (except for a portrait of Kaiser Wilhelm II, hung mistakenly with his face to the wall), was erected and quickly consecrated by the local pastor. Emma’s Villa Gunantambu, too, was relocated to Rabaul; still, many were initially unable to grow accustomed to going down Chinatownward to the left rather than right, and they missed trees that had stood in particular places—indeed, it was exceedingly disorienting.