During these remarks to which the two listened, nodding, justifiably pleased with the governor’s almost socialist approach, a Chinese steward brought fruit juices on a silver tray, and a hummingbird with a pale blue gleam, halfheartedly eyeing the juice glasses, strayed into the salon and adeptly navigated between the whirring blades of the ceiling fans only to fly back outside moments later through the open front section of the residence.
Hahl made a quick mental note to make a new file for his card index in which he would theorize about the difficulty of bringing about hovering flight—whether one would perhaps be capable of constructing a flying object that, based on the hummingbird, could hold its position floating in space. The colorful bird, Hahl thought while chatting with these two odd fellows, was really an involuntary perpetuum mobile of nature, so to speak; the hummingbird consumed vast quantities of energy in the form of sweet fructose in order to drink from the calyxes while hovering, which in turn allowed it to feed from them only by so hovering; ergo, if one wanted to build a technical object that could linger in the air, one had to guarantee the energy supply from within, as it were. Well, these were the sorts of amateur scholarly studies that occupied Governor Hahl at the end of his workday.
Now, he had already, in his letter, outlined the reason he had requested they call on the Rabaul residence: quite frankly, it was about the crowd of mostly adolescent visitors whom Engelhardt had lured into the protectorate with his writings. Now, of course—and at this point it must be said, Hahl declared, that he was personally delighted at the pursuit not just of economic and missionary ventures in the colony, but also at running a very interesting philosophical experiment—Engelhardt did not bear any direct liability for the actions of his readers, but all the same, he could not deny a certain moral responsibility, especially in view of their health. One unfortunate man had already passed away from the fever (at the moment Hahl uttered this, a morphic phantom pain stirred in him, his body momentarily recalling at subatomic levels the destructive power of malaria it had recently experienced), and thus they had taken the throng of completely ignorant and unprepared new arrivals from the outdoor camp they had chosen for themselves—teeming with pathogens and just bristling with filth—and placed them in the little infirmary and the local hotels.
From Engelhardt’s ear, meanwhile, came warm drops, then, trickling down, a small hot rivulet. He turned his head to the side to see what was running onto his shoulder so unexpectedly. His garb was suddenly stained yellow by a load of earwax that had dissolved into a flow. What an astounding, uncontrollable, childlike amount. He repressed the urge to plunge his finger into his ear and usher the secretion to his mouth for a taste, but instead sat somewhat sideways so that Hahl and Lützow could not see the stains, raised his glass with the fruit juice, acted as if he were such a spellbound listener that he missed his slightly open mouth with the glass, and deftly spilled a few splotches of juice onto his shoulder such that the ear discharge was not only unrecognizable, but also completely covered by the like-colored drink.
Now Hahl had just mentioned the writings of the French thinker Charles Fourier in some detail (the sound of the final lashes on the back of the alleged thief outside had faded in the square) and handed Engelhardt a napkin, with which he wiped off his shoulder in theatrical exaggeration, whereupon Lützow, who hadn’t read Fourier, but had read a little of Proudhon (one of his erstwhile girlfriends had been a bomb maker in Dublin), remarked that the Order of the Sun was indeed a place of social renewal and it was just splendid that the governor not only tolerated it, but supported it morally and intellectually, so to speak, because they had, well, begging his pardon, always assumed that a supreme state authority like Hahl here was a natural foe of individual utopia. Freedom was first and foremost freedom from property; that’s how they lived on Kabakon, and that’s how they would keep on living.
Engelhardt, who not only found Lützow’s sudden amateur foray into political matters disturbing, but who was also inwardly astonished that the man was now styling himself a theoretician of his, Engelhardt’s, ideological constructs, interjected that Fourier had been a notorious anti-Semite, that Engelhardt had purchased Kabakon lawfully and was by no means professing anarchism, and that what Fourier had imagined as phalanstère (Engelhardt was absolutely certain that Lützow didn’t know the term) was an expression of a shabby, Philistine utopia of the petit bourgeois governed, to top it all off, by an obsessive sex drive.
Lützow looked at his friend and immediately went silent. The governor, taking note of this little skirmish within the cocovore brothers’ power structure in his mind’s file cabinet, clapped his hands and said that it was, to be sure, extremely edifying to have conversations like this in such a godforsaken place, but one now had to return to reality, if the gentlemen would allow it; this week, he still had to look after a cholera outbreak in Kavieng, and, at the end of the month, a proper tribal feud (with casualties) on Astrolabe Bay, then the famous American author Jack London had planned a visit, and now could they put their minds together, please, and address what should happen to the young adepts who had been lured to Rabaul by the call of the Order of the Sun.
So they walked over together to the Hotel Fürst Bismarck, fetched the physician Wind on the way, and had an indignant Director Hellwig, who was now no longer quite so amicably disposed toward Engelhardt, show them the throngs of newcomers napping away either their afternoon or their convalescence. Hahl folded his arms over his broad chest as if he did not wish to comment on the whole affair for the time being. Dr. Wind turned out to be fairly hostile toward cocovorism. He bent over the patients dozing on the hotel beds that had been pushed out into the corridors, raised an eyelid here and there, and commented at a whisper how truly damaging it was for the human person to live exclusively from one nutrient. Yes, those wounds, for example, there on Mr. Engelhardt’s legs, which were now covered in pus, would not only be unable to heal cleanly and properly because of the tropically induced damp, but in fact were precisely the result of pronounced malnutrition. Begging pardon, but that was nonsense, Lützow replied in a loud voice, for it was evident to everyone that in his case those very innumerable ailments he had been unable to fend off in Germany for years had vanished, all of them, completely, on account of the coconut diet he had adopted here.
When talk came around to coconuts, here and there the young people in the beds began to stir: waking from their light sleep, they suddenly saw August Engelhardt in their midst and in the flesh, the same gaunt figure they had seen illustrated in various newspapers at home and because of whom they had set out. A murmuring of recognition went through the hallways, a Swabian boy, barely of age, called out with a croak, Savior!, a young woman rose from her sickbed, walked shakily toward Engelhardt, knelt down, seized his hand, and under the bewildered gazes of the visitors finally sank floorward to caress the feet of Engelhardt, who looked extremely embarrassed.
Wind and Lützow lifted the girl up off the floor, mumbling, Come, come, and Hahl, unable to suppress an amused smile at the absurdity of the scene, conducted Engelhardt with a firm hand back toward the hotel lobby, where the latter was informed by Director Hellwig point-blank that he had to bear the costs these deranged people had incurred, immediately and without ceremony. Engelhardt retreated deeply into himself, sucking his thumb. Governor Hahl formed a cathedral with his fingertips under his nose and said, Slowly now, please. Mustn’t it lie within the realm of possibility to reallocate certain debts Engelhardt owed to Queen Emma in such a way that his plantation’s copra production could be borrowed against in this case, too? Exactly, very good, he would sign everything, our friend yammered, indeed he was prepared to do anything, just send these horrible people back, he wanted nothing to do with them, they all ought to be transported back to Germany, at his expense. Indeed, that was likely the most prudent course, the governor replied, quickly calculating that passage on a ship for around twenty-five individuals would nevertheless add up to a grand total of twelve thousand five hundre
d marks.
They agreed: to send the confused young people back, that Engelhardt, in order to defray these costs, would borrow against his own production for several more years, and finally that future visitors to the Order of the Sun would only be let aboard in Germany by Norddeutscher Lloyd if they could prove that they had sufficient funds to transport themselves from the protectorate back to the Reich. Engelhardt for his part would pledge to send no further letters of advertisement with proclamations that New Pomerania was the alleged Garden of Eden. In fact, it was best if he wrote no further letters of any kind. There was a crackling and rushing in Engelhardt’s ear as if he were standing underwater, as if an ocean were engulfing him. He shoved his thumb in his mouth once more. Lützow stood somewhat off to the side during this horse trade and nibbled with irritation on a cuticle.
Later, Governor Hahl was himself standing under water, lathering up listlessly under the tepidly drizzling shower he had had installed in his new bathroom after the relocation of the capital, because he preferred being sprinkled from above to lying moronically in the tub. After the two oddballs had trotted off, he had opened the letter with the official seal that he had been carrying around with him for some time in expectation of good news (the document came from the new Berlin office of his friend Wilhelm Solf, who had just been named director of the Imperial Colonial Office), but in its stead he had to endure an incendiary three-page screed: what in the hell was going on there under his aegis; indeed, whenever the German press reported on New Guinea, it only ever mentioned that the protectorate was evidently in a state of libertinage, populated by naked Germans who engaged in orgies, who subsisted on flowers and butterflies; if he wished to retain his well-remunerated post (and Solf was saying this as a friend) and did not want to find himself occupying a pathetic clerical office in the subterranean bowels of the Berlin Imperial Colonial building, then he must see to it forthwith that these undisciplined conditions cease immediately (Solf was sparing himself the mitigating word please). Only a few drops more found their way out of the showerhead onto the governor’s scalp, which he had scrubbed to a froth with a fragrant and yet slightly caustic hair soap. Then the water ran out, and Hahl stood half blind and dripping in the gubernatorial shower; stifling the onset of an outburst of rage, he pondered what exactly should be done now.
Come evening, Engelhardt and Lützow sailed back to Kabakon; under a fading orange-red sky, they said nothing to each other, though not as if they were among friends and therefore needn’t talk for a few hours, but in the awareness that something had shattered and couldn’t be pieced back together. A few times, Lützow attempted to break the spell and make his friend smile with a poetic interjection regarding the enchanted cascades of clouds, but Engelhardt was having none of it; in fact, he heard every seemingly casual remark about the course of their visit in Rabaul as pedantic, enervating counsel directed at him.
After reaching the isle, he even forbade his friend from sitting down at the piano, withdrew to his bed, and—the sonorous snoring of the virtuoso had just begun filling their shared home—stared up at the ceiling for many hours, sucking his thumb, without thinking about anything at all, until he got bogged down again so deeply in a specific thought that the latter cast itself over the entire essence of the world and over the all-expansive, infinitely vast cosmos like a flaming mene mene (or perhaps like an ouroboros, that mythological serpent gorging on its own tail).
Again he saw that wheel of fire that his mother had shown him when he was a little boy. And when it appeared above him on the ceiling of the house, rotating on its own axis, and since he had no pillow with which to cover his eyes, he buried his face in his hands, groaning in terror. Animals then appeared to him, tremendous creatures akin to the genius malignus, their sight so unspeakably gruesome that he curled up into a ball in horror, miserably seeking shelter in the darkest recesses of his own person. Beasts whose dreadful names he was afraid to utter, hideous beings that were called Hastur and Azathoth and whispered to him, hissing, that mankind was an insignificant, irrelevant, completely negligible bagatelle in the universe whose fate it was to appear and pass away again unnoticed and unlamented. Lützow, who wouldn’t have understood such things at all, slept, slept, did not even stir when Engelhardt stooped over him just before dawn, wondering how he could kill him without waking him up.
Part Three
X
While Captain Christian Slütter is slogging through the last, still furiously seething tails of a July storm that incessantly sends breakers from the Solomon Sea crashing over the deck of his rusty boil–covered freighter, the SS Jeddah, Max Lützow is boarding, bright and early, the same little launch on which he arrived in Kabakon almost a year ago. Both vessels are steaming inevitably toward each other. The center of the cyclone, meanwhile, has rolled by two hundred nautical miles north. Over in Apia, Slütter has dropped two hundred crates of French brandy that he had taken aboard in Sydney in adverse circumstances, and he is now ferrying kitchen appliances, knives, axes, pans, and such up to New Pomerania.
Lützow, by contrast, had packed his bag one morning before sunrise, gently touched the piano in passing with the tips of his fingers, and before Engelhardt awoke, walked down to the beach to be rowed out to the launch awaiting him beyond the lagoon by Makeli, who was smiling inscrutably to himself.
The secret departure was preceded by a terrible argument the prior evening. Engelhardt had been convinced his comrade had stolen the scissors he himself had in fact inadvertently misplaced. During a downpour that drummed on the roof, as the mosquitoes became such a nuisance that both had coated themselves in a thick layer of coconut oil and lit several coir fires, and when a certain hopelessness in the situation became apparent, Engelhardt had swept the white chess figures off the board with a surly wipe of the hand. Knight and rook had landed, like wooden grenades, in the sand beside a millipede, which, sorely disturbed in its consumption of the leaf that was its supper, crept off sullenly in the rain. Engelhardt had brought up the missing scissors again, and Lützow, who despite all his shortcomings had no intention of arguing purely for the sake of argument, replied that he had no knowledge of any scissors, and the matter didn’t interest him anyway—weren’t all items communal property, including the scissors in question? He was quite prepared, Lützow said, to overlook this little tropical hysteria, but he was not about to take farfetched, unjustified accusations sitting down. Unjustified accusations, Engelhardt blurted out—leaping to his feet, running back into the house, and beginning, in a kind of frenzy, to pull individual volumes from the bookshelves and throw them out the open window into the rain—they most certainly were not, no, several times now Lützow had fancied himself a secret theoretician of his order, though in truth he, Engelhardt, had invented and planned everything, such that he now had to ask himself when the musician would finally take over control of Kabakon, it was only a question of time, after all, but he intended to put a stop to this as quickly as possible because this island, contrary to the remarks Lützow had made to Hahl, was in no way a democracy, and least of all some infantile Communist collective, nor would it ever be. Engelhardt alone determined where it was going, and Lützow’s advice to settle that horde of nutcases from Rabaul on Kabakon had essentially been a malicious attempt at a coup, which had only served to deprive him of power in the long run.
Fine, Lützow replied, then he would just leave if so little value was placed on his presence; he had thought, perhaps in error, that they were together on Kabakon to establish a new Eden. And he, who was by nature an altogether affable fellow, was in no way scheming to take anything away from Engelhardt, and least of all was he thinking of making demands for power, which would get him absolutely nothing on a coconut plantation, because he was an artist and not an accountant—in short, he was really very sorry if he had given some other impression, but now he needed to—he wanted to—go, and he wished his friend good luck. He was truly sad; after all, he had felt an intimacy between them, for the disintegration of which
he probably had himself partly to blame (That’s right, that’s right, Engelhardt said, nodding grimly), but regardless of how it was about to end, his friend had taught and shown him a lot, that there was a way to escape the stupefying plight of modern existence, and for that he would always be thankful. The scissors, incidentally, would reappear a few days later as if they had never been missing.
One faded photograph of the two still exists showing them with full beards in front of a palm tree; Lützow, half supine, bemused, his left arm braced against the sand, is looking straight at the camera; Engelhardt, startlingly scrawny, shows his crow-like profile. It’s an oddly strained, haughty way to hold one’s head, which could perhaps be confused with pretension; but it also expresses self-confidence, even a hint of smugness. By now his belly stretches over the checkered waistcloth, distended, globular, undernourished; he is far beyond sucking it in out of vanity before the shutter mechanism of the camera is depressed with a click.
Alas, so Lützow turned out to be a decent enough person—he had doubtless always been one, a little vain perhaps, but certainly had not allowed the touches of twisted, malevolent misanthropy that Engelhardt had been displaying for some time (the ghoulish intentions he harbors regarding Lützow and others shall remain hidden in a shadowy side corridor of his psyche for a while yet) to provoke him. Lützow acted most fairly toward his friend, and so his morning exodus from Kabakon, though it doesn’t quite seem like it to him, is in fact a respectable course of action and not some slithering away.
Imperium: A Fiction of the South Seas Page 11
