The captain, who senses a vague but still distinctly immediate danger in the room, suggests they might go over and inspect the plantations, at which Engelhardt instantly ceases to cry and exclaims that this is an excellent idea, Makeli and Slütter ought to go ahead, nature will speak to them outside, he will come after them presently, he just has to nibble on something quickly since he feels so endlessly weak. Slütter and the native boy step out into the blinding sunlight.
Engelhardt really does want to explain himself to his guest, he wants to convey to him everything he has realized, really everything, but now the proper moment has passed. And so he keeps mumbling to himself, pacing back and forth in his dwelling: even Nietzsche ate his own excretions toward the end, after his breakdown in Turin, it’s the great circle, the Möbius strip, the wheel of fire, the Kalachakra—only Nietzsche in his benightedness wasn’t able to think the matter through to its conclusion, he never had to experience these continuous years of hunger; Engelhardt is here among unfortunate cannibals who have evolved away from their natural, God-given instinct, dissuaded from it by the missionaries’ blather, yet everything is actually so incredibly simple; it is not the coconut that is the actual sustenance of man, but man himself. The original man of the Golden Age lived off other men, ergo, the one who becomes godlike, the one who returns to Elysium refers to himself as: God-eater. Devourer of God. And Engelhardt reaches for the coconut shell wherein he has kept his severed thumb, carefully brushes off the salt, and bites into it, crunching the bone to pieces with his teeth.
The tops of the palms sway, tousled and scruffy in the light wind of the afternoon. A bird of paradise trots back into the underbrush when it sees the two coming. Makeli shows Slütter the places where the coconuts were once harvested. Now of course no one cares about them anymore. It is a shame what’s happening, but the mind-set, indeed, the unshakable attitude of his people is just like that. They simply leave everything where it lies, there is no responsibility, they are like children who grow weary of a toy. Slütter marvels at young Makeli, who has become German to such a degree that he judges his race as a colonial official might. And here, the coconuts, that’s what Engelhardt has been living off this whole time? Nothing else? And the young man?
Makeli smiles coyly. The bearded white man in his uniform with the pistol is quite obviously not a bad man, not a monster as that Mr. Hobbes, in his Leviathan, showed man in general to be, but he is still an intruder, and like every intruder a danger. He, Makeli, drove away the musician, but it took a year, and he cannot wait so long for this one here.
Slütter walks over to a palm, touches its trunk, lost in thought, and looks out onto the ocean. He sees Engelhardt approaching from some distance. Slütter and Makeli are to come along, he, Engelhardt, has something interesting to show them in the jungle, he says, gesturing toward a clearing. They go in together, Engelhardt humming a cheerful melody and mincing before them—as his naked buttocks, reduced by malnourishment to something resembling cowpats, flap slackly back and forth—until they reach a spot that seems familiar to him; he drifts off to the left of the beaten path and indicates to Slütter that he ought to please walk in front. Makeli lets him by and begins to giggle uncontrollably.
Suspecting that he is in grave mortal danger, Slütter draws his revolver and declares that he has been sent to kill Engelhardt; they have, shall we say, grown weary of him over in the capital. But he has no intention whatsoever of doing it. Slütter points the revolver upward and shoots several times into the air. An earsplitting arpeggio of fluttering birds, complaining macaques, and hissing lizards fills the jungle. Engelhardt and Makeli stand frozen in place.
At this moment, Engelhardt sees twilight racing down upon him though it is still as bright as day. He sees the fading traces of the stars, he is standing on a wooded hill quite close to a city that has been abandoned for countless eons, the double moon rises orange-red and sallow on the horizon, that cozy little twin star of the harmonia caelestis; he believes himself to be in Arcadia and suddenly knows that his enigmatic vision has never been Kabakon, but the tapestry of his dreamworld, revolving and expanding into infinity. His certainty is the retching he feels in the face of his own birth. Highly developed species on other planets, he now knows, always behave like predators.
Engelhardt embraces his erstwhile murderer, kisses and caresses his hands, assuring him over and over again how thankful he is to him, something has now gotten sorted out in his head again, this wonderful clemency is an expression of cosmic destiny, indeed, his gratitude is an inexhaustible and immeasurable Fibonacci sequence. He’s thrown out his Swedenborg, as a matter of fact. Crossed out and thrown out. Everything has to go. Bergson is the only one whom one might still be able to read, although he, too, has disqualified himself on account of his Judaism. And the cowardly order to murder him? Hahl probably gave it, Hahl being a Jew as well, he expected nothing else from this people, in all likelihood Hahl blackmailed him, hadn’t he, Slütter should just admit as much, there’s no shame in it, this sordid governor-philosopher is an insidious crook for whom every means is justified to see his disgusting aims achieved.
It’s true, Engelhardt had unexpectedly turned into an anti-Semite; like most of his contemporaries, like all members of his race, he had sooner or later come to see in the existence of the Jews a scapegoat, tried and true, for each and every wrong suffered. The nervous breakdown wreaked on him by the leprosy had little to do with this; there was no causal correlation between his disease-induced irritability and that hatred of the Jews. Nonetheless, it blusters forth jauntily out of him: how much blame the people of Moses had brought upon themselves in his eyes; the philosophical machinations by certain charlatans that had made this or that mistaken path possible in the first place; that there had been conspiracies against him at the highest level, indeed, it was a Zionist plot that had been hatched, the King of England was involved, Hahl, Queen Emma (to whom he still owes a gigantic sum of money, he recalls angrily), and others; that the whole miserable failure of his blessed utopia could be chalked up to those who held the reins in their greedy hands, those hands gnarled by Mammon beyond all human recognition.
During this insane harangue by Engelhardt, young Makeli creeps off unnoticed. He has had enough of the white men and their lunacy and this island. Two fingers he’s sacrificed, and now he’s had it. He wraps a cloth around his loins, points the prow of one of the sailing canoes toward Rabaul, and as he leaves Kabakon, he knows that it is forever, and he cannot help but weep.
Slütter likewise turns his back on the furiously seething Engelhardt, walks wordlessly to the beach, and marches back out through the surging waves to the launch. He was unable to kill the poor lunatic obsessed with the canard of a Jewish global conspiracy, that’s just the way it is, and Hahl will have to swallow it, and if he intends to take Pandora away from him, then Slütter can potentially offer him something else, his own life perhaps.
But the girl is of course not behaving as Slütter would have liked; as if he could just have frozen her in the everlasting present, immutable until the end of all times. While Slütter is on Kabakon, she remembers Apirana’s offer on the Jeddah and asks him if he will tattoo the story of the storm in pictures, he can do it however he wants, preferably on her back, there’s lots of room there, and afterward Slütter can’t do anything about it either way.
She takes off her dress and underwear and lays herself naked, facedown on the forecastle of the freighter, and as swallows dart up and down, high in the gloriously blue sky, Apirana prepares the traditional bone needles, gives her a piece of rope to bite down on, and begins to punch the tips dipped in black ink into the skin of the young girl’s back.
As if he were a dark Pygmalion, he runs his skilled hand in rehearsal over the places he intends to draw menacing black clouds, gruesome krakens emerging from the troughs. The frigate birds that signaled the end of the hurricane will go on the right toward the shoulder, to the left down near the sacrum their little threatened ship, on it, in m
iniature, so tiny that they are barely perceptible, Pandora herself, Apirana, November, and Slütter. And finally, in the middle, between the shoulder blades trembling under his gentle touch, the storm itself: figment of a fantastic monstrosity from prehistoric times, baring sharp-edged teeth, writhing fiercely and tremendously, the monster scoops deluges of water from the ocean with its scaly paws to make the ill-fated Jeddah keel over.
When Slütter arrives back in Rabaul, the Maori’s artwork is complete. Apirana has carefully dabbed off Pandora’s bleeding back and bandaged it tightly with a bedsheet. Almost at the very same time, Makeli’s little canoe sails into Blanche Bay. Observe now: events are coming thick and fast. Slütter encounters Hahl; the latter, being the Realpolitiker he is, has of course long since notified the English police that Pandora is in his custody ready to be picked up and taken back to Australia. To this treachery, Slütter can do nothing but add his own—having not killed Engelhardt—at which Hahl only shrugs, offers the captain a cigarette, and not without concision says that it’s all rubbish now anyway, since there’s threat of war—if he’s understood correctly, a world war, as a matter of fact, in which enough disaster will rain down upon humanity, so it’s quite honorable after all not to have partaken in Engelhardt’s death, to boot.
To Slütter, in his contempt for mankind, this appears more than incredible, but he lets nothing show—he could still bring Pandora to safety, he could still keep her with him if only he maintained his calm. But the girl has long since made up her mind. This bearded, aging seaman is too forthright, too reliable for her; she feels his rage over the exquisite tattoo on her back to be petty-minded, his dreams (if he even has any) are not hers, he has grown as stale to her as the dropped toy has to the child. Yes, he has fulfilled his purpose, which fact she screams in his face standing on the landing pier, still barefoot.
Slütter takes leave of Pandora, and it tears apart his soul. In the distance, the cone of the purple volcano towers into the sky, and lizards conceal themselves timorously on its stony slopes. Makeli and Pandora, children of the South Seas, leave Rabaul together in a sailboat, headed into the unknown. The wind blows them to Hawaii, perhaps, or to the Marquesas, girded by vanilla vines, of which it is said their perfume can be smelled long before they are seen on the horizon, even all the way to Pitcairn, that volcanic rock in the empty, wordless south of the Pacific Ocean.
Engelhardt likewise becomes a child, a rex solus. Vegetative and simple, without memory, without foresight, he lives alone in the present; now and again receiving visitors, he talks incoherently; the people depart again and laugh about him: in the end he becomes an attraction for voyagers in the South Seas who visit him as one might a wild animal in the zoo.
In this time when simply nothing will happen while one awaits what is looming on the horizon, two German painters turn up in Rabaul: Messrs. Emil Nolde and Max Pechstein. Both have sworn off traditional modes of seeing and painting and feel themselves to be innovators of a hopelessly antiquated notion of art stuck in the previous century; yes, the French above all and their overly intellectual, spineless daubs are to be vanquished. Pechstein wears shorts every day.
They are passed around, the carousel of receptions and evening shows revolving. By day, Nolde mostly withdraws a few hundred yards into the nearby jungle to make a few sketches with vigorous and expressive strokes. Pechstein, growing bored, takes his leave and sails by steamship to Palau, while Nolde, when his cigars have finally run out, ferries over to Kabakon, since he’s heard a deranged though quite harmless German is living there, leading the simple and quiet life of a naked native.
They get along as well as they can and talk about the future possibilities of art—Engelhardt moans his old litany that it is likely his fate to die without being understood, forgotten, without a trace. Nolde nods sympathetically, says the Jews are probably to blame for that, and following a sudden, strong impulse, asks if he might paint him in oils sitting on the beach beneath the orange-red evening clouds with a conch half raised like a horn in his thumbless hand; now Engelhardt truly has become a work of art.
The painting, admittedly, goes missing in the turmoil of the First World War, but fifteen years later, Nolde, who has now mentally fashioned himself into the first painter of the Volk for the new ruling powers, will recall the picture and make a sketch from memory and begin to paint the oil portrait of Engelhardt afresh using this drawing; this panel is produced without haste, elaborately, splendidly. It is perhaps, he says to himself, his finest work.
When it is done, he invites Gauleiter Hinrich Lohse over to his house in Seebüll for tea and rock candy. One assures the other of his mutual esteem, the artist leads the politician into his studio, and while Ada Nolde brings in a tray with aquavit and pilsner, Lohse inspects the work, uttering bumbling long drawn-out oohs and ahs, sits down, stands back up, downs a glass of schnapps, walks around the easel while making a mental note to report the painter to the Reich Chamber of Culture as soon as possible. Nolde walks the slightly tipsy fellow to the door, there’s a long and heartfelt handshake. After the Second World War, Lohse, who will become the Reichskommissar of Ostland and rule like a disgusting brute in Riga, Vilnius, Minsk, and Reval, will merely be denied his pension payments as punishment.
For years, Nolde has successfully schemed against the proscribed Pechstein, Tappert, Schmidt-Rottluff, Kirchner, Barlach, Weber—who naturally have greater talent at their disposal than he—but it’s of no use; they impose a prohibition on his brush, too, clear out the museums, destroy a few pictures until it dawns on someone in the Reich Office for Foreign Trade how many Swiss francs they can get for these spatterings (essentially, so they say, vast expanses of color strung together in which one can occasionally recognize a mouth or a dog, sometimes a cloud, flowers, rarely a group of people—a child or an imbecile could paint like this), and so the paintings that haven’t already been destroyed are sold off abroad. The second portrait of August Engelhardt goes to a private collector in Mexico City in whose house it hangs even now, over a sideboard on which freshly cut roses wither in a vase every day.
Nolde, who has propagandized against the Jews for as long as he can remember, and who is convinced his painting is the spearhead of a new Teutonic aesthetic, is unable to comprehend that his pictures are so unsuited to the new era. He falls into a deep depression, painting secretly, waiting, as so many opportunists of that time, until finis germaniae.
XIV
First, the student Gavrilo Princip, after hastily gobbling down a ham sandwich in Moritz Schiller’s café, runs out into the street of that small, tranquil city in the Balkans and at point-blank range, pieces of sandwich still in his mouth, bread crumbs still on his sparse, downy mustache, fires right in the thick of things at the invidious despot and his wife Sophie with a gleaming revolver. Then, to put it mildly, one thing leads to another. The sea of flames that follows the murder sweeps across Europe with universal mercilessness; rickety planes buzz like paper dragonflies over Flemish trenches; anyone who’s a soldier and possesses a mask scrambles, hands atremble, to yank it over his face as soon as the cry Chlorine gas! rings out; one of the millions of pieces of glowing shrapnel exploding on the Western Front bores like a white worm into the calf of the young private from the Sixth Royal Bavarian Reserve Division. Just a few inches higher, closer to the main artery, and it might never have come to pass that but a few decades later my grandparents would be walking apace in Hamburg’s Moorweide, just as if they hadn’t noticed those men, women, and children laden with suitcases loaded onto trains at Dammtor Station across the way and sent eastward, out to the edge of the imperium, as if they were already shadows now, already cindery smoke.
Patience, though. It is not like a distant thunderstorm whose fronts approach inexorably and menacingly—such that one can still get to safety—but rapidly and relentlessly and not without a certain drollery that the First World War comes to the Bismarck Archipelago, too. The Rabaul radio station that maintains contact with the German Reich via
the Nauen Transmitter Station is shot up by an advance unit of Australian commandos and blown apart by several hand grenades thrown inside. The postmaster, who in former times had designed the labels for Engelhardt’s coconut oil bottles, is wearing a uniform in the wrong place at the wrong time; an iron mail cabinet crashes down on top of him, and while falling, he is struck in the forehead by a soldier’s bullet.
A few days later, an Australian battleship starts cruising around Blanche Bay, and a submarine surfaces. There’s general confusion and great disorder; people flee to the governor’s residence and barricade the windows by stacking chintz sofas and mattresses against them from the inside. Blond women who were just leafing through magazines and complaining about the putative recalcitrance of Malaysian employees sink to the floor in a swoon and must be tended to. The electricity goes out, the humming fans go silent. A lone shell fired off toward Rabaul by the battleship lands in front of one of the hotels with a buzzing wail, tearing a palm tree to tatters.
There ensues a kind of invasion, the course of which might be deemed quite anarchic. Chickens and pigs are rounded up; artworks of infinitesimally small value are requisitioned and carried aboard ships to exhibit in Australian museums (even Hahl’s reproduction of the Isle of the Dead); they arrest a soldier from Wagga Wagga who has raped a native woman and send him home in shackles as well; Hotel Director Hellwig wrings his hands at the great number of rude officers who drink his bar dry while boisterously singing “Waltzing Matilda”; driven from the jungle by the noise, a bird of paradise that strays into Rabaul is robbed, alive, of its feathers; soldiers stick the plume, the quill-end still bleeding, into their southwesters; after being dubbed Kaiser Wilhelm, the naked bird, screeching with pain, is kicked back and forth like a rugby ball amid snorting laughter; the crates of long-rancid coconut oil stored in the Forsayth trading post are opened with a crowbar; suspecting a cache of weapons, the soldiers merely find old-maidish bottles nestled in wood shavings; they cannot read the German labeling, uncork them in the hopes of booze, sniff them, and then, with theatrical expressions of disgust and noses pinched shut with thumb and forefinger, pour the contents out onto the sandy ground.
Imperium: A Fiction of the South Seas Page 14
