Imperium (10 page)

Humanity was not yet ready to accept Engelhardt’s doctrine, however; humankind must first begin to transcend itself, and he called upon the following analogy (during the narration of which Aueckens, his head cocked slightly, scratched his forehead in thought): If while hunting around, for instance, an ant fell upon a piece of chocolate it had detected through the indeed astoundingly complex design of its antennae’s sensorium, then this was an event comprehensible within the bounds of the formicine conceptual horizon and wholly natural to it. But if a human being entered into the equation, wanting to safeguard his chocolate, for example, by preventing that insect from notifying its peers so that together they might take possession of the sweet comestible, and if he thus hid the chocolate from the insect inside an icebox, then the ant (whose groping movements would grow continually slower and more unsure on account of the cold), still wandering around on that chocolaty surface, would have no possible way to figure out what was happening. The fact that it and the object of its desire had been put into a cold, hostile environment would lie entirely outside its conceptual apparatus; not even in a hundred thousand years could the ant understand the mechanism underlying the onset of its own demise by freezing, lacking as it does the ganglionic armamentarium, for example, to understand why it had ever become necessary for a culture to design a cabinet in which things may be kept cold by adding blocks of ice. It was similar for man, who wanted to understand his purpose on this planet; man’s sensorium is simply not sufficient to grasp the whole background of the fact of his own existence. Were he able (but it would, as he said, lie in the realm of the completely impossible), then the veil of Maya would lift, and he would transcend his existence, would become godlike, quite analogously to the ant, who would finally break through to us, its immense deities, and our eternally opaque actions.

Aueckens, who didn’t quite understand what Engelhardt was trying to explain with the ant and the chocolate, ceased listening the moment he noticed it was indeed a rather proper house that Engelhardt had built for himself here: an immaculate six-foot-wide veranda made of jackfruit tree timbers girded the whole structure. The walls of the interior rooms were decorated with pretty shells, a chessboard was set up and ready for play on a block of driftwood, a thoughtfully planted, lovely flower garden buzzing with vibrantly colored hummingbirds was about to bloom. There were windows with wooden louvers that could be properly sealed against weather and various wildlife, and if by evening the shutters were clapped shut, one felt safe and homey, a feeling that had pleasantly saturated Engelhardt when he had slept in his new dwelling the first night. Yes, let’s be honest, he hadn’t constructed it himself, but had sent for a skillful carpenter from Herbertsh
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he, who erected the three-room home inside of a week and at his behest had even built for him a shrine from fragrant sandalwood on which Engelhardt had positioned an old carved wooden figurine so that its inscrutable gaze flowed through all the rooms of the house.

This fetish, with which a delegation of his workers had solemnly presented him at a small ceremony, was incidentally missing an ear in much the same way as Hotel Director Hellwig—the result of an amputation that a drunk missionary had performed a good twenty years ago while zealously attempting to familiarize the islanders of the Neu-Lauenburg archipelago with the Catholic faith by defiling their idols with an axe. The selfsame padre turned up later, having hardly slept off his inebriation, slain by his own axe. Left hanging on a tree afterward to be drained of blood, he was then portioned into small pieces on a ceremonial stone, the choicest of which were served steamed and wrapped in pandanus leaves to the owner of the figurine at the time, an influential chieftain. That grandee, who most certainly did not lack for a sense of humor, insisted on having the ear of the missionary for dessert, roasted crispy on a wooden skewer—quid pro quo, so to speak.

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 Hoysh
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rn 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 Herbertsh
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he 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.