Imperium (14 page)

After arriving in Rabaul, Engelhardt and L
ü
tzow strode down the causeway shaded by palm trees toward the governor’s residence. They were of course not walking naked; Engelhardt was wearing the now heavily bleached-out cotton vestment in which he had first arrived in the protectorate, while L
ü
tzow had wrapped himself about the hips in a colorful sheet and thrown over his shoulder the now no longer quite clean, collarless formal shirt he had worn during the last of his horrid evening performances at the piano in the German Club.

Engelhardt noticed that nature around the capital had been visibly subdued, that they had driven back the jungle and laid far more decent avenues than they had in Herbertsh
ö
he. What, he thought, could counter this, this revolt of man against the chaos of the organic, this tidying impulse to straighten, this guiding of ectoplasm into well-defined limits? So that was it, the civilizing element, that’s what this led to: things moral, boiled, steamed. He needed to cough, faltered, almost falling flat.

On the broad lawn laid out before the governor’s residence, a wooden trestle had been erected. They brought a native offender and fastened him to the construction with two crossed rattan straps. Some white-suited planters had turned up, arms folded at the chest, as well as a crowd of jeering children and a delegation of native policemen from the colonial protection force; each policeman had been allotted a tunic and a belt with a bayonet, but neither shoes nor boots, so that in the eyes of the white masters some element of the ridiculous would always cling to his authority. A man from the colonial forces stepped forward, took off his uniform jacket, and—baring a muscular torso with an almost blue-black sheen—received from the white police constable what in his gigantic hands seemed an impossibly delicate and thin bamboo cane. Now the planters were clapping their hands, smirking; the children whistled with their fingers, and while Engelhardt and L
ü
tzow turned away, the giant struck the supple cane with unimaginable force against the naked back of the man bound to the trestle.

L
ü
tzow gently touched the elbow of his friend, who was wincing on account of the cane strokes, and soon they entered the shadowy retreat of the governor’s veranda, on which Hahl stood with legs apart, bobbing up and down, observing the punitive action from a distance, thumbs stuck left and right in his waistband. They all introduced themselves, and the governor seized Engelhardt’s hands and shook them quite vigorously. They must follow him inside, please, Hahl said; it seemed as if he were genuinely happy to see them both. In the salon itself it was wondrously cool; Engelhardt counted eight modern electrical fans up there on the ceiling.

That man out there had been a thief, one had to take drastic measures although it didn’t suit him at all, he wanted to run the colony differently than, say, his colleagues down in German South-West Africa or in Cameroon, one had to try to incorporate the natives into the principled and impartial German legal system, which was of course a highly moral, fair authority and not, as in the French or Dutch territories, for example (not to mention the Belgian ones), merely a whitewash designed to mask the preservation of a modern form of slavery, which is to say, economic exploitation with maximum profit and minimal humanity.

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 L
ü
tzow 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 L
ü
tzow, 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 L
ü
tzow’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
phalanst
è
re
(Engelhardt was absolutely certain that L
ü
tzow 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.

L
ü
tzow 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 F
ü
rst 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, L
ü
tzow 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 L
ü
tzow 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 hundred 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. L
ü
tzow 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.