Imperium (15 page)

Come evening, Engelhardt and L
ü
tzow 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, L
ü
tzow 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. L
ü
tzow, 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 Sl
ü
tter 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 L
ü
tzow 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, Sl
ü
tter 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.

L
ü
tzow, 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 L
ü
tzow, 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, L
ü
tzow 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 L
ü
tzow 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 L
ü
tzow 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 L
ü
tzow’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, L
ü
tzow 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; L
ü
tzow, 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 L
ü
tzow 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 L
ü
tzow and others shall remain hidden in a shadowy side corridor of his psyche for a while yet) to provoke him. L
ü
tzow 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.

The natives already working in the plantation this early morning observe him sailing away and view his departure, whispering with one another, as a bad omen on which even worse will follow. Indeed, yesterday they had seen a peculiar, unknown bird pitifully wallowing in the sand as if it wanted to get rid of something gumming up its plumage. A collective decision is made to lay down their work and do nothing but wait for more signs to manifest themselves. That Engelhardt hasn’t been paying his employees for almost two years now isn’t seen as particularly grave, since they assume their employer simply has no money at his disposal right now. The Tolai chief, who so enthusiastically played on the rattan piano by night, having now thoroughly outgrown what seem to him as the primitive drums and whistles of his race, is sitting somewhat off to the side under a palm tree and rubbing his numb hands, feeling a deep sadness at the departure of the white music conjurer that is infinitely increased by the fact, conscientiously concealed from his tribe, that he has contracted leprosy.

Engelhardt—and neither he nor Max L
ü
tzow knows this—has likewise caught leprosy, and this disease, whose Old Testament nimbus obscures the simple reality that it is primarily a nervous disorder, causes certain addled reactions within Engelhardt’s person, which is already deranged from several years of his unhealthy diet. Dr. Wind, over in the Rabaul area, was of course quite right in his own way.

Now, it would probably be overstating things to say that Engelhardt’s psyche had drunk from the river Lethe, on whose shores it had long been resting, gazing at its own reflection, sinking into the most profound cosmic forgetfulness about why he had ever come here in the first place. The truth looks much more mundane; the farther he removes himself from the community of man, the more outlandish his behavior and relationship to it grows. He is thrown back into an atavistic mental state that expresses itself in a premonition of total loss of control: the bottles with Kabakon Oil piling up in Rabaul are consigned to oblivion, copra production has halted, the pages of his beloved books curl in the tropical humidity because they are no longer regularly set out to air in the sunshine, yes, even the flowers around his house, which he had tended before with nurturing love, have become overgrown and are in danger of being strangled by creepers. Yes, it is as if he has become the old spinster Miss Havisham, who stolidly awaits that great, all-consuming conflagration that might finally deliver her.

And what of the leprosy? The ostensible epicenter of infection lay somewhere within the perfect fifth formed by the C and G keys on L
ü
tzow’s piano, where a scab loosened from the Tolai chief’s leprous finger remained, which Engelhardt a short time later took for his own and, as a matter of routine and reflex, stuck in his mouth without bearing in mind or imagining that there were several bleeding spots in his oral cavity and on the gums, so-called canker sores. In truth, our friend had been infected years before, of course.

XI

So while Engelhardt persists in furious, paralyzed, inflamed derangement on Kabakon (a neurologist would have diagnosed severe paranoia) and Max L
ü
tzow, a genuine lump in his throat, chugs toward Rabaul feeling cheerful and relieved in spite of everything, Captain Christian Sl
ü
tter, standing on the bridge of the
Jeddah
(which essentially consists of a crooked steel structure open astern), rounds a spit of land jutting bottle-green into Blanche Bay and sights first the smoking cone of the volcano and then the little German town spreading out so tidily before him. He recalls with a smile his last stay, when he still did not possess a captain’s license, and—running his hand through the blond beard (which is already showing several white hairs, which before, during the visit a few years back, were present only subcutaneously)—moves the crank of the chadburn up to half ahead. Stuck in the inside pocket of Sl
ü
tter’s white, dirty, always half-wet captain’s jacket is a letter received in Apia from Governor Hahl, and in it the request to report to the new capital Rabaul for a discussion about eliminating a small but pressing problem.

The blustering has been replaced by a glassy, picture-book sea, the sun appears, he sticks a moist cigarette between his lips and hums a little melody known only to him. Looking at the whole scene stretched out before him, and himself in it, he is reminded of perusing decades-old albums and the gradually fading photographs in them. It’s as if one had seen it this way once before, exactly like this, only now the outer world and oneself have changed, while the album has not—it still radiates intensely out of the past, which in reality lasts forever, while the present, by contrast, consumes itself in fractions of a second. Sl
ü
tter draws on his cigarette and is forced to laugh because his brain absolutely cannot wrap itself around these paradoxical lines of thought. If you snatch at it, the thought goes poof; if you ambush it, it fades at the moment of insight. Only his own death, he thinks, is predestined; even now this event is inscribed in the future, he only lacks its coordinates, its precise calibration in space and time.

On the freighter, besides Apirana, a Maori with imposing facial tattoos he hired in New Caledonia as an experienced seaman, and Mr. November, the stoker, there’s also the young girl Pandora. Sl
ü
tter picked her up in Sydney; she more or less bumped into him after he’d slept off his opium dreams, smoking as he does twice yearly in Sydney’s Chinatown, and had staggered back down to his freighter that afternoon. He’d turned the corner to the quay on Darling Harbour, slightly off-kilter; there, between magnificent barques and whitewashed liners, had lain the
Jeddah
, that ugly, beloved freighter of indeterminate color, peppered in barnacles. And as soon as he had sized up her quarterdeck and the already smoking funnel, bleary-eyed, and tossed his kit bag to a coolie, there was Pandora standing before him, barefoot, red-haired, maybe twelve, maybe fourteen, a little eyebrow raised deftly, a bag slung over her slender shoulder with several pencils and a Hawaiian quilt in it.