Imperium (19 page)

When Sl
ü
tter 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. Sl
ü
tter 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, Sl
ü
tter 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 Sl
ü
tter, 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.

Sl
ü
tter 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 Seeb
ü
ll 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 caf
é
, 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.

A detachment of Australian soldiers ultimately ends up on Kabakon, too. Engelhardt, who steps toward them on the beach, naked, amid the laughter of the uniformed men, is dispossessed forthwith. He is handed the sum of six pounds sterling for the run-down plantation, and it’s left up to him whether to return to Germany. Six pounds for this life. He casts the puny sum of money at the Australian officer’s feet, does an about-face, and vanishes into the shady jungle. He is not followed.

Captain Sl
ü
tter, cruising with the
Jeddah
off Samoa in these confusing, peculiar times, reports to the commander of the SMS
Cormoran
, which is also lingering in the warm waters of the South Pacific; coal is in short supply, it is no longer safe to put to harbor anywhere, but they can’t remain at sea, either, they are
sitting ducks
, as the British say. The crew of the
Cormoran
hopes for the expeditious arrival of the large German battleship
Scharnhorst
; in the meantime, Sl
ü
tter, who has placed himself and his ship at the disposal of the
Cormoran
, is ordered to capture an unarmed French collier, recover the cargo, and torpedo the bugger.

And thus the aged
Jeddah
becomes a warship. She isn’t allowed to hoist the colors of the German Imperial Navy, but Apirana, Sl
ü
tter, and November do in fact manage to capsize the collier by affixing an explosive device to the prow of the
Jeddah
, setting a collision course, and escaping to safety with the tiny lifeboat just in time. The black plume of smoke can be seen for miles around. And so they bob, rowing off to the arranged meeting point with the
Cormoran
, which of course never appears. In its stead—it is nearly unbearable—two Australian warships show up; they take Sl
ü
tter captive and land on a nameless island to collect water. Sl
ü
tter is accused of piracy, stood against a palm tree, and executed. He acquiesces calmly, unshaven, refusing the blindfold. Another captive German sailor loans him his uniform coat so that Sl
ü
tter doesn’t have to die in civvies. When the bullets pierce him, he sees neither Pandora in his mind nor the soldiers aiming at him, just the solemn and distressingly unforgiving deep blue ocean. Cigarettes are distributed among the firing squad. The sailor’s coat is returned after the sentence is carried out, and he wears it with head held high and a straight back; he will never sew up those four punctures at the height of his heart.

Escaping the soldiers by some ruse, Apirana, after long odysseys that send him sailing over the inexhaustibly vast quilt of the Pacific, that star field of his ancestors, and that blow the fancies of white men out of his soul good and proper, joins the New Zealand Navy on a whim. November, who had accompanied him, is swept overboard in a typhoon. He sinks with open eyes miles down into the calm, night-blue cosmos of the sea. Many decades later, Apirana will be the first Maori in the New Zealand Parliament. He dies somewhere in midcentury, ubiquitously honored, bearing a rank beyond reproach, as Sir Apirana Turupa Ngata.

After having cheated their way around the Pacific for a long while with extremely profitable cardsharping, the two crooks Govindarajan and Mittenzwey are arrested on Samoa and deported in chains to Australia on a prisoner convoy; the latter is torpedoed en route by a German cruiser and sinks with all hands into the surges of the Pacific Ocean.

Albert Hahl returns to a wintry, silent Berlin that is no longer quite so euphoric about the war, and there, over ten years—using as a reference his card index filled with aper
ç
us, diverse discoveries, philosophical observations, and inventions—works on his memoirs, which for want of an interested press remain sadly unpublished. The helicopter Hahl envisioned, finally, that he once dreamt up in a bright, flower-strewn kingdom by the sea while observing the hovering flight of the hummingbird, will be developed much later, in the next war, as most splendid inventions of humanity are products of its feuds. Granted a halfhearted appanage by the Imperial Colonial Office, he devotes himself increasingly to private scholarship. As politics irritate him, he writes the long letters of an aging man who no longer occupies center stage. Even the philosopher Edmund Husserl receives mail from Albert Hahl, a densely inked, eighty-page epistle in which it is set forth that we men are living in a kind of highly complex motion picture or theatrical work, but suspect nothing because the illusion is so perfectly staged by the director. The letter is half skimmed by Husserl, dismissed as childish, and not dignified with a reply. Hahl—his hair has long since turned gray when the sun-crossed F
ü
hrer of the Germans becomes swinishly insufferable—then conspires with the wife of Wilhelm Solf (erstwhile governor of German Samoa) by joining a resistance group whose brutish end on the piano-wire gallows of the imperium Hahl will not live to see.