Imperium (20 page)
Authors: Christian Kracht
Emma Forsayth-L
ü
tzow dies in Monte Carlo at the gambling table of the longed-for casino after placing her last ten-thousand-franc chip on the color red. Black 35 wins. She slumps down in her chair without a word, two gloved casino employees rush to fan air at her, a third brings her a glass of cognac that is spilled amid the commotion, leaving a dark stain on the bottle-green frieze of the gaming table, which will have vanished the next day. The Soci
é
t
é
des bains de mer de Monaco erects a headstone for her that reads
Emma, Reine des Mers du Sud
. Today the inscription is weathered but still quite decipherable.
And our more-than-bewildered friend, our problem child? He does materialize once more, you know. Shortly after the end of the Second World War, in the Solomon Islands, on the battle-ravaged isle of Kolombangara, not far from the flattened peak of a smoking volcano, American naval units discover an ancient white man who is missing both thumbs living in a cave. He seems to have subsisted on nuts, grasses, and beetles. A young woman Navy doctor examines the old man, skeletally emaciated yet still oddly strong, and notes with great astonishment that he suffered for decades from a multibacillary form of leprosy, but that it has by some amazing miracle completely healed.
The long-haired graybeard is taken to and shown around a confusingly large military base on the island of Guadalcanal, which was wrested away from the Japanese. Wide-eyed, he sees everywhere friendly black GIs whose teeth, quite unlike his own ruinously rotten heap of dental wreckage, gleam with a secret, surreal luminosity; everyone appears so extraordinarily clean, their hair parted and clothes pressed; he is given a dark brown, sugary, rather tasty liquid to drink from a glass bottle slightly tapered in the middle; sedulous fighter planes set down on runways at minute intervals and take off again (the pilots smile, waving, from glass cockpits, radiant in the sunlight); with an expression of rapt attention, an officer holds a metal box with small perforations to his ear, from which enigmatic, heavily rhythmic, but still not at all unpleasant-sounding music emanates; the old man’s hair and beard are combed; an immaculately white cotton collarless camisole is pulled over his head; he’s given a wristwatch; they pat him gaily on the back; this is now the imperium; he is served a type of sausage brushed with garishly bright-colored sauce that lies in a bed of oblong bread as soft as a down pillow, as a result of which Engelhardt, for the first time in long over half a century, ingests a piece of animal flesh; here, a soldier of German extraction (his parents simply forgot their language of origin—it was assimilated
pars pro toto
into the
E Pluribus Unum
), one Lieutenant Kinnboot, in shirtsleeves, preparing with patient affability to ask Engelhardt dozens of questions for a newspaper, is mightily impressed when Engelhardt suddenly recalls the English language—which of course has grown somewhat rusty over the decades—and begins to speak, at first haltingly, then with increasing vivacity, of the age before the world war, no, not the one favorably just ended, but the one before that, even. And Kinnboot, quite riveted, lighting one cigarette after the other, forgetting to offer the bearded old man one, is unable to make notes anywhere but in the margins of a steno pad long since filled with scribbles, shakes his head again and again, and, smiling incredulously, he professes:
Sweet bejesus, that’s one heck of a story
, and:
Just wait ’til Hollywood gets wind of this
, and:
You, sir, will be in pictures
.
And in fact, several years later—Engelhardt has now already left us—solemn, monumental orchestral music will surge before audiences. The director is present at the premiere, first-row seats; he is sitting there, biting at the crescent moon of the fingernail on his pinkie, chewing up the sharp keratin particles, the projector clatters, no, hundreds of projectors are flickering and beaming their cones of light, accompanied by wildly dancing dust motes, onto hundreds of screens, in Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, San Francisco, Boston, on which a white postal steamer, beneath long white clouds, is sailing through an endless ocean. The camera zooms in; a tooting, the ship’s bell sounds the midday hour, and a dark-skinned extra (who will not appear again in the film) strides, gentle-footed and quiet, the length of the upper deck so as to wake with a circumspect squeeze of the shoulder those passengers who had drifted off to sleep again just after their lavish breakfast.
The author would like to thank Frauke Finsterwalder, Carol and Lars Korschen, Errol Tzrebinski, Angelika Schütz, Rafael Horzon, Humphrey Kithi, Ernst August of Hanover, and Frank Feremans for helping him write this book.
Christian Kracht
is a Swiss novelist whose books have been translated into twenty-seven languages. His previous novels include
Faserland
;
1979
; and
I Will Be Here, in Sunshine and in Shadow. Imperium
was the recipient of the 2012 Wilhelm Raabe literature prize. You can sign up for email updates
here
.
Daniel Bowles
teaches German studies at Boston College. His previous translations include novels by Thomas Meinecke and short texts by Alexander Kluge and Rainald Goetz.
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Contents
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2012 by Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch
Translation copyright © 2015 by Daniel Bowles
All rights reserved
Originally published in 2012 by Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Germany
English translation published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First edition, 2015
eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kracht, Christian, 1966–
[Imperium. English]
Imperium: a fiction of the South Seas / Christian Kracht; translated from the German by Daniel Bowles. — First edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-374-17524-5 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-0-374-70986-0 (e-book)
1. Engelhardt, August, 1877–1919—Fiction. 2. Germany—Colonies—Oceania—Fiction. I. Bowles, Daniel, translator. II. Title.
PT2671.R225 I5713 2015
833'.92—dc23
2014039370
