Imperium (3 page)

II

It was in Port Said, half an eternity ago (in reality just a few weeks earlier)—when his eleven overseas crates with one thousand two hundred books had been mistakenly unloaded and he fancied them lost, never to be seen again—that he had last wept, one or two almost saltless tears, out of desperation and the vague feeling that for the first time his courage was now truly failing him. After searching in vain for the harbormaster, he used his time to post to a good friend in Frankfurt a letter that he had written while still in the Mediterranean—he had wrapped it in a cotton cloth to protect it from the damp—and drank unsweetened peppermint tea on the terrace at Simon Arzt’s for an hour and a half while a silent Nubian, with a white napkin, dried glasses that refracted the shimmering canal in the dazzling desert light.

All of Thoreau, Tolstoy, Stirner, Lamarck, Hobbes, Swedenborg, too, Madame Blavatsky and the theosophists—everything gone, everything lost. Alas, perhaps it was better this way, all that pointless thought, poof, shipped off somewhere else. Sullen, he made his way again to the pier and to his ship to Ceylon. The idea occurred to him that one ought to hand out a few piasters among the stevedores, so Engelhardt dug into his tunic pockets and addressed a seaman whose ethnicity (Greek? Portuguese? Mexican? Armenian?) was indecipherable due to a regrettable one-sided facial paralysis. He gave him the money and heard the man fold the bills together while smacking his lips. But, but, please, effendi, his books were over there! They apologized to him and without further ado loaded the crates on board again; it had been a misunderstanding, they had made a silly mistake, supposing Herbertsh
ö
he to be somewhere else, on the coast of German East Africa. Engelhardt’s letter to his friend, wherein he wrote of
contamination by Europe
and of
the Garden of Eden
, turned up, insufficiently stamped, in the office of Port Said’s French postal service; there it was laid aside, ultimately, to its eternal rest. In a receptacle for such envelopes, underneath a table, it gathered dust and was buried by other letters. After many years, the course of which spanned one or two world wars, it was baled and strung together with others in a hefty bundle by a Coptic wastepaper merchant and chauffeured in a donkey cart out to a squalid hut at the fringes of the Sinai Desert—which, however, Engelhardt, whose ship was sailing to Ceylon that very evening with him and his book crates aboard, was never to discover.

In Colombo, there were two luxurious grand hotels: the Galle Face, situated on the edge of a large maidan, and the Mount Lavinia, erected on a hill somewhat outside of and to the south of the city. Engelhardt, who would otherwise have certainly headed to more modest lodgings, had decided that he should indulge himself for once in Ceylon, and boarded a rickshaw after giving a liveried boy several annas, so that he might look after the whereabouts and custody of his baggage, which it had been necessary, yet again, to unload from the ship and store at the harbor. He made himself comfortable on the extraordinarily wide seat and wished to be conveyed to the Galle Face Hotel at a leisurely pace. But it went too quickly! The bare feet of the little old Ceylonese man slapped onomatopoeically and monotonously on the street before and below him; Engelhardt wondered whether the rickshaw wallah was running so fast because the asphalt was so hot, or whether the velocity was, so to speak, one of the expectations of passengers who wanted to arrive at their destination rapidly. He leaned down to touch the little man on the shoulder and communicate to him that he need not hurry so on his account, please, but the fellow did not understand him and even accelerated his pace, which is why, after finally arriving in front of the grand hotel, he collapsed beside the rickshaw, drenched in sweat and gasping for breath.

The liveried porter, a burly Sikh with a magnificent white beard, came running, blanketed the poor rickshaw wallah with reproachful curses, took Engelhardt’s hand luggage from him with dozens of apologies, and, tossing a coin at the feet of the poor old man lying in the street, steered our friend into the cool and cavernous reception hall, where, with a practiced movement of his flattened hand, he rang a silver bell that had been affixed to the reception desk for this very purpose.

Engelhardt slept long and dreamlessly in a large white room. A modern electric fan hummed on the ceiling above him; now and again a gecko somewhere in the room chirped its bleating courtship song and then shot its tongue at a bug it had been approaching slyly, millimeter by millimeter. Around four in the morning, the window shutters rattled, a wind sprang up, and it rained for an hour. But Engelhardt heard nothing. Lying on his back, profoundly at ease, he slumbered away on the freshly starched sheets, hands folded on his chest. His long hair, liberated before bedtime from the practical hair band that tied it back during the day, encircled the head resting on the white pillow in dark blond waves as if he were Wagner’s sleeping young Siegfried.

On the following day, in the compartment of the awfully sluggish train to Kandy, on the way to the old royal city of Ceylon, a Tamil gentleman sat opposite to him; his blue-black skin stood in peculiar contrast to the snow-white tufts of hair that jutted out from his ears as if they were woolly cauliflower rosettes attached to his head, right and left. The soporifically slow journey wound through shady coconut groves and emerald rice paddies. The gentleman wore a black suit and a high white collar that lent him the dignity of a magistrate or a state solicitor. Engelhardt was reading an amusing book (Dickens) as one switchback after another passed before the window and the view looked out onto gently sloping fields of tea—tea that grew in walkable furrows, from which protruded colorfully dressed, dark-skinned tea-picking women, green-filled baskets on their backs.

The gentleman had addressed him with a question, and Engelhardt, holding the page of the book he had just read with a wetted thumb and forefinger, asked him politely to repeat it, as the gentleman’s English was accented with a melody and tonality so foreign that Engelhardt would have better understood an Australian, even a Texan, but this venerable Tamil? Almost not at all. While the afternoon dust danced through the open train window, they conversed as well as they were able—they had made an agreement to employ the idiom both used purely as a mediating language deliberately and slowly—about the relics of the Holy Lord Buddha and, in particular, for Engelhardt soon steered the conversation in that direction, about the coconut.

With soft gestures, the gentleman declared that, as a Tamil, he was beholden to Hinduism, but according to the sacred text of the Bhagavata Purana, the Buddha was one of the avatars of Vishnu, the twenty-fourth, to be precise, and for that reason—and here he introduced himself briskly as Mr. K. V. Govindarajan with a handshake that Engelhardt found pleasantly dry and firm—he was on the way to Kandy to view the tooth of the Buddha that was venerated there in a temple shrine. The relic at issue was the
dens caninus
, the upper left eyetooth. Govindarajan daintily raised a lip with the tip of his dark ring finger and graphically pointed out the location of the tooth in question; Engelhardt peered into the bone-white dentition embedded in perfectly healthy pink gums and mentally shuddered with a sensation of warm contentedness. His interlocutor’s plain, unhurried, and yet touchingly emotive means of expression filled him with an intense feeling of sudden intimacy.

All at once, he reached for Govindarajan’s hand and asked him outright whether he was a vegetarian. But of course, certainly, came the answer, he himself and his family had been subsisting for years on fruits alone. Engelhardt was scarcely capable of grasping the coincidence of this encounter. Across from him in the compartment sat not only a brother in spirit, a like-minded soul, but a man whose subsistence placed him on par with God. Were not the dark races centuries ahead of the white race? And didn’t Hinduism, the highest expression of which was vegetarianism, i.e., love, constitute a force in the fabric of the universe, wouldn’t its all-encompassing, lucid rustlings one day outshine like a blinding comet those nations upon which Christianity had bestowed a charitable love that excluded animals from its purview? Hadn’t Rousseau and Burnett, following the vegetarian Plutarch, and as an overdue response to Hobbes’s
Leviathan
, claimed that the primordial instinct inherent in mankind was the renunciation of meat? And hadn’t Engelhardt’s dreadful Uncle Kuno tried to make the consumption of ham more palatable to him as a young boy by rolling a pink cigar for him from the thin flaps of pig meat as he laughed and smirked, then sticking it into his young mouth, and holding a match to the protruding end, just for the fun of it? And, finally, wasn’t the killing of animals, which is to say the preparation of meat and the nourishment of man with animal substances, really the preliminary stage of anthropophagy?

Engelhardt’s knowledge of English was sometimes not entirely sufficient to formulate such questions exactly—and yet they had to come out; where he lacked the abstract terms, he made do with clouds of ideas painted into the air, with comets whose traces he drew through the sunlit compartment with his finger.

Engelhardt asked his new travel friend whether he had heard of Swami Vivekananda. And when the latter said no, he unpacked from his valise several pamphlets, which he timidly laid out beside himself on the compartment seat. They were the writings of that selfsame swami, who had recently caused a furor in the New World by virtue of his unusual ideas and rhetorical talents. There, too, mimeographed and stitched together with a ribbon (the Franconian adhesive binding had disintegrated back in the southern Red Sea, near Aden, on account of intense exposure to heat), was his own treatise, the contents of which heralded the healing power of cocovorism, though unfortunately in German, such that Engelhardt might point to the volume as an object without, however, being able to articulate for his new friend the thoughts therein, which were considerably more skillfully phrased in written form.

And yet he did not wish to leave it untried; with some effort he paraphrased the fundamental notion in his text that man was the animal likeness of God and that the fruit of the coconut, in turn, which of all plants most resembled the human head (he was referring to the shape and hairs of the nut), was the vegetal likeness of God. It also grew,
nota bene
, closest to the heavens and the sun, high above atop the palm tree. Govindarajan nodded in assent and, as they passed through a small country station without stopping, was about to cite a relevant passage from the Bhagavata Purana (this was not the only sacred text he had had to memorize in his years of youth at the venerable University of Madras), when he resolved instead simply to continue nodding and let his interlocutor finish speaking in order, then, to note, with a certain gravitas he now deemed appropriate, that man, were he to subsist solely from the divine coconut, would not only be a cocovore, but also by definition a theophage. This he let resound for a moment in silence and then uttered the expression again into the stillness of midmorning, which was punctuated only by the clicking of the tracks:
God-eater
.
Devourer of God.

Engelhardt was overwhelmed by that realization. Indeed, it cut him to the proverbial quick and began to take effect there as if it were a resounding, humming field of energy. Yes, indeed, the coconut—the delectable thought now revealed itself to him—was in truth the theosophical grail! The open shell with the meat and the sweet milk within was thus not just a symbol for, but in actual fact the body and blood of Christ. In his brief Catholic theology seminar in Nuremberg, he had heard it set forth in the same way, and now, on this tropical railroad journey, found it confirmed from quite a different perspective—the transubstantiating moment of the Eucharist could indeed be understood as physically becoming one with the divine. The host and Communion wine, however, couldn’t be compared with the real sacrament of nature, his luscious, ingenious fruit: the coconut.

Govindarajan was quite evidently happy to have met a frugivore brother so serendipitously and then invited him—at that moment the train overcame one of the last hairpin turns, gasping and sputtering, and then straightened the course of its tracks toward the old Ceylonese royal city—to visit the Temple of the Tooth with him. They’d take a room in Kandy and, after a lavish fruit lunch, decamp together from there to the temple, which, Govindarajan claimed, lay but a few edifying steps from the city center on a small hill above Kandy Lake.

At the Queen’s Hotel, they decided for reasons of cost to share a single room, which aroused a certain suspiciousness on the part of the receptionist that rapidly subsided, however, after Engelhardt placed a few banknotes on the counter, asserting that he very much wished to pay a gratuity in advance. One was accustomed to the eccentricities of the Anglo-Saxons, and if this German gentleman here wanted to sleep in the same room as a Tamil friend, then by all means. The question then arose whether one might expect the two gentlemen for lunch, whereupon both answered in English that a few papayas and pineapples would suffice entirely, but if a coconut were available, they would consider themselves fortunate to be served the coconut milk in a glass and the meat scooped onto a plate. The receptionist bowed, turned around, and disappeared off to the kitchen to place the two frugivores’ order, rolling his eyes in annoyance.

Sated, rested despite the rail ride, and with the euphoric mood of a pair of pilgrims whose destination, long promised, now lay just within reach, the two strolled across the street and then leaned over a stone balustrade to find themselves reflected for a moment in the sacred lake, as lotus and frangipani blossoms floated on its surface. A group of bald-headed monks hurried by, chattering, each with a black rolled-up umbrella in his hand, their habits glowing saffron-yellow in the afternoon sun. A slender dandy in white flannel hurtled past on a penny-farthing, waving, honking the black squeeze bulb on his handlebars twice in quick succession. Govindarajan pointed with a cane (had he had one with him earlier?) toward the temple, and they then prepared to ascend the stairs leading up to the tabernacle.