Imperium (9 page)
Authors: Christian Kracht
The Kellogg brothers had recently founded the Sanitas Food Company in the United States, you see, and, with their idea for producing so-called breakfast cereals palatable to people, they were well on their way not only toward triggering a small revolution in the eating habits of their countrymen, but also toward becoming dizzyingly rich.
Young Halsey had asked the two brothers for an appointment, had appeared in their sparse, orderly office, and had then thoroughly impressed upon them with the conviction of an incensed fanatic that cereals were by no means the right path to pure Adventist doctrine because ingesting them into the body necessitated the addition of cow’s milk—no one wanted to eat dry cereal alone. But the milk that provided the lubricant, as it were, was obviously an animal product; thus, they must cease cereal production immediately and come up with something new that could teach the American consumer to be a vegetarian.
Good Lord
, off to Australia with him, the brothers thought, for they may have been pious adherents of their Adventist faith, but were simultaneously incorrigible, unalloyed Yankees, confident of business as a raison d’
ê
tre. And so Halsey traveled by steamer from San Francisco (which would be almost completely destroyed by an earthquake a very short time after his embarkation) across to Sydney and then to Cairns, and there he now lay, head to head with Engelhardt.
It is possible that both vegetarians felt each other’s presence without being aware of it, as if the thin plywood panel between their heads were a kind of electrical conductor. Halsey was of course a genius, as was Engelhardt. It’s just often the case that one person’s genius is acknowledged in the world—his idea spreads and evolves like a well-told joke that isn’t forgotten, like the virus of some disease—while the other’s withers away under the saddest of circumstances. The Kellogg brothers, who had sent Halsey to the other end of the world, were convinced that their pupil’s lines of thought to a certain degree must seem too radical for their time, but they were also undoubtedly in love with him, in an avuncular sense. Still, they didn’t want him on the same continent because he had criticized their foundations, had nibbled away at their morals, so to speak.
At any rate, on the following day the two sat at the same table in the breakfast room of the little boardinghouse, the windows of which looked out on a slightly sloping dusty street so that the sporadically recurring rain showers transformed it mostly into a muddy torrent. Frangipani blossoms would then come floating down the street, coming to rest before the boardinghouse, as they did today, for it was raining fiercely, and Engelhardt was brewing for himself with some care a cup of brown loam so as to spend the day reading in the boardinghouse and then to prepare for his well-earned departure from Australia.
Halsey addressed him with interest, asking what sort of extract Engelhardt was mixing, and was informed that it was medicinal clay; if one couldn’t get hold of the original product from Germany, one could use any soil, it contained all the minerals the body needed, for his visits to so-called civilization would suck those substances out of Engelhardt, and this was the only way he could stay healthy. But didn’t Engelhardt live in civilization? Halsey wanted to know, whereupon the former replied with a dose of nonchalant pride that he was the leader and creator of the Order of the Sun and ran a coconut plantation in the German colonies north of Australia, so it depended on the definition of the word
civilization
. A truer word was never spoken, Halsey said, and requested permission to taste the medicinal clay. He was a strict vegetarian, he explained, and was always happy to try something new that didn’t harm an animal in its production.
Halsey’s idea, which he was now explaining to Engelhardt over a cup of the brown dust, was to develop a food paste that one could use as a healthy spread for bread—with a purely vegetable base, naturally—so as to cure young and old of the desire for meat through the flavor of the paste. The trick would be to blend this spread in such a way that the flavor would actually make one think one was in fact enjoying Liebig’s popular Extract of Meat smeared on one’s breakfast toast.
Cooked, preserved in a jar, and consisting of malt and yeast, the new foodstuff would be delectable and full of vitamins and create—and this was the actual idea (since, according to Halsey, behind every good world-altering thought there must be another, hidden thought)—a new type of person: a healthy, powerful vegetarian who did not have to answer for the blatant injustice of suffering animals. In short, Halsey wanted to reform his fellow man by outfoxing his palate. The dark brown yeast substance was to simmer in large vats in specially built factories the world over (for one would have to produce the paste in huge quantities), so he saw it in his mind’s eye. On the one hand, Engelhardt was touched by Halsey’s generous trust, though they had known each other for only about ten minutes (let’s not count the night in which both, without knowing of each other, slept head to head and, so to speak, emanated into each other in their dreams). It was a proselytizing, vegetarian idea that this young Adventist was voicing, not dissimilar from Engelhardt’s own conceptions.
But now he had been brooding for weeks about a suitable name and could not settle on one. He had here, if you please, a piece of paper with several options, most of them crossed out. Did Engelhardt perhaps have a revelatory idea? It should sound as healthful as possible, and with a harmonious succession of consonants and vowels. Please, Halsey said, could he not donate a name to his cause? Engelhardt urged the young American, quid pro quo, to travel with him to New Pomerania and try subsisting exclusively on coconuts for three months. During this time, he would then have the opportunity to give further thought to this spreadable condiment, its production (couldn’t one perhaps also cook it from a copra paste?), as well as its marketing. On Kabakon they would arrive at a fitting name for this new product. Oh, yes, indeed, they would be naked together the whole time.
Halsey, to cut a long story short, refused everything, disconcerted and rather perturbed. He was sorry, but his vegetarianism had grown out of a quite puritanical tradition and would result in a pragmatic realism oriented, above all, toward capitalism. One’s own body was not essential to his philosophy. Sure, it existed, but that was no reason to lie naked on a beach; surely no one could be persuaded by that. His counterpart seemed to him to be, if he might be permitted to say so, like all romantics, merely an egoist of a Schopenhauerian persuasion.
Engelhardt sat facing him very quietly for a spell while shredding up into tinier and tinier shreds Halsey’s piece of paper with possible names on it and then in turn (for it is common knowledge that no people tear each other apart as exhaustively as those whose ideas are identical) began to reproach the poor Yankee. He was a Calvinist bore, and really, who was supposed to spread spiced paste on bread? He, Halsey, would see where he ended up—in the poorhouse; he’d fail with his phantasmagoria, which was basically premised only on exploitation, because he wanted to manufacture industrially and not discover what nature harmoniously offered him.
I see, I see, aha, Communist, idiot, Halsey blurted out, rising angrily, taking his hat from the table, and hurrying to the door. Traitor to our sacred vegetarian cause, Engelhardt called after him, and: Prudish, prematurely senile Philistine! This last, however, Halsey did not hear as he had long since disappeared into the crowd on the main road of Cairns, which was colored slate-gray by the rain, surfacing once or twice on one street corner or another until nothing more was left of him but the shredded paper with the ten or twelve potential names for the spread, which Engelhardt had tossed under the table, and which that evening—our hero having already departed—was swept up by the boardinghouse proprietor and tossed into the kitchen oven together with the package of medicinal clay Engelhardt had intentionally forgotten in his room. From now on, our friend swore to himself, he would live off coconuts exclusively. And those slips of paper that resembled black roses at the moment they went up in flames, their fluorescent edges gleaming whitish yellow?
Vegetarians Delite
could be read on those snippets, then a few names crossed out, among them
Veggie’s Might
,
Yeastie
, and
Beast-Free
, and then, clear and distinct, underlined twice and marked with angular exclamation points, the word
Vegemite
.
Let us now speak about love. It was a grievous, rainy return voyage. The ocean lay gray and leaden for a depressing week; only just before the sighting of the New Pomeranian coast did Engelhardt glimpse the sun he so desired again. While still on the Herbertsh
ö
he landing quay, he was welcomed by his young boy Makeli, who had sailed over from Kabakon to await the return of his master in the capital. Engelhardt disembarked resignedly and unhappily. Marching toward him, which is to say in the direction of the Imperial Post ship, was a corpulent man in a white suit looking equally grim. (It was Hartmut Otto, the awful bird dealer, who was leaving New Pomerania again for the umpteenth time, en route to Kaiser-Wilhelmsland since he had once more been cheated most perfidiously out of a batch of bird-of-paradise feathers.) They took no notice of each other.
Meanwhile, Makeli opened a hole-ridden umbrella over Engelhardt’s head to protect him from the piercing rain, relieved him of the small carpetbag, and walked beside him awhile in silence, sensing that his master was suffering from a great dejection. Pondering this or that means of cheering him up, he spontaneously recalled the young German waiting for Engelhardt in the Hotel F
ü
rst Bismarck. He mustn’t be so sad, Makeli smattered, after all he had a visitor from Germany. What, a visitor? Yes, a young blond man (who, incidentally, would not touch a bite of meat or fish) had been sitting here for over a week awaiting Engelhardt’s return from Australia. Why, Makeli, boy, he now shouted, seizing him by the shoulders, why hadn’t he said that right away? A visitor! What news!
Engelhardt left Makeli standing there smiling blissfully, while he raced down the street, flew through the puddles, sidestepped a weeping fig tree with vividly orange-red blossoms, skipped over the individual steps of the hotel veranda with a hop, and, breathing heavily, stopped before a freckled young man who in turn leapt up from the wicker sofa, tucked the blond forelock behind his ear, wiped his damp hands on his trousers, and introduced himself with a crooked grin as Heinrich Aueckens, vegetarian, from Heligoland. And that it was a colossal honor, a truly colossal honor, finally to stand face-to-face, so to speak, before the brilliant author of the book
A Carefree Future
. He had saved, paid for the voyage from his own pocket, and just left, without announcing himself by letter, of course, for which he begged pardon, but he had only ever left Heligoland once before, to study in Hamburg, so now he was here in any case and was tremendously glad, and he wanted to join the Order of the Sun, provided this was readily possible. The strawberry-blond Aueckens spoke without periods and commas, and Engelhardt sensed an immeasurable satisfaction rise up in his soul, like the invigoratingly effervescent bubbles in a glass of mineral water, on account of the so eagerly awaited visit.
In hindsight, it may be said that the exceedingly positive first impression Engelhardt had gotten from his visitor was heavily tinged by the feeling of his, Engelhardt’s, loneliness, and that he was moved, certainly, also by the recently experienced gruff rejection of his ideological edifice by the Yankee Halsey, to immediately demolish, in Aueckens’s presence, the diffident defensive walls against people that he had so carefully erected during his childhood. This Aueckens, you see, would soon turn out to be a first-class swine, which is why even a few weeks later he was no longer among us;
il mangeait les pissenlits par la racine
, as the French would say.
However did Aueckens learn of Kabakon’s existence? our friend wanted to know. Well, from a pamphlet by the nudist Richard Ungewitter that he had received in Heligoland. In that treatise, Engelhardt’s experiment in the South Seas colonies had been praised as an attempt to break through the intellectual narrowness of Germany and establish a brave (albeit ultimately utopian) new beginning under palm trees, far away from the infirm machinery of a meaningless and ever-accelerating society.
Engelhardt, who hadn’t expected so much goodwill on the part of Ungewitter (the two had severed epistolary contact as a result of a severe difference of opinion that, in retrospect, was probably based on a misunderstanding), bade his visitor to have his luggage brought from the hotel room quickly, they would ferry over together to Kabakon, he was to be the first member of the Order of the Sun, so to speak, yes, yes, indeed, Engelhardt would immediately and unceremoniously appoint him a proper brother, they would then build a hut for him and, in general, do splendidly well together. Oh, there were otherwise no other members at all? Aueckens wanted to know, whereupon our friend proclaimed with a smile: not yet, one must be patient; the thought of living naked and free and only from coconuts was, though imperative, an idea that would need time to sink in among the civilized world. He paid Aueckens’s hotel bill by signature, steered the young Heligolander down to the landing pier, and together they boarded the sailing canoe, which was navigated over to the isle by Makeli’s steady hand.
By the very next day, the newcomer’s palm-frond hut had been erected. And it was so very good to be able to converse, in German, about issues concerning German things. By no means had Engelhardt felt lonely, but the awareness that he could now share his thoughts with someone who possessed a similar horizon sent him into a rare euphoria. Aueckens had read Thoreau! They sat together on the beach, spoke about the political and ethical absurdity of the German government in having ceded East African Wituland, as well as the islands of Zanzibar, Lamu, and Pemba, for Heligoland a few years before, and shared the meat of several coconuts. It was overcast and windless. Before them in the sand, tiny crabs geared up to duel, keeping each other at bay in zigzags. Aueckens—one could most certainly not yet expect him to have already become a total cocovore—ate a few bananas as well, and Engelhardt gave a small toast in honor of his visitor. Elevating the coconut shell like a glass of Franconian wine, he thanked his new brother in spirit for having taken the long road here. Together they would soon be able to accept other new members into the Order of the Sun, leading by good example, for—and one could now hear them clink shell to shell while shouting,
Vivat!
—a superb idea will prevail all on its own, to be sure.
