Machine Translated by Google Andre Gide For Hope Grave et religieux il reprend sa calme attitude: il demeure – Symbols qui grandit – et, penche sur l'apparence du Monde, sent vaguement en lui, resorbees, les generations humaines qui passent. novel Mark Twain Naked people have little or no influence on society. IMPERIUM CHRISTIAN KRACHT Machine Translated by Google PART ONE Machine Translated by Google Engelhardt was also fascinated by the birds of the Pacific Ocean, especially the bell- shaped honeyeater (anthornis melanura). As a boy, he had spent hours studying them in folios and their magnificent, expansive plumage, shimmering in the blazing sun of his childish imagination, running his little fingers over their beaks and their colorful feathers. Under the long white clouds, under the magnificent sun, under the bright sky, first a long drawn- out hoot could be heard, then the ship's bell rang urgently for lunch, and a Malay boy walked gently and quietly along the upper deck to gently press on the shoulders of those passengers who had fallen asleep again immediately after the sumptuous breakfast. The North German Lloyd, God curse him, provided every morning, if you were travelling in first class, with the skill of long- braided Chinese cooks, wonderful Alphonso mangos from Ceylon, cut lengthways and artfully arranged, fried eggs with bacon, spicy pickled chicken breast, shrimps, aromatic rice and a strong English porter beer. It was precisely the enjoyment of the latter that created an extremely uncouth, almost slovenly appearance among the returning planters, who - dressed in the white flannel of their guild - had sprawled on the deck chairs on the upper deck of the Prinz Waldemar rather than slept properly. The buttons of their trousers, which were open at the bib, hung loosely on threads, and their waistcoats were covered in saffron- yellow curry sauce stains. It was completely unbearable. Pale, bristly, vulgar Germans, reminiscent of aardvarks in appearance, lay there and slowly awoke from their digestive sleep, Germans at the zenith of their influence in the world. This is more or less what the young August Engelhardt thought as he crossed his thin legs, wiped some imaginary crumbs from his robe with the back of his hand and looked grimly over the railing at the oily, smooth sea. Frigate birds accompanied the ship on either side; it was never more than a hundred nautical miles from land. They dove up and down, these large, swallowtail- like hunters whose perfect flight and strange hunting maneuvers were loved by every South Seas traveler. I Machine Translated by Google The word planter was not quite right, because that term presupposed dignity, a knowledgeable engagement with nature and the noble miracle of growth; no, one had to speak of administrators in the true sense of the word, because that is exactly what they were, administrators of supposed progress, these philistines with their trimmed moustaches, in the Berlin or Munich fashion of three years ago, under red- veined nostrils, which in turn trembled violently with every exhalation, and with their fluttering, spongy lips beneath which saliva sacs hung, as if they could only free themselves from their labial stickiness and take to the air of their own accord, like the floating soap bubbles of a child's game. The loud, creaking snoring accompanied the German ship past the American Philippines, through the Strait of The planters, on the other hand, peeped out from under their eyelids and saw there, a little way off, a trembling bundle of nerves, barely twenty- five years old, with the melancholy eyes of a salamander, thin, scrawny, with long hair, wearing an eggshell- colored, shapeless robe, with a long beard, the end of which brushed restlessly over his collarless coat, and they probably wondered briefly what it was about this man who, at every second breakfast, even at every lunch, sat in a corner of the second- class salon, alone at a table in front of a glass of juice, carefully cutting up half a tropical fruit, then for dessert opened a cardboard package and spooned some brown, powdery dust into a water glass, which by all appearances consisted of pulverized earth. And ate this earth pudding too! How exalted! A preacher most likely, obviously anemic, unfit for life. But now that Engelhardt was actually flying under her wing beat, he no longer had eyes for her, only for the corpulent planters who - long suffering from untreated tertiary syphilis - were now returning to their plantations and had fallen asleep over the dry and tedious articles in Der Tropenpflanzer or the Deutsche Kolonialzeitung and were now smacking their lips as they dreamed of bare- breasted, dark- brown Negro girls. But basically it was uninteresting. And above all it was pointless to think about it any further. You gave him a year in the Pacific in your mind, shook your head, closed your slightly open eyelids and fell asleep again, muttering something incomprehensible. Machine Translated by Google No, how he detested them. No, no and no again. Engelhardt opened Schlickeysen's standard work, Fruit and Bread , and opened it again and again, tried in vain to read a few paragraphs, and made a few notes in the margin of a page with the stub of a pencil that he always carried in his pocket. He could no longer decipher them, even after he had written them. The Prinz Waldemar was a robust, modern steamer of three thousand tons, which, every twelve weeks from Hong Kong, crossed the Pacific Ocean towards Sydney, calling at the German protectorate, namely New Pomerania, the Gazelle Peninsula, the new capital Herbertshöhe in Blanche Bay (and one of its two mooring quays there), whose easily navigable basin was, in an optimistic mood, called a harbor. The ship lurched along quietly under a cloudless sky. At one point Engelhardt saw a school of dolphins in the distance, but he had barely borrowed a pair of binoculars from the ship's master when they had already dived back into the unfathomable depths of the sea. Soon the pretty island of Palau was reached, the mail bags were handed over and left again. Luzon (they did not sail to Manila because there was uncertainty as to whether the war that had engulfed the colony would ever turn out for the better), through the waters of the seemingly endless territory of the Dutch East Indies and finally into the protectorate itself. At the next short stop, in Yap, a few outrigger canoes approached the large ship hesitantly, offering halves of pigs and yams for sale, but neither the passengers nor the crew showed the slightest interest in the goods on offer. As the ship turned away, however, one canoe was caught in the vortex of the propellers and pressed against the side of the ship. The islander saved himself by jumping into the sea, but the canoe burst into two pieces, and the food, which had just been held up to the sky by brown hands, now lurched in the foaming water, and Engelhardt, who, clutching Schlickeysen's book with one hand, leaned far out over the parapet and looked down, shuddered at the sight of a half pig, which, at first floating, still covered with bloody tendons on the side, then slowly sank down into the indigo- blue depths of the ocean. Machine Translated by Google After the midday rain showers, the sun always came out, promptly at three, and wonderfully colorful birds strutted about in the chiaroscuro of the long grass, preening their dripping feathers. Then the Kanaka children frolicked in the puddles of the avenues, under the towering coconut palms, barefoot, naked, some in short, torn trousers (which were more of a hole than fabric), their heads covered in woolly hair, which had turned blonde by some funny whim of nature. They called Herbertshöhe Kokopo, which sounded much better and was, above all, more pleasant to say. Well, this chronicle falls into this period, and if one wants to tell it, one must also keep the future in mind, because this report takes place entirely The experts agreed that the German protectorates in the Pacific Ocean were, in contrast to the African possessions of His Majesty Kaiser Wilhelm II, completely superfluous. The yield of copra, guano and mother- of- pearl was far from sufficient to support such a large empire, scattered in the immensity of the Pacific Ocean. In faraway Berlin, however, the islands were spoken of as precious, shining pearls strung together in a necklace. Herbertshöhe was not Singapore, it consisted essentially of those two wooden piers, a few intersecting, wide avenues, on which the trading posts of Forsayth, Hernsheim & Co and Burns Philp had been built, which, depending on your point of view, were to be regarded as more or less impressive. Then there was a larger building, that of the Jaluit Company, which traded in guano in Yap and Palau, a police station, a church with its extremely picturesque cemetery, the Hotel Fürst Bismarck, the competing Hotel Deutscher Hof, a harbor master's office, two or three taverns, a Chinatown not worth mentioning, a German Club, a small clinic under the caring supervision of Doctors Wind and Hagen and the governor's residence, slightly elevated above the city on a hill covered with unrealistically bright green grass in the afternoon. But it was an up- and- coming, German, decent town, and if you called it a nest, you only did so in derision, or when it was raining so heavily that you couldn't see anything more than thirty feet in front of your nose. There were plenty of advocates and opponents of the Pacific colonies, but it was mostly the young Social Democrats who most loudly questioned the relevance of the South Sea possessions. Machine Translated by Google On board the Prinz Waldemar was the young August Engelhardt from Nuremberg, a bearded man, a vegetarian and a nudist. Some time ago he had published a book in Germany with the enthusiastic title A Carefree Future , and now he was travelling to New Pomerania to buy land for a coconut plantation. He did not yet know exactly how much land and where. He would become a planter, but not out of greed for profit, but out of a deep- seated belief that with the power of his great idea he could change the world, which he found hostile, stupid and cruel, forever. at the beginning of the twentieth century, which until almost halfway through its life looked as if it would be the century of the Germans, the century in which Germany would take its rightful place of honour and presidency at the world table, and again from the perspective of the new century, only a few human years old, it certainly seemed that way. So now the story of just one German will be told, a romantic who, like so many of this species, was a frustrated artist, and if parallels to a later German romantic and vegetarian come to mind, who perhaps would have preferred to stay at his easel, this is entirely intentional and, sensibly, pardon me, also coherent in nuce . Only at the moment the latter is still a spotty, eccentric boy who is receiving countless slaps from his father. But just wait: he is growing, he is growing. After Engelhardt had found all other foods to be impure through a process of elimination, he suddenly came across the fruit of the coconut palm. There was no other option; cocos nucifera was, Engelhardt had recognized, the proverbial crown of creation, the fruit of the world tree Yggdrasil. It grew at the highest point of the palm tree, facing the sun and the bright Lord God; it gave us water, milk, coconut fat and nutritious pulp; it provided humans with the element selenium, unique in nature; mats, roofs and ropes were woven from its fibers, furniture and entire houses were built from its trunk; oil was produced from its kernel to drive away the darkness and to anoint the skin; even the hollowed- out, empty nutshell provided an excellent vessel from which bowls, spoons, jugs and even buttons could be made. Finally, the combustion of the empty shell was not only far superior to that of conventional firewood, but also an excellent Machine Translated by Google Engelhardt had not been prepared for the almost painful beauty of these southern seas; rays of sunlight penetrated the clouds in luminous columns, and in the evening a peaceful mildness descended over the coasts and their mountain ranges, staggered one after the other, stretching into infinity in the sugary violet light of dusk. Engelhardt did not fully understand, and he was also suspicious of jokes of a sexual nature, as he considered the sexual act to be something completely natural, entirely God- given and not part of a repressed, misunderstood male discipline. But he refrained from saying this, The Prinz Waldemar, with its smokestack belching out of its chimney, kept a straight course towards Herbertshöhe. And while twice a day large buckets of leftover food were tipped into the sea from the quarterdeck, the dark coast of Kaiser Wilhelmland passed by far to the south, the Finisterre Mountains, as they were whispered on Engelhardt's map, and the unexplored, dangerous lands that lay beyond, never before set foot by German feet. One hundred thousand million coconut palms grew there. A means of keeping mosquitoes and flies away thanks to its smoke, in short, the coconut was perfect. Anyone who ate only coconuts would become godlike, would become immortal. August Engelhardt's greatest wish, indeed his destiny, was to create a colony of coconuts; he saw himself as a prophet and a missionary at the same time. For this reason he traveled to the South Seas, which had already lured countless dreamers with the siren call of paradise. A gentleman in a white tropical suit and pince- nez approached him, one who, although corpulent, did not seem quite as dull as his colleagues, and Engelhardt was immediately seized by that almost pathological shyness that always took hold of him when he met people who were completely convinced of themselves and of the rightness of their actions and being. Did he know what the armchair was called in which Engelhardt and the other passengers spent the afternoons dozing away on deck? Engelhardt silently denied it and lowered his head to say that he wanted to immerse himself in the mud again, but the planter, who now introduced himself with a minuscule bow as Mr. Hartmut Otto, took another step closer as if he had an extremely important secret to share. The deck chair, Engelhardt should please hold on tight, is called a bombay fornicator because of its wooden leg rests that swing forward . Machine Translated by Google but looked at the planter somewhat perplexed and scrutinizing. Now it was Mr. Otto's turn to backtrack, so to speak, and to explain his business in the German protectorate with a rapid succession of sweeping hand movements. Let's forget it, he said, and sat down with aplomb on the lower part of the armchair, loosening his shirt collar, which had become a little damp from the humidity and perspiration. He was, he reported, while artfully twirling the ends of his moustache towards the sky with his fingers, on the hunt for Paradisaeidae, birds of paradise, for whose feathers in the salons of the New World, from New York to Buenos Aires, he must know, currently fetch astronomical prices. Engelhardt now wanted to know whether the birds had to give up their lives for this, because now that Otto had made himself comfortable, he saw no more possibilities of attempting evasive maneuvers in the direction of his book. Ideally, the feathers would be plucked from the animal while it was still alive - of course, there were also traders who would simply have the ornaments that had fallen from the rear of the adult birds of paradise onto the jungle floor picked up, but he, Otto, did not believe in such methods. The feathers had to have traces of blood on the lower end of their quills, as a seal of quality, so to speak, otherwise he would not buy them in the first place. Engelhardt pulled a face, he felt a little uneasy, then the lunch bell rang, and Otto gently and firmly took him by the arm, saying that he must please do him the honor of dining with him. Hartmut Otto was a moral man in the truest sense of the word, even if his decency had grown out of the century that had just passed and he had little understanding for the new era that was now dawning, whose protagonist was August Engelhardt. Of course, the bird of paradise hunter had read progressive natural scientists, such as Alfred Rüssel Wallace, Lamarck, Darwin, and with a certain meticulousness, especially with regard to their taxonomic work, but not only did he lack faith in modernity as a cumulative process, he was also unable to recognize and accept a radical mind (such as Wallace and Darwin had been, for example), should he meet it personally, by chance, as he did now, on a sea voyage; Engelhardt's vegetarianism alone was anathema enough for Otto. Machine Translated by Google Otto, who was basically a good- natured person, thought that his counterpart was intimidated because, as a second- class passenger, he did not know how he was going to pay for what was for him an extravagant lunch, and he asked him to help himself to the pork chop, yes, yes, please, at his invitation, to which Engelhardt replied politely, but with the firmness of his (and Schopenhauer's and Emerson's) conscience, no, thank you, he was an avowed vegetarian in general and a fruitivore in particular, and asked if he could perhaps ask for a green salad, not dressed, without pepper and salt. Two parties formed and began to argue fiercely. Engelhardt heard a few sentences clearly in the tumult. It was about his, Engelhardt's, right to refuse to eat meat. They also spoke of savages, if, according to one of the plantation owners, they could still be called savages. Or had it already gotten to the point where a German in the protectorate was not allowed to Engelhardt looked with undisguised disgust at the piece of meat that lay there in front of him on the bed of noodles, its edges iridescent blue. Engelhardt reluctantly allowed himself to be led to a table in the first class lounge. There, sitting on heavy, neo- Gothic chairs with horsehair- stuffed backs and gazing at gold- framed reproductions of Dutch masters, Otto gestured to the Malay steward and, contrary to Engelhardt's usual daily eating habits, he was served a plate of steaming noodles and a pork chop with a rich brown gravy. The bird seller paused, put the cutlery he had already held over his plate down to the left and right, chuckled, dabbed his upper lip and moustache with his napkin and then burst into a barking, bleating, even snorting laughter. Tears welled up from his eyes, first the napkin flew to the floor, then a plate shattered, and while Otto repeated the words salad and fructivore over and over, he turned purple as if he were choking. While people jumped up from the table next to him to free him from the piece of bone that was supposedly lodged in his trachea by means of sweeping blows on the back, August Engelhardt sat opposite him, looking at the floor, manically swinging his sandal crossed over his left ankle. A Chinese cook hurried out of the galley, the dripping whisk still in his hand. Machine Translated by Google He slept badly that night. In the distance a thunderstorm passed by the Prinz Waldemar, and the erratically twitching lightning, following a disordered rhythm, repeatedly bathed the steamer in a ghostly, pale snow- white. While he tossed and turned in the damp sheets, in half- awake moments of shock he saw the strange outlines of England cast on the ceiling above him by distant lightning, and when he finally fell asleep - the storm could only be heard as the most distant, dark rumbling - he dreamed of a cult temple, built under the dim evening sun on the shore of a windless Baltic Sea, lit by Viking torches stuck in the sand. A burial was taking place there, bronze can one distinguish a Kanak from a Rhinelander? But one should be happy, said the opposing party, to have plant products on the menu, when in large parts of our happy island kingdom people have long since returned to anthropophagy, after having laboriously discouraged the savages from it through draconian punishments. Oh, nonsense! Old hat! came the counter cry. Yes, yes, just four months ago a priest was eaten, over there, by the Steyler Mission Sisters in Tumleo. Those parts of the man of God's body that were not eaten immediately were pickled, shipped up the coast and sold in the Dutch East Indies. Engelhardt's sense of shame threatened to overwhelm him. He turned pale, then red, and made preparations to get up and leave this disrespectful salon. He smoothed the napkin on the table in front of him and thanked Hartmut Otto quietly, almost inaudibly, without a trace of irony. A plantation owner grabbed his thin upper arm roughly, trying to prevent him from leaving, but he managed to free himself with a sharp movement of his shoulders, crossed the room in a few steps and opened the door of the salon, which led straight to the deck. There he paused, agitated, and rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand. And as he breathed in and out the humid tropical air, pondering whether he should perhaps cling to the wall of the promenade deck after all, but then immediately dismissing the thought as being effeminate, he was finally overcome by a deep, deep loneliness, far more unfathomable than he had ever felt in his native Franconia. He had landed here among terrible people, among loveless, brutal barbarians. Machine Translated by Google Well, he thought, he would not die here, on these green shores. Palm trees as tall as houses stood out from the steaming bushes of New Pomerania. Early the next morning, the steamer entered Blanche Bay under glaring sunlight, cheerful band music and the loud hooting of the siren, and Engelhardt stood at the railing, slightly disheveled, still feeling the strange, eerie dream of the previous night in his bones, the content of which became more and more foggy the closer he saw land come. He suspected that both ships, the modern steamer and the pagan burial raft, were interwoven in meaning and significance, but this morning he was in no mood to draw conclusions from that dream about his own departure from home, which had taken place not hastily, but certainly with embarrassment, under the vulgar sieder- beating Prussian police. Northmen stood guard at the temple. Children, whose blond hair was woven into wreaths on their heads, played softly on bone flutes at their feet. The raft on which the dead man was laid out was pushed out to sea in the last light of the evening. A giant, standing up to his waist in the water, lit the log, then it drifted, gradually catching fire, slowly and melancholy northwards towards Hyperborea. Feeling an almost cat- like readiness to pounce, he excitedly watched the approaching mainland. So this was it, his Zion. Here in this terra incognita he would settle, from this spot on the globe his presence would be projected. He paced up and down excitedly, and when he reached the quarterdeck he turned abruptly back around. There a few gentlemen who had drunk again for breakfast - the terrible bird seller Otto was not among them - had toasted him and cheerfully called out to him that he should leave it alone, that they wanted to be friends again, after all, Germans in the protectorate had to stick together, etc. Ignoring the louts, he surveyed the leisurely stretching coast with his eyes, looking for inlets, irregularities, elevations. Blue smoke rose from the wooded slopes, here and there clearings and individual grass huts could be seen in them. A macaque screamed miserably. An approaching grey cloud front briefly covered the sun and then released it again. Engelhardt's fingers drummed one or two impatient marches, the horns rang out again. Machine Translated by Google Engelhardt stood in his cabin, or more precisely, at the porthole of the emptying steamer, and looked out through the double glass onto Herbertshöhe. The nosebleed had stopped as suddenly as it had started. He was not standing steadily, he leaned against the cabin wall, slightly bent, his cheek gently brushing the gauze of the curtain, in the pocket of his robe he was clutching his pencil stub with the fingers of his right hand, the sun shining through the porthole with terrible force. When the fine cloth of the curtain touched him again, he began to cry, a shiver ran through him, his knees trembled, he felt as if some machine had sucked all the courage out of his bones, and now the structure that had previously only been held together by the cement of courage was collapsing. Ship's siren. The cone of a volcano, only half covered in forest, came into view. Suddenly, red droplets burst on the white- painted railing, and he was frightened. Blood dripped from his nose and he had to hurry below deck, feeling his way carefully down the stairs into the dim light of the steel corridors, lie on his back in the bunk of his cabin and, with closed, throbbing eyelids, press a bedsheet that was slowly turning red to his face. He poured some fruit juice into his glass from a jug covered with a cloth and drank it in greedy gulps. Meanwhile, the whole of Herbertshöhe had gathered; it was the first week of September. People were standing on the wooden walkways, freshly groomed, shaved and with new collars, waiting for the not- so- latest newspapers from Berlin, the beer that had only been ice- cold for a short while and which was uncapped and passed around by the bottle as soon as the first crates had been unloaded, the dozens of letters from home and, of course, the new arrivals, the fortune hunters and adventurers, the returning planters, the isolated researchers, the ornithologists and mineralogists, the destitute nobles chased from their confiscated lands, the confused minds, the flotsam and jetsam of the German Empire. Machine Translated by Google II All of Thoreau, Tolstoy, Stirner, Lamarck, Hobbes, even Swedenborg, Blavatsky and the theosophists, all gone, all gone. Ah, perhaps it was better that way, all of the useless thinking gone, shipped off somewhere else. Engelhardt's letter to his friend, however, which spoke of poisoning Europe and the Garden of Eden , was found, insufficiently stamped, in the office of the French post office in Port Said, and there it lay and finally rested. It gathered dust in a recipe for such envelopes under a table and was covered by other letters, and after many years, during which one or two But he was so attached to it! Sullenly, he set off again for the pier and his ship to Ceylon. It occurred to him that some piastres should be distributed among the dock workers, so Engelhardt dug into his coat pockets and spoke to a sailor whose origins (Greek? Portuguese? Mexican? Armenian?) could not be determined by assessing his physiognomy alone due to an unfortunate, half- facial paralysis. He gave him the money and heard the man folding the notes with a smacking sound. But, but, please, Effendi, there were his books! They apologized to him and loaded the boxes back on board without much fuss, saying that it was a misunderstanding, that they had made a stupid mistake and thought Herbertshöhe was somewhere else, on the coast of German East Africa. In Port Said, half an eternity ago (which in reality had only lasted a few weeks), when his eleven overseas chests containing the 1,200 books had been mistakenly unloaded and he thought they had disappeared forever, he had cried for the last time, one or two almost saltless tears, out of despair and the dull feeling that for the first time he was really losing his courage. After searching in vain for the harbor master, he had used the time to post a letter he had written in the Mediterranean to a good friend in Frankfurt, which he had wrapped in a cotton cloth to protect it from moisture, and he drank unsweetened peppermint tea for an hour and a half on the terrace at Simon Arzt's, while a mute Nubian dried glasses with a white napkin in which the canal shimmered in the dazzling desert light. Machine Translated by Google There were two grand hotels in Colombo - the Galle Face, located on a large maidan , and the Mount Lavinia, built on a hill just outside and south of the city. Engelhardt, who would otherwise have chosen more modest accommodation, decided to treat himself to something in Ceylon and climbed into a rickshaw after giving a uniformed boy several annas to look after and guard his luggage, which had to be unloaded from the ship and stored at the port. He made himself comfortable on the extraordinarily wide bench and wanted to be driven to the Galle Face Hotel in peace. But it was too fast! The bare feet of the little old Ceylonese man slapped onomatopoeically and monotonously on the street in front of and below him; Engelhardt wondered whether the rickshaw- wallah was running so fast because the asphalt was so hot, or whether the speed was part of the passengers' expectations of getting to their destination quickly. He bent down to touch the little man on the shoulder and tell him that he didn't need to hurry so much on his account, but the man didn't understand him and sped up his pace, which is why he finally arrived at the driveway of the Grand Hotel, drenched in sweat and gasping for breath, and collapsed next to the rickshaw. A modern electric fan hummed on the ceiling above him; every now and then a salamander hissed its bleating sound somewhere in the room. The uniformed doorman, a stately Sikh with a magnificent white beard, came running, showered the poor rickshaw- wallah with reproachful curses, took Engelhardt's hand luggage with dozens of apologies and, throwing a coin at the feet of the old man lying on the street, gasping, maneuvered our friend into the cool and cavernous reception hall, where he struck with a practiced movement the flat of his hand on a small silver bell that had been attached to the reception desk for just this purpose. World Wars, were bundled and tied into impressive packages by a Coptic waste paper dealer and driven on a donkey cart to a miserable hut on the edge of the Sinai desert, something Engelhardt, whose ship set sail for Ceylon that evening with him and his boxes of books, was never to find out. Engelhardt slept long and dreamlessly in a large, white room. Machine Translated by Google The next day, in the compartment of the extremely slow train to Kandy, on the way to the old royal city of Ceylon, he had sat opposite a Tamil gentleman whose blue- black skin was in strange contrast to the snow- white tufts of hair that protruded from his ears on either side of his head, as if they were woolly cauliflower florets attached to his head. The journey was soporific, driving through shady coconut groves and emerald rice fields. The gentleman wore a black suit and a high white collar that gave him the dignity of a judge or a public advocate. Engelhardt was reading an enjoyable book (Dickens) while one hairpin bend after another was negotiated outside the window and the view stretched far out over gently rising tea fields - tea growing in walkable furrows from which brightly dressed, dark- skinned pickers protruded, with a green- filled collecting basket on their backs. Engelhardt would probably have understood an Australian, or even a Texan, but almost not at all this venerable Tamil. While the afternoon dust danced on the rays of sunlight through the open train window, they spoke as well as they could - they had agreed to use the idiom that both sides used only as an intermediary, carefully and slowly - about the relics of the Holy Lord Buddha and especially, because Engelhardt soon steered the conversation in that direction, about the coconut. But Engelhardt heard nothing of it; he slept on his back in a deeply relaxed position on the freshly starched sheets, his hands folded on his chest. His long hair, freed from the practical hair tie that held it back at the back of his head during the day before going to bed, played around his head resting on the white pillow in dark blond waves, as if he were Wagner's sleeping young Siegfried. He sang his song and then stuck his tongue out at the mosquito, which he had been lurking and approaching millimeter by millimeter. At about four in the morning the shutters rattled, a wind came up and it rained for an hour. Hinduism obliges, but according to the sacred text of the Bhagavata The gentleman had already asked him a question, and Engelhardt, holding the page of his book he had just read with his moist thumb and forefinger, politely asked him to repeat the question, since the gentleman’s Anglo- Saxon accent was so foreign in melody and tonality that The gentleman explained with gentle gestures that as a Tamil he was Machine Translated by Google He quickly took Govindarajan's hand and asked him frankly if he was a vegetarian. Yes, of course, came the answer, he and his family had only been eating fruit for years. Engelhardt could hardly believe the coincidence of this encounter; in the compartment opposite him sat not only a spiritual brother, a soul mate, but a man whose diet put him on the level of God. Weren't the dark races centuries ahead of the white ones? And wasn't Hinduism, whose highest expression was vegetarianism, i.e. love, a force in the world structure whose all- encompassing, light rush would one day outshine those countries to which Christianity had given charity but had not included animals, like a dazzling comet? Hadn't Rousseau and Burnett, following the vegetarian Plutarch and as a due reply to Hobbes' Leviathan, claimed that man's innate, primal instinct was to renounce meat? And hadn't his horrible Uncle Kuno tried to make eating ham more palatable to him as a little boy by rolling a pink cigar out of the thin strip of pork, laughing and grinning, then putting it in his mouth and holding a match to the protruding end for fun? And wasn't the killing of animals, i.e. the preparation of meat and the feeding of humans with animal substances, the precursor to anthropophagy? Purana, the Buddha was one of Vishnu's avatars, the twenty- fourth to be precise, and therefore - and he quickly introduced himself as Mr. KV Govindarajan with a handshake that Engelhardt found pleasantly dry and firm - he was on his way to Kandy to see the Buddha's tooth, which was venerated there in a temple shrine. The relic was the dens caninus, the canine tooth located at the top left. Govindarajan gracefully pulled up a lip with the tip of his dark ring finger and clearly demonstrated the location of the tooth in question; Engelhardt looked at the bone- white teeth, which were embedded in perfectly healthy, pink gums, and shuddered inwardly with well- being. The simple, slow and yet touchingly pathetic expressions of his counterpart filled him with a sudden, intensely felt familiarity. Engelhardt's knowledge of English was sometimes not quite sufficient to formulate such questions precisely - but they still had to come out; where Machine Translated by Google Nevertheless, he did not want to leave it untried; with some effort he paraphrased the basic idea contained in his writing that man is the animal image of God and that the coconut fruit, which of all plants most resembled the human head (he referred to the shape and hair of the nut), was the plant image of God. It also grew, mind you, closest to the sky and the sun, high up on the top of the palm tree. Govindarajan nodded in agreement and, as the train passed through a small country station without stopping, began to quote a relevant passage from the Bhagavata Purana (not only this holy scripture had he had to learn by heart in his younger years at the venerable University of Madras), but then decided to just keep nodding and let his counterpart finish speaking, and then, with a certain gravitas that now seemed appropriate to him, he remarked that if a person lived exclusively on the divine coconut, he would not only be a coconut eater, but by definition a theophage, a god eater. He let this sink in for a moment and then repeated the expression into the morning silence, which was only rhythmicized by the clicking of the tracks: Godeater. Devourer of God. Engelhardt asked his new travel companion if he had heard of Swami Vivekananda. And when he said no, he took some pamphlets out of his travel bag, which he timidly placed next to him on the compartment bench. They were the writings of the same Indian Swami who had recently caused a sensation in the New World with his extraordinary ideas and rhetorical gifts, as well as his own treatise, mimeographed and bound together with a volume (the Franconian adhesive binding had already disintegrated in the southern Red Sea, near Aden, due to the strong heat), the content of which proclaimed the healing power of cocovorism, unfortunately in German, so that Engelhardt could refer to it as an object, but could not convey to his new friend his own thoughts, which were formulated much more expertly in written form. Lacking abstract terms, he made do with clouds of ideas painted in the air, with comets whose trail his finger traced through the sunlit compartment. Engelhardt was overwhelmed by this realization, yes, it literally went straight to his core and began to work there as if it were a ringing, humming energetic field. Yes, the coconut was the delicious Machine Translated by Google Govindarajan was obviously delighted to have met a fruit- loving brother by chance and invited him - the train was just now negotiating one of the last hairpin bends, panting and spitting, and straightening its tracks in the direction of the old Ceylonese royal city - to visit the Temple of the Tooth with him. They would take a room in Kandy and from there, after a sumptuous fruit lunch, they would set off together to the temple, which, according to Govindarajan, was located just a few edifying steps from the city center on a small hill above Lake Kandy. One was used to the whimsicality of the Anglo- Saxons, and if this German gentleman wanted to sleep in the same room as a Tamil friend, then fine. The question then arose as to whether one could expect to join the gentlemen for lunch, to which both replied in English that a few papayas and pineapples would be enough for them, but if a coconut was handy, one would be extremely lucky to be served coconut milk in a glass and the flesh removed on a plate. The receptionist bowed, turned around and disappeared towards the kitchen, rolling his eyes, to place the order for the two fruit- lovers. He had also explained this in his short Catholic theology seminar in Nuremberg and now, on this tropical train journey, he found confirmation from a completely different perspective - the moment of the Eucharist, that is, the transformation of being, was definitely to be understood as a real union with the divine. But the host and the communion wine could not be compared with the real sacrament of nature, its delicious, ingenious fruit - the coconut. Thought manifested itself to him, in truth the theosophical Grail! The open bowl with the pulp and the sweet milk inside was therefore not only a symbol for, but actually the body and blood of Christ. At the Queen's Hotel they decided to share a room for cost reasons, which aroused some suspicion on the part of the receptionist, who then quickly calmed down when Engelhardt put some bills on the counter and assured him that he would be happy to pay a tip in advance. Full, rested despite the train journey and in the euphoric mood of a pilgrim couple whose long- promised destination is now right in front of them, the two strolled across the street and then leaned over a stone parapet to take a quick dip in the holy lake. Machine Translated by Google