Imperium Read Free Page B

wretchedly. A gathering gray cloud front briefly blocked the sun and then let it shine forth once more. Engelhardt’s fingers drummed one or two impatient marches; again the tooting ship’s siren sounded. The cone of a volcano only half covered by trees pushed its way into view. All of a sudden red droplets spattered onto the white-painted balustrade, and he was seized with fright. It was blood dripping from his nose, and he had to race belowdecks, groping his way carefully down the ladders into the diffuse light of the steel corridors, lie on his back in his cabin’s berth, and, with closed, throbbing eyelids, press a slowly reddening bedsheet over his face. From a jug covered by a towel he poured himself some fruit juice into a glass and drank it down in thirsty gulps.
    Meanwhile, all of Herbertsh ö he had gathered; it was the first week of September. They stood on wooden gangplanks, freshly combed, shaven, and furnished with new collars, awaiting what were no longer the most recent newspapers from Berlin; the beer that would remain iced now only a short while, and which was uncapped immediately—the first cases were hardly unloaded—and passed around bottle by bottle; the dozens of letters from home; and of course the newcomers: soldiers of fortune and adventurers, returning planters, the occasional researchers, ornithologists, and mineralogists, the destitute noblemen chased away from their impounded estates, the crazies, the flotsam and jetsam of the German Empire.
    Engelhardt was standing in his cabin, at the porthole of the emptying steamship, to be precise, looking out through the double-paned glass onto Herbertsh ö he. The nosebleed had ceased as suddenly as it had begun. He wasn’t secure in his footing and leaned against the bulkhead of his cabin somewhat stooped, his cheek grazing the gauzy curtain fabric; in the pocket of his robe, he clasped the pencil stump with the fingers of his right hand. The sun shone through the porthole with tremendous strength. When the wispy cloth of the curtain touched him once more, he began to cry. He was overcome, his knees quaked, he felt as if the very last drop of his bravery had been sucked from his bones by means of some kind of contraption, and now the scaffolding that had once been held together solely by the glue of courage was buckling.

 
    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;