Imperium by Christian Kracht Read Free Book Online Page B

was cut from the shore into the bush, some corner posts were rammed into the exposed marshy soil, which had first been dried for a few hours in the sun by removing the overstory, and the mats of palm fronds that had been created in the meantime were now woven together. Engelhardt, whose shyness had made him seem so unfit for life in our world, but which among these savages seemed whisked away by a fresh, jocose breeze, eagerly took part in the collective wattling. Now and again, he ran down to the shore and scooped cooling ocean water onto his burning shoulders with both hands. Small children would run with him then, throwing themselves naked and screeching and grinning before him into the surges, and Engelhardt laughed with them.
    The first night, he lay on the sand floor he himself had shoveled into the hut on top of the marshy, still slightly wet clay ground and decided after some unpleasant tossing and turning that henceforth he would sleep elevated on a bedstead or a wicker cot. The sand may have been soft, but it trickled into his ear if he made himself comfortable on his side in the fetal position. On the other hand, if he lay on his back, he found the back of his head and the long hair underneath scratched by the sand in the most aggravating manner (the heat and humidity had crumbled his hair band into disintegrating bits). And he had scarcely calmed himself, saying nothing more could be done tonight to make sleep more bearable, and tomorrow morning we’ll see how a bed can be built—he was drifting off to sleep, smiling almost contentedly about his own Buddhist-seeming indifference to discomfort—when he became aware of hundreds of mosquitoes that had chosen to punish his skin with extremely painful bites. For a long while he slapped at them in the dark helplessly and pitifully and then set fire to a coir mat. Its heavy emission of smoke successfully drove the mosquitoes from his hut but made him cough with such unbridled force, while at the same time bringing stifling tears to his burning eyes, that he buried his face in a sand pit and, enraged, awaited the hour at which first sunlight would finally break through the holes in the fringy rattan walls.
    The following late afternoon he recalled the mosquito nets brought along from Herbertsh ö he, unpacked one from its cardboard container, unfolded it, and hung it with great circumspection from the walls and ceiling of his rattan hut. A small rip that resulted from the process he mended with two or three skillful sutures. Then he tentatively lay down beneath it, smiling at his unyieldingness; someone else might have considered leaving. He harbored the greatest fear of the fever and ardently hoped he had not been bitten last night by an infected insect; on the other hand, that was simply the price one had to pay here. In Germany, there were few diseases whose course brought about such horrific repercussions; instead, one had to suffer an infestation of the mind, an inner, incurable rottenness, the corrosive power of which was capable of eating through the soul like a cancerous ulcer.
    Now, one cannot avoid saying that the inhabitants of Kabakon knew nothing whatsoever of the fact that the little island on which they had lived for as long as anyone could remember suddenly no longer belonged to them but to the young witeman whom they had amicably taken in at the behest of the agent Botkin, for whom they built a hut, and to whom they had brought fruit. And at the outset it was by no means Engelhardt’s intention to conduct himself like an especially stern island king; but, returning to his hut one afternoon from an exploratory walk around the two wooded hills, he chanced upon the following scene.
    There, in a glade, a boy had ensnared a pitch-black piglet, which he was dragging around by its tail. A young man joined him, raising a heavy wooden club, and sending it hurtling down with a crack onto the animal’s head; the pig immediately collapsed dead with an abject