Free Imperium by Christian Kracht

opacity of which nothing at all is reflected. I do not believe he has ever truly loved anyone.
    Berlin is groaning under a high pressure system that has lasted now for weeks on end and, beginning down in the Ottoman Empire, pushing up through Central Europe, has blanketed the city so stiflingly that a populace mutinying against the heat hijacks ice-cream carts, wet handkerchiefs are worn on heads, and fire engines have been commandeered and sent to the Zoological Garden to hose down the animals howling from heat and thirst. When Engelhardt’s train from Danzig arrives at Schlesischer Bahnhof, though, it is as if a needle were inserted in a balloon: within minutes, the flaying heat bursts, towering clouds gather, piling themselves over the city, and instantly it pours and dumps down in unimaginable, outrageous floods. Streams of water tumble down in cascades, the rain in places so impenetrable that it links building fronts on adjacent street corners like a solid aquatic wall; muslin umbrellas are of precious little use here. People drape themselves in black-rubberized rain capes (all the caoutchouc required for the varnish is imported from the brutish slave plantations of the Belgian Congo) and proceed, like crows strutting aslant, against the pelting rain now blowing sideways, now pouring down from above, now pushing from behind.
    The city is one large construction zone; holes as deep as a man hinder orderly passage, and these are now filling with brackish water, to boot. Siberian traders sell their soggy bric-a-brac at Alexanderplatz, where there’s also extremely inexpensive bratwurst to be had, consisting mainly of meat scraps and moldy flour, that disintegrates immediately in the rain. The tram, creaking and throwing sparks, shoves past decent citizens, who jump onto the footstep to avoid the most severe showers of all; everywhere, dripping iron cranes strain heavenward. This, then, is Berlin, a mediocre, slovenly, provincial town, carelessly erected in the sands of Brandenburg, masquerading as an imperial capital.
    After learning that Silvio Gesell, whom he wanted to consult here in Berlin on founding a moneyless vegetarian community, has since emigrated to Argentina, Engelhardt escapes the small throng of his liberators in the bustle of Schlesischer Bahnhof, leaps into a horse-drawn bus, and disposes of the bandages that have robbed him of half his sight. He can see again, very well, actually, in spite of the rain. And his resolve is steeled: what he will do is say adieu forever to this poisoned, vulgar, cruel, hedonistic society rotting from the inside out, a society whose sole occupation consists in amassing useless things, slaughtering animals, and exterminating the soul.
    A few stops later, at Alexanderplatz, a soaked Berliner is leaning against the wall of a building and eating—chewing, mesmerized—one of those bland bratwursts. The whole wretchedness of his people is written on his face. The unctuous, indifferent desolation, the gray lament of his bristly-cut hair, the oily specks of sausage between his crude fingers—one day he’ll be painted like that, the German. Engelhardt, just as hypnotized, fixes him in his gaze as the omnibus rattles past through the wall of water. For a second it is as if a fiercely bright beam of light joins the two, one enlightened and one subordinate.

 
    V
    Now that we have endeavored to tell of our poor friend’s past, we will skip a few short years, like an untiring, lofty seabird for whom crossing the time zones of our globe is of no consequence whatsoever, indeed, who neither notices nor reflects upon them, and visit August Engelhardt again where we left him a few pages ago: walking stark-naked on the beach—on his own beach, mind you—stooping here and there to collect an especially lovely shell and slip it into a wicker basket he has thrown over his shoulder.
    The Time Statute of the German Empire, which was passed a good decade ago in Berlin and aptly went into effect