Free Imperium by Christian Kracht Page B

hands. And yet they were able to feel the embroidered blanket with which he had been tucked in; in fact, he discerned the pale blue checkered pattern of a baby bonnet at the edge of his field of vision and saw above him the infinite forkings of a summery cherry tree under which someone had pushed the pram at midday. He heard ringing laughter, glasses clinked together, the barking of a dachshund. A pink blossom, marbled somewhat with midnight blue at the edges, glided down slowly and came to rest gently on his little face.
    Unexpectedly, the queasy feeling that his body was floating overcame him. It was even earlier now. A soft surface that engulfed him, then the not-unpleasant impression that he was being drawn across pumice, over a whole volcanic expanse made of this very rock; for hours he floated a few inches above that expanse as if he were a helium balloon about to burst because of the rough surface of the stone, but then which laboriously manages to get free; there was a precipice, a pulling, a dragging. Finally he fell downward, a catastrophic plunge toward the earth, as if he himself were that blossom that had drifted down from the treetop. Then he awoke.

 
    VI
    During his stay on his island, Engelhardt had not only lost several pounds, but had also grown wiry and muscular; his skin was now a rich dark brown, and his hair and beard, which he slathered with coconut oil every morning, had become bright blond and golden from sun and salt. Pursuant to his instructions, the oil his employees squeezed on Kabakon was bottled in half-liter flasks on the mainland and given an appealing label designed by the Herbertsh ö he postmaster, which showed Engelhardt’s somewhat touched-up, bearded profile. (The alternative—providing from the congealed oil the base ingredient for Palmin cooking fat and the margarine much in demand in Germany—was completely out of the question for him, for ethical reasons; he would most certainly not supply his countrymen with vegetable oil in which to sizzle their Sunday beefsteak.)
    The oil-refining process Engelhardt paid for out of pocket (or rather on credit from Queen Emma, who was still, more or less, smiling inscrutably), a somewhat doubled advance payment; one day that Kabakon Oil, which already lay stacked in the Forsayth trading post packed in dozens of wooden crates, would surely find a buyer.
    To this end, Engelhardt had established several very promising contacts in Australia, notwithstanding the fact that the letters he dispatched to Darwin, Cairns, and Sydney, as befell mailed advertisements all over the world, were briefly skimmed, then stacked, cut down the middle, and reused as coarse toilet paper; his letters in particular were employed in the staff privy of the accountant’s office at a copper and bauxite mine not far from Cairns.
    The writings that told of the therapeutic, thoroughly beneficial, and diverse possible applications of his Kabakon Coconut Oil, in Engelhardt’s quite literary but somewhat awkward English, served the visitors to that Australian toilet only to a limited extent as entertaining reading while they did their business, as they had been perforated, cut, and separated at precisely those areas that would have enabled an unhindered read in complete sentences. Reassembled and reread with the hundreds of similar mailed advertisements, they no longer made any sense, of course. Thus, his letters wandered: scanned fleetingly, bereft of meaning, wadded up, and smeared with filth, they landed in a seepage pit on that gigantic, almost uninhabited continent to the south, which Engelhardt once visited with friendly intentions during the time remaining for him in the protectorate, but whose soldierly and coarse, mostly drunken inhabitants so disgusted him that after only a week and a half he boarded a mail steamer to return to New Pomerania.
    The humiliating ends that befell his brochures remained concealed from Engelhardt. Had he found out, he would scarcely have