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Authors: Christian Kracht
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swollen shut).
The editor and his bride left for Munich by daybreak, the incident nearly forgotten already; they are sitting across from one another in the dining car of the adjoining wagon-lit; railroad-induced stains from a bottle of Trollinger, ordered in a moment of airy mischief, have splotched the tablecloth with purple hue. The conversation isn’t quite flowing, be it from fatigue or perhaps from an already anticipated sense of the boredom that will set in after years of marriage. With a mild lack of enthusiasm, the editor’s gaze tracks left, out through the darkening pane of train glass, which grows more and more mirrorlike by the minute, onto the fading East Prussian plain, and he suddenly becomes aware of the almost boyishly slender shoulders of the naked young man lying on the beach yesterday, and he recognizes at this moment the actual reason he lodged a complaint, and that his whole future life will be, must be, covered over in painful self-deception, the immensity of which will discolor everything until his dying day—the still-unborn children, the work (for several novels are ripening within him), the still-amused relationship to the ideal of his own bourgeois sensibility, and the now-nascent revulsion at those hands there, folded in elegant calm on the dining car table, of his patiently smiling fianc é e, who in turn will persist in decades of ignorance, though her propensity to behave and dress with a certain unwomanliness might have given the young girl, perhaps even now at the outset of their relationship, an indication vis- à -vis the actual proclivities of her betrothed.
On the afternoon of the following day, August Engelhardt is released. A delegation of activists did not balk at the long journey from Danzig, among them a solicitor licensed by the Imperial Court of Justice, who, obtaining entry to the detention cell, casts but one glance at Engelhardt and his wounds and immediately roars into the ears of the Memel constables a philippic recited in a furious stentorian voice: they should count themselves fortunate if they still hold a job this evening and are not in fetters, dishonored, and forever stripped of their uniforms, on their way to the dungeons of a special police purgatory (wherever this might be).
The completely overwhelmed gendarmes flit nervously through the office, variously colored papers and carbon copies waft about, the constable who first tripped Engelhardt on the beach even salutes the solicitor most humbly as if he were His Majesty the Kaiser himself. They hurry to release Engelhardt immediately, and the activists almost carry him on their hands out of the Memel police station, shouting, Vivat! , Freedom! , and Down with violence!
A crowd of townsfolk gathers in the market square—there are perhaps fifty or sixty of them, though their number seems somewhat higher than it is in reality—while the report of the hermit’s abuse is passed from ear to ear, altered slightly with each further telling, so that ultimately the news goes around that a Catholic priest passing through from Avignon was tortured at the mercy of the local police and that the mayor, who has since come running, was in fact already in Tilsit requesting relief and replacement for the now-intolerable Memel constabulary.
Engelhardt is maneuvered into a first-class compartment of the Prussian State Railways. There they bed him on cooling sheets, two down pillows are thrust under his head, and after he refuses with a gesture of mild revulsion the fresh cow’s milk that the doctor on board considerately hands him, he is given a half pint of unfiltered apple juice to drink, while a likable and, in her own way, even quite charming Frisian female activist (in a starched gown bulging over her tremendous bosom) pats the back of his slackened hand. She smells, it seems to Engelhardt, of mild cheese rind, but perhaps it’s just the spurned, jittery glass of milk over in the corner of the compartment, in the convex
The editor and his bride left for Munich by daybreak, the incident nearly forgotten already; they are sitting across from one another in the dining car of the adjoining wagon-lit; railroad-induced stains from a bottle of Trollinger, ordered in a moment of airy mischief, have splotched the tablecloth with purple hue. The conversation isn’t quite flowing, be it from fatigue or perhaps from an already anticipated sense of the boredom that will set in after years of marriage. With a mild lack of enthusiasm, the editor’s gaze tracks left, out through the darkening pane of train glass, which grows more and more mirrorlike by the minute, onto the fading East Prussian plain, and he suddenly becomes aware of the almost boyishly slender shoulders of the naked young man lying on the beach yesterday, and he recognizes at this moment the actual reason he lodged a complaint, and that his whole future life will be, must be, covered over in painful self-deception, the immensity of which will discolor everything until his dying day—the still-unborn children, the work (for several novels are ripening within him), the still-amused relationship to the ideal of his own bourgeois sensibility, and the now-nascent revulsion at those hands there, folded in elegant calm on the dining car table, of his patiently smiling fianc é e, who in turn will persist in decades of ignorance, though her propensity to behave and dress with a certain unwomanliness might have given the young girl, perhaps even now at the outset of their relationship, an indication vis- à -vis the actual proclivities of her betrothed.
On the afternoon of the following day, August Engelhardt is released. A delegation of activists did not balk at the long journey from Danzig, among them a solicitor licensed by the Imperial Court of Justice, who, obtaining entry to the detention cell, casts but one glance at Engelhardt and his wounds and immediately roars into the ears of the Memel constables a philippic recited in a furious stentorian voice: they should count themselves fortunate if they still hold a job this evening and are not in fetters, dishonored, and forever stripped of their uniforms, on their way to the dungeons of a special police purgatory (wherever this might be).
The completely overwhelmed gendarmes flit nervously through the office, variously colored papers and carbon copies waft about, the constable who first tripped Engelhardt on the beach even salutes the solicitor most humbly as if he were His Majesty the Kaiser himself. They hurry to release Engelhardt immediately, and the activists almost carry him on their hands out of the Memel police station, shouting, Vivat! , Freedom! , and Down with violence!
A crowd of townsfolk gathers in the market square—there are perhaps fifty or sixty of them, though their number seems somewhat higher than it is in reality—while the report of the hermit’s abuse is passed from ear to ear, altered slightly with each further telling, so that ultimately the news goes around that a Catholic priest passing through from Avignon was tortured at the mercy of the local police and that the mayor, who has since come running, was in fact already in Tilsit requesting relief and replacement for the now-intolerable Memel constabulary.
Engelhardt is maneuvered into a first-class compartment of the Prussian State Railways. There they bed him on cooling sheets, two down pillows are thrust under his head, and after he refuses with a gesture of mild revulsion the fresh cow’s milk that the doctor on board considerately hands him, he is given a half pint of unfiltered apple juice to drink, while a likable and, in her own way, even quite charming Frisian female activist (in a starched gown bulging over her tremendous bosom) pats the back of his slackened hand. She smells, it seems to Engelhardt, of mild cheese rind, but perhaps it’s just the spurned, jittery glass of milk over in the corner of the compartment, in the convex
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