While Captain Christian Slütter is slogging through the last, still furiously seething tails of a July storm that incessantly sends breakers from the Solomon Sea crashing over the deck of his rusty boil–covered freighter, the SS Jeddah, Max Lützow is boarding, bright and early, the same little launch on which he arrived in Kabakon almost a year ago. Both vessels are steaming inevitably toward each other. The center of the cyclone, meanwhile, has rolled by two hundred nautical miles north. Over in Apia, Slütter has dropped two hundred crates of French brandy that he had taken aboard in Sydney in adverse circumstances, and he is now ferrying kitchen appliances, knives, axes, pans, and such up to New Pomerania.
Lützow, by contrast, had packed his bag one morning before sunrise, gently touched the piano in passing with the tips of his fingers, and before Engelhardt awoke, walked down to the beach to be rowed out to the launch awaiting him beyond the lagoon by Makeli, who was smiling inscrutably to himself.
The secret departure was preceded by a terrible argument the prior evening. Engelhardt had been convinced his comrade had stolen the scissors he himself had in fact inadvertently misplaced. During a downpour that drummed on the roof, as the mosquitoes became such a nuisance that both had coated themselves in a thick layer of coconut oil and lit several coir fires, and when a certain hopelessness in the situation became apparent, Engelhardt had swept the white chess figures off the board with a surly wipe of the hand. Knight and rook had landed, like wooden grenades, in the sand beside a millipede, which, sorely disturbed in its consumption of the leaf that was its supper, crept off sullenly in the rain. Engelhardt had brought up the missing scissors again, and Lützow, who despite all his shortcomings had no intention of arguing purely for the sake of argument, replied that he had no knowledge of any scissors, and the matter didn’t interest him anyway—weren’t all items communal property, including the scissors in question? He was quite prepared, Lützow said, to overlook this little tropical hysteria, but he was not about to take farfetched, unjustified accusations sitting down. Unjustified accusations, Engelhardt blurted out—leaping to his feet, running back into the house, and beginning, in a kind of frenzy, to pull individual volumes from the bookshelves and throw them out the open window into the rain—they most certainly were not, no, several times now Lützow had fancied himself a secret theoretician of his order, though in truth he, Engelhardt, had invented and planned everything, such that he now had to ask himself when the musician would finally take over control of Kabakon, it was only a question of time, after all, but he intended to put a stop to this as quickly as possible because this island, contrary to the remarks Lützow had made to Hahl, was in no way a democracy, and least of all some infantile Communist collective, nor would it ever be. Engelhardt alone determined where it was going, and Lützow’s advice to settle that horde of nutcases from Rabaul on Kabakon had essentially been a malicious attempt at a coup, which had only served to deprive him of power in the long run.
Fine, Lützow replied, then he would just leave if so little value was placed on his presence; he had thought, perhaps in error, that they were together on Kabakon to establish a new Eden. And he, who was by nature an altogether affable fellow, was in no way scheming to take anything away from Engelhardt, and least of all was he thinking of making demands for power, which would get him absolutely nothing on a coconut plantation, because he was an artist and not an accountant—in short, he was really very sorry if he had given some other impression, but now he needed to—he wanted to—go, and he wished his friend good luck. He was truly sad; after all, he had felt an intimacy between them, for the disintegration of which he probably had himself partly to blame (That’s right, that’s right, Engelhardt said, nodding grimly), but regardless of how it was about to end, his friend had taught and shown him a lot, that there was a way to escape the stupefying plight of modern existence, and for that he would always be thankful. The scissors, incidentally, would reappear a few days later as if they had never been missing.
One faded photograph of the two still exists showing them with full beards in front of a palm tree; Lützow, half supine, bemused, his left arm braced against the sand, is looking straight at the camera; Engelhardt, startlingly scrawny, shows his crow-like profile. It’s an oddly strained, haughty way to hold one’s head, which could perhaps be confused with pretension; but it also expresses self-confidence, even a hint of smugness. By now his belly stretches over the checkered waistcloth, distended, globular, undernourished; he is far beyond sucking it in out of vanity before the shutter mechanism of the camera is depressed with a click.
Alas, so Lützow turned out to be a decent enough person—he had doubtless always been one, a little vain perhaps, but certainly had not allowed the touches of twisted, malevolent misanthropy that Engelhardt had been displaying for some time (the ghoulish intentions he harbors regarding Lützow and others shall remain hidden in a shadowy side corridor of his psyche for a while yet) to provoke him. Lützow acted most fairly toward his friend, and so his morning exodus from Kabakon, though it doesn’t quite seem like it to him, is in fact a respectable course of action and not some slithering away.
The natives already working in the plantation this early morning observe him sailing away and view his departure, whispering with one another, as a bad omen on which even worse will follow. Indeed, yesterday they had seen a peculiar, unknown bird pitifully wallowing in the sand as if it wanted to get rid of something gumming up its plumage. A collective decision is made to lay down their work and do nothing but wait for more signs to manifest themselves. That Engelhardt hasn’t been paying his employees for almost two years now isn’t seen as particularly grave, since they assume their employer simply has no money at his disposal right now. The Tolai chief, who so enthusiastically played on the rattan piano by night, having now thoroughly outgrown what seem to him as the primitive drums and whistles of his race, is sitting somewhat off to the side under a palm tree and rubbing his numb hands, feeling a deep sadness at the departure of the white music conjurer that is infinitely increased by the fact, conscientiously concealed from his tribe, that he has contracted leprosy.
Engelhardt—and neither he nor Max Lützow knows this—has likewise caught leprosy, and this disease, whose Old Testament nimbus obscures the simple reality that it is primarily a nervous disorder, causes certain addled reactions within Engelhardt’s person, which is already deranged from several years of his unhealthy diet. Dr. Wind, over in the Rabaul area, was of course quite right in his own way.
Now, it would probably be overstating things to say that Engelhardt’s psyche had drunk from the river Lethe, on whose shores it had long been resting, gazing at its own reflection, sinking into the most profound cosmic forgetfulness about why he had ever come here in the first place. The truth looks much more mundane; the farther he removes himself from the community of man, the more outlandish his behavior and relationship to it grows. He is thrown back into an atavistic mental state that expresses itself in a premonition of total loss of control: the bottles with Kabakon Oil piling up in Rabaul are consigned to oblivion, copra production has halted, the pages of his beloved books curl in the tropical humidity because they are no longer regularly set out to air in the sunshine, yes, even the flowers around his house, which he had tended before with nurturing love, have become overgrown and are in danger of being strangled by creepers. Yes, it is as if he has become the old spinster Miss Havisham, who stolidly awaits that great, all-consuming conflagration that might finally deliver her.
And what of the leprosy? The ostensible epicenter of infection lay somewhere within the perfect fifth formed by the C and G keys on Lützow’s piano, where a scab loosened from the Tolai chief’s leprous finger remained, which Engelhardt a short time later took for his own and, as a matter of routine and reflex, stuck in his mouth without bearing in mind or imagining that there were several bleeding spots in his oral cavity and on the gums, so-called canker sores. In truth, our friend had been infected years before, of course.