First, the student Gavrilo Princip, after hastily gobbling down a ham sandwich in Moritz Schiller’s café, runs out into the street of that small, tranquil city in the Balkans and at point-blank range, pieces of sandwich still in his mouth, bread crumbs still on his sparse, downy mustache, fires right in the thick of things at the invidious despot and his wife Sophie with a gleaming revolver. Then, to put it mildly, one thing leads to another. The sea of flames that follows the murder sweeps across Europe with universal mercilessness; rickety planes buzz like paper dragonflies over Flemish trenches; anyone who’s a soldier and possesses a mask scrambles, hands atremble, to yank it over his face as soon as the cry Chlorine gas! rings out; one of the millions of pieces of glowing shrapnel exploding on the Western Front bores like a white worm into the calf of the young private from the Sixth Royal Bavarian Reserve Division. Just a few inches higher, closer to the main artery, and it might never have come to pass that but a few decades later my grandparents would be walking apace in Hamburg’s Moorweide, just as if they hadn’t noticed those men, women, and children laden with suitcases loaded onto trains at Dammtor Station across the way and sent eastward, out to the edge of the imperium, as if they were already shadows now, already cindery smoke.
Patience, though. It is not like a distant thunderstorm whose fronts approach inexorably and menacingly—such that one can still get to safety—but rapidly and relentlessly and not without a certain drollery that the First World War comes to the Bismarck Archipelago, too. The Rabaul radio station that maintains contact with the German Reich via the Nauen Transmitter Station is shot up by an advance unit of Australian commandos and blown apart by several hand grenades thrown inside. The postmaster, who in former times had designed the labels for Engelhardt’s coconut oil bottles, is wearing a uniform in the wrong place at the wrong time; an iron mail cabinet crashes down on top of him, and while falling, he is struck in the forehead by a soldier’s bullet.
A few days later, an Australian battleship starts cruising around Blanche Bay, and a submarine surfaces. There’s general confusion and great disorder; people flee to the governor’s residence and barricade the windows by stacking chintz sofas and mattresses against them from the inside. Blond women who were just leafing through magazines and complaining about the putative recalcitrance of Malaysian employees sink to the floor in a swoon and must be tended to. The electricity goes out, the humming fans go silent. A lone shell fired off toward Rabaul by the battleship lands in front of one of the hotels with a buzzing wail, tearing a palm tree to tatters.
There ensues a kind of invasion, the course of which might be deemed quite anarchic. Chickens and pigs are rounded up; artworks of infinitesimally small value are requisitioned and carried aboard ships to exhibit in Australian museums (even Hahl’s reproduction of the Isle of the Dead); they arrest a soldier from Wagga Wagga who has raped a native woman and send him home in shackles as well; Hotel Director Hellwig wrings his hands at the great number of rude officers who drink his bar dry while boisterously singing “Waltzing Matilda”; driven from the jungle by the noise, a bird of paradise that strays into Rabaul is robbed, alive, of its feathers; soldiers stick the plume, the quill-end still bleeding, into their southwesters; after being dubbed Kaiser Wilhelm, the naked bird, screeching with pain, is kicked back and forth like a rugby ball amid snorting laughter; the crates of long-rancid coconut oil stored in the Forsayth trading post are opened with a crowbar; suspecting a cache of weapons, the soldiers merely find old-maidish bottles nestled in wood shavings; they cannot read the German labeling, uncork them in the hopes of booze, sniff them, and then, with theatrical expressions of disgust and noses pinched shut with thumb and forefinger, pour the contents out onto the sandy ground.
A detachment of Australian soldiers ultimately ends up on Kabakon, too. Engelhardt, who steps toward them on the beach, naked, amid the laughter of the uniformed men, is dispossessed forthwith. He is handed the sum of six pounds sterling for the run-down plantation, and it’s left up to him whether to return to Germany. Six pounds for this life. He casts the puny sum of money at the Australian officer’s feet, does an about-face, and vanishes into the shady jungle. He is not followed.
Captain Slütter, cruising with the Jeddah off Samoa in these confusing, peculiar times, reports to the commander of the SMS Cormoran, which is also lingering in the warm waters of the South Pacific; coal is in short supply, it is no longer safe to put to harbor anywhere, but they can’t remain at sea, either, they are sitting ducks, as the British say. The crew of the Cormoran hopes for the expeditious arrival of the large German battleship Scharnhorst; in the meantime, Slütter, who has placed himself and his ship at the disposal of the Cormoran, is ordered to capture an unarmed French collier, recover the cargo, and torpedo the bugger.
And thus the aged Jeddah becomes a warship. She isn’t allowed to hoist the colors of the German Imperial Navy, but Apirana, Slütter, and November do in fact manage to capsize the collier by affixing an explosive device to the prow of the Jeddah, setting a collision course, and escaping to safety with the tiny lifeboat just in time. The black plume of smoke can be seen for miles around. And so they bob, rowing off to the arranged meeting point with the Cormoran, which of course never appears. In its stead—it is nearly unbearable—two Australian warships show up; they take Slütter captive and land on a nameless island to collect water. Slütter is accused of piracy, stood against a palm tree, and executed. He acquiesces calmly, unshaven, refusing the blindfold. Another captive German sailor loans him his uniform coat so that Slütter doesn’t have to die in civvies. When the bullets pierce him, he sees neither Pandora in his mind nor the soldiers aiming at him, just the solemn and distressingly unforgiving deep blue ocean. Cigarettes are distributed among the firing squad. The sailor’s coat is returned after the sentence is carried out, and he wears it with head held high and a straight back; he will never sew up those four punctures at the height of his heart.
Escaping the soldiers by some ruse, Apirana, after long odysseys that send him sailing over the inexhaustibly vast quilt of the Pacific, that star field of his ancestors, and that blow the fancies of white men out of his soul good and proper, joins the New Zealand Navy on a whim. November, who had accompanied him, is swept overboard in a typhoon. He sinks with open eyes miles down into the calm, night-blue cosmos of the sea. Many decades later, Apirana will be the first Maori in the New Zealand Parliament. He dies somewhere in midcentury, ubiquitously honored, bearing a rank beyond reproach, as Sir Apirana Turupa Ngata.
After having cheated their way around the Pacific for a long while with extremely profitable cardsharping, the two crooks Govindarajan and Mittenzwey are arrested on Samoa and deported in chains to Australia on a prisoner convoy; the latter is torpedoed en route by a German cruiser and sinks with all hands into the surges of the Pacific Ocean.
Albert Hahl returns to a wintry, silent Berlin that is no longer quite so euphoric about the war, and there, over ten years—using as a reference his card index filled with aperçus, diverse discoveries, philosophical observations, and inventions—works on his memoirs, which for want of an interested press remain sadly unpublished. The helicopter Hahl envisioned, finally, that he once dreamt up in a bright, flower-strewn kingdom by the sea while observing the hovering flight of the hummingbird, will be developed much later, in the next war, as most splendid inventions of humanity are products of its feuds. Granted a halfhearted appanage by the Imperial Colonial Office, he devotes himself increasingly to private scholarship. As politics irritate him, he writes the long letters of an aging man who no longer occupies center stage. Even the philosopher Edmund Husserl receives mail from Albert Hahl, a densely inked, eighty-page epistle in which it is set forth that we men are living in a kind of highly complex motion picture or theatrical work, but suspect nothing because the illusion is so perfectly staged by the director. The letter is half skimmed by Husserl, dismissed as childish, and not dignified with a reply. Hahl—his hair has long since turned gray when the sun-crossed Führer of the Germans becomes swinishly insufferable—then conspires with the wife of Wilhelm Solf (erstwhile governor of German Samoa) by joining a resistance group whose brutish end on the piano-wire gallows of the imperium Hahl will not live to see.
Emma Forsayth-Lützow dies in Monte Carlo at the gambling table of the longed-for casino after placing her last ten-thousand-franc chip on the color red. Black 35 wins. She slumps down in her chair without a word, two gloved casino employees rush to fan air at her, a third brings her a glass of cognac that is spilled amid the commotion, leaving a dark stain on the bottle-green frieze of the gaming table, which will have vanished the next day. The Société des bains de mer de Monaco erects a headstone for her that reads Emma, Reine des Mers du Sud. Today the inscription is weathered but still quite decipherable.