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 Herbertshöhe 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 decamped for Cairns; nor was he able to anticipate anything of the great calamity later to be dubbed the First World War. So it was only a premonition that afflicted him as he sauntered through the alleys of that Queensland gold mining town.
The following had happened to him: the wooden door of a public house had been pushed open, and a bearded colored man, a Pacific islander obviously, had fallen backward onto the dirt road, uttering a dull, grunting cry. The black man rolled over on his stomach in anguish and crawled toward Engelhardt; a throng of white Australians followed him out of the pub, whereupon he was cruelly beset with kicks until he could hardly ward off their brutal blows any further. He came to rest before Engelhardt with arm outstretched, bleeding and coughing and motionless. Recalling that he himself had once been so beaten, on that beach in East Prussia, Engelhardt knelt down and tried to lift the victim by the shoulders, but the white men, intoxicated nearly to the point of dehumanization, shoved him back brusquely, screaming, Nigger lover! and other despicable words.
One ought not treat a human being like that, Engelhardt said, growing furious, and all at once he sprouted wings of courage, and he stood up straight, a slight, rickety figure against six or seven rough gold panners. One now noticed his German accent, called him dirty Hun, and raised his fists to pummel him as well. Another held him back, saying that there would be war between Edward and the Kaiser soon enough anyway, and we’ll teach ’em manners then, those bastard Germans. Finally, bawling out patriotic songs, they withdrew to the counter of the canteen bar whose publican, as was customary in those days in Australia, had diluted the brandy with gunpowder and cayenne pepper, to enhance the effect of the alcohol on the one hand and, on the other, to mask the repulsive taste of his hooch with a false, fiery note.
Aha, Engelhardt thought to himself. And, after putting a few shillings into the wounded colored man’s still-outstretched hand, he made his way back to the boardinghouse room on the second floor of a clothier’s, lay down on his bed with a sigh, and ruminated on the encounter. Could it not be that the subjects of His Britannic Majesty would one day annex the German protectorate just like that, were the war they had just prophesied to him, Engelhardt, actually to occur? Kaiser-Wilhelmsland, New Pomerania, and the smaller islands were defended by a mere handful of German soldiers, and it was precisely the extraordinary remoteness and irrelevance of the colony that had to seem tempting to a bellicose people, as the British doubtless were—much like raspberry cake would be to a hungry child. Engelhardt was, please note, unable to sense anything of the gigantic conflagration that would cover the globe a few years later, but from then on his senses were sharpened, his image of the British and young Australia altered forever by the encounter in Cairns: Would the sea become an Anglo-Saxon Pacific, would he be left to do as he pleased, on his Kabakon? Hardly. Wouldn’t the little isle instead be annexed as well and his workers henceforth required to slave at his coconut palms for the English king? Then that free, that German, paradise would be finished.
While he was thinking this, next door, virtually tête-à-tête with him and separated only by a thin sheet of plywood that served as a divider for the boardinghouse rooms, lay a young man who was not dissimilar to Engelhardt in habitus and countenance, likewise keenly contemplating, though his thoughts at the moment did not revolve around a potential war between the German Reich and Great Britain, but around yeast paste. Halsey was a Seventh-day Adventist and baker, hailed from the United States, also had a rather slight build, and was developing ways to popularize natural foods. He had ended up in Australia because the Christian-Adventist company for which he worked had dispatched him there to sideline him, on the one hand (for he was somewhat of an oddball), and, on the other, to give him the opportunity to prove himself by running riot, so to speak, over the sixth continent. Could be, his masters in the far-off state of Michigan thought, could be that young Halsey will make something of himself down there among the kangaroos.
The Kellogg brothers had recently founded the Sanitas Food Company in the United States, you see, and, with their idea for producing so-called breakfast cereals palatable to people, they were well on their way not only toward triggering a small revolution in the eating habits of their countrymen, but also toward becoming dizzyingly rich.
Young Halsey had asked the two brothers for an appointment, had appeared in their sparse, orderly office, and had then thoroughly impressed upon them with the conviction of an incensed fanatic that cereals were by no means the right path to pure Adventist doctrine because ingesting them into the body necessitated the addition of cow’s milk—no one wanted to eat dry cereal alone. But the milk that provided the lubricant, as it were, was obviously an animal product; thus, they must cease cereal production immediately and come up with something new that could teach the American consumer to be a vegetarian. Good Lord, off to Australia with him, the brothers thought, for they may have been pious adherents of their Adventist faith, but were simultaneously incorrigible, unalloyed Yankees, confident of business as a raison d’être. And so Halsey traveled by steamer from San Francisco (which would be almost completely destroyed by an earthquake a very short time after his embarkation) across to Sydney and then to Cairns, and there he now lay, head to head with Engelhardt.
It is possible that both vegetarians felt each other’s presence without being aware of it, as if the thin plywood panel between their heads were a kind of electrical conductor. Halsey was of course a genius, as was Engelhardt. It’s just often the case that one person’s genius is acknowledged in the world—his idea spreads and evolves like a well-told joke that isn’t forgotten, like the virus of some disease—while the other’s withers away under the saddest of circumstances. The Kellogg brothers, who had sent Halsey to the other end of the world, were convinced that their pupil’s lines of thought to a certain degree must seem too radical for their time, but they were also undoubtedly in love with him, in an avuncular sense. Still, they didn’t want him on the same continent because he had criticized their foundations, had nibbled away at their morals, so to speak.
At any rate, on the following day the two sat at the same table in the breakfast room of the little boardinghouse, the windows of which looked out on a slightly sloping dusty street so that the sporadically recurring rain showers transformed it mostly into a muddy torrent. Frangipani blossoms would then come floating down the street, coming to rest before the boardinghouse, as they did today, for it was raining fiercely, and Engelhardt was brewing for himself with some care a cup of brown loam so as to spend the day reading in the boardinghouse and then to prepare for his well-earned departure from Australia.
Halsey addressed him with interest, asking what sort of extract Engelhardt was mixing, and was informed that it was medicinal clay; if one couldn’t get hold of the original product from Germany, one could use any soil, it contained all the minerals the body needed, for his visits to so-called civilization would suck those substances out of Engelhardt, and this was the only way he could stay healthy. But didn’t Engelhardt live in civilization? Halsey wanted to know, whereupon the former replied with a dose of nonchalant pride that he was the leader and creator of the Order of the Sun and ran a coconut plantation in the German colonies north of Australia, so it depended on the definition of the word civilization. A truer word was never spoken, Halsey said, and requested permission to taste the medicinal clay. He was a strict vegetarian, he explained, and was always happy to try something new that didn’t harm an animal in its production.
Halsey’s idea, which he was now explaining to Engelhardt over a cup of the brown dust, was to develop a food paste that one could use as a healthy spread for bread—with a purely vegetable base, naturally—so as to cure young and old of the desire for meat through the flavor of the paste. The trick would be to blend this spread in such a way that the flavor would actually make one think one was in fact enjoying Liebig’s popular Extract of Meat smeared on one’s breakfast toast.
Cooked, preserved in a jar, and consisting of malt and yeast, the new foodstuff would be delectable and full of vitamins and create—and this was the actual idea (since, according to Halsey, behind every good world-altering thought there must be another, hidden thought)—a new type of person: a healthy, powerful vegetarian who did not have to answer for the blatant injustice of suffering animals. In short, Halsey wanted to reform his fellow man by outfoxing his palate. The dark brown yeast substance was to simmer in large vats in specially built factories the world over (for one would have to produce the paste in huge quantities), so he saw it in his mind’s eye. On the one hand, Engelhardt was touched by Halsey’s generous trust, though they had known each other for only about ten minutes (let’s not count the night in which both, without knowing of each other, slept head to head and, so to speak, emanated into each other in their dreams). It was a proselytizing, vegetarian idea that this young Adventist was voicing, not dissimilar from Engelhardt’s own conceptions.
But now he had been brooding for weeks about a suitable name and could not settle on one. He had here, if you please, a piece of paper with several options, most of them crossed out. Did Engelhardt perhaps have a revelatory idea? It should sound as healthful as possible, and with a harmonious succession of consonants and vowels. Please, Halsey said, could he not donate a name to his cause? Engelhardt urged the young American, quid pro quo, to travel with him to New Pomerania and try subsisting exclusively on coconuts for three months. During this time, he would then have the opportunity to give further thought to this spreadable condiment, its production (couldn’t one perhaps also cook it from a copra paste?), as well as its marketing. On Kabakon they would arrive at a fitting name for this new product. Oh, yes, indeed, they would be naked together the whole time.
Halsey, to cut a long story short, refused everything, disconcerted and rather perturbed. He was sorry, but his vegetarianism had grown out of a quite puritanical tradition and would result in a pragmatic realism oriented, above all, toward capitalism. One’s own body was not essential to his philosophy. Sure, it existed, but that was no reason to lie naked on a beach; surely no one could be persuaded by that. His counterpart seemed to him to be, if he might be permitted to say so, like all romantics, merely an egoist of a Schopenhauerian persuasion.
Engelhardt sat facing him very quietly for a spell while shredding up into tinier and tinier shreds Halsey’s piece of paper with possible names on it and then in turn (for it is common knowledge that no people tear each other apart as exhaustively as those whose ideas are identical) began to reproach the poor Yankee. He was a Calvinist bore, and really, who was supposed to spread spiced paste on bread? He, Halsey, would see where he ended up—in the poorhouse; he’d fail with his phantasmagoria, which was basically premised only on exploitation, because he wanted to manufacture industrially and not discover what nature harmoniously offered him.
I see, I see, aha, Communist, idiot, Halsey blurted out, rising angrily, taking his hat from the table, and hurrying to the door. Traitor to our sacred vegetarian cause, Engelhardt called after him, and: Prudish, prematurely senile Philistine! This last, however, Halsey did not hear as he had long since disappeared into the crowd on the main road of Cairns, which was colored slate-gray by the rain, surfacing once or twice on one street corner or another until nothing more was left of him but the shredded paper with the ten or twelve potential names for the spread, which Engelhardt had tossed under the table, and which that evening—our hero having already departed—was swept up by the boardinghouse proprietor and tossed into the kitchen oven together with the package of medicinal clay Engelhardt had intentionally forgotten in his room. From now on, our friend swore to himself, he would live off coconuts exclusively. And those slips of paper that resembled black roses at the moment they went up in flames, their fluorescent edges gleaming whitish yellow? Vegetarians Delite could be read on those snippets, then a few names crossed out, among them Veggie’s Might, Yeastie, and Beast-Free, and then, clear and distinct, underlined twice and marked with angular exclamation points, the word Vegemite.