The Alphabet of Birds

by SJ Naudé

  A call for him late afternoon on his cellphone. It is his own mother, from South Africa. He shifts from one corner of his mind to another, through all the rooms in between. His parents still live in South Africa, even though all their children have left the country. They own a farm there. An old family farm, inherited. They rarely go to the place nowadays; it is no longer safe. His mother harbours a deep nostalgia that nevertheless draws her back there. On the farm is a newer house, as well as a crumbling hundred-year-old farmhouse.

  In front of the old farmhouse, next to the half-collapsed sandstone pergola, there grows an old crabapple tree that she remembers as a young tree, before the new house was built. She remembers the shade, has often told him how she played underneath it as a child. Now it is old, knotty. In summertime, when the fruit becomes too heavy to carry, branches tear and collapse in the dust, apple clusters and all. When he was young, apples were steamed and stewed for lunches in the new house. Sugar was added to counter the sourness. When served as part of a plate of food, it was brown, half-caramelised. Sweetly sour. Nowhere else has he ever encountered exactly such apples. When raw, they were inconceivably sour. One’s face involuntarily screwed up when you bit into it.

  ‘The tree is dying,’ she now says over the phone, ‘branch by branch.’

  They took a cutting to a botanist, she explains, and he had never encountered the species. She is having it grafted. They are using the trunk of a hardened European apple tree. Notches will be cut into it and buds carved from the crabapple tree will be inserted. Then it will be wrapped in cloth, like dressing a wound with bandage. They will replant the new tree at the new house when the grafts have taken, when it starts budding with the new season’s blossoms.

  ‘Is that all you called to say?’

  Usually she only calls when there is important news, whether good or bad. His parents are not of the Skype generation. Long-distance calls are not for conversation, but for conveying information. Sometimes more than one call is required, sometimes the ground has to be prepared first.

  ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘that is all.’ (He doubts it.)

  The jump in his mind to South Africa is too great, too fast. He returns to Bavaria, to the Oberpfalz. To Joschka, of whom his mother has never heard and never will.

  Joschka wants to cook a large dinner for them all. They are standing in Kaufland, a supermarket on the fringes of Nuremberg. It is the largest supermarket he has ever been in. The dairy products disappear into infinity. It is fresh and bright in here, like spring. Joschka looks intently at the refrigerated shelf, as if searching for an ingredient.

  ‘There is something,’ says Joschka, ‘I have to tell you. About the blood, the other night.’

  He can feel the cool air against his temple. He waits for the rest.

  ‘You should get tested.’

  For a few moments he is silent.

  ‘Are you saying what I think you’re saying?’

  Joschka turns away, starts packing things into his basket, things they do not need. He looks at Joschka as he is walking away, through the fog that is rolling from the fridges. There is a tingling feeling in his upper back.

  Back at home, Joschka takes the key and they ascend the stairs in die Ruine.

  ‘Where can I have myself tested?’ His voice is pinched.

  He does not ask Joschka other questions, about his history, whether he is on medication. He is considering his own options. Too late now, anyhow, for post-exposure prophylaxis.

  ‘There’s a clinic in Nuremberg. It’ll be open on Monday. We’ll have to wait.’

  ‘Wait? Wait!’

  His voice penetrates the walls. Somewhere higher up, pigeons flutter between oak beams.

  Joschka looks down at the floor, speaking slowly. ‘It wasn’t easy, you know, having to tell you …’

  ‘Enough, please.’

  Until now it has always been possible to declare any seed of doubt, any sign of indifference towards him from Joschka, void. The slightest touch between them would exorcise any uncertainty regarding their connection. The touch would make him understand Joschka’s quirks, made him endlessly patient with him: his bravado, his instinct to pull away feverishly and be deeply needy at the same time. Perhaps that is what Joschka found in him. And a hesitant promise of safekeeping. And what did he find in Joschka? Apart from the fact that Joschka came to redeem him from his worn world, there is a lot which he draws from Joschka, but he understands little of the mechanisms as yet; he will still have to work it out for himself. For the time being, he can only understand Joschka in strings of images. Joschka ignites a blowtorch in his chest, that he knows. Joschka lifts his heart, lends him a comet’s speed and brightness, makes him as weightless as a bat. With Joschka he has been simultaneously untouchable – immortal – and a target for danger. Simultaneously armour-plated and flayed.

  Now he sees Joschka stripped of imagery. He avoids the smoothness of Joschka’s skin. He is filled with urgency and disquiet, worry about himself mingled with concern for Joschka and the implications of his disclosure.

  He is playing with Maximilian in the courtyard garden. They are kicking a ball back and forth, sometimes too far, so that it bounces off thick walls. Joschka is sitting in a rusty garden chair, watching. Back and forth the ball goes. The child cannot get enough of the game. They do not utter a word. They throw, then they kick. An hour passes. The sun is baking down. The child does not smile, does not say a thing. The game is all seriousness. He kicks the ball too hard; it ends up in the well. They both look over the edge; it is lying at the bottom, a red dot on a heap of rubbish.

  ‘Warte hier,’ says Maximilian, asking him not to go. Running into the house, the boy looks over his shoulder to make sure he stays.

  He brings two plastic swords and shields from his room. They cross swords, again and again. Stand back, charge. Joschka is sitting in the sun. Blades are clashing with a clacking noise. On the other side of the house the Doberman is barking. Incessantly, hoarsely. He looks at Joschka from the corner of his eye, mouth tense, muscles increasingly tightened. The blunt swords keep on smacking, against the shields, against each other. Joschka jumps like a wound coil from his chair.

  ‘I’m going for a walk,’ he says. ‘Come with me.’

  ‘I’m playing.’

  Maximilian looks, sword by his side. Joschka exits the gate, the heavy door swings open, he disappears alone over the moat bridge.

  He holds his sword aloft. Maximilian too. They start again.

  Half an hour later, Joschka is back. He and the child are sweating, but they do not stop. The swords hit each other with a rhythm distinct from that of the dog’s thirsty bark. He gains ground, retreats, lets Maximilian move forward. They stop, hold the swords in the air, start again, take turns driving each other back.

  Joschka has a sheaf of yellow wild flowers in his arms, carrying it like a child against his tattoos. When Joschka passes behind him, he can smell the forest outside the thick walls. The instant consolation offered by the shadow falling over him, as soothing and intimate as moss, makes him want to sob. Their shadows slip through each other and then Joschka is gone, inside the house.

  ‘Let’s put away the swords, Maxi.’

  Joschka puts the flowers in an earthenware ewer in their room. He does not remark on it. Joschka avoids looking at him. Within a day he will have forgotten Joschka’s eyes. Already he has trouble picturing them – sometimes so black, at other times so transparent.

  Maximilian had to vacate his room for him and Joschka; the boy is sleeping with his parents in the only other bedroom. The room is filled with children’s things. Books with stories about knights, an encyclopedia showing different types of knight’s armour, swords and shields. A book about the forging of blades in previous times, about castles and city states of the Middle Ages. One containing children’s versions of Germanic and Nordic myths. There is a Lego set with plastic panels for building castle walls, little pointed flags for clicking onto the crenellations. A miniature trap do
or, operated with a crank between the index finger and thumb. A garrison of knights on horseback, arrangeable in battle formations. In a corner there is a box with lances and plastic swords in sheaths.

  They sleep on bunk beds with children’s bedding. The duvets are virtually the only items in the room without a medieval theme. His has a pattern of aeroplanes on it, Joschka’s has red racing cars. He gets the top bunk, Joschka the bottom one. Before switching off the light, they lie in silence for a long time. They cannot see each other. His feet are sticking out from under the duvet, over the end of the bed. Joschka’s are probably hanging out even further.

  They sleep restlessly amongst the toys, with cars and planes beneath their chins. When he gets up to go to the bathroom, he bends over to look out the small window. The dog is still barking ceaselessly. Above the back door there is an outdoor light. On the bright cement, the animal is contracting into spasms when the noise tears from him, as if he is vomiting. Is it not bothering anyone else? He looks in Joschka’s direction, but he is invisible in the dark. Is he sleeping or are his eyes open? Is Joschka looking at him as he is looking back at the dog? The ribs suck in, the desiccated body convulses. The eyes are glassy, the mouth foaming. When the dog notices him, he stops for a moment, looks down the quiet valley and then starts again. Like a tubercular cough. He looks at the outlines of the hills surrounding the valley. The barking is projected onto the entire landscape. Everything looks like the sound from the dog’s dry lungs.

  When he returns to bed, he sees that Joschka is lying with his knees pulled close to his chest, curled up tightly against the barking. He thinks about how everything will end after this weekend. He thinks of Joschka’s shadow, soft and cool and intimate. Of how that is all that will remain.

  Sunday. He does not eat breakfast, Joschka neither. Joschka’s sister and brother-in-law left early with Maximilian for the morning mass in the white baroque church whose spire rises above the pine trees at the other end of the valley. The fridge is droning and the wall clock ticking.

  ‘Shall we get out of here for a while?’ Joschka asks.

  ‘I’m not really in the mood.’

  ‘How about Bayreuth?’

  Before they came, he told Joschka he would like to visit Bayreuth to see the opera house and Haus Wahnfried, Wagner’s villa.

  ‘Come,’ Joschka says, ‘come.’

  He gives in. They drive in silence.

  They walk through Haus Wahnfried. The sacred atmosphere would normally irritate him, the way in which the place is curated so as to render one complicit in worshipping the master, but his attention is elsewhere. All of this makes no impression on him. He is listening to his own footsteps, and Joschka’s. In the main room, the salon-cum-music-room, they walk along opposite walls. The room protrudes into the garden, in a half-circle with large windows. Here they meet, here they come face to face with each other, each with a hand on the grand piano. They look out into the garden, to the granite grave of the god himself. Far back, beyond a fountain. Joschka looks down at the piano.

  ‘Will we never look each other in the eye again?’

  It is Joschka who says this, before moving away. On the piano, on the black lacquer, the shape of his hand remains for a few seconds in a whisper of vapour before it disappears.

  After lunch, back home in the castle, they visit Joschka’s aunt. She is ninety-two. When Joschka first asks him to come along, he says: ‘You go. I don’t feel up to it.’

  He is lying on the aeroplane-patterned duvet, facing the wall.

  ‘Please,’ Joschka says behind his back. ‘I told her about you. She’s expecting both of us. She wants me to come and show you to her. Please.’

  They go. The aunt is small and fit and shy. Never married. Her speech is nasal (a split palate). She would go to pick chanterelles at dawn, on her daily wander through the woods, before swimming twenty-four lengths in the pool at the American army base. The house smells yeasty, of the fresh mushrooms, of soil. And chocolate cake. Chlorine, when one gets close to her. In her presence there is a new Joschka, softened to the core.

  ‘I taught him to bake, this Junge,’ she says while taking the cake from the oven, Joschka beaming behind her in the heat. There is apple tart too.

  They come from her garden, she tells them. The apples.

  To demonstrate, she opens the window and picks an apple from one of the branches abutting the house. She is wiry, as he sees when she bends over. A forest woman, a survivor. She offers him the apple.

  Back home, he says, ‘I am going for a walk.’

  ‘I’m coming with you,’ Joschka says.

  ‘No, alone.’

  Outside the gates, he walks along a curved footpath, further up the hill. He walks past a small wooden hut, a forest ranger’s house. He stops for a moment, looks out over the next valley, parallel to the one overlooked by Burg Heimhof. Downy seeds drift around him, catching the sunlight. There are white butterflies around his feet. The path turns increasingly wet and slippery where it approaches the forest. It reminds him of an Anselm Kiefer exhibition he and Joschka saw in London, in the white subterranean cube of a Mayfair gallery. Canvases ten metres wide layered with paint and mud as deep as the span of a man’s hand. One could not refrain from touching it. It was not the representation of a landscape of mud and sludge. It was the landscape itself.

  Then he is in the forest.

  When he closes his eyes, he is no longer in a pine forest, but in the cliché of the German forest. A dim place of antique oaks with interlocking branches. He wants to feel all the things that hover here right on his skin, wants to shift them across each other like a quadruple exposure: myths and music, history and landscape. A richly decorated Szene. It is becoming colder the deeper he goes. In this air, one could perhaps even, with sufficient concentration, stir up all the twentieth-century European horrors. He stops, opens his eyes. It is just a dead forest. Absolute silence. The signs are hidden, the codes illegible beneath the floor of pine needles, antique blood seeped deep into dark soil. Out there, from where the light is filtering in through the forest’s edge, the Vierte Reich reigns: American military bases, BMWs and highways like deep blue rivers. It is the outside realm that gives the forest meaning, not the other way around. It renders the forest small and harmless. The force drained from everything, the claws filed blunt.

  His cellphone rings in his pocket. A muted sound amongst the pine needles. He is surprised there is signal coverage here. It is his father.

  ‘It is about your mother,’ his father says, his voice unsteady. ‘She wanted to tell you yesterday, but she couldn’t.’

  ‘What is it? What did she want to say?’

  ‘She wanted to tell you, but couldn’t.’ His father’s voice is strange. He utters a wild sob. ‘She is ill. Liver cancer. It’s spread to the lungs. And the brain. There won’t be treatment.’

  His father puts down the receiver. He leaves the path, deeper into the forest. As he walks, the tears come.

  A miniature scene is all he is capable of. He can only put together the small pictures, in a chaotic fashion: he and Joschka, fragments of the castle, the house with the room full of plastic swords, the fragments of forest around him, his own worry and sorrow. His mother: she stays on the edge of the photo, too over-exposed to recognise, the continent where she finds herself too cut off from everything northern.

  He stops, looks up, listens for birds. All he can hear are the lines, something from his school days, which he now starts reciting:

  Über allen Gipfeln

  Ist Ruh,

  In allen Wipfeln

  Spürest du

  Kaum einen Hauch;

  Die Vögellein schweigen im Walde—

  The voice of a bird, somewhere above the pines (they will not venture into the dead dusk down here), sweeps away the calm peaks and windless treetops of the poem: ‘Sie bricht herein! Sie bricht herein! Die dunkle Nacht der Seele …’

  ‘Don’t bother,’ he says, ‘with the warnings and the mockery. It�
�s already enveloping me from all sides.’

  He gets bored of being lost. Time to go back; soon the sun will set. He crosses paths he has probably walked on before, encounters a pile of pine trunks he is convinced he recognises. Sometimes he sees light and thinks it is the forest edge, but then it turns out to be a clearing. He crosses open areas with wild flowers that look familiar, a square of blue sky above him. He is starting to get worried. Occasionally he encounters a viewing tower for fire watchers. He climbs the ladder of one such tower, hoping he might be able to see Burg Heimhof on its rock amidst the forests and valleys. When he has almost reached the top, he finds the trap door above him locked shut, confirmed with a sign: Zutritt verboten.

  He wanders around for another hour, searching for light. Then he hears the bass line of music. He follows the sound. Furious German rap. He imagines a skinhead next to a boom box, tattooed on his neck or shaven temple. Then the music is joined by light. He is out. In a dark fold against a northern slope, a small village with featureless modern houses. Right up against the mythical/non-mythical forest. Two young men with spits in their hands. They are roasting bratwurst over open flames, the music emanating from the house. He needs to cross a corner of their garden. They look at him. He does not look at the spits. He walks along a tarred road, there are road signs, he emerges in the valley below the castle. He sees the place from a new angle. From down here it seems like an extension of the cliff.