The Third Reel

by S J Naudé

  THE THIRD REEL

  by

  S. J. NAUDÉ

  SYNOPSIS

  Twenty-two-year-old Etienne is studying film in London, having fled conscription in his native South Africa. It is 1986, the time of Thatcher, anti-apartheid campaigns and Aids, but also of postmodern art, post-punk rock, and Royal Vauxhall Tavern. Adrift in a city cast in shadow, he falls in love with a German artist while living in derelict artists’ communes.

  When Etienne finds the first of three reels of a German film from the 1930s, he begins searching for the missing reels, a project that turns into an obsession when his lover disappears in Berlin. It is while navigating this city divided by the Wall that Etienne gradually pieces together the history of a small group of Jewish film makers in Nazi Germany.

  It is a desperate quest amid complications that pull him back to the present and to South Africa. However, his search for the missing film continues.

  Ambitious and cosmopolitan, the material of S. J. Naudé’s The Third Reel is as disparate as the cities in which the book is set. Architecture, cinematography, sex, music, illness, loss and love all collide in this exquisitely wrought, deeply affecting novel.

  PRAISE FOR THIS BOOK

  ‘I read this haunting and brilliant book in a white heat of wonder ... The Third Reel gives that rare excitement peculiar to great novels: the thrill of discovering a new and necessary world.’ —GARTH GREENWELL, author of What Belongs to You

  REVIEWS OF THIS BOOK

  ‘Part thriller and mystery, a story of becoming oneself and then seeing oneself undone. This is a serious book that pulls the reader into realms that many of us are scared to venture Naudé has written a masterpiece of literature with an end that will leave you staring into the heart of light or darkness. But, mostly looking towards the light.’ —Cape Times

  ‘S. J. Naudé, who also wrote the much acclaimed Alphabet of Birds, has captured the spirit of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain of the 80s perfectly: the squats, the depressing grey of London, the anti-apartheid campaigners, the beginning of HIV Aids and of people with big dreams and visions for a better world who join forces to make ends meet. The Third Reel is a complex novel with many layers and allegories. It is an unsettling book that will give you plenty to think about. However, it is compelling reading and is just as compulsive as Etienne’s search for the missing reel’ —BRIAN JOSS, The Gremlin

  ‘Reading this book I was thunderstruck, with all that it implies: humidity, lightning, sweat, frissons of fear, the commanding of attention. Look at me, hear me. Reading SJ Naudé’s The Third Reel pinioned me throughout, exhausting, exhiliarating. It is a magnificent, brilliant feat of writing, visceral and unflinching, and marks the point at which Naudé moves to the front line of the best of South African writers … Few books in the past years have I thought of more highly, or affected me as much.”’ —BEVERLEY ROOS-MULLER, Cape Argus

  ‘A work that definitely pushes the boundaries of convention, hope and desire, it is written in an eminently readable and beautiful style … The story is intricate, ambitious and haunting. Reflective of the cities in which the book is set, you’ll relive the sights and smells of an era that was fraught with sex, music, illness, loss and love. The construction is that of a fine piece of architecture, brilliantly fashioned and held together, taking us on a step-by-step journey through all the rooms of the psyche … Without doubt a book of great literary standing and one that holds the reader in its thrall, never losing its grip on you.’ —BERYL EICHENBERGER, The Books Page

  ‘A magisterial novel … rarely have I been so captivated by an Afrikaans novel, so fascinated and impressed, kept so busy by it, even after a second read. With S J Naude’s The Third Reel, we have a formidable new voice in Afrikaans, firmly established. The fact that he is writing in Afrikaans, and on the black wall of pessimism descending around us, takes one’s breath away -- and provides a peeping hole to the light beaming on the other shore.”’ —HELIZE VAN VUUREN, LitNet

  ‘To describe this novel as captivating would be a euphemism … People will be talking about this novel for a long time … With this book, Naudé’s talent as a writer is confirmed. In my view, it is one of the literary highlights of 2017.’ —DEWALD KOEN, Die Burger

  ‘Like all good art, The Third Reel does not conform to conventional expectations. It is a novel that is unsettling due to its uniqueness and delivers a real punch. It belongs on a shelf with the best Afrikaans novels.’ —NEIL COCHRANE, Rapport

  The Third Reel

  S. J. Naudé is the author of The Alphabet of Birds, a collection of short stories, and a novel, The Third Reel. His work is published in Afrikaans, English and Dutch. He studied at Cambridge University and Columbia Law School. He has won the University of Johannesburg Debut Prize and a South African Literary Award, and was awarded the Jan Rabie and Marjorie Wallace Writing Grant for 2014. His work has appeared in Granta and journals in the United States, the Netherlands, and Italy. Having worked as a lawyer in New York and London for many years, he currently lives in Johannesburg.

  For Pierre

  Du warst mein Tod:

  dich konnte ich halten,

  während mir alles entfiel.

  You were my death:

  you I could hold

  when all fell away from me.

  —Paul Celan, Fadensonnen (1968)

  I. REVOLUTION OF THE CHILDREN (London, April–December 1986)

  Chapter i

  When Etienne wakes up, a world map has been imprinted on him. Then the continents start moving and disintegrating: the shadows, it turns out, of cobwebs moving in the morning sun. Above him a ladder leads to a platform and large bronze bells hanging between beams. Next to him lies a sturdy body, hair spread over the pillow. He has kicked off the sheet; one knee is pulled up. Frank the New Zealander. Twenty-five, three years older than he.

  In Pretoria, the city of his youth, Etienne used to visualise his awakening in a New City as a Blake drawing. An explosion of light and muscle power. Sunbeams fanning out, lightning shooting from dragon horns. At night, in the silence of the suburbs, he would open his book of Blake pictures across his knees. While the city was sleeping – bodies struck down in airless rooms like plague deaths – he wanted to fling open the curtains and invite visions of other cities into his bedroom.

  Only in the military base outside the city was there life. He would close the book and think of soldiers on sentry duty. Of the intimacy of glowing cigarette tracks approaching each other in the dark, crossing and moving apart. As a child, he once visited the base’s hospital with a school friend whose father was a landmine victim just back from the border war. Etienne wasn’t allowed in the hospital room. He walked through the corridors and looked down at the anonymous barracks while trying to imagine his friend’s father without legs. At night in his room he would henceforth visualise rows of sleeping soldiers. Blake’s light, he reckoned, had the same temperature as the air around their grey beds.

  That kind of heat was what he’d felt on his skin last night. In the morning hours, he and Frank had climbed the ladder to the wooden platform. Etienne leaned over towards a bell, touching the bronze. They were both naked. Frank – much larger than he – was behind him.

  Frank stretched his fingers towards the bronze too, the hair in his armpit brushing against Etienne’s shoulder. ‘There are far more impressive ones. As a continent of bells, Europe is young. Eastern civilisations were far ahead of the West.’ Frank elaborated: about the Chinese history of bells, about Continental village festivals to inaugurate newly cast bells. About how, in England, casting pits would be dug in the church itself. Etienne was listening with his skin, to every little puff o
f breath in his neck.

  Frank knocked against the bronze. ‘The waist.’ He flattened Etienne’s hand against the bell. ‘Made of copper and tin.’ He moved Etienne’s hand higher up. ‘The shoulder.’ Their hands slid down together. Etienne’s chest was now pressed against the bell; their fingers slipped underneath the lip. ‘And the clapper.’

  By the time Frank was explaining bell-tuning methods, Etienne’s cheek was touching the cool metal. Frank was saying something about second partials, but his words floated in the tower like down. Etienne hardly heard Frank’s definitions of terms like ‘tierce’ and ‘quint’. Only the tone of his voice registered. Dense and dark, like the New Zealand soil of which Frank had told him earlier that evening. The clapper knocked against the bronze, made it sing. Etienne’s teeth and bones sang too.

  Etienne and Frank had met earlier in the evening at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. Amid the throng they spilled beer on each other, then, laughing, tried to wipe the drops from each other. Before long they were outside. Away from the drag queens on the little stage and the currents of men flowing as smoothly as honey inside. Only the pumping bass of Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s ‘Relax’ could still be heard. Frank led him to a lawn behind the Tavern. ‘Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens,’ Frank said. On the railway viaduct nearby, train wheels screeched against tracks. The smell of garbage drifted over from the Tavern’s bins. ‘In the nineteenth century, everything looked different here: walking lanes for lovers, tightrope walkers, hot-air balloons, fireworks . . .’ Frank looked around with rising intensity, as if he could see right through 1986. ‘Women with umbrellas. Dandies with pencil moustaches. Rococo and chinoiserie . . . And now? Just the trains. And parched grass.’ He took Etienne’s cheeks in his hands. ‘And you and I.’ Frank’s hands were callused; his hair fell over Etienne’s face as he kissed him. It didn’t surprise Etienne, the insistence of a man’s lips against his own for the first time.

  They entered the tunnel under the viaduct, turned right in Lambeth Road, amid the fumes of buses and taxis. After ten minutes of walking, they stopped at an old church. ‘I live in the tower. And no hunchback jokes, please. I’m a campanologist.’ Frank read the question mark on Etienne’s face. ‘A bell-master. Someone who knows bells, who fixes and tunes them. And sometimes rings them.’ His hand was on the back of Etienne’s neck; he swung open the church door. ‘Welcome. And don’t be overcome by Protestant guilt. It hasn’t been a church for a long time. A museum of gardens these days.’ Etienne wasn’t too sober. He looked at the little hairs on Frank’s knuckles. They walked up the steep tower steps, the smell of church mould in his nose. Frank’s quarters consisted of a small room with a stone window. And, above their heads, the bells. Below them, the Thames: a black highway dividing the city.

  Etienne exits the church, inhales the traffic fumes. Like the sulphuric smoke, he thinks, of Blake’s heavenly fires. Further down the street, he realises: Frank hasn’t rung the bells. Neither last night, nor this morning. And it is Sunday, after all. Not much of a bell-master, our Frank. Lying there spread-eagled while the sun draws musk from his body’s creases, the bells motionless. Wouldn’t it be simpler to mechanise the bells? Etienne wonders. It is the ’80s, after all.

  A bell-ringer, nevertheless, with the loveliest round buttocks of all bell-ringers. When a shockwave of sound hits Etienne from behind, he stops. It is pure, like a bird singing for the first time. He turns around. The sound is emanating from the sun, which is shining fiercely behind the tower. Is Frank looking down at him while doing the ringing? Etienne smiles, lifts his hand in a blind salute, fist clenched.

  He walks further. ‘A campanologist,’ he says out loud in the wind, shaking his head. The sun warms his shoulder blades; the bells keep ringing. Is this the kind of pealing that might once have welcomed a king back to London after a hunt in the countryside? An image appears in his mind’s eye: a procession of coaches entering the city and, behind them, horse-drawn carriages stacked with deer, slick with blood, horns interlocked like a primitive shelter of branches.

  He closes his eyes, smiles as he walks. The bells keep sounding. At Vauxhall station, he turns and passes underneath the tracks, then turns right. He turns left in Vauxhall Grove, walks down to Bonnington Square. The bells’ rhythm is slowing in the distance. He opens No. 52’s front door, takes the stairs to the top. One by one the bells fall silent. Morning sun is pouring into his room. With his eyes fixed on the skylight, trying to recall if the tower can be seen from the roof, he crashes into his drum kit. ‘Fuck,’ he says in Afrikaans, silencing a resonating cymbal with his hand. He undresses in front of the mirror, looking at his new body. It might look like his old body, but every cell has been displaced. Silvery blood is pumping though his veins. There are bruises on his chest. But when he rubs them, they come off: bell soot. His skin is excited by the merest touch. Even when he almost touches it. His nerves are picking up the slightest distortions in the air.

  His old flesh has had to yield to something harder, bronzelike. Something that can be polished to a cold sheen. He is ready for the New City. His body is a radar, his skin a new country, his heart a shiny machine.

  Chapter 2

  When Etienne arrived in London in late April, fresh from the plane and Tube, suitcase in hand, he headed directly to the offices of The Committee on South African War Resistance, or cosawr. He had no contacts in the city. In South Africa he had known no one else who would consider dodging the draft. For his school and university friends, two years in the army were an opportunity to become a man, to do your part for the fatherland.

  During his last year in university, Etienne wrote a letter to the End Conscription Campaign, or ecc. I would do anything to avoid going to the army. Do you have any advice for me?

  The evening after he had posted the letter, his father summoned him to his study. Etienne got a scare, convinced his letter must have been intercepted. It turned out to be a vague conversation, amid gleaming wooden panelling, about Etienne’s future. Etienne was in his final year of engineering studies and was still living with his parents. ‘Remember, not only your own interests are at stake where career matters are concerned. A man must be able to support his family and be valuable to his country. The time has come to shake off the things of a child.’ His father referred to his own studies as an agricultural economist ‘in times when agriculture was decisive for the Afrikaner’s upliftment’.

  Etienne looked his father in the eye. He wasn’t thinking of agricultural history, but of his history teacher. A Mister van Rooyen. Of his moustache and the knob in his nylon slacks. His buttocks sweating while he barked orders during cadet hours.

  School cadets: a joint project by the military authorities and education department. Etienne had attended a school for boys. For years he and his classmates had to drill in the heat every Wednesday. The school grounds were temporarily militarised. Teachers were now in uniform, acutely aware of their rank. They had to march across the sports fields in shorts and shirts of brown canvas, sweat darkening armpits and buttock clefts. Van Rooyen was the leader of the pack, stars and stripes on his epaulettes. Afterwards he would shower and dress with the boys. ‘I’m with you all the way, guys. It’s looking good. Soldiers-in-training.’ Little muscle man, Van Rooyen: sweat smelling of conspiracy, bare feet on a concrete floor, scrotum being soaped up under a cold shower.

  Now Etienne averted his gaze, mumbled something about skinny cows and rusty ploughs. His father ignored him. ‘What I’m saying is that one must have vision. Idealism running like a golden thread through everything you do.’ His father began his career as a lecturer at the University of Pretoria, but, after his years of student leadership and an early professorship, started making swift political progress. He was elected a member of the Volksraad, and later appointed deputy minister of agriculture. A young star in the Party.

  Before he could be appointed a cabinet minister, his political career was nipped in the bud. The press release spoke abo
ut other opportunities that I could not refuse. Etienne knows there were murkier reasons. A letter was slipped under their front door one evening. When his father returned from a late meeting, there were whispered conversations, his mother crying. The light in the study shining all night. His father’s voice, urgent on the phone. Etienne never got to the bottom of the matter. In any event, this hardly broke his father’s stride. He was appointed head of the Land Bank, later chairman of an agricultural cooperative. Esteemed and successful, he now serves on various boards of directors: a bank, a life insurer, a tobacco company.

  ‘You would, of course, first have to complete your conscription after finishing your studies. That’s an honourable way of contributing to the greater good. You’ll quickly work your way up to officer status. I’ll whisper a word in the right people’s ears. But you’d have to show your mettle too. And after the army, I would urge you to do your master’s degree in business administration. A good start for the business world. And, in the long run, you’ll learn that whom you associate with is critical. The Organisation remains important.’ On his father’s desk was a bronze sculpture of a leopard pouncing on an impala. Like an action photo. ‘I shall introduce you to people. In time. Remember,’ he added, ‘clever young Afrikaner men have a special responsibility. Our freedom and survival in this country were bought at a high price, and are increasingly under pressure.’ Etienne became aware of the shape his bare soles were imprinting on the carpet’s deep pile. Bought at a hiiiigh price, he mocked in his mind, but resisted rolling his eyes.

  ‘One thing you now have to let go of is this nonsense about rock music.’ His father shook his head. ‘All the drum-playing. Child’s play. It doesn’t fit in with your future.’ His father looked up at the shelves, as if he was trying to find his next sentence in a book. For a few moments he closed his lids, his eyeballs moving behind them. He stroked his hair, smiling stiffly. He opened his diary, found a date a few months ahead. ‘How about you and I go hunting for once? Go and shoot ourselves a few springboks. In the Kalahari. I have a friend with a farm.’ His voice had become hoarse; he cleared his throat. ‘We’ll get to know each other again. Out there in the veld.’ It wasn’t the first time his father had tried to arrange a hunting trip. Etienne gazed at him past the fine engravings in the bronze where the leopard’s claws were tearing into impala skin. He was taken aback by the hunger in his father’s eyes, the neediness with which he was trying to find something recognisable in his son.