by S J Naudé
Henceforth the Blake book would stay under Etienne’s mattress, except when his parents were asleep.
His mother’s letter continues: Your father is not as merciless as you might think. He cannot help himself; his sorrow sounds like anger. He is making plans to help you. Give him a chance.
Etienne sits up on the futon, writes a letter to his mother. He has everything he needs. Accommodation, food to eat, clothes to wear. He is relieved that he has managed to escape South Africa. I am renouncing it, that Republic of Dust. I’m glad I’m now a criminal there. Never again do I have to set foot there. He is rewiring himself, he continues. He doesn’t need help, whether from her or his father. And he doubts whether he will ever write again.
Chapter 7
September. Etienne is taking introductory courses in camera techniques and cinematography, directing, scriptwriting and film editing. He has a choice between film theory and history. In addition, he is taking a seminar entitled Lost Continental Films.
A film narrative is a series of constantly changing images that depict events from a variety of viewpoints. According to his American textbook, that is. He reads about visual planning. About storyboards. Objective and subjective camera angles. The determination of camera height and angles. How to alternate close-up, long- and medium-distance shots. And about more complex camera movements, on dollies or from cranes.
He likes the ultra-long shot, the wide lens taking in epic scenes. His textbook demonstrates this with frames from cowboy movies: three lonely riders in a wide-open landscape, a herd of bison thundering ahead of a cloud of dust. Or a battlefield littered with dying soldiers. His other favourite is the ‘Dutch tilt’ – a low camera aiming upwards at an oblique angle to the player. It disorients the viewer, his textbook explains, and also suggests that the character is disoriented, drunk or agitated. In extremis. One day, Etienne thinks, he will make a film in which every shot is taken from such an unsteady angle.
‘In whichever space the cameraman finds himself,’ Etienne’s camerawork instructor says while acquainting them with 8 mm and 16 mm cameras, ‘he’s moving in a world of dotted lines. He is constantly seeing viewpoints like vectors, calculating every permutation of angle and distance. The lines resemble the trajectories of bullets flying everywhere. He is caught up in a violent skirmish. Constantly measuring and estimating, aiming at soft targets in the best available light. Gradually it all becomes second nature.’
In film theory the lecturer explains hypotheses about film, the eye and the brain. Etienne’s notion that the brain simply merges static frames by inserting after-images in between is clearly naive. The lecturer elaborates on complex theories regarding the illusion of movement in film – physiological, psychological, technological. He uses terms like ‘phi phenomenon’, ‘iconic memory’ and ‘shutter frequency’. The students become restless; they are here to make films, not to philosophise about the interaction between neurology and the film frame, or to express flicker fusion rates in hertz.
As a practical project that cuts across disciplines, each student has to make a 16 mm film. Equipment is provided. Etienne has already decided on his subject matter: Axel and his world.
Axel lives south of the river, across from the City’s towers. The squat is in a dilapidated Georgian house in Bermondsey Street, close to the tunnel with the angel. A revolving set of friends and wanderers lives there with him. Axel’s fellow squatters don’t know he is a nurse. They only know him as an artist. In the backyard there is an old well. Contaminated water glistens at the bottom. Frank once elaborated about the residue of centuries of malodorous industrial activities here – tanneries, fur factories, paper and textile manufacture. And, of course, the vinegar factory, which is still active. The soil is soaked with previous centuries’ toxins.
Axel lives as if it is 1930. In the kitchen there is a cast-iron Dover stove. Coal is delivered from time to time. There is no central heating, though most rooms have a fireplace. Bathing happens in a tin bath on the kitchen floor. Walls have been removed between some rooms; sagging ceilings display water stains. There are a few broken chairs and mattresses. On the walls are crusts of paint and brittle wallpaper. Just a stone’s throw away, beyond the viaducts of London Bridge station, there are rows of glass buildings north of the river where financiers lead the kind of existence that was once laid out for Etienne in South Africa. Before he became a criminal.
It is here, just out of reach of the City towers’ morning shadows, that Etienne makes his first film. He doesn’t ask anyone’s permission. He takes the camera in his hand, switches it on, lets the film roll.
Guys come and go, unperturbed by the camera. They move in and out of focus at the edge of the lens. They smoke and sleep, drape their naked selves over shared mattresses, sing and play guitar through the night. Take pills, gulp wine from bottles and stroke each other’s backs, drink saliva from each other’s lips. Sometimes one will run down the street with wide pupils, or stare down the well for hours. It is possible, at any time, to encounter a shiny naked stranger in a steaming tin bath.
Etienne focuses his lens on one of Axel’s art projects. Wallpaper torn away in concentric circles. Painfully precise. Like the growing circles of a sawn-off tree trunk. One of the drifters, a Brit, interprets the circles while the camera is rolling. In the centre there is a dot of wine-red Georgian paint. It is surrounded by Victorian wallpaper, which yields to a wider circle of Morris motifs. This is followed by mustard-coloured 1950s patterns, then psychedelic 1970s zigzag. A tunnel through which one may travel back in time, or through which the past ripples out into the present. Etienne switches off the camera, pictures Axel, nose against the wallpaper. Tearing with the hand of a surgeon, painfully slowly, all through the long winter.
He directs his lens toward the smokers around the well. ‘Right here below us,’ one of them declares in a Spanish accent, ‘there is enough arsenic to wipe out the entire fucking City. We just have to get it in the drinking water.’ Now Etienne turns the camera towards two Swedish guys. They are leaning back, shirtless, planning a revolution, joints between their fingers. He zooms in on tiny hairs on their ears. Or fingers scratching at a scab or cupping around a scrotum. He focuses on the one Swede’s abdominal tattoo: the revolution is my boyfriend, it reads amid the upper trail of pubic hair.
Like a half-grown litter, these Bermondsey Street striplings, Etienne thinks. During the day they doze contentedly; at night they copulate clumsily and indifferently.
When Etienne and Axel are alone, the camera is switched off. The hairs on Etienne’s arms are constantly raised. They writhe and ejaculate. They poison each other, are at the same time each other’s antidote. They contaminate each other, inoculate each other. Outside the clouds are urgent and the sky blue.
This afternoon Axel is lying on Etienne’s futon. He smokes slowly while Etienne is examining his body. He throws Axel off the futon, turns him over, studies the tattoo. Axel smells of dry wood and hot stones. There is no sound in his eyes. The attic room becomes a vacuum. Their mouths lock, their temples are streaming with sweat. They half-suffocate each other, spill seed. They sit in opposite corners, stare at each other, charge at each other.
The next day they are in Bermondsey Street. Guys are hovering in the kitchen and by the well. Etienne and Axel are in an upper room. They are noisy. Now and then someone comes and watches them in silence. No one dares interrupt their copulation; their bodies have grown into each other. After a while the watchers leave.
They are dissolving in an ever denser thicket of images, Etienne thinks: branches becoming entangled in a storm, bones intertwining. They grab and attack and tear, breathe fire and spit it out. They were electrified when they met in the substation. Etienne is waiting for the short circuit, for the current to be interrupted.
Tonight they are in Etienne’s room again. Axel tears himself away, throws his head back. Etienne lets go of Axel’s neck, startled by the marks across
his throat. Axel makes a noise, as if he is gargling with blood or seed. ‘Look,’ he says and points at the pale green sky beyond the skylight. ‘He is tired of the cold stars. He is coming down . . .’ Axel is listening intently, watching the door with widened eyes. ‘He is here.’
‘Who?’ Etienne’s body is a slippery carcass among wild dogs. ‘Who’s here?’
Axel is whispering now, his eyes shiny. ‘God. He is jealous; he is looking through the keyhole. He wants to come and taste the fiery saliva. These bitter juices that are seeping from us like wolf’s blood.’
Axel’s irises turn toxic green. It is dizzying to Etienne, the fact that he and the German are driving each other to such raving, such visions. In the outer corner of his eye a white flame is burning constantly.
Chapter 8
Atop the Bermondsey Street house’s three brick storeys is a wooden attic: 18th-century, with factory windows and high ceilings. Once a workshop, now Axel’s studio and gallery. In the ranks of the squatters, Axel is honoured as an art hero. In a rough-and-ready, casual sort of way, but still. Sometimes his eyes become hard and black, and then he shuts himself off in the studio. Guys wait around the well. All day long. In between his film-school classes, Etienne and his camera are there too. They sniff the air, the young men. They want to smell what is going on up there. Now and then an assistant or two are summoned upstairs. Some come just for the day. Others spend the night. Some keep coming back, others quickly lose patience. Those whom Axel invites up are sworn to silence.
Axel leaves clues. A sliver of a photo is found on the stairs one morning: an underwater scene. On a hot afternoon a fragment of yellow satin wafts down to the well from an open window. A soiled child’s glove appears in the toilet (crusted with blood?); snippets of fur appear next to the oven. These things are snatched up. They prompt speculation, or disappear into trouser pockets, where they are silently fingered. Materials, the well-sitters imagine, that betray something about the work that is taking shape upstairs. Axel is full of tricks, Etienne reckons. He is carefully construing secrets: the scraps are dispersed to throw the hungry ones off his scent, to still their appetite briefly and then heighten it again.
Etienne looks past the false signs, focusing instead on those Axel summons from outside. Squatters’ children, and the offspring of council-flat dwellers. Young boys or teenagers. They knock on the front door, are shown the stairs to the studio. Some are accompanied by parents. One child arrives with a yapping dog; others bring toys. Dead-eyed children, some of them, and frightened. Others are swift as lizards, with sly lashes and couldn’t-care-less shoulders. Magnesium flashes flicker in the afternoon light: Axel is taking photos. A bedroom is used as a temporary darkroom. The hours when Axel isn’t working in the attic or the hospital, or spending naked with Etienne, he is holed up there. And no one is allowed in.
Axel sends out squatter assistants on blind expeditions. They are instructed to arrive at a specified place at a given time, where a stranger then hands over unknown items. They come back laden with props: chairs and side tables, velvet cloths and candelabra. And costumes – Victorian children’s outfits. It is as if the whole of South London is in Axel’s service. Everyone responds when he invisibly snaps his fingers. They are all made to feel as if they are becoming part of his art, slotting into an inevitable pattern. He is a perfectionist, perhaps a tyrant.
The installation has been completed. The assistants are dispatched to distribute pamphlets for the opening. Axel takes Etienne upstairs. Only him.
The windows are wide open. On one wall there are rows of photographs in sepia. Dozens of them. Tacked on with inch nails, trembling in the breeze. Etienne approaches. Boys, all of them. Dressed in their Sunday best, hair combed or slicked back with oil. Some of them have a sailboat or a ball in their hands. They sit uncomfortably in chairs, or on the laps of sombre parents. Something is amiss. Etienne moves along, looks at more photos, trying to unravel his discomfort. A little dog is pulling away from one boy; a cat is arching its back.
A train rumbles in the distance; something is dawning upon Etienne. He steps back. A baby is sleeping on velvet, naked like a cherub. Children are sitting bolt upright next to brothers or friends. Or in a family group, head resting on a mother’s or father’s lap. Some children are holding hands. Some have their eyes closed, others are gazing mercilessly at the viewer. ‘These children . . .’ Etienne casts his eye over the rows, his gaze settling on identical twins. With identical caps and knickerbockers. One is looking into the camera, his likeness is sleeping on his shoulder. ‘Are they alive?’
Axel smiles, shaking his head slowly. ‘All dead. Shortly before the photos were taken. They’re Victorian post-mortem photographs.’ Axel presses his finger on the twins. ‘Photography was expensive in those days. After someone’s death there was a last chance for a photo. Usually the only chance . . .’ He steers Etienne by the shoulder, presses his nose up against the photographs. ‘Look closely. Some have their eyes closed; the lids of others have been painted over with eyes. See how they stare.’
Etienne retreats to the middle of the room. He knocks against something, turns around: a glass case on a pedestal. A silver teaspoon is floating inside the glass (upon closer inspection, it is suspended from silk threads). The spoon is filled with a milky fluid.
‘Is that . . . ?’
Axel nods. ‘Semen. Fresh every morning.’ The corners of his mouth move. ‘My own, in case you were wondering . . .’ He takes Etienne by the arm. ‘Come and see the other side.’ More photographs in rows. The neighbourhood children who have recently been coming and going. The Victorian images are echoed, picture by picture: boy with dog, naked baby on velvet, identical twins with caps. But these models are alive.
Etienne switches on his camera, turns the lens towards Axel. ‘What do you call your installation?’
Wake up the Children, the title turns out to be. There is a party, a kind of opening – wine bottles scattered about, a band playing next to the well. South London squatters swarm down Bermondsey Street and up to the attic. They study the photographs raptly, linger by the quarter-ounce of fresh semen hovering behind glass. Everyone wants to be close to Axel. They stand in his sphere, brush against him, utter his name. Letter by letter: a-x-e-l. Hands rest on the glass case; it is collecting vapour and fingerprints. Every day, Axel explains, one pair of photos – old and new – will be removed and disposed of in the well. Etienne picks up his camera, points it at Axel, immediately switches it off again. The attic is jam-packed; there is hardly room to move. People cluster ever more densely around Axel. Later Axel, and then some of the other men too, strip off their shirts. Axel is slick with sweat and surrounded by the leanest men and women of the tribe, the ones with the darkest hearts. They want to touch his skin. Like Jesus’s robe.
They want to drag Axel off with them, these South London squatters, but it is Etienne whom Axel chooses. They spend more and more time in each other’s company.
Tonight they are in Etienne’s room in the Square. There are white flashes outside: a neighbour welding rusty sculptures. Electrical crackling noises, as if something is being shocked to death. They are lying on the futon, leafing through the pages of the Blake book. The evening is cool; their clothes are scattered on the floor. Axel doesn’t know most of the Blake works. Etienne is relieved to be showing him something new. Axel is saying more than usual, muttering something about ‘no-man’s light’ and ‘prophetic radiance’. The glow, he explains, that would emanate from Etienne’s chest if he were to rip it open. Light in which they could pray to each other in the nude.
They let the book slip to the floor, try to rip each other open. They don’t stop before the room is smelling of raw flesh. Then they start again, slowly and tenderly.
‘It’s the only thing I brought with me,’ Etienne says when he leans back against the wall and lights one of Axel’s cigarettes. ‘This book.’ He doesn’t add ‘from South Africa’. He put
s it down on Axel’s chest, keeps turning the pages.
Axel drops glowing ash on the page; it burns a hole in a choir of angels. They hastily extinguish it. ‘And your drums. I brought almost nothing from Germany; I make everything from scratch,’ he says and falls asleep against Etienne’s shoulder. Outside welding sparks are flying. Once, just after they met, Axel mentioned that he had lived in Berlin at some point, even named a few cafés and gay bars that he used to frequent there. Etienne figured that he must have been well-known in Berlin’s night streets. Other than that, tonight’s conversation is the closest they have ever come to sharing anything about their origins and previous lives. They don’t usually ask each other questions. They don’t talk about parents, family or places of birth. About schools, homes or childhood friends.
They are comets in deep space, falling smoothly. They grant each other the oxygen-free universe. And all the light of all its suns.
Etienne still has Aodhan’s video recorder. He rarely watches films at the film school. His Belgian housemate has rewired an old television for him. At the film-school library he borrows work of underground American directors. Kenneth Anger films from the ’40s and ’60s, with sailors, motorcycle gangs and undertones of s-m. And Andy Warhol’s Empire. A static camera focusing on the Empire State Building for eight hours. All that changes – ever so gradually – is the light. He lies back on his futon, watches it right through the night.
When the video stops automatically, the shape of the Empire State Building has been burnt onto his retinas. Next to him on the floor is one of the Resister magazines that Ben at cosawr so solemnly hands over every time he goes to their offices. Axel, on his last visit, used it to wipe semen spatter from the floor. Etienne slings it into a corner, under the drums. On the television there is the buzz of digital snow.
