The Third Reel

by S J Naudé

  Etienne is so absorbed by the spectacle that it takes a while before he realises the birds aren’t stuffed. The stench enters his sinuses. Behind him the threshold creaks; he swivels around. Axel is standing in the doorway, dripping, towel around his waist.

  ‘Put it away, fuck it!’ he says. ‘Can’t you smell?’ Etienne can: it is now a dense cloud in his nostrils. He looks back at the birds rotting away in their own houses. At the things they were doing when an unknown cataclysm struck – washing dishes, sleeping, reading a book. As if nothing could ever go wrong.

  Axel smiles. ‘I’m kidding. It should all rot. The installation is only starting to ripen now.’ He lifts his nose, sniffing greedily. ‘At last the fucking birds are starting to fall apart. Now it’s smelling like something meaningful!’ Something tells Etienne Axel had wanted him to stumble upon this, that more things are hidden away for him to find. There is a new shade of light in Axel’s eyes as he approaches. A wolf’s appetite.

  Axel steps onto the blue file. He unravels the towel, grabs Etienne’s head like a parched skull, forcing it towards his hips.

  Chapter 10

  At night, Etienne works on deciphering parts of Irmgard’s file. Sometimes Axel helps with unusual words or tricky sentences. Most of the time, though, he is too busy in the attic. Or just moody and reluctant. During the day Etienne searches catalogues and lists for a film entitled Berliner Chronik. At the film school, in film libraries, the bfi. Nothing. That the film, or at least parts of it, were indeed shot, becomes clear when he reviews the production schedule and Irmgard’s notes more closely. It is the kind of lost film about which hardly anyone, except the few people who worked on it, would have known. And how many of them would have survived the war?

  There are also a few letters bound into the file. Carbon copies of Ariel Schnur’s correspondence in late 1932 and early 1933. Etienne casts his eye over these. The first letter, written in December 1932, is addressed to one Wilhelm Reich. Axel helps with the translation. He is fidgeting; it looks as if he would prefer to be somewhere else. Ariel refers to previous meetings with Reich. He expresses his admiration for a manuscript that Reich sent him, shortly to be published as Massenpsychologie des Faschismus. Ariel carefully broaches the possibility of making a documentary film about Reich.

  Axel tires of the translation. Etienne goes to the Goldsmiths College library, where one of the Square’s inhabitants works as a part-time librarian; she lets him in. He finds information about Reich. Austrian psychoanalyst, post-Freud. Sexologist and communist. To his relief he finds a copy of Massenpsychologie in English translation. The librarian lets him take out the book under her name. Back in Bermondsey Street, he goes up to the roof and thumbs through the book. The only sounds carried by the afternoon breeze are those of trains at London Bridge station and lazy autumn planes overhead. The roof hatch is open; below Etienne Axel is working in the attic. Etienne shifts closer to the hatch. ‘Listen to this,’ he says, even though he knows Axel doesn’t like to be disturbed while he is working. ‘This kicks ass. Let me read—’

  ‘Please.’ Axel’s voice is tense. ‘Just summarise . . .’

  ‘ok. Reich is saying something like this: if you supress a child’s sexuality, you make him frightened. Ashamed, scared of authority. “Well-adjusted.” The rebellious instincts are thus paralysed—’ Two trains thunder past each other above the Bermondsey Street tunnel, drowning him out. ‘So, if you suppress sexual thoughts and curiosity in a child, you’re bringing up someone who stays obedient. However fucking miserable he might be, and irrespective of how much you humiliate him. The family is a miniature state; once you are habituated to it, the true state has you in its claws forever . . .’

  Axel’s response is to emerge through the hatch and pull Etienne’s shirt over his head. He is sweaty; he pushes Etienne onto the roof, kissing him. Axel smells of freshly sawn wood. The roof is rough against Etienne’s back. They spill seed, then lie on their backs, the trails of planes dissipating above them.

  ‘Wait here,’ Etienne says. He lowers himself through the hatch, scoots down the ladder and stairs, grabs his blue file in the kitchen. On his way back up, he picks up Axel’s well-worn German-English dictionary. Axel sighs when Etienne asks him to help translate the rest of Ariel’s letters. Etienne’s German is improving, but he still gets stuck. Axel looks up at the fresh lines being drawn across the sky, then peers askance at the pages Etienne wants to show him.

  The file doesn’t contain any response to Reich’s letter. The pile of correspondence that follows is between Ariel Schnur and one Walter Benjamin. The correspondence stretches from late December 1932 to March 1933. They don’t know each other; in the first letter Ariel introduces himself as an aspiring director. He expresses his admiration for Benjamin’s essays, specifically complimenting him on a piece about Berlin that has just been published in a paper. In these difficult times I am looking for my first film project. He enquires whether Benjamin thinks that some of his work may fruitfully be used as a source for a film.

  Benjamin writes back. Over the past year he has written several such fragments about Berlin. Denkbilder, he calls them. He wants to publish them as a book, but could also consider making them available as the basis for a film. It would greatly please me, although I can hardly imagine how it could find a form in images alone. He nevertheless includes copies of the pieces with his letter, he writes.

  Ariel’s next letter, in early March 1933, starts off with the menace looming over Berlin: the atmosphere since the inauguration of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor in January, the Reichstag fire, the arrest of communists. The brutality of Gleichschaltung. (Axel shrugs his shoulders – he doesn’t know the term either.) I have read all your Denkbilder about childhood in Berlin in one sitting; I am deeply moved and impressed by them. I will take up the challenge, Ariel writes. A film shall emerge from this material. I plead for your understanding that my ability – as a young director – to compensate you is limited. He refers to the challenge of trying to make a film now, in these times, to the absurd light being cast onto all ordinary human activities. To the stench of unreason and violence in the Berlin air.

  You may use it without any advance payment, Benjamin writes back, provided we can agree on a revenue share. A wry joke? Etienne wonders. Though it is never expressed, by this time it is apparent that they are both Jews. They could surely not have been expecting that a film by a Jewish director would still be distributed – not to mention make a profit. Benjamin’s only reference to the political conditions is the following: Whether one will know the streets of Berlin, or the heavens above it, for much longer, is, needless to say, doubtful. About filming: I shall demand no involvement or control. All visual interpretation I shall leave in your hands. As regards the title: I plan to call the book Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert. The title of the film I shall leave to you too. Should you wish to distinguish it from the book, consider Parloir des Nichts.

  ‘The consulting room of nothingness,’ Axel translates, looking Etienne in the eye. It sounds to Etienne like another dark joke.

  The Benjamin texts themselves are not in the file. Axel jumps up, stands on the edge of the roof. How small he looks against the City’s glass towers. ‘I have to go to the hospital. Kill a few children.’ It is a standing joke. Axel rarely mentions his work at the hospital. If someone asks how he makes a living, he’ll say: ‘I’m a child murderer.’ And then grin.

  Axel disappears down the hatch. Etienne looks at him walking down Bermondsey Street. Without his hospital clothes. The sky is deep red and smelling of far-off fires. Etienne lowers himself through the hatch, locks it above him. There isn’t really a shift at the hospital tonight. Axel has other – secret – destinations somewhere in this city that always feels as if it is engulfed in flames.

  Etienne skips some of his classes, goes to the Goldsmiths library and reads about Benjamin. Jewish philosopher from the early part of the century. He flees from Berl
in to Paris in 1933, becomes trapped in Europe in the late ’30s. In 1940 he dodges the Gestapo in Paris, tries to flee through Spain and Portugal to the us. The Spaniards cancel his visa at the border, forcing him to turn back. He takes his own life with an overdose of morphine rather than to be delivered into the hands of the Nazis.

  Etienne borrows the English translation of Benjamin’s Berlin texts from the library, under his librarian friend’s name as usual. It was published. Only after Benjamin’s death, though, and after he had tried in vain to find a publisher for years. It contains reworked versions of the original texts from the ’30s.

  Etienne lies reading under his skylight. He finds himself moved. Memories of childhood in a bourgeois Jewish Berlin household. Things, places, obscure associations. The labyrinth of a young mind and the retrospection of the older narrator shift across each other, and over the city. Like multiple exposures of film frames.

  Late one evening, Etienne and Axel are sitting on rickety chairs in the Bermondsey Street kitchen. ‘Listen to Benjamin,’ Etienne says, and then translates: ‘Memory . . . is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities are buried. He who wants to get close to his own buried past must behave like a man who is digging . . .’

  While Etienne is reading, he watches Axel from the corner of his eye; the supple tree roots on his neck change shape whenever his head moves. Axel doesn’t say anything, but Etienne can see he is pleased by how intrigued Etienne is by the file’s secrets.

  Axel takes the file from his hand, leads him to the attic, then further up the ladder to the roof. Axel traps him against the chimney, strips off Etienne’s clothes, staying dressed himself. The bricks are cold against Etienne’s buttocks. Axel’s hands multiply across his body, as if a multitude of gods have joined him. As if Axel has as many fingers as the blue file has pages.

  Etienne’s limbs unfold in blind flashes. He is being flayed for the city: an insect behind a magnifying glass, pinned through the head, writhing. He is being exhibited for people on trains and behind office windows, for commuters on bridges, vagrants on station benches. He belongs to them now. And they can do with him whatever they will.

  While delving deeper into the file, Etienne tries to imagine the film. He conjures up images using production notes, technical details and the incomplete set of storyboards. He fills in the gaps.

  As he works through the Benjamin book and the file, he discovers how the Berlin texts fit in with the storyboards, which he has now stuck on the bedroom wall, their fragility notwithstanding. The image of the boy in the bed and the woman pushing an apple into the flames? From a piece called Wintermorgen, winter morning: the chambermaid coming in early, lantern in her hand, to stoke the stove in the hearth. The boy gets up, opens the stove, anticipating the apple’s secret smell. He warms his hands against the apple’s cheeks – hesitant to bite through the baked skin, afraid that the fugitive knowledge residing in the aroma might escape on its way to his tongue . . .

  Etienne sounds Axel out again about the origin of the blue file. Axel just slips his hand into Etienne’s shirt, smothers him with his tongue.

  Etienne makes rough sketches of other scenes in the Benjamin book. Scenes that are also listed in the film plan but for which no storyboards exist. His sketches are rough and childish, too provisional even for story­boards.

  In the back of the file there are a dozen or so blank pages. Etienne keeps returning to them, wondering about them. For long periods he stares intently at each page, as if ink would spontaneously darken from the fibres in the shape of letters, then merge into sentences.

  Axel now often works evening or night shifts at the hospital. Or this is where he says he has been when he arrives in the Square at strange times, looking the worse for wear. Axel never talks about the hospital. Etienne sometimes senses distress or disquiet in Axel after one of his shifts. At first he asks him about it. All he gets in response are shrugs of the shoulders and ‘Well, I only maimed one last night; nobody died’, or ‘Yes, a few were burnt and disfigured, brains were damaged, limbs amputated, guts spilled . . .’ When Axel returns these days, they go on silent walks for hours. They don’t talk about the file, or about Irmgard, Ariel or the film, even though questions are swirling inside Etienne.

  They are out of synch with the city, Etienne thinks. They are becoming secret inhabitants, appearing when everyone else has disappeared, as if having fled an epidemic overnight. When the trains are rattling on their tracks, bright and empty, when the City’s thousands of windows are stripped of office heads, they walk the streets that still hold the warmth of vanished bodies.

  Chapter 11

  Early morning. Etienne is sitting by the well, hands clasped around his legs, chin on his knees. Axel joins him. It must have been a productive night in the attic – after an unsettling hospital shift yesterday, the restiveness now seems to have drained from his body. He puts an arm around Etienne’s shoulders; they look down the well. Since Etienne found the decaying pigeons, his city joy has been waning. The blue file is consuming him, but it isn’t lifting the weight from his chest.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  Etienne doesn’t respond.

  Axel nods distractedly. ‘It’s London. It happens: the city can start to—’

  ‘There’s no one else left,’ Etienne blurts. ‘Just me.’ He listens to himself as if to a stranger. Even where I’m not, his thoughts continue, my feet echo in the streets . . .

  Axel tangles his fingers in Etienne’s hair, shakes him by the shoulder. ‘We have to get you out of here. Come, I’ll get some friends together. People who know how to let go, how to live off light and air . . .’

  ‘Impossible. I have classes this morning. Why I attend them, God only knows, though. Nothing will come of it.’

  ‘You’ve never been out of the city, have you? Except for Birmingham and Gateshead, that is. Which don’t count.’ Etienne shakes his head. Axel jumps up like a coiled spring. ‘Forget the classes, forget the blue file. Shake off the weight. Let the light flow in.’

  Etienne smiles. Axel too. It is already flowing.

  Within half an hour Axel has gathered twelve or thirteen guys and girls from the squats. Pale and tender. Weightless and laughing, wearing t-shirts through which one can count vertebrae.

  A cool mist rises in Etienne’s chest when the train leaves London and starts accelerating. The landscape opens up. Someone knows someone whose uncle has a cottage in Suffolk; they are heading there for the weekend. After two hours they get off at a small station, walk half an hour further.

  It is a bountiful afternoon. The cottage, with its heavy thatch roof, stands on its own beside a high pine tree and a shallow valley. They make a fire under the tree. They sit in a circle, put pills on each other’s tongues, smoke joints, pass brandy around. Someone has brought a pet rabbit. The animal is passed along too, caressed, rubbed against cheeks. In the valley there are fields with wheat and bright yellow rapeseed. Some fields have been harvested; pollen and hay are floating on the air, making them sneeze. They look at each other through the flames. The air is becoming thinner; their heads are filling with light. All that remains is the crackling of the fire, and their sun-washed bodies.

  A few jump up, start running. Then a few more, then the rest. Etienne jumps up too, even though he doesn’t know why. Axel is ahead of him. They tear down the hill, through fields. Light-footed, like a herd of small animals. Everyone is laughing, the sun in their hair. Etienne is high, they are all high. Lighter than wheat, lighter than chaff. Their feet are no longer touching the ground. They strip off each garment while they run, throwing it into the wind. Now and then someone trips over, gets up and runs further, laughing. The pills make them faster. They run through hissing wheat, over yellow-white stalks. The sun is white; colour has bled from the landscape. Etienne closes his eyes; his feet are flying over the turf. He can’t stop smiling.

  He op
ens his eyes, looks in wonderment at a girl – thin as a deer, flame-red hair – who jumps on a row of straw bales and flies across it. Against her pallor the rust-coloured tuft of pubic hair is shocking. A lost autumn leaf. Axel and others also jump on the bales. They trip each other, roll off, climb up again.

  They could run to the end of the earth. But the pills are running, rather than the legs; they have to stop after all. They fall down on a hillside, one by one, gasping. Etienne looks at Axel, at the red-haired girl sitting between his legs. Her elbows hook around his knees; her head rolls backwards against his chest. Etienne moves closer. The three of them take each other’s hands, staring at the small cuts on each other’s feet.

  Around them, Etienne now notices, there are rock formations. From the Stone Age, or once rolled here by druids and witches. Their distribution seems arbitrary. Or in patterns only the gods can discern, like Axel’s installations.

  They get up, wander among the stones like sacrificial animals. They lean their heads against them, listening for smothered screams from inside. The sun is hovering on the horizon. They take more pills. After ten minutes, yet more. They walk in circles for a while, then sit down in a patch of heather. The girl curls up against Axel’s chest; he folds his arms around her. The pills make her tremble; she is foaming a little around the mouth. Her body is bent at sad angles. Etienne’s mouth is dry. He becomes aware of a rushing sound. He gets up, walks up the hill, beckons the others. Axel picks up the redhead like a newborn lamb, tries to make her stand on her own feet.

  From the top of the hill one can see a rainbow and a spray of fine drops: a waterfall! The girl runs ahead, down the hill. By the time Etienne and Axel catch up with her, she is standing waist-deep in a dark pond. Her arms are like twigs, her little nipples pink and frightened. She has a hay rash and she is chafed over her back and thighs. Etienne suddenly wonders: didn’t she have the rabbit with her earlier on? Has she hugged it to death and dropped it somewhere in the wheat? Etienne touches the straw and chaff in his hair. He wishes he now had a rabbit in his arms.