by S J Naudé
The redhead is standing under the waterfall. The bones of her shoulders hardly interrupt the water’s violence. She washes off blood, stretches out her hands. Etienne wades towards her. He has never felt so much joy. The afternoon is ever more radiant.
The three of them sit down on a mossy bank, shivering. The others are no longer with them, Etienne realises. On which hill, or in which wheat field, they lost each other, he cannot tell. Axel has a handful of pills with him; he has somehow managed to hold on to it. Whenever they think they cannot get any higher, or the sun looks as if it is setting, the girl puts a pill on his and Axel’s tongues. The mark of her finger is forever imprinted on his taste buds. In future, he will be able to recognise her forensically with his tongue. One day, when he encounters her in a dark city and her index finger serves him a magic tablet again, he will instantly decipher every groove.
The sun has frozen. The pills in their blood keep it just above the horizon. As long as they remain happy, as long as they keep touching each other, it won’t set. The girl climbs a birch tree, the tuft of ginger between her legs shining like an oil lamp. They have lost all sense of direction, Etienne thinks. And their clothes are scattered across the landscape. It is getting cold. And they are flying high, so high . . .
The redhead descends from the branches, sits down between Etienne and Axel on the moss, stupefied. They are now allowing the moon to rise, letting the pale stars shine. They touch each other casually, feeling each other’s burning skins. The pressure in Etienne’s head is shifting and adjusting, as if quicksilver is swilling around in pockets of his brain. His happiness keeps growing. He and Axel lean in from both sides, resting against the redhead’s shoulders. She smells of bark. Etienne wonders whether she has a name, or whether she is identified solely by her smell. She touches Etienne’s face, her fingertips like ferns. They take turns: first Axel’s tongue enters her mouth, then his own. How sweet is the crushing against her inner cheek! Etienne can taste traces of Axel in her honey-like saliva. He feels the pull of the earth; his head drops in her lap.
If he had to die here, today, after taking one too many pill, he would be content. Would be the brightest star in the firmament. Above him, Axel and the redhead’s saliva is mixing slowly. His ear is resting against a little nest of pubic hair. He turns his lips downward, tastes the muddiness.
With his eyes closed, and his heart provisionally arrested, Etienne can still see them run: he, Axel and the redhead. Tearing endlessly across a landscape of moss and black rocks. Their feet bloody, her hair like a blowtorch in the wind.
They are back at the cottage beside the pine tree. It is around midnight. Etienne is not sure how they found their way back, but they have been walking for hours, descending from the pill heights. Probably ten or fifteen kilometres. The others have apparently been back for some time. When Etienne enters the cottage, they are sleeping: one on the bare floor, two on a sofa, a few on chairs. Three guys have curled up in front of the cold hearth. They fit into each other: wolf brothers from the same litter, bodies remembering the earliest entanglements. There are blankets everywhere. One girl has rolled a carpet around herself. Etienne looks back. Where Axel and the redhead are, he doesn’t know. He is no longer sure whether they have indeed returned with him. Everything is starting to look uncertain. Etienne lights a new fire in the hearth. He nestles in between the three guys in front of the fireplace.
Slowly the day dissolves in sleep. He dreams in autumn colours: purple and orange and velvety green.
When Etienne wakes up, he is hungry. In front of him two eyes are glowing red. A wet snout sniffs his mouth, fur brushes against his cheek: the pet rabbit. He has no idea how long he has slept. It is still night, but light is shining through a parting in the curtains. A spaceship, he realises. They will all be transported up in a light beam. He gets up, walks out the front door. Not a gleaming flying saucer, it turns out, but a huge flame leaking into the sky. It is sucking up the air; it is nigh impossible to breathe. Etienne’s feet are on the verge of lifting off the ground.
And there Axel is: standing under the tree, looking up at the bright violence. He is still naked, every rib casting a wary shadow. Has he been standing there all night? And where is the wisp of a red-haired girl? Etienne’s memory is hazy. He looks down: he too is naked. The day has written the code of grazes and cuts on his body. Axel turns towards Etienne. They look at each other in the glow, trying to read each other’s skins. Etienne approaches him.
They look penetratingly at each other. Axel’s face is itself a flame when he speaks: ‘We’ll burn and burn, you and I. We’re not ordinary; we’re bodies in the deep cosmos. Blinding comets. Long after our death, the children of earth will see us. Like the ones sleeping in there. Through long, lonely evenings they will recognise us as a fiery pathway in the sky. They will know our names, follow our arc across the heavens. And we will take away their loneliness.’
‘You,’ Etienne says. ‘You . . .’ he says again. He doesn’t get any further. He holds out his arms towards Axel, then touches his own lips. Then his own hair. He is surprised that he still has any sort of shape. The pills have taken away his speech, perhaps forever. It doesn’t matter. They can cut out his tongue, sew up his lips with rough thread. He will communicate with Axel by way of tremors, electrical transmissions between their spines. I’m burning with you, Axel, is what he wants to say. I’m soaring too. Both of them look up at the tree again.
But now the flames loosen his tongue, like someone being filled by the Holy Spirit, someone bearing witness in a church full of the wretched. ‘The tides have brought us here, Axel, phosphorous waves are washing us ashore, out into the burning night.’ How undefended he is in this moment, Etienne thinks. These are not his own words. Like Axel’s, they belong to the pills. For a long time they keep standing there, without touching each other, until the branches fall down around them and only the burnt-out tree remains, creaking and glowing. Etienne can no longer stay awake. Any moment now he will collapse in the dew. He sleepwalks inside, leaving Axel outside.
Etienne lies down with the others in front of the fireplace again. The last thing he sees before falling into darkness is the dim rectangle of the door. He listens to the tree cooling down, and the ticking embers. Ash is whirling in the hearth. Large flakes blow in from outside, descending onto the sleepers like snow. He is waiting for Axel to come and lie down with him, to come and tattoo him with soot.
Etienne is the last to wake up. Outside, the others are standing in silence around the black totem that remains of the pine tree. They are sombre, solemn. Branches are lying in a broken circle in front of their feet. Then he notices for the first time: the girl from yesterday, the one with the pubic hair like the sun at dusk – there are two of her. Identical twins. And everyone, including the two redheads, is looking down at a small corpse: the pet rabbit, pinned down under a burnt-out branch.
In the train on the way back, the wind is still in Etienne’s ears, and his racing comrades’ heels keep flickering in the corner of his eye. His head is bursting with sunshine and the open sky, wild thin bodies, mud on white skins, water streaming, seeds blowing in the late afternoon. If he had his way, he could live in those hills forever with Axel and the red-haired twins. One of them is sitting on the train seat opposite him; which one he doesn’t know. She is fiddling with her kneecaps, as if trying to tune herself to a radio station.
Chapter 12
Etienne feels scorched clean after their Suffolk excursion; he is ready for the blue file once more. Until now, he has been dipping into it arbitrarily, a dictionary by his elbow. Now he starts from the beginning. Axel sits next to him, carefully translating the portions of Irmgard’s journal that Etienne points out, patiently answering questions.
The first entry is dated 4 March 1933. Ariel has just received consent from Benjamin to use his texts. Actors’ auditions are hastily arranged, as well as meetings with cameramen, sound and lighting technicians
and a make-up artist. There are minutes of meetings, notes on equipment and locations. Letters, schedules, plans, addresses. No script will be written, Irmgard notes on 7 March. They will be working directly from text to storyboard. Ariel is conceptualising. And improvisation will be the order of the day.
Filming starts in earnest on 12 April. Etienne reads the daily reports. Irmgard describes it all in painstaking detail, as if seeing everything herself: the position of tracks and dollies, as well as a tower for shoots from above. Etienne tries to monitor the progress with reference to the original film plan and list of scenes. But as the journal progresses, plans shift, and technical detail is increasingly interrupted by comments on political developments. On 2 June Irmgard writes: Another plan of Goebbels announced. No further loans for film production except through the Filmkreditbank. Thank God Ariel’s friends are financing him. And that our project is small and secret.
There are still sentences with which Axel has to help Etienne. And references that Etienne doesn’t understand. Irmgard talks about the tyrants at the spio. Etienne does some research – it is a reference to the Spitzenorganisation der Deutschen Filmindustrie: an organisation that controlled all the tools of film production. Only firms that were members were allowed to make films.
Etienne only drags himself away from the blue file when he has to go to the film school. He can hardly sit still in the classes, editing laboratory or camera workshops now. He marvels at his fellow students’ competitiveness, their self-confidence. After their studies, they want to make commercial films, or bbc miniseries of classic novels, or underground projects in the spirit of Derek Jarman. Some want to imitate their favourite auteurs obsessively. Others want to shoot documentaries. In war zones or the Amazon. Films about the disappearing rainforests or the last Indians who have never met a Westerner. Or they want to take a handheld camera and live with tribes in Central Africa. Or make films about punks and junkies in West Berlin. For them, London is a dull place, a starting point. They dream of film festivals in Toronto or Goa, Cairo or Chicago. Or the glamour of Cannes or Venice. Etienne has little to say to them. And they don’t talk to him in the cafeteria between classes.
His thoughts stay with Irmgard’s journal. Even the film theory seminars, which he previously found so engaging, test his patience. He is now looking through things, like Frank the campanologist. And the smoky air of a 1930s film set is lingering in his nostrils.
On 10 May Irmgard writes about book burnings, the Säuberung: You can smell the smoke drifting over from Opernplatz, the millions of letters floating upwards. I lift my nose, read the acrid cloud of words. Inhale it deeply, store the sentences in my lungs.
A July entry reads: Ariel has just read me this morning’s paper. Goebbels’ Reichsfilmkammer announced. The days of Jews in the film industry numbered. Is it lunacy to continue? I am afraid; Ariel and the team are fearless. Or so they pretend. Early in August the providers of equipment, materials and filming locations start to withdraw. Also some financiers (so-called friends). The make-up artist and second cameraman are no longer affordable. The lighting technician has stopped turning up; others have to take over his tasks.
Letters, rather than names, are now used to identify people who are willing to help despite the risks. The Bell & Howell cameras have both been taken back, Irmgard writes on 24 July 1933.
Ariel first angry, then despondent. After a few unsuccessful phone calls – everyone wants to help, they insist, ‘but the risks, the risks . . .’ – x comes to our rescue. He lends us a brand new Bolex h-16. We have to switch to 16 mm for part iii. Everything is scaled down and expedited. We are replanning, adapting. The portable Bolex, I tell Ariel, makes us agile. He lifts a cynical eyebrow, so I imagine. But I feel his hand around my shoulders, and put mine around his.
Etienne flicks the pages to September. They keep improvising – new equipment, new sources of financing. Acquaintances of Ariel at commercial studios make small personal loans. a, b and c are acquaintances of Ariel, similarly attached to (unspecified) studios, who undertake to help with editing. At night, in secret, in studio facilities, while Ariel and his team keep shooting new scenes by day.
The journal becomes increasingly chaotic. Etienne has difficulty following it. Things are deleted, rewritten in (Ariel’s?) handwriting. The entire production schedule is being disrupted. On 28 September Irmgard writes that they are still working out how to have negatives printed. The laboratories are no longer allowed to help them. On the night of 2 October, an editing machine is smuggled out of one of the large spio commercial studios.
Ariel does a week’s editing in one night. If only I could have helped him! I bring him coffee, sit next to him. Occasionally he takes my hand. Or I search for his.
No wonder the storyboards are so incomplete, Etienne thinks. Tonight he is sitting in the Bermondsey Street kitchen. It is becoming colder; coal is glowing in the iron stove. He sits back, looking through the windowpanes. The old glass distorts the City’s buildings. He tries to imagine Irmgard: behind her typewriter, back straight, her little black eyes dogged and unseeing. Mousy brown hair, lips pursed.
Too vague, he thinks, too generic. And plucked from his imagination. Let him rather focus on technical information. He flicks back to the original specifications: Bell & Howell 35 mm cameras, model 2709, the Tri-Ergon system for sound synchronisation, the amplifier and loudspeakers, five standing lamps, two camera tripods, two dollies, the microphones . . . He works through lists, and amended lists. Gradually their equipment is being taken away. Etienne ignores Irmgard’s personal commentary, which increases as the apparatus and facilities disappear. He rests his gaze on brand names, letters and numbers, as if that is where meaning is to be found.
In the back of the file, in a cardboard pocket, Etienne finds a folded sheet. He opens it. Large handwritten letters read: Tonaufname! Grösste Ruhe! Eintritt verboten! Sound recording! Absolute silence! No entry! Clearly, a notice that was used during filming. He puts it down; it closes automatically along the decades-old fold. He extends his right hand, makes a turning motion, as if feeding film with a hand crank into a shutter. He suddenly feels self-conscious, lowers his arm. He shall find it, this film. Or whatever may be left of it. That is what he will become: a film archaeologist. The ordering of images may escape him, but digging is something he can do. Blindly, fanatically.
They rarely go up to the roof in Bermondsey Street now; cold winds have started blowing. And Axel ceases his work in the attic, the new project half-finished. Usually, when he isn’t working, he drapes a sheet over the installation-in-progress. Now the sheet never comes off any more. These days, Etienne does a minimum of work for his film-school courses. He handed in his film project two weeks ago, relieved to be rid of the camera. Today, for the first time, he feels like switching it on again. What a relief it would be to shoot something that doesn’t have to fit into any project! Just a few free-floating frames. He goes up to the attic. In the changing light he takes lengthy shots of the sheet, draped over an assortment of unknown objects.
Late morning. It is raining. Axel and Etienne are sitting in the Square’s café, where Etienne has previously worked as a volunteer. They are slurping steaming leek and potato soup.
It is the end of October. Even though he has only been here for about six months, it feels to Etienne as if he has never known any other life. As if he was born here among the squatters.
Axel is sitting at some distance from Etienne. Etienne surreptitiously breathes in Axel’s scent. He knows how Axel smells after a shift in the hospital: of ointment and bandages, wounds and disinfectant. Sometimes he pretends he is going to work, but when he returns, he only smells of London, of the streets and the night.
‘There’s a place I’ve been wanting to show you,’ Axel says. He avoids looking Etienne in the eye, blows on a spoonful of hot soup. When they were running wildly in the Suffolk hills, the sun shone behind his irises. Now only the dull light of mena
ce is glowing around each pupil.
Etienne has grown wary of what others want to show him. Why does everyone he meets in this city want to foist their obsessions on him? As if he is a pane onto which to breathe their own vapour? He looks at Axel in the soup steam, wonders whether he is making him part of an installation as well.
The rain has stopped; it is cool and cloudy. At Denmark Hill station they get off the train and start walking. Nunhead Cemetery, Etienne reads above the cast-iron gates through which Axel enters after a while. He follows. The massive cemetery is overgrown and neglected; it has clearly been in disuse for a long time. Axel leaves the path, leads him into the bushes. The roots of fallen trees have ripped open graves, a hundred years or more after they were filled. Axel and he clamber over trunks, stepping on and over crumbling headstones. Axel walks fiercely ahead, his neck muscles tense. Etienne follows in silence, wishing he had brought his camera.
Through the foliage, a small group of black-clad men becomes visible. And music becomes audible, heavy post-punk rock. Axel increases his pace. They are walking in a row, the guys in black. Goths: the leader at the front, four others following like disciples.
Axel and Etienne stop opposite the goths, on the other side of a fallen tree trunk. The disciples are standing on either side of, and a step behind, their priest. On the sleeveless shirt of one is a faded picture of an angel with a dog’s head.