The Third Reel

by S J Naudé

  It starts raining. He seeks shelter in the station. Two petite figures halt in front of him. He blinks. Indeed, it is the red-haired twins with whom he once ran naked across the Suffolk hills. How long ago that feels! Their hair has been extinguished; it is now hanging in wet strings from identical woolly hats. They look at him with surly – accusing? – faces. They turn around simultaneously, disappear into the station.

  He walks back to the Square. He heads for the fire in No. 37. No one else is there; he lies down on the sofa, under the London night sky, looking at the rain and drifting clouds. The fire sizzles and smokes. Water seeps into the sofa. A few noisy drinkers arrive, come and stand near Etienne. He goes to the room with the community television. The door is locked – the first locked door he has ever encountered in the Square.

  He walks out into the rain, crawls under a hedge in the community garden, curls up around the bag of clothes. The storyboards rustle and crumple against his stomach. He reckons it might be warmer in the electrical substation in the Bermondsey Street tunnel. Perhaps he should go and join the blind dog there. Just before he falls asleep, a skittish fox sniffs his head.

  He washes his face at a leaking fire hydrant. When he looks up, the goth leader is standing on the flat roof outside his old room. He is stark naked and white as paper. Hairless, androgynous. He is slowly rubbing cream into his thighs, looking down impassively at Etienne.

  Etienne heads to the station, takes the Underground to Kilburn. In Kilburn High Street he stops at a shop window. Old-fashioned trinkets: sherry glasses, pillboxes, napkin rings. He will never have a house where a patina accretes on such things. Even his drums can rot away; he won’t care. Perhaps he thinks, he should start collecting useless things: locks for which there are no longer keys, old tresses of hair in satin boxes without discernible owners, the cufflinks of strangers’ dead grandfathers . . .

  His reflection shifts over a silver male grooming set. It reminds him of a Christmas from his childhood. He had bought his father a set containing a shaving brush, aftershave and cologne. It had cost more than his pocket money, but the scent had convinced him, and his mother had contributed some money. The wrapping was messy, even though he had done his best, and had started over twice. His father frowned when he opened it, and looked over his glasses, like a diagnosing physician. ‘Real men,’ his father said, ‘do not rub perfume all over themselves.’ He kept shaking his head. ‘This is not a gift one man gives to another.’

  Later, Etienne tore the model planes that he and his father had once built together from the fishing lines hanging from his bedroom ceiling. He looked at the oozing mess of glue where he had attached wings, and at the perfectly smooth joints where his father had glued bombs and rockets. He first broke off the wings, then crushed all of them under his heel and kicked the pieces under his bed. When he lay under the sheets, he thought: I am not even a man. Not yet.

  The next morning the maid had to crawl under the bed to retrieve the plastic shards. His mother threw them on the compost heap, where his father wouldn’t find them. In the kitchen, she took Etienne by the elbow and whispered: ‘Last night, before we went to bed, he opened the cologne and smelled it. A few times.’

  He pulled away. ‘I don’t care.’

  He walks on, stops in front of Miss Jackson’s door. This time she receives him in the lounge. She is wearing tights and leg warmers (just back from aerobics?). And a synthetic camisole, one strap slipping from her shoulder. She folds her legs under her on the sofa. It is just after nine in the morning. She is sipping from a glass of wine, doesn’t offer Etienne anything.

  Etienne drops his bag of clothes on the floor, sits down. She lights a cigarette, picks tobacco fragments from her tongue. She studies the bits on a fingertip, her mouth turned down.

  Etienne looks at his cold fingers. ‘I wanted to ask: has a room by any chance opened up here yet?’ He looks her in the eye. She is lazily blowing smoke sideways, looking half-bored, half-amused. His jaws tense up. ‘I don’t mind sharing a room.’ Her eyes are blurring in the smoke. ‘Even with yourself.’ Whether she is considering or ignoring the request is briefly unclear. Then she shakes her head almost invisibly.

  He gets up and walks out the front door. His cheeks are burning. When he is some distance down the street, he hears someone behind him. ‘Etienne, wait!’ He stops. Brent. His pushy mentor in matters of the conscience. ‘Wait,’ Brent says again when he reaches Etienne, even though Etienne is already waiting. Brent is panting, stooped over with his hand on his knees. Too unfit to run even one block. ‘Let me buy you a cup of tea,’ he says. Etienne allows himself to be dragged along by the arm. They go to the greasy spoon where they went before. The place smells of cooking oil and disinfectant. For the first time since the previous day, Etienne starts warming up.

  The moment Brent starts talking, Etienne regrets coming along. The same old story. About the Struggle, the injustices, the freedom that is just around the corner for South Africa. Brent’s head angles forward like a tortoise’s. ‘Do you have any idea of the suffering of black South Africans? Of the kind of lives they lead in townships, on farms, in factories and mines? The worthlessness of black bodies? Does it perturb you at all? How can you simply detach yourself? As if it has nothing to do with you?’

  ‘You want to add as if you have no conscience.’ Etienne looks down at his muddy t-shirt. This is the worst he has ever had to suffer: a single cold night without a bed. Of real struggle and suffering he understands nothing. This he knows well.

  Brent is now looking at the mud stains as well. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘as if you have no conscience. How can you simply expel that country from your system, like shit? You’re making an historical error, Etienne. One day you’ll be denounced as a traitor. As one of the enemy. History will leave you behind.’ It is the first time that Brent has addressed him by his name. He feels unexpectedly moved. And then annoyed because he is feeling moved.

  He looks Brent in the eye, searching his own thoughts. ‘South Africa washes over me like a cold river on a strange continent.’ He slurps milky tea through numb lips. ‘I’m a stranger to that country. That place and her brutality have nothing to do with me. To give it up, to disown it – that is also something. It is also “no”.’ He sips more tea, sits back. ‘That’s the best I can do for you, Brent.’

  ‘My need for an explanation is not the point. That’s not what this is about.’ Accusation has drained from his voice. For the first time they are sitting opposite each other as true fellow countrymen. Brent unfolds his arms. ‘You can stay with me for a while.’ He looks down at Etienne’s shirt again. ‘Until you find somewhere else to sleep.’ A lair, Etienne thinks, like an animal in the veld.

  Brent sits back, wringing his hands. ‘You have to understand that my attempts to recruit you are all about your conscience, the welfare of your soul.’

  Enough, Etienne thinks. He pushes his chair back, picks up his bag of clothes. ‘I’m perfectly fine, thanks. And I have a refuge.’

  It is raining again. When Etienne descends into the Tube station, he thinks of the word ‘refuge’, of the load it carries. He compares it to the weight of the bag of clothes in his right hand. He is feeling light on his feet. And giddy in the head.

  ‘How dare you? Who are you? What do you want from me?’ Etienne shouts when Axel opens the door in Bermondsey Street. He is rain-soaked, and angrier than he could have predicted. The bag of clothes is shaking in his hand.

  Axel smiles like a blind dog. ‘Welcome,’ he says. ‘Welcome to my lair.’ He stands aside.

  Where else, Etienne thinks, would there be a bed for him in this city of cold surfaces? He crosses the threshold. Axel leads him upstairs. Only in the dim interior does he realise that he left his Blake book behind in the Square. It now belongs to the Finnish goths. Insofar as anything belongs to anyone.

  Chapter 14

  The german in Irmgard’s journal is now decoding itsel
f right in front of his eyes. The sentences simply open up. He hardly needs Axel’s help any more.

  They move from location to location, Irmgard writes in October. They are moving deeper and deeper underground. From the small sound film studio where they started, to empty industrial sites, then to flats belonging to members of the film team. They hardly ever shoot twice in the same place. One evening they film in a former pornographic studio. The next day in a Nachtlokal where, until a year or so before, women used to box naked in front of audiences. Everywhere they black out the windows. Thank God for the portable Bolex camera! Irmgard writes. To be carrying around those Bell & Howell coffins now would have been a nightmare! Outside scenes are the most dangerous, she writes on 19 October. For these they have to slink through the icy streets in the morning hours, cloths draped over our equipment like crape. Always just a step away from being arrested.

  In mid-November there are secret negotiations with contacts at commercial studios to print the first two – hastily edited – reels and make copies. In the meantime the filming is steaming ahead. Unexpectedly a former cabaret theatre is made available.

  For an entire week’s filming! Ariel has been here before. The impresario back then was one Lowinsky. Only the most talentless individuals would participate in his cabaret – the Kabarett der Namenlosen. Ariel recounts: singing housewives, hypnotists who would fail to bring volunteers out of their trances, schizophrenic dilettantes . . . Only the most pathetic candidates would be encouraged. Lowinsky would heckle his drunk audiences. ‘Jüdischer Narr!’ they would snarl back. The place has been standing empty since the Nazis closed it. The sound of sneering and cackling still swirls in the corners . . .

  At dusk Irmgard and Ariel go for wary strolls in the Tiergarten.

  I feel Ariel’s heat next to me. And cold currents from elsewhere. The air is polluted: one can smell wolves . . .

  They dare to go and see a film at the Titania-Palast cinema in Steglitz-Zehlendorf. For a change, it’s not showing a propaganda film.

  My feet are wobbling on the cobblestones outside the cinema. Ariel’s grip bruises my arm. We enter. I feel the chair’s velvet against my neck, Ariel’s breath beside me.

  Ariel describes the ceiling: brightly lit ridges in rhythmic arches. ‘Like ribs,’ he says. ‘If the theatre were a chest, we are where the heart should be.’ He puts his hand on mine; the film starts. He describes everything in my ear: each camera angle, each frame.

  A voice from behind: ‘Shut up, Jew!’ Ariel freezes; so do I.

  ‘Raus!’ a voice says. Out! Another voice, louder: ‘Raus!’ A heckling choir, now.

  We get up; I cling to the back of Ariel’s shirt. People hiss when we push past them. I feel an insect against my cheek. It drips down: spittle.

  ‘Chont!’ someone shouts at me. From a different direction: ‘Kontroll-Girl!’ Ariel steers me. Only when we are outside in the street do his fingers start trembling; he disentangles them from mine.

  After a long search in the Goldsmiths library, Etienne establishes that the Yiddish word Chont refers to a low-class Jewish prostitute. Kontroll-Girls were government-regulated prostitutes, also known as Bone-Crackers or Railway-Girls.

  Etienne wakes up around midnight. Axel isn’t next to him. Abducted by the ghost boys, is his first sleepy thought. He gets up, heads upstairs to the studio. Axel no longer tolerates the crowds who used to drift through this place; the house is empty. Amid the detritus of the previous installation – drawing pins and fragments of photographs – the new project is awaiting completion underneath a sheet. Etienne ascends the ladder, exits through the open hatch.

  Axel looks around with a start from where he is sitting on the roof’s edge in the chilly night air. Etienne squats some distance away, as if approaching a wild animal. After a while, Axel comes closer, rests his head on Etienne’s lap. Etienne places a hand on Axel’s shaved temple, stubble like a scorched savannah under his palm. He feels something warm and damp on his upper leg. It confuses him; tears are not what he wants from Axel. ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ Etienne says.

  They put on extra pullovers, go out. They cross London Bridge. Etienne looks furtively at Axel against the glimmering water, trying to imagine scenes from Axel’s childhood. A boy with a school satchel on a train, next to his mother. She leans over to him, whispers in his ear. The child’s shoulders droop, the weight of her sentences pushing him down into the seat. Or behind his father’s back on a city bicycle. The lines of rubber tyres cross in fresh snow. The father is silent, cap pulled down over his eyes. The child is looking down, letting the tip of his shoe whirr against the spokes.

  This is the first time Etienne has ever been in the City. They walk past blind buildings enveloped in glass sheaths reflecting stone churches. Past porticoes of limestone. Except for security guards pacing in overlit glass lobbies, all is still. They linger in a narrow street. The weighty concrete of the Barbican towers above them. Next to them are the remains of the city’s Roman walls.

  Axel’s sinews are taut; electricity is sparking down them. His body is hunching, as if in pain. Etienne feels Axel’s pulse, then his temperature. Etienne looks away. He forgives Axel for that afternoon in Nunhead. And anything and everything else. They can cross the river again. He will crawl into bed behind Axel. Black rain will fall on the roof. Their pores will open; their skins will exchange messages through the night.

  Etienne places classified advertisements in community papers – an appeal for information about Berliner Chronik. He lists the names of the film production team. Bösel the cameraman, Schwarz the lighting technician. Smaller papers place his advertisement for free. To the larger papers, who charge a fee, he sends a shorter version. He traverses the city, posts notices in art cinemas. And on community noticeboards. The Square’s, as well as in Camberwell, Southwark, Kilburn, Chelsea, Notting Hill and Islington.

  The more he struggles with technical subjects, the harder he tries to find Berliner Chronik’s trail. His fellow students in the lost continental films seminar just shake their heads when he reports on his project. ‘My search efforts may look amateurish,’ he says, ‘but it’s only a starting point.’ It isn’t even that, his sceptical fellow students’ expressions suggest.

  The lecturer smiles condescendingly. ‘Don’t spend too much time on this. Look how little success the British Film Institute has had in uncovering lost films. And that despite their funds and reach . . .’

  ‘There are so many documentaries demanding to be made,’ a feminist student explodes. ‘So many urgent issues. For God’s sake, do something useful!’

  Etienne is unfazed. He writes to the London family registry, as well as the Genealogical and Biographical Society in New York. Most Jewish escapees from Europe would have ended up in these cities. He lists actors and production team members, requesting information about descendants. And, if possible, extracts from immigration records of the ’30s or early ’40s in which these names appear. He also writes to the archives in West Berlin.

  Axel wakes Etienne up early. He is heading to the hospital for a double shift.

  ‘I need your help.’

  ‘In the hospital?’ Etienne is only half-awake. His lips are numb, his eyes scratchy. A garbage truck is making a racket in Bermondsey Street.

  ‘With my project.’ His finger points to the attic. ‘I need to get it going again.’ Axel takes Etienne’s hand, presses it against his own chest. The agile torso of a fox. ‘Meet me at eleven tonight at St Thomas. We’ll be harvesting material.’

  Etienne crosses Westminster Bridge on his way from the Tube station. Below him the currents pass violently and without a sound. Axel is awaiting him at the hospital reception. He takes him into a dressing room, gives him hospital garb to wear. ‘Is this allowed?’ Axel doesn’t respond. He takes Etienne into the paediatric section. A senior nurse observes them from behind a counter.

  They walk down the corridor. It is
after bedtime; there is dim night lighting in the wards. Machines peep and flicker. Axel indicates that Etienne should put on his protective mask. He first breathes in deeply, as if the mask will smother him. They walk past a closed door: Intensive Care. Outside a second door – Burns Unit – they stop. Axel takes something from his pocket. The light is low; Etienne brings his face closer.

  ‘Pigeon feathers? What’s that for?’

  ‘Shh.’ Axel peers down the corridor. ‘You’ll see.’

  There are a dozen beds in each ward, six on each side. ‘Wait,’ Axel says at the door. He enters on his own, moves from bed to bed. He studies the patients and – so it seems in the gloom – rummages through patient files. Sterile silence governs here, like in a vacuum or outer space. There are only the sucking noises of Axel’s rubber soles on the vinyl floor.

  He returns to Etienne. ‘Tonight we’re collecting hair samples.’

  ‘Hair?’

  ‘Cut just enough off each head so that it’s not visible. I’ve marked them: just harvest from each patient on whose feet I’ve left a feather.’

  Etienne frowns. Axel gives him a sealable plastic bag and scissors. The blades’ surgical steel is cool against his palm.

  Axel walks down one wall, Etienne down the other. On Etienne’s side there are four feathers. He is jumpy. The little sleeping figures’ breathing is shallow. They are swathed in bandages. He observes Axel, carefully snipping off locks. He does the same, keeping the sharp points away from the thin skin, the smell of disinfectant in his nostrils. The patients have been rubbed from head to toe with ointment. Where the skin isn’t bandaged, it is shining like roast lamb.