by S J Naudé
When they are done, Axel collects the feathers. Outside, in the bright corridor, he studies the plastic bags, shakes his head. ‘I need more.’
Axel holds a finger to his lips. They go into the intensive care section. More peeping and flickering. Axel scans through files again, leaves feathers on seven beds. The harvesting continues. While Etienne is cutting hair off the last little patient, the door opens. He drops the strand on the sheet, grabs it in a reflex movement, folds it in his palm.
It is the senior nurse. She looks at them in silence, closes the door again. He slips the lock of hair into his pocket.
In the corridor Axel takes Etienne by the wrist, presses his finger against Etienne’s lips. He folds Etienne’s hand tightly around the scissors, points the blades to yet another door. It is too dark to see the sign on it. Etienne’s eyebrows curve into a question. ‘Just you this time,’ Axel whispers. It is a blind mission, Etienne realises, like those on which Axel used to send his Bermondsey Street assistants. I’m neither your disciple, nor your assistant, Etienne wants to say. Axel gently pushes him forward.
With his hand on the door handle, he looks around. He is curious, and he does want to please Axel. Axel retreats, disappears in the gloom. Etienne goes in. There are rows of lit glass cases on either side. And, in each, a premature baby not much larger than a man’s palm. Half-formed, unprotected. Skin that would tear if touched. He recoils. He wants to flee, but something is compelling him. He holds his breath, reaches with the scissors into the warmth of one of the incubators. His hands are trembling; the blades are longer than the child itself. There are downy hairs on the head, a fuzz growing around the shoulders. He closes his eyes, snips. Snips again. When he opens his eyes, there is nothing. The down is too fine.
He looks around, finds a pair of nail scissors on a steel tray. He reaches in again, cuts, closer to the skin this time. A few strands of blonde hair fall onto the sheet, next to the little misshapen ear. He picks them up. They look like the sea silk that Etienne once read about in the Children’s Encyclopaedia, the golden filaments with which mussels attach themselves to rocks. Then he is out in the corridor.
They walk through the hospital. The hospital gown is cool and loose, too large for Etienne. Now that he has the hair samples, he feels free, almost naked; the cotton sleeves sweep and whistle. He observes actual nurses in the corridors, then looks down at himself, the imposter. It isn’t in fact an ordinary nurse’s outfit, he realises. Perhaps a theatre gown. Or a surgeon’s operating garb. He imagines the gown under ultraviolet light, showing the traces of years of procedures: stain upon stain, soaked into the deepest fibres. The fluids of operations and amputations, of transplants and tumour removals.
Axel pulls him into a dim space. A tea room. There is the hum of electricity. Scattered tables and chairs, all stackable or foldable. The lights are off. Beyond wide glass panels he sees the river and the brightly lit parliament building. Light is reflecting off the water, creating patterns on the walls and ceiling. They stand opposite each other, water and light playing on their faces. Etienne solemnly hands over his sealed bag of hair.
He wants to ask Axel what he is planning to do with it. Wants to ask what the meaning of the ritual was, and why he had to come along. Those would be the wrong questions. Where Axel’s art is concerned, you are better off playing the obedient apprentice. What he does ask is: ‘You select those who are going to die, don’t you?’
‘One can never be sure who will survive . . .’
The glass and the river and Axel’s eyes are shimmering. Beyond this, there are only shadows. Etienne feels sentiment surging, and tears. ‘Promise me you’ll stay with me,’ Etienne says without wanting to, ‘when I’m no longer a child. Until I’m old, and tired, and bent double. Until pearls grow over my eyes.’ He says it in Afrikaans. The hospital’s machines are droning. The river is flowing silently. Etienne thinks of London, of this city of stone. Of the thousands of lovers’ promises it has had to absorb without ever being warmed up by even a single degree Celsius.
Axel feels Etienne’s collarbone, rests his finger in the indentation beneath his throat. With his own finger Etienne feels Axel’s pulse (as regular as a watch). ‘You know I can’t follow what you’re saying,’ Axel says. Etienne takes the lock of hair from his pocket, opens Axel’s hand, lets go of it.
Chapter 15
Axel is working with his hair samples in the attic. Etienne is reading the last pages of Irmgard’s diary – that is, the typed text preceding the blank pages at the back. There are no further references to the filming or production process. Nothing about editing or post-production work. Have they abandoned it all?
The entries become chaotic. Typos appear. Dates disappear, then paragraphs. Only dense text remains. Capitals and punctuation – even full stops – ultimately fall away. Irmgard is typing in a frenzy. A stream of thought. They apparently rarely venture outside any more. She refers to candles, oil lamps, light through cracks – all the things she cannot see. i just wan togo wandering one more time on unter den linden ariel say s if icould see what he sees i’d know ho crazy it is to brave thta lair
She writes about a secret Brecht performance where the ss showed up. A play for the education of workers. Ariel was there. The ss casually walked in during the performance and sat down in the audience. People fled from their chairs; the ss let them go. The players froze in their tracks, were arrested on the stage. The director too. The small theatre’s Jewish owner was dragged away; a cabaret singer was hit in the face with a rifle butt.
Irmgard describes how she and Axel sit through long evenings holding hands, making plans to leave Germany. Then the text just breaks off. In the middle of a sentence. She is writing about menstruation: i wait for the flow ifeel the tension buildin up the pain in my abdomen thesore joints m y back everything is so tender and ontop of that the w orld is so
Late November. The semester is almost over. Today Etienne has to listen to his film – Waking up in Axel’s World – being assessed. If he himself has no confidence in it, how could the experts? It is a cobbling together of fragments, and the arrangement doesn’t feel right. He has since thought better of every sequence, has imagined alternative shots and scenes, conceived of cleverer concepts. In his mind he is constantly re-editing.
They are sitting in a small auditorium: Etienne’s lecturers for camerawork and cinematography, editing, scriptwriting and directing. And the film theorist. They have already written their report, but have to watch the film with the candidate too. Etienne loads the reel onto the projector. While scenes in the Bermondsey Street house are flickering across the screen, he looks from one to the other. The cinematographer is playing with his beard; the images are reflecting in the editor’s glasses. The faces betray little. Etienne looks at the screen, where the lens is zooming in on Axel’s back. He is in the tin bath in the kitchen, cigarette in his hand. The oak tree is out of focus. The supple branches ripple along with the sinews.
When the film ends, the theorist gets up to switch on the light. He is moving swiftly and nervously, his fringe falling over one eye, shirt buttoned to the top. Like a veritable New Romantic, an odd style for someone in early middle age. Only the humming of equipment is audible, the vibrations of electrical currents in the walls.
The cinematographer’s tone is pedantic, pontificating. ‘After Tarkovsky’s death, his production manager told an interviewer how, one morning in the ’70s, when they were working on Stalker, they had to film a scene in a field of grass. The previous evening Tarkovsky had studied the landscape from every conceivable angle. When they started shooting, he jumped up, waving his arms. “Cut, cut.”’ The cinematographer makes silly waving movements; the theorist frowns. ‘Overnight a few wild flowers had started blooming. The assistants had to move sideways through the grass, crablike, so as not to disrupt anything, and pick every last flower. Only then could the shoot continue . . .’
The lesson isn�
�t obvious to Etienne. ‘Yes,’ the editor says, ‘and after all that the material was destroyed in a Soviet library that didn’t know how to develop the American Kodak film. Tarkovsky had to start from scratch. He ultimately used five thousand metres of film.’ He gestures towards the cinematographer. ‘What we’re trying to say is: our students have to develop a fine eye. Attention to detail, skill. Perseverance, even obsession. There is such a thing as raw talent . . .’ A fan starts hissing in the projector. The theorist jumps up, switches the machine off. The editor continues. ‘And, yes, there are Americans like Warhol or Bruce LaBruce – or their predecessor Kenneth Anger – who elevate amateurishness to art, but that kind of work has its own context. Our students have to apply acquired technique.’
It is the scriptwriter’s turn. He is wearing a tweed jacket and black-framed spectacles. ‘There is nothing wrong with an instinct for spectacle, but narrative is a better starting place. Or at least show us some patterns. Let me be blunt: you’re hardly demonstrating a feeling for story. And the spectacle is hardly something to write home about. Your material is promising, but the parts of your film keep hovering separately. The whole ultimately amounts to less than the sum of the—’
‘We’ve prepared a report with more complete commentary,’ the theorist says. He glances quickly at his colleagues, holds out the document towards Etienne. ‘Alas, it’s not a pass. Back to the camera for you, and to the editing laboratory.’
On his way home on the Underground, Etienne reads the report. First the summary at the end:
Although there are therefore interesting choices of material, and a few frames deliver strong images, the student has not absorbed enough basic techniques in the lectures and workshops. The successful images feel like flukes, and do not save the project. The will to acquire technique, and consistently apply same, is a prerequisite. Even taking into account that this is a first attempt, the student is not adequately demonstrating this will.
An earlier paragraph catches his eye:
The student might want to consider the Lumière brothers/Méliès dichotomy. The focus on truth versus the fantastical, shooting on the scene or in the studio, the documentation of events versus the telling of an engaging story, the camera as witness of true events or the truth-maker of fantasy, truth on the surface as opposed to embedded truth. The student has to place himself in this framework, find his place.
Axel is awaiting Etienne when he arrives home, report in hand. Axel’s eyebrows twist into question marks. He rubs his own knuckles, his fingers intertwining. Etienne just shakes his head. He is surprised to feel emotion welling up. This city is constantly keeping him close to tears these days. He turns away quickly.
‘I have something for you,’ Axel says. He heads upstairs, pulling Etienne along.
The sheet is still there, with something unknown underneath it. The shape is now regular, though, a rectangle – an item has been removed and is leaning uncovered against a wall. The afternoon light is falling upon it: a painting on a huge canvas. In hyperbolic Blake style, a figure in a radiating robe. A shortened perspective, the angle sharp from below; the viewer is looking into scorching white light. The face in the painting is Etienne’s. Chin lifted, the expression haughty. From the skull magnificent ram’s horns emerge; they are rubbing against the skies, emitting sparks.
‘I didn’t know you painted,’ is all Etienne says. Many things occur to him while he is looking at his strange likeness. He swallows a sob. I will stay with you, he wants to say, among other things, until you are old, and tired, and bent double. Until pearls grow over your eyes.
In the film-school library, Etienne takes out a book to read about the production history of Stalker. About the precision to which his editing instructor had referred, and the obsession. He reads about how the team filmed in Estonia over long periods, and under difficult circumstances. In old factories, near chemical plants. In a poisoned landscape. Several members of the production team later died of lung cancer, including Tarkovsky himself. Etienne sits reading on the studio floor, underneath the painting of himself as a horned Satan-God. He rests his face against the oil paint. It is still damp, and fragrant.
Axel smells vaguely of death when he comes home. He smiles, touches the paint stain on Etienne’s cheek with the back of his hand.
Etienne receives a swift response to his query to the archives in West Berlin. A German bureaucrat points out that many family registers in Germany, particularly those of Jews, were destroyed during the war, or scattered thereafter. Many of those that were preserved ended up in East Germany. This kind of search, where so few facts are known – in essence a name and a year during which the relevant individuals lived in Berlin – is rarely successful.
He hears nothing from the London family registry, but a few days later there is a letter from the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Your information is too limited, and therefore does not enable us to respond in a meaningful way, writes a blunter American. Clearly you are searching for a needle in all the haystacks of the world. You need a fine comb rather than a pitchfork. And a thousand years.
For weeks he has been following up responses to his classified advertisements in community papers. Attention seekers, it turns out every time. Hoaxers, tricksters, swindlers. Individuals who are greedy or bored or disturbed. They try to lead him astray. One woman writes a long letter describing how her grandmother had supposedly acted in such a film, how she herself had watched the film over and over as a child in a terraced house in East London. They arrange to meet for coffee in Holborn; she doesn’t turn up. She confesses in a further letter that she does not in fact know anything about the film and had simply wanted to meet Etienne. She watched him waiting in the coffee shop, she writes. She hopes he can forgive her. She is now more sure than ever that divine intervention has brought them together. Over the course of twelve pages she declares her undying love. (The paper is drenched with perfume.) Then there is a man who alleges in a letter that he possesses a full print of Berliner Chronik. In fact, he had acted in the film himself! He suggests setting up a treasure hunt for Etienne, with clues hidden all over London and the long-lost film as the prize at the end. Etienne looks at the recent photograph of himself that the man has included. At the earliest, he was born two decades after 1933 . . .
One night he dreams that he is suffering a strange kind of blindness. All he can still see is Berliner Chronik, projected in an endless loop on the inside of his lids. These are the only images that he will ever see again, he realises with dream logic, until, one day, they flicker and die with him.
Afternoon, mid-week. Axel is at the hospital. Etienne goes upstairs to the studio. Against his better judgement, he plucks at a corner of the sheet. It crumples at his feet. In front of him is a large glass case. Inside: a cityscape in miniature. The execution here is more detailed, the scale more ambitious, than in the earlier installation using pigeons. There are streets, buildings, train tracks, buses and cars. And human figures this time, instead of birds: tightly woven from hair, like voodoo dolls. Dozens of them – that night in the hospital certainly wasn’t Axel’s first harvest. The roofs of buildings are, once again, scorched open, as if torched with a flamethrower. Over everything lies a thick layer of ash.
Chapter 16
Early december. Buildings look brittle, frozen. Streets and pavements sound hollow underfoot. The windows in Bermondsey Street are closed; now the morning fog slips around, rather than through, the house. The gluttonous Dover is being fed with coal; heat rises up to the attic. They arrange the rooms with furniture they collect in the streets. One day Axel comes home with newly purchased bed linen. ‘You’re becoming domesticated,’ Etienne says.
Axel grins. ‘Don’t be so sure.’ But a few days later he brings home a television and videocassette player that he bought second-hand somewhere. At night, they also light wood fires in the fireplaces. They cook together. Soups and stews. Axel prepares heavy southern Ger
man dishes. Their thin bodies are growing stronger. On dark evenings they linger in boiling water in the tin bath, washing each other thoroughly.
Etienne is letting his hair grow; it is now touching his shoulders. Axel’s is shaved against his scalp every few days. In the evenings Etienne lays his head on Axel’s chest, or vice versa. They listen to music, or foxes in the streets. They watch films on video. Or they dress warmly and walk through the city streets for hours. Etienne inhales the cold air deeply, looking at the ice crystals forming in Axel’s hair, smiling. Axel doesn’t smile, just reaches for Etienne’s knuckles every now and then.
When Etienne wakes up, ladybirds are clustering at the window.
In South Africa he had imagined London as a frozen winter landscape. To his surprise, his first few months here felt like eternal summer. An unusual season, everyone told him, we don’t usually have such summers in this city. In the meantime there has been a short autumn; now winter has properly arrived. Dull days, low clouds. In his mind, London and long summer days have nevertheless become synonymous, afternoons in which one can unwind in generous light.
This morning, out of the blue, it is warm again, as if summer wants to send a last message. Morning sun is pouring through the window. Axel is still snoring. A few ladybirds crawl through the crack between the window and frame, fly around clumsily, crawl in circles on the sheet. More follow, confused by the seasons, still drunk with summer lust. Perhaps the earth has slipped on its axis, and true north has shifted infinitesimally. Unmeasurable by a compass, but enough to disrupt animal radar: shortly bats will start crashing mid-air, migrating birds will turn around mid-flight and head back north, or kill themselves against wires and masts.
