by S J Naudé
The iron sounds of Stunde Null’s noise are lingering in his ears. They will be able to make something of it. He will have his drums shipped to West Berlin, even if it costs half his month’s scholarship money. He could store it in his new friends’ little factory.
It is ironic, Etienne thinks on the u-Bahn to Prenzlauer Berg, that his lack of talent has brought him to the other side of the Iron Curtain. His two later film projects in London didn’t show much improvement. In one of them, his focus was on Bonnington Square. It was winter; there were no longer parties and music in the open air. The streets were empty, the trees bare. In No. 52, Patrick was lying in a haze of smoke that had apparently robbed him of his speech. Etienne hovered on the stairs, listening out for the Finns. He took a close-up of his closed bedroom door. There were new squatters everywhere who didn’t know him.
Some of the old inhabitants had forgotten him, or so they pretended. Nobody was, in any event, in the mood to perform for Etienne’s lens. He went back to the café, where the volunteer cooks were irritated by the camera in the cramped kitchen. The drinkers in No. 37 were annoyed too. Hilde and Glenda, each with a glass of red wine in her hand, turned their backs. Others pushed away the camera.
Without a Trace, Etienne called this film. It ends with a shot of the frozen community garden, Frank’s bells audible in the background.
For the third project, he took Miss Jackson’s cubs in Kilburn as his subject. Young South Africans, as pale as subterranean plants. They weren’t in the mood for Etienne’s camera either. Etienne kept returning, lingering in the rooms of a few who had half-heartedly started talking on camera. He tried to gain their confidence, probing them about their escape from South Africa, and their lives in London. He wanted to avoid a political angle insofar as possible, wanted to get under the milky skins. Some unfolded their arms, stretched out their legs on the single beds, started talking more freely. Generally, they didn’t say much; the soundtrack consisted mostly of Etienne’s unanswered questions. He didn’t film faces. The lens would instead pan over worn rugs, or posters of films and art exhibitions. Over bookshelves: sociology and anthropology, Gordimer novels, a biography of Che Guevara. And bodies: toes stirring, pale sunlight on a rough knee. One morning he arrived to find Miss Jackson blocking the front door. In a thin kaftan, despite the cold. Her expression was vague, her arms folded. She shook her head. He had to manage with the material he had. It was his shortest film, entitled Refusal.
His instructors shook their heads over the cobbled-together results, the films about failed attempts to make films. They were increasingly reticent in their comments. At the assessment meeting for Refusal, only one had something to say: ‘Your theme is unclear. There is a strangeness of atmosphere, but there is hardly a story to follow, and we get to know little about the people in your film.’ The formal report entailed a single sentence: The candidate has not succeeded in organising his material in an engaging manner. They had given up.
The good mark for his seminar project could not carry him. He wrote it in diary form – an echo of Irmgard’s production journal. His ‘diary’ consisted of a chronology of his search, as well as copies of correspondence, notices and newspaper advertisements. And his own storyboards for imagined scenes in Berliner Chronik. The day that Etienne had gone to Rotherhithe was described, although the presence of the dying Bernhard Sauer and the finding of the film reel were left out. According to the ‘diary’, Etienne had arrived there in Thatcher’s barren field to find nobody at home; the anonymous note was just another false clue, the visit another cul-de-sac. The diary ended with Etienne pedalling home empty-handed.
His seminar lecturer showed Etienne’s so-called diary to the scriptwriting instructor. The latter called Etienne to his office, suggested that he might want to focus on scriptwriting. ‘If you were to sharpen your plotting – tighten the tension, dramatise events more vividly – something might come of it. Write another ending. Let your character find the film.’ But Etienne was happy with the open ending. The only two people who would ever know about the real ending – and the evening of projector light, ghost images and silver snow in a Bermondsey Street backyard – were he and Axel.
When it became clear, just before Christmas, that Axel wasn’t coming back, Etienne wanted to go and search for him in Berlin. There was no way he could afford it. He had to calm down, wait for an opportunity. In early January, information about the student exchange programme was made available. The possibilities were New York, Vancouver, Stockholm, Barcelona, even Mexico City. And the hff in East Berlin. Berlin was the only place where Etienne wanted to be, had to be. Axel was there, and, he hoped, the remainder of Berliner Chronik. West Berlin wasn’t on the list. He chose the hff, hoping no one else would. The London Film School was surely keen to get rid of him. In light of his anti-apartheid aura, and the political intervention around his admission, it would have been hard for them to force him out. In March he heard that he was on his way to East Germany’s only film school. And that his scholarship money would be increased. He was stranded in London until the new academic year, but a new city was beckoning.
Etienne gets off at Schönhauser Allee, turns left in Stargarder Strasse as usual. Chilly fog is floating around his ankles.
When he enters the flat on the fifth floor of No. 72, Frau Drechsler is sitting in the Berliner Zimmer. The radio is on. The voice of Erich Honecker, the East German leader, is droning. Etienne’s earlier, tentative feeling of arriving home, when he had exited Friedrichstrasse on the eastern side, instantly evaporates as Drechsler’s beady eyes meet his gaze.
He has brought back gifts from West Berlin. A bottle of French Chablis and Swiss chocolate for Frau Drechsler. Cassettes for Nils: Bronski Beat, Depeche Mode, Roxy Music. These he had hidden on his person. Chocolate imports are rationed; the customs official had weighed it. Frau Drechsler frowns at the wine, as if she is planning to throw it away. The next day he hears her humming and smacking her lips; he catches a glimpse of her with a glass brimful of Chablis in her hand. A welcome change, he is sure, from her nasty Rotkäppchen Sekt. And better than she would find at Exquisit – the Ost-Delikatessen in Kastanienallee – even if she could afford it. She is tuned into Stimme der ddr, propelled by East German Schlager music. She isn’t dancing. Or not quite. Her oscillations between the Berliner Zimmer and the kitchen aren’t entirely independent of the swerving melodies. Etienne looks at her swollen feet in slippers.
Etienne has greater freedom at the hff than in London. The fact that he left South Africa in protest, and is vaguely focused on anti-fascist films, is enough. He is not expected to do any practical work. Not that the standard of student work here intimidates him; it consists of sycophantic documentaries toeing the party line or, in the case of narrative films, sentimental social realism that defies any sense of reality.
He has been attending classes for almost six weeks, and now he has to select a research topic. ‘Trümmerfilme are what I wish to study,’ he announces to Herr Direktor. He is sitting in the director’s office, on an orange chair. He wants to do a comprehensive investigation, he explains, into this genre that was so popular in the 1940s. Stories of people trying to survive in the rubble of destroyed German cities while being confronted by moral and ethical questions. He initially wanted to profess that he would be working on ‘mountain films’ from the 1930s – films featuring heroic adventures in the Alps, with hardly any dialogue. The uncomfortable associations with filmmakers who were later co-opted by the National Socialists would, he subsequently decided, make this genre a suspect choice. Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s favourite film propagandist, had, after all, once enthusiastically performed in such a film.
‘That is a dignified and promising subject,’ the director says. ‘The semi-documentary nature of several Trümmerfilme offers a firm base for the kind of work we encourage here at Konrad Wolf. Insofar as both production and theoretical study are concerned.’
Etienne listens to his
robotic cadences, like a child reciting portions of the Bible. He was right not to mention anything about his true subject, Berliner Chronik. His first meeting with the director served as a warning as to what could be said. Although Benjamin was once nominally a communist, his position is far too complicated, his class background too decadently Jewish-bourgeois, to fit in with this man’s – or his masters’ – schemes. Etienne looks into the director’s watery eyes, at his ill-fitting jacket. Yellowish and rough-textured, like curtain cloth. He suddenly feels sorry for him. How does his internal life align with what he is reciting? Which thwarted creative ambitions are simmering inside his skull?
Or could it be that he does his work with conviction? It is difficult to read men here. They remind him of South African men: closed and fierce, with a secret yearning for violence.
Herr Direktor keeps nodding. Here is Etienne’s chance: Trümmerfilme as smokescreen, the freedom to quietly do what he wants. Veiled projects are nothing new to him. Nor the uttering of compliant sentences that belie the rhythm of the heart.
Chapter 22
Etienne exits no. 72, turns left in Stargarder Strasse. Is Frau Drechsler watching him from the bay window? He doesn’t look back, crosses Pappelallee. Then Lychener Strasse and Dunckerstrasse, registering the cobbles through his soles. Stained sheets hang in the windows of some former shops; others have been covered up with wooden planks. On stone façades are weathered letters from the previous century. The modernisation of some shopfronts during the gdr era has exposed Jewish traders’ names. Rawitz Kristall und Glas. Kronthal Silberwaren. Apart from the bakery opposite No. 72, there is only one functioning shop in the street: a Fleischerei. Lumps of shockingly red meat are exhibited in the window.
He crosses to the middle of Prenzlauer Allee; a grey-green tram rattles past, centimetres from his toes. Opposite him is a building with a domed roof. He immediately recognises it: the new planetarium. It looks like a stranded jellyfish, twin brother of the Fernsehturm’s dome floating in the distance when he looks down Prenzlauer Allee.
When he was a child, he remembers, his father took him to the Johannesburg planetarium. There was an official narrator: a disembodied voice unlocking the secrets of the cosmos in a soothing voice and sabc English. Other sons and their fathers lay back, drinking in the secrets with shiny eyes. Etienne’s father wasn’t giving the heavenly narrator a chance. He was elucidating what was happening on the ceiling himself – in an increasingly thundering voice, and an apparent attempt to drown out not only the heavenly voice but the rumblings of the universe itself. Etienne put his hands over his ears, screwed his eyes shut. He dreamt up counter-sounds in his own voice: cacophony to battle the cacophony. His father grabbed him by the arm, took him outside.
Zeiss-Grossplanetarium, it says next to the entrance. Etienne enters, buys a ticket from a woman with a drab face and dull hair. Another man enters behind him, he sees from the corner of his eye.
Etienne sits down in the dark; the chair smoothly tilts back. The glittering universe drifts by above him, but it feels as if he is moving. A disembodied voice starts narrating. Heavenly bodies and constellations glow more brightly when the voice refers to them. Etienne’s eyes don’t follow the illuminations; he is more interested in the darker stars on the edges and the burnt-out planets. The narrator intones comforting cosmic truths, his very tone suggesting infinity. Etienne can hear a grey-faced bureaucrat somewhere behind it.
The other man sits down a few chairs along. They are the only ones in the auditorium. Overhead, explosions and solar systems shift past in a sluggish current, the waters of a sorrowful heavenly river taking leave of tiny human figures in velvet chairs. Stars slip over the edge and disappear. The chairs are ergonomically ill-designed; within minutes Etienne’s neck is aching. It is stuffy too. His scalp is itchy, sweat is soaking into the velvet. He can’t look away from the drama overhead. The river – an equatorial night river – is now beneath him; he is on his back in a boat. Oarless, heading towards the fast-approaching rush of a waterfall . . .
The man is looking at Etienne rather than the ceiling. Etienne’s eyes have become used to the dark. He returns the man’s gaze, annoyed. Was there a subtle hand signal? He ignores him, lies back again.
Underneath the light of the synthetic East German stars he suddenly misses Axel, in his bones. They were only together for a few months. And yet Axel has caused his bone plates to shift tectonically. His body is functioning differently from before. Chunks of bone have split off, attached somewhere else. He is now more scar tissue than healthy flesh. If he were to be cut in half and dipped in formaldehyde, he would be a peculiar specimen. The only other halved body that would look like that is Axel’s . . .
The man gets up, sits down right next to him. Etienne turns his head. It is the most beautiful man he has ever seen. Shiny eyes, stubbled chin. He is staring at Etienne. In the radiance of Jupiter and Mars, Etienne can see an erection in the man’s trousers. He thinks of Axel, of their blasphemous nights in London’s vinegary air. He sighs, though it sounds like a sob. He rolls his head sideward to meet the man’s lips. The cosmic-bureaucratic god speaks soothingly of explosions on the sun. It is getting warmer and warmer. The sun’s flames are roaring, shooting across the firmament. (Will the velvet chairs catch fire?) Then he sees it, through half-open eyes in the orange light: the man’s shoes. Etienne pulls back, snarls. He jumps up, shuffles past the chairs. He stumbles, hurries up the aisle, into the lobby and then frenziedly out into the pale afternoon light.
He scurries around the back of the planetarium, turns into the park. ‘Idiot,’ Etienne addresses himself. ‘You stupid bloody idiot!’ What had Nils told him? Look at the shoes. Shiny Western shoes mean someone is either a visitor from West Berlin or Stasi. Why would a visitor from West Berlin come to this planetarium? And no ordinary East German would so nonchalantly take risks. He looks over his shoulder at the back of the planetarium, walks into a copse of trees. He won’t be tricked again so easily. There is nothing as intimate between men as being strangers; this he learnt in London. In this half of this city, he will have to learn, intimacy doesn’t exist, and especially not between those who are closest to each other.
A document that allows Etienne access to the gdr film archives has been issued. Herr Direktor calls him to his office, hands it over personally. It is co-signed by some government official. Why, Etienne wonders, does Herr Direktor show so much interest in him? There are other exchange students here – from Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria. One from Mozambique. Does he give as much attention to them? The director opens a map, draws a red circle around the Staatliches Filmarchiv. He summons Frau Finkel, hands her the map.
‘Frau Finkel, won’t you show the student the route, please?’ Etienne follows her to her small office. She draws a dotted line to a destination on the edge of Potsdam, hands the map to him with an inscrutable smile. Etienne looks at her hair, stacked in a beehive. He half expects her to perform a little dance: the jive or jitterbug, the Lindy hop. She keeps standing there uncomfortably, blinking her eyes. Her smile becomes a grimace.
Every morning, Etienne commutes an hour to the film school. Today he takes a bus even further. He waits in front of the villa where Herr Direktor has his office. It is a cold, foggy day: his first taste of winter here. On the bus he follows Frau Finkel’s red dots with his finger.
From the bus stop where he gets off, he has to walk a hundred metres or so further to the Staatliches Filmarchiv in Kohlhasenbrücker Strasse, a cul-de-sac. On the right is a low asbestos building, beyond which a young forest stretches. Soon, winter will be stripping the leaves, but, for now, light is still filtering through the foliage. Trails of fog are seeping through the sprigs; tiny drops are forming on his cheeks.
The front door is locked. He rings a hoarse bell. A woman opens the door, lets him into a reception area. She turns the lock again, walks to her counter. ‘Can I help you?’
‘I am Etienne Nieuwenhui
s.’ He extends his hand; she just looks at it. He clears his throat, unfolds the permission document on the counter.
She puts on her glasses, reads, takes them off. ‘I am Frau Fuchs.’ She walks out from behind the counter, to the opposite side of the space. Etienne follows. She opens a door to a tiny room. She switches on a desk lamp; it emits a small circle of cold light. ‘This is how it works: you may sit here . . .’ She switches on a light box in front of him. ‘A microfiche reader. We only use the newest technology here.’ She bends forward, feeds a microfilm into the machine, turns a knob. Categories and lists roll across the screen. He looks furtively at her lower lip, from which her neck runs down chinlessly. She has bulging eyes, as dim as a fish’s. Her hair is spiked and peroxided.
‘This is how the system works.’ She starts reciting an explanation. They have material from the pre-war Reichsarchiv, as well as everything produced in East Germany under the aegis of defa, the government film studio. ‘And everything from other countries that embrace the socialist system. There are categories and subcategories for newsreels, documentaries, feature films, short films and television programmes . . .’
She drones on in a robotic voice, gives repetitive and contradictory descriptions of the obscure numbering system. The Reichsarchiv items, she explains, go back to 1934. ‘What was left after the war was taken to Russia for safekeeping. This material was later brought back. But a lot of things had gone up in flames. Dissolved into the heavens.’ Her hand opens, as if letting go of a balloon. ‘Poof! Smoke and ash. And in 1945 the Americans had looted crates full of Reichsarchiv material. Whatever might’ve happened to that, no one knows . . . but the post-war material, administered by the gdr, in this archive,’ her finger points at her own chest, as if her body houses shelves full of film, ‘is complete, and scientifically catalogued.’
