by S J Naudé
‘Are you Herr Anton Bösel’s daughter?’ She is startled, heads off down the street. He follows. ‘You are, aren’t you?’ She picks up the pace; he too. Her panic is now tangible. Good, he thinks. In the land of the Stasi one takes one’s cue from the Stasi.
He catches up with her, blocks her way. She is wheezing. ‘What do you want from me? And from my father?’
‘Ah, so he is your father!’ She leans against a wall, looking for help over his shoulder. He softens his tone: ‘Just information. I’m looking for a film. I’m not Stasi. I’m from the West.’ She looks down at his shoes. His voice rises again: ‘The address! Now!’ Amid tears she blurts it out. He stands aside, lets her pass. She pulls in her shoulders, folds an arm across her soft organs.
Etienne doesn’t bother with practical film-school projects. The anti-fascist from South Africa is, after all, occupied with his important project about Trümmerfilme. Until now, he has been attending lectures, but he doubts whether anyone would care if he didn’t. One afternoon he skips class, takes an early train back. Berlin rain is pouring straight down, returning the factory smoke to earth. He is drenched and soiled with soot when he unlocks the flat. From the Berliner Zimmer he notices a shadow in the corridor by his bedroom. He approaches: Frau Drechsler, on her knees in the bathroom. The laundry basket has been turned over. She is sifting through clothes, turning Etienne’s trouser pockets inside out. By her feet there are little stacks of receipts and notes. She unfolds each new piece of paper. Rain is drumming against the panes. He steps forward. Frau Drechsler freezes, her eyes on his shoes. She falls backwards against the edge of the bath, starts rattling like a machine gun: ‘Coins in pockets break washing machines . . . I’m just making sure . . .’
She stands up briskly. Again, he realises that she is younger than she looks. Her face, as round as a cheese, has a reddish-yellow glow. Her anger makes her look as if she has been exposed to radiation. ‘You should be grateful that there are facilities here! Not everyone in the gdr has washing machines or telephones, I’ll have you know!’
Suddenly Etienne starts wondering: how does she afford these luxuries? Surely not from his and Nils’s modest boarding fees? He picks up the bundle of clothes, carries it to his room. A futile gesture – it will only have to go back to the laundry basket. He drops it on the floor, sits down on his bed. The tram rattles past in Pappelallee. From now on, Frau Drechsler will surely hate him.
Then it occurs to him: what does Nils do to earn an income? How does he pay his rent?
Chapter 25
Over the last week, Etienne has been dining alone with Frau Drechsler. Nils’s bedroom door is now always shut. He hardly speaks to Etienne any more, doesn’t call anyone. Etienne hears his cassette player late at night. Traditional Japanese music, alternating with British synthesiser bands. Someone will have to drag him out of his stupor, Etienne thinks. Whether Nils has friends, he doesn’t know – he has never met one.
He knocks on Nils’s door; the music is turned up. He opens the door, enters. Nils is sitting cross-legged on the bed, staring at the sheets. Etienne turns down the volume. ‘Nobody knows I’m here,’ Nils says without looking up. His skin is dry, his eyes grey. ‘Nothing is moving outside. Not in the courtyards, nor the streets. Not in the air above, nor the tunnels beneath us.’ Etienne pricks up his ears: nothing but the rustling of leaves being chased along the streets by the wind.
Nils is rocking slightly. It looks as if his shoulder bones might tear through the t-shirt. Etienne has noticed how Nils avoids eye contact when their paths cross at the bathroom door, each with a towel around his waist. Etienne would stand there in the lingering steam of Nils’s shower, dropping his towel in front of the mirror, wondering whether Nils would like to intertwine his thin body with Etienne’s again. Etienne remembers their hands in each other’s groins. There wasn’t much heat between their skins; it hardly broke the ice.
He looks at the blue half-moons under Nils’s eyes. He touches Nils’s elbow. ‘Come and attend a few film-school classes with me. I can’t imagine the lecturers would object.’
Nils smiles wryly, shakes his head. ‘This isn’t England. You can’t just turn up. You have to be registered, authorised, approved. Be declared desirable.’
‘Walk around in Potsdam, then, while I’m in class. Just get out. Get some fresh air.’
The next morning they board the train together. When they get off at Potsdam station, Etienne says: ‘Let’s see if they allow you in my class. I’m the anti-fascist from the South, I have room to manoeuvre.’
Nils shakes his head. ‘There is something else I want to do.’
‘As you wish.’
Nils walks down the street. Etienne takes a tram to the film school.
When Etienne’s classes are over, they meet back at the station. Nils’s cheeks are red, his head pulled into his shoulders. He has clearly been out in the cold for much of the day. His eyes are shining. ‘I want to show you something,’ he says. They take a bus, get off after about twenty minutes. Nils veers onto a narrow pedestrian track, between two villas. Etienne follows, looking at the Prussian woodwork on the buildings. The track is wet and slippery. In front of them is one of the lakes that surround – and in places slice through – Potsdam. The villas’ gardens stretch down to the shore. The track ends in stone steps that disappear into the lake, as if leading to streets and villas under the water.
Nils wavers on the top step, as if contemplating descending into the chilly watery city. Then he turns left along the shore, towards moored pedal boats shaped like swans. Etienne turns up his coat collar, follows. They stop next to the swans, chained together in pairs. Each has two seats and two sets of pedals. And fibreglass necks like the bowsprits of gondolas. Small wavelets make the hulls collide and the chains rattle. ‘Come,’ Nils says. He gets into one of the two boats at the back. The circles under his eyes have vanished. He beckons. Etienne hesitates, looking back at the villas’ blind windows. ‘Those belong to senior Party members,’ Nils says in a low voice. ‘They’re given weekend homes.’
Etienne looks at Nils. ‘Surely we can’t just take a boat?’
Nils starts unstringing the chain. ‘I’ve been going around in one of these for much of the afternoon. It’s fine, really.’
‘Where’s the border? Doesn’t it cut across the lake? I don’t want to drown with a bullet in my spine.’ Or, Etienne thinks, with my arms around a swan’s neck and a hole through my heart. Or with a head wound and bloody hands trailing through the water.
‘The border is far enough. Do you think they’d take the risk of people drifting over to the West on plastic swans?’
Etienne pulls his coat tighter around himself. In the middle of the lake there is an island with a forest of bare trees. The branches are so dense that one can’t see beyond the outer trees. He bends forward, knocks on the fibreglass.
‘Did you know,’ Nils asks, ‘that swans choose partners for life? And often males pair up with males.’ He strokes the plastic neck in front of him abstractedly.
Etienne gets in the boat; Nils smiles a little. The fresh air and movement are clearly doing him good. They start pedalling, first backwards until the chain slips off, then out on the open water. Neither of them says anything; only their feet are moving. The wind picks up as they glide further out. Etienne looks over his shoulder at the villas’ frozen gardens. He is convinced a dozen eyes are trained on them, perhaps also the crosses of telescopes. His feet are becoming heavier, his neck starting to sweat under his coat. Except for the swan’s chest breaking the swell with soft lapping sounds, all is quiet.
‘I don’t think you’re supposed to go out this far,’ Etienne says and stops pedalling. ‘Perhaps we should turn around.’ Nils’s hair is sweaty; the veins on his hands stand out in ridges. He is pedalling as hard as he can. ‘Nils!’
He keeps going. The water isn’t as flat as it looked from the shore. Etienne is n
ow experiencing pure dread: fear of the wide-open space, terror of the depths. Ahead of them, the island’s shore is approaching. Etienne starts pedalling again, as if for his life. The swan’s neck is arching proudly, anxiously. They get stuck in the shallows; there are tree roots on the bottom. They get out, tug at the swan. It is heavier than one would expect. They drag it across the roots, losing their footing, onto a little beach.
They enter the thicket of trees – a seam of protection against the water and the dark forms that might rise from it. Etienne involuntarily touches his own head, then looks at Nils’s, as if to confirm they haven’t been shot in the skull. They stop, take off their wet shoes, hang them by the laces around their necks.
The shoes keep the rhythm against their chests as they walk. Etienne’s bare feet are freezing and getting muddy, but the wet shoes are likely to be worse. Nils gestures towards the outlines of a colossal building that is now becoming visible among the trees. ‘That’s what I wanted to show you.’
They stop some distance away from the façade: a grey wall among silver trees. The scale of it astonishes Etienne. ‘What is – or was – this?’ His voice sounds small.
‘An old hospital.’
‘Why so isolated? A hospital for what?’
‘No idea. Infectious diseases, perhaps?’ Plants are trailing and twining everywhere; silence is emanating from the walls. A few tall trunks have fallen and are leaning against the building. Further away, saplings are growing in what used to be a garden.
‘How do you know of this place?’
‘I discovered it as a child once, while we were holidaying on the other side of the lake. There used to be a few wooden huts and a little beach there. I wanted to come here today and see whether I had made it all up.’
Etienne’s feet are getting even colder. This isn’t the kind of place, he thinks, that the authorities would want one to visit. Too far from signals and radio waves, from surveillance equipment. The East German government prefers its citizens in the city. In streets with names and houses with numbers. In public housing, preferably, for which the authorities have floor plans. They don’t like places where one disappears off the radar, like in Schrebergärten on the edge of the city, or summer houses outside it. Not to speak of a ruin in the shadows, surrounded by so much silent water.
The double doors under the portico are hanging askew. Nils and Etienne enter. Columns of light slant through the tall windows – like those of a wrecked ship – above the central stairway. A tree has fallen and burst through the windows. It is leaning on the stairs’ balustrade, as if in a deep sleep.
Halfway up the stairs, the tree trunk blocks their way. Nils looks Etienne in the eye. The urgency that Etienne can sense in Nils makes him queasy. ‘I have to tell you something,’ Nils says. Etienne squats, passes underneath the trunk, comes up on the other side. ‘Frau Drechsler is making enquiries about you. She wants to know things.’ Nils strokes the trunk between them. ‘And she’s still spying. She takes photos of the pictures on your walls. Looks at your documents, your books and notes. Lifts up your mattress . . .’ Etienne rests his palm on the cool bark. The temperature of someone in a coma, he thinks. ‘She isn’t just nosy,’ Nils continues. ‘She’s reporting to someone.’
Etienne stretches his neck muscles, which are on the verge of cramping. He is listening more closely to Nils’s overeager tone than to his words. Nils also crawls under the trunk. They climb the rest of the stairs in silence. They walk down a dim corridor, looking into derelict wards. Iron beds are chaotically dispersed, as if some heavy-footed animal has stomped through the place.
They enter one of the wards: crumbling plaster and rusty beds, old drip racks like hatstands. Blankets that fall apart when touched. ‘You’re not telling me anything new,’ Etienne says. ‘I have caught old Drechsler going through my pockets. By the way, the “pictures” on my walls are in fact “storyboards”.’ Nils’s shoulders droop. Etienne instantly regrets his dismissal; the revelations were what Nils had to offer.
It takes a while before Nils speaks again, his voice now sounding distant. ‘I must’ve been eleven or twelve when my brother and I swam out here. The place had just been closed.’ Etienne looks around in the gloom. Leaves have stacked up in the corners; he can smell the compost underneath. ‘It was summer. There was still a garden around the building then. Medicine in the cupboards, blood-drenched swabs, needles strewn everywhere . . . As if a deadly epidemic had struck the place overnight.’
They enter another ward. There is animal dung on the plank floors. No names of lovers on the walls, no gang symbols. No sign whatsoever of any recent human presence. ‘So, what has become of your brother?’
‘Gone. Disappeared.’
‘Gone?’
Nils opens and closes his hands, as if looking for something to hold on to.
‘Two years ago. On his twenty-third birthday.’
‘Where? How?’
‘Will we ever know? Dead, probably. Perhaps in prison.’
Etienne looks at him enquiringly. Does one ever get full disclosure from East Germans? ‘How, Nils? How?’
Nils sighs, starts recounting. Two years before his disappearance, his brother became fed up with life in the gdr. The sins of their parents – their activities in peace circles, their association with the resistance figure Wolf Biermann, who by that time had been expelled to the West – had been following him everywhere. He couldn’t go to university. The only work he could find was in a radar factory in the north, near the Baltic Sea. His girlfriend in Berlin, who had started her own underground band and had been singing protest lyrics increasingly openly, simply disappeared one day. ‘She was taken’ is how Nils expresses it. (It sounds to Etienne like an abduction by aliens in an American film.) Shortly afterwards his brother lost his job. Then he too disappeared without a trace.
After months without any news, Nils’s mother revealed that his brother had been planning to escape to the West. For Nils’s own sake, he had not been informed. His brother had built a tiny submarine in his cellar – from a chimney pipe, the engine of a scooter and the fan of a Trabant cooler. A water pony, he called it. It would have dragged him deep into the Baltic Sea, to the Danish coast, with him breathing through a snorkel. On his birthday he packed his components in a suitcase and travelled to the coast, where he was to don his extra-thick wetsuit and brave the waters . . .
When Nils starts opening the steel drawers of the bed pedestals one by one, as if he could find an ending for his brother’s story there, Etienne leaves him alone. He walks down the corridor, into a smaller ward. Birds fly up, exit through broken panes. Etienne walks up to the window. He closes his eyes, listening to the wind. He wonders whether he can believe Nils’s story. He tries to imagine the voyage, under the surface of a leaden sea. But strange voices interrupt his thoughts. Like a radio on which the stations are playing simultaneously, or telephone lines crossing: . . . hibernation in the palace of diseases . . . coma on a rusty bed . . . under a blanket of leaves . . . narcosis of the morning mists . . .
The rustling wind behind him interrupts the strange, insistent voices. Etienne turns around. Not the wind, but Nils. He is naked. He drops his little bundle of clothes by his feet, approaches. He presses himself against Etienne, his dry lips touching Etienne’s. Nils clasps him in his arms: the cool grip of a skeleton. Nils’s mouth seals off his own. Nils’s breath is a dark fire sucking the life out of him.
There is a loud tearing noise outside: a falling tree. It hits the forest floor, sending a tremor through the ruin. Nils freezes. Etienne prises himself loose from the embrace, retreats, sits down hard on the bed. His buttocks sink through the rotten bedding, onto the iron. Dust and fibres rise in a black cloud; he starts coughing. Nils dresses, quickly and silently. Etienne touches his chest. Has Nils left scorch marks on his skin? The shadow of a skeleton?
He gets his breath back. ‘I already have someone, Nils. A phan
tom, perhaps, but even so.’ To steal my breath, he wants to add, or Axel’s from me, won’t work. But Nils has gone.
Etienne gets up. His body aches; his feet are numb with cold. He walks down the corridor, down the stairs, crawls through under the trunk. The front door frames the trees outside. Nils is walking away. Etienne follows. Through the branches, the sky is even paler than before.
They struggle to get the swan in the water. The neck jerks stubbornly and arrogantly when they drag it out across the roots. They put on their wet shoes, pedal to the sound of gentle splashing. Neither of them says anything. Nils is looking out across the lake. Etienne is looking down into the water. Images from a period film that he saw in his London days return to him. It is set on a Venetian island that is used as a quarantine area. Carriers of the plague are spewed from boats, then huddle together fearfully on the quays. Fires burn high on the shore; seamen are hurling shoes and clothes into the greedy flames. Heaps of dead bodies are thrown into holes. Cadavers sizzle and crackle, exhaling black smoke . . .
As they approach the shore, Etienne stops pedalling. Next to the moored swans, a man with dark glasses is waiting. Nils also stops. Etienne is remembering something he only half-remembered earlier on: it’s black swans, in particular, that often pair off in male couples. Etienne suddenly wonders whether a deadly disease is clinging to him, with the fibres of decaying hospital blankets. Something medieval. The man on the shore walks on. Etienne immerses a hand in the lake water. Is Nils’s brother still zooming along on his underwater pony? he wonders. On his way to the North Pole, the snorkel’s tip just a speck in the fog?
As if Nils has read his mind, he says: ‘I don’t know whether I should hope that they caught him or that he is still floating somewhere.’ He swallows. ‘I think he is sleeping on the bottom, my brother, beneath all that water. The Baltic Sea barely contains any salt.’ Light, wild waves, Etienne thinks. Slaves of the wind. ‘Boats capsize easily. Bodies sink quickly.’
