by S J Naudé
Nils’s tears arrive. Those, Etienne thinks, are heavy with salt. He starts pedalling again; the little boat glides forward. In his mind’s eye he is observing an underwater scene. The current around the swan’s water wheel whirls downwards. Bones, densely compressed and water-smoothed, are stirred up from the sludge – the bones of deceased patients dumped into the lake when the hospital was closed. They tumble upwards, grouping together in skeletons: a chaotic revolution of the dead.
Chapter 26
Etienne writes a letter to Patrick in Bonnington Square. He enquires about Patrick’s well-being, elaborates superficially about his life in Berlin, asks for his drum kit to be sent. He provides the address of his three friends in West Berlin for delivery. Etienne will arrange with his new bandmates to send Patrick money through a West Berlin bank and then reimburse them.
He walks out onto Stargarder Strasse to post the letter. When he has inserted the letter into the yellow postbox’s mouth, he suddenly cannot stand the idea of returning to Frau Drechsler’s buzzing radio. He walks on, past the Bäckerei with its fresh bread smells. Trade names hardly exist here: a shop is simply Laden, a butcher’s shop Fleischerei and, indeed, a bakery Bäckerei. Even the pale neon signs spelling out the names look the same. Probably all from the same factory.
He crosses Prenzlauer Allee, buys a planetarium ticket. Someone approaches, stands in the queue behind him: a man with a reddish-blond beard and a woollen pullover. Etienne sits down more or less in the middle of the theatre, tilts his chair back. He closes his eyes, hoping that the second reel of Berliner Chronik will magically be projected against the ceiling. Or that Axel’s face will appear in the Milky Way. Not the one in the fading Polaroid, but Axel as he looks now. When he opens his eyes, Axel’s face shatters into synthetic East German stars. Etienne looks around. The other man is nowhere to be seen.
Then he feels breath against his ear; his scalp crawls. For a fraction of a second he thinks it is Frau Drechsler, having followed him here – blowing a curse in his ear with her proletarian breath. He jerks the chair upright, looks back: the man in the pullover. He shrinks back, as if expecting Etienne to assault him. ‘Sorry,’ the man whispers. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you.’
Etienne waits until his heartbeat has settled. ‘What do you want?’ he asks out loud.
The man sits up straight, looking Etienne insolently in the eye. His lips are encircled by deep beard. ‘You.’
For a while neither says anything. The man gets up, waits in the aisle. Etienne looks at his shoes in the radiance of the Milky Way: dull brown, East German. Etienne gets up too, follows the man to the exit. Just before exiting into the foyer, Etienne notices a third figure in the dark auditorium. Something about his posture seems familiar in the gloom, but Etienne can’t immediately place him.
The man’s pullover is olive green, Etienne notices when they exit into the blinding afternoon. His father, he remembers, used to have a similar pullover. His mother had knitted it when they were young and in love. While he and the man walk down Prenzlauer Allee without speaking, Etienne remembers a photo taken on Hermanus beach when he was a baby. His mother is looking up, laughing, arms stretched upwards. She has just thrown Etienne into the air, is standing by to catch him. His father is looking on, arms folded. He is looking at her rather than at Etienne, suspended against the blue sky. His father is wearing bathing trunks, and the green pullover. Is the framed photo still exhibited in his parents’ bedroom? he wonders.
Amid the noise of a tram on Prenzlauer Allee, Etienne and the man look properly at each other for the first time. The veins in Etienne’s neck are pulsating. They turn right, walk to Helmholtzplatz. The man unlocks a door; they walk up one floor to his flat. The man makes small talk, asks whether Etienne ever goes to the disco on Buschallee. A gay nightclub, the man explains. It is state-run, he quickly adds. Etienne goes to a window overlooking the small square. Alcoholics are sitting on benches. Reflected in the glass, Etienne can see the man undressing behind him. He is very pale and muscular, with a fleece of reddish-blond chest hair. He approaches, presses himself against Etienne’s back. His upper body and groin squeak against Etienne’s leather jacket. The beard is soft in his neck, the lips as cold as snow against his ear. Etienne looks up at the ornate ceilings. Adrenalin is coursing through his arteries like light. He could grab the man by his beard and force him onto the floor, could flay and tear and slaughter him.
Suddenly it strikes him: the other figure in the planetarium was Mthu, the South African counter-intelligence student. His blood heats up like that of prey. He is being watched. And this man is surely his pursuer’s deputy. He disentangles himself from the man’s grip. He walks out the room and out the front door, down the stairs and across Helmholtzplatz, past the alcoholics on their benches, up Dunckerstrasse. He doesn’t look back at the figure behind the first-floor window. He wonders whether he has put on his green pullover again. Then he stops thinking about him.
Herr Bösel, Ariel Schnur’s purported cameraman, lives in a concrete block right by Alexanderplatz, a massive gdr-era building. The man sounds cheerful, even chaotic, over the 1970s intercom. Etienne has barely started explaining the purpose of his visit when the speaker vibrates: ‘Come in! Come in!’ The lift only has a button for every other floor, Bösel being on one of the in-between floors. Etienne gets off on the floor above his. He tries to go down one level, but different sets of stairs similarly only serve particular floors. The place reminds him of the brutalist buildings that Aodhan showed him in London. Or of Aodhan’s fantasy cities: bridges, walkways and squares floating in the air. Buildings in which people are born and die without ever setting foot on the earth.
After several sets of stairs up and down, and walking the length of various corridors, Etienne is at his wits’ end. He is in a vertical labyrinth. He imagines the diagram being drawn by his movements through the building. He is no longer even sure which floor he is on. The apparently arbitrary numbers on the doors of flats don’t help. Herr Bösel’s flat remains just out of reach, as if sealed off from the rest of the building. He takes a lift back down to the ground level. One lift, he now realises, only serves the floors with even numbers, another one those with uneven numbers. When, at last, he walks down the right corridor, an old, bewildered man is awaiting him.
‘Herr Bösel, I presume?’ The man’s plastic spectacle frames have been repaired with masking tape; one lens is cracked. Etienne involuntarily thinks of Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, of the iconic close-up of the wounded old woman: her broken pince-nez, her bloody face twisted in a scream.
‘What took you so long?’ Herr Bösel says. ‘Come in! I have tea!’
Etienne follows Herr Bösel into the little kitchen, where he fusses with cups and a kettle. His hair is thin but voluminous, like candyfloss. The mouth has collapsed inwards; it looks as if he has forgotten his dentures. He wheezes when he talks. Etienne starts explaining: the film, Ariel, Irmgard. ‘Your daughter has given me your address . . .’
‘Yes, yes, I know everything, I know what you’re looking for!’ He drops a cup; it shatters.
‘You know?’ Etienne is baffled.
Bösel ignores the shards of porcelain by his feet. ‘Yes, yes, I worked with such a director in the 1930s! We were trying to do something. Something new, yes. And I have the film, or part of it.’ Hope expands like light in Etienne’s chest. But something seems odd. Could the search really have been so easy, the route so short? A telephone directory and a few enquiries?
Herr Bösel walks into the living room; Etienne follows. ‘No, no,’ he says over his shoulder, vehemently waving Etienne away. ‘I will go and fetch it. Just me!’ He disappears through a door. Etienne is caught off guard by the manic energy. On a little table, next to a plant with sharp-tipped green-and-yellow leaves, is a framed photo of a younger Bösel with a woman. Etienne bends forward to read the writing in the corner of the picture: Norna, Dez. 1976. He returns to
the kitchen, picks up the pieces. Except for the cup, everything in the kitchen is made of plastic.
Herr Bösel returns. Under his arm he is carrying a worn film case. A little vein starts throbbing in Etienne’s temple. ‘Is it . . . ? Do you really have Schnur’s—?’
‘Yes, yes!’ the man says. ‘Of course!’ Etienne looks at the metal container. His urge is to grab it, to shake it next to his ear. To listen rather than to look.
‘I’ve been searching for so long . . .’ Etienne warily extends a hand, as if to a growling dog. ‘I’m astonished that it would materialise just like—’
‘Take it. It’s yours!’
It is too light in Etienne’s hands: empty. The spark of hope dims. He holds it in front of his chest like a shield. He speaks slowly now, as if addressing a child. ‘I don’t think there is anything in here.’
‘Oh! Sorry, I’m sorry!’ Bösel grabs the container, disappears again. Etienne waits, deeply sceptical. When Bösel reappears after a minute, he hands over an even more tatty case, sealed with masking tape. This time, the weight is about right.
‘Thanks,’ Etienne says cautiously. If this man is who he says he is, Etienne will have a thousand questions. He is itching to open the steel box, to look at a few frames. Patience, he thinks, patience. He can always come back. ‘Thanks, Herr Bösel. I will borrow this then.’
‘Keep it!’ the older man shouts after Etienne when he walks back to the lift.
When he exits on Alexanderplatz, Etienne can no longer contain himself. He enters the melange of people by the fountains. In the vapour of mingling breaths, he peels off the masking tape. At first the lid sticks. He manages to prise it open, unspools a strip of the film, holds it up against the fountain. He shifts it through his fingers, frame by frame. Images of a young woman, picking fruit in an orchard. He realises at once it is not what he is looking for.
He looks at the people around him, stiff with cold. Today he wishes he had a rabbit-fur hat. The shop he once visited is just around the corner. He will go and just touch one of those hats. He walks to Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse. The Mongolian shop assistant looks at the film reel under Etienne’s arm, fits a hat over his head. Etienne closes his eyes, touches the pelt covering his ears. He feels like one of a snug litter. He nods at the Mongolian. The hat costs him more than half of his month’s grant money.
Back in his room in Stargarder Strasse he studies the frames more closely. He saw such films when he was studying in London. One of his fellow students – the feminist filmmaker – did a project about them: French pornographic shorts from the 1930s. In this one, an innocent-looking girl is skipping through an orchard, picking cherries. She is lifting the hem of her skirt with one hand, dropping the berries in it. She is not wearing any knickers: between her legs there is the flickering of coal-black pubic hair.
By now, Etienne has virtuously sat through all the Trümmerfilme in the archive: unconvincing sets of cities lying in ruin, artificial daylight shining on the faces of long-dead actors. Etienne’s secret project – to search the archive freely on his own – has stalled. Frau Fuchs has been reigning with an eagle eye from her counter since she caught him in the storeroom. He is biding his time.
As he arrives in Kohlhasenbrückerstrasse this morning, he stops in his tracks. Opposite the archive, a baby-blue Trabant stands idling in the drizzle – the only vehicle in the cul-de-sac, steam coiling from its exhaust. Etienne looks straight ahead as he passes the car.
Inside the archive, the exhaust fumes are still in Etienne’s nostrils when he shakes the drops from his sleeves. As usual, there is no one but himself and Fraue Fuchs and Keller. He has never encountered another archive user. The place feels like a film set. Or a set of rooms lined with one-way mirrors: a vivarium with Etienne as insect.
Frau Keller silently accepts his forms in her gloomy little office. His most recent request is for Anders als die Andern, a Weimar film from 1919 that he discovered while at film school in London. A story about a violin teacher who falls in love with his pupil. The first true gay film. All copies were probably burnt by the Nazis in 1933. But who knows what might have ended up on these shelves, and via which detours? His request form omits a catalogue number; the film is not listed in the categories to which he has access. If the true catalogue is the universe, then the little corner illuminated by his microfiche is but one solar system. There must be larger microfiches elsewhere, with brighter lights. Further categories, more lists, grander storerooms. Perhaps an entire additional building – with cellars and attics, shelves stretching into infinity. This banal little building is surely just a faint reflection of the true archive, with its corridors, ladders and steel containers stacked to the ceiling. With its rooms full of hundreds of kilometres of unspooled film, being wound back onto reels by blind children, year in, year out, their fingers weak and raw from the chemicals, their lungs destroyed by the vinegary fumes. (Did they become blind in these rooms? Or are they given the task because they are blind?) And perhaps, even, there are giant subterranean theatres where one can lie back while every film you have ever desired to see is projected onto the ceilings . . .
Surely it won’t yield anything, his presumptuous request for Anders als die Anderen. It is a shot into the empty universe, but what is there to lose by grasping at dark matter?
Frau Fuchs comes and innocently threads a film through the projector. She is well-practised at it, and usually dexterous. Today, however, her scaly hands are struggling. She clicks her tongue, repeatedly pulls the film out and starts over again. Is she taunting him?
Etienne notices raw patches on Frau Fuchs’s neck: eczema. And her hair seems to be thinning; the bleached spikes are now flat against her scalp. Her eyes are bloodshot behind the glasses. She is breathing heavily. It looks as if she has been exposed to radiation and is experiencing a gradual decline.
When the film finally starts, it is in Russian. He encountered this kind of Soviet film in his London film-history classes. So-called ‘production films’. This one is about a soldier in the Red Army who returns to his home town and imbues the revolutionary ideals of the cement-factory workers and his comrades with new life. There aren’t even subtitles; only the title is written in German on the container: Der Zement. Frau Fuchs is clearly hell-bent on embedding socialist principles into Etienne’s education.
Etienne sits through the barren film. He keeps his face neutral when Frau Fuchs arrives to change reels. In between he grinds his teeth, yawns, stares at the ceiling.
When the last reel ends and the loose end of the film keeps flapping, Frau Fuchs arrives to wind the reel back.
‘Frau Fuchs, I think there might have been some kind of error.’
‘How so, Herr Nieuwenhuis?’
‘This is not the film that I requested.’
‘But that is inconceivable. Frau Keller is extremely precise. She knows the catalogue like the palm of her hand.’
‘I think if you compare my request form with the title of this film, you will appreciate the mistake.’
She is quiet for a while, then brings the steel box closer to her eyes, shakes her head. ‘Alas, I’m not wearing my glasses.’ She scratches her scabby neck. ‘If you wish to submit a formal complaint, you may request the applicable form, Herr Nieuwenhuis. Then we shall investigate.’
They stand opposite each other in the dark. Her face is a blurry mirror.
Chapter 27
It is after two in the morning. Etienne is turning the pages of Irmgard’s blue file for the umpteenth time. He thinks he can hear a far-off tram, but they don’t run this late. A ghost tram, perhaps: echoes of the day’s noises still travelling through the streets, rebounding from façade to façade. He stares at the sheaf of empty pages in the back. Unused paper. He hasn’t paid much attention to them before. Tonight it is as if the bare sheets are saturated with secrets, like human skin, as if they could become legible at any moment. He keeps looking. And wa
iting. For the secret fibres to darken, for something to take shape. He brings the paper to his face, holding it at an angle next to the desk lamp. There is something. He turns the lamp, bringing the paper right up against his eye. His lashes brush against it like insects’ feet.
And there it is! He can’t believe he hasn’t noticed it before: invisible letters, inklessly imprinted onto the paper. This is what must have happened, he instantly understands: the typing ribbon broke without Irmgard realising, and she just kept on typing. He tries in vain to read the indentations against the light. On a hunch, he rummages around in the drawer, finds a pencil and starts lightly colouring the page, the lead flat against the paper. Then it happens: the indentations become legible, lost letters lifted from the past. One after the other the words emerge from the blank page.
He first colours all the sheets, then returns to the beginning. He reads wildly, breathlessly. He takes in entire paragraphs in a single glance, like a starved prisoner chancing upon a banquet. The entries are even more chaotic than before, and error-ridden. The film’s production programme no longer features anywhere. The topics are haphazard; Irmgard is mainly describing her daily experiences in the increasingly threatening city. One fragment catches his eye:
one is so scared when you relise what is hapenning on the streets of berlin where will it all end this btutality Ventured out this morningt almost caught upin the voilence. I come aroudn a corner, hear the shouting it s the Sturmabteilung young communists being arested. Were they still courageous enough to appear in publci were they dragged fomr theuir hdiing places I prss myusefll against a wall, make mysel small right in the mdidle of it all! Rouh uniform brushing against mhy arm the breath being hit out of someone s lungs, a baton a head crakcing againdtst the pavement . . .
