by S J Naudé
Frederick gets going again, rattling off bands, speaking ever faster: Nurse with Wound, Nocturnal Emissions, Pornotanz, Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft. After each name the verdict follows. He makes short shrift: revolutionary or banal, absolute genius or utter shit.
Christof sits back; he has given up any hope of getting a turn. Matthias waits until Frederick has vented fully. ‘Stunde Null can learn a lesson from Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft.’ He speaks slowly, with emphasis. ‘To be circumspect with the fascist stuff. daf once arrived to play at a festival in the uk. And encountered thousands of amped-up skinheads waiting for them in a cloud of sweat and adrenalin.’ He turns to Etienne. ‘Do you know daf?’ Etienne shakes his head. ‘Gay, lefties. One of their songs is “Der Mussolini”. But people hear what they want to hear, filter the riffs through their own hate. It’s naive to expect an ironic ear, or a sense of parody. Skinheads don’t do nuance.’
‘What about Eintstürzende?’ They look at Etienne in silence. He should have known: Einstürzende Neubauten is untouchable; their music trumps anything anyone could ever dare to say about it.
When they get back home, Matthias shows Etienne his cherished single cassette of Last Few Days. The title is So The Last Shall Be The First And First Last For Many Be Called But Few Chosen.
Apart from the endless conversations in cafés and bars, they also write songs. The four of them together. At the kitchen table, while someone is cooking. In the steamy bathroom, while someone is taking a bath. On the parquet floor of the living room. In the icy morning air on the building’s roof. The music is emerging, songs being spewed out as if from a geyser. For hours on end they sit in front of their instruments in the Oranienstrasse factory, breathing vapour through their scarfs. Songs get titles like ‘The Language of Men and Machines’, ‘God’s Idiots’, ‘Ritual Bombs’, ‘Infinite Violence’. They let the currents flow, the ideas from four heads into a single reservoir. It comes to them with ever-increasing speed. Lyrics such as ‘learn the language of engines, of exploding organs’, ‘fear doesn’t protect you against what you fear’. Or ‘in order to discover the unknown, you have to gain pleasure from pain’. Overblown, yes, Etienne thinks. But it works with their sound.
Early morning. They are walking back from the Rote Harfe to Chamissoplatz. As they cross streets and walk around corners, phrases and ideas come up, are exchanged. ‘Before the beginning and after the end everything is as pure as hate’ is one of the lines that occurs to Etienne while they walk past huge graffiti letters. renovieren nicht abreissen! the letters say. Not that different from Prenzlauer Berg, he thinks. Here too the authorities want the squatters out. Old buildings have to make room for new ones, for cubes with square windows.
At home in Chamissoplatz, Frederick goes rummaging in an old crate, anxious to show Etienne something. A rare memento, it turns out: a pamphlet for a 1975 gig of the band Monte Cazazza. It reads: Sex-religious show; giant statue of Jesus got chainsawed and gang raped into oblivion. ‘How’s that for promotion?’ Frederick says and grins.
Etienne is feeling increasingly at home in the West. He tries to avoid the parts of the s-Bahn that pass underneath East Berlin. Something plunges in his chest when the West Berlin train crawls through ghost stations, past twilight platforms where East German guards stand ready with machine guns. He remembers the traces of such stations above ground in the East: bricked-up doorways, or steps leading down from the street only to end abruptly against a raw wall. He cannot match all these stations with their blocked entrances on the surface – in East Berlin the station names have been removed, and, in some cases, the structures at street level have been demolished. The names of some streets or places have also been changed and no longer match the names on the 1930s wall tiles down here. There are some tracks that blindly end in a wall. If the shunter were to make a mistake – a single rail switch clicking in the wrong direction – then the passengers would be crushed against the bricks, or burst through to another world.
Etienne tries to make out the guards’ expressions in the dark. Does he expect that it will be Axel who returns his gaze? The faces remain invisible. Ghost faces. There are too many such things in his world, Etienne thinks: ghost films, ghost stations, ghost guards, a ghost lover. And his ghost country of origin. He looks down at his fingers; they too are becoming half-transparent. Only his three West German friends are still of flesh and blood.
An invisible hand twists his intestines when the train starts accelerating again.
❦
They figure out their sound labyrinths in a communal mania. They already have a dozen or so songs. But the frenzy takes its toll. Sometimes Etienne needs to escape the pressure-cooker atmosphere of the flat. Then he spends hours on his own in Zensor in Belziger Strasse – surely, he thinks, the best record shop in the world. He smells the vinyl and weathered cardboard of the covers, gets lost among the shelves. He lifts oil-black records from their sleeves and studies the grooves. Sometimes he works his way alphabetically through bands or titles; sometimes he listens only to records that he doesn’t know. The earphones tranquillise him. He escapes his body, washes up on a shore called Nowhere.
Late in January, Stunde Null starts playing at underground parties in Kreuzberg. In Oranienstrasse and places around Kottbusser Tor. All the new songs. The first time they play ‘Sonnenfinsternis’, the air in the Lokal crackles. The noise crashes into the listeners’ skulls; within moments, revolt is in the air.
Over the next few weeks they play a gig virtually every night. Since arriving in West Berlin, Etienne has been growing his hair again, and his beard. He looks like a Californian hippy of a decade or two ago. He never wears a shirt when he is behind his drums. Sometimes he wears his Russian fur hat, rips it off when he starts sweating through it. Matthias, Christof and Frederick have shaved their hair against the scalp and now wear black shirts buttoned all the way to the top. Before long, Stunde Null has become one of the most popular bands in Kreuzberg. The walls of small Lokale fling the sound back at them: a dull, cruel wave, a blast of scorching air against Etienne’s bare chest.
It is a blunt scream, their music. Without beginning or end. Birth and death in the same breath. A new heaven and a new hell.
A crumbling old factory on the Spree River. Dark Prussian architecture. Their biggest gig to date, almost a thousand people. Behind the stage there is a huge sun – a stage light wrapped in layers of amber cellophane. As the evening progresses, a dark moon gradually moves in from the side. When it shifts across the sun, they at last sing ‘Sonnenfinsternis’. It is what everyone has been waiting for, and the first few notes send the audience into a frenzy. Etienne closes his eyes. In the most intense moments, all distances dwindle to zero – between him and Berlin, between his body and others’, between here and elsewhere. It is then that he gets closest to exorcising Axel, to pulling Axel’s shiny blade from his side. To letting his father’s face dissolve into the noise, and his mother’s. To dimming the sun of his continent of origin. In these moments he sometimes also sees a vision: of an angel dragging its wings backwards through a city, and the rubble that remains – shattered gargoyles, the marble limbs of statues, the shards of fountains.
Etienne dreams of his mother. He finds her in a burnt-out car under a desolate bridge. She has been kept hostage for a long time. He is startled by her appearance. She is just skin and bone, like a prisoner. Her skin is like wax. ‘Didn’t they feed you, Mother?’ he wants to know. ‘No,’ she says, ‘I’m no longer familiar with food.’ Her voice is calm, neutral, but he can sense her sorrow in his bones. And he knows it is his fault that her eyes have sunk so deep into their sockets. He lifts her like a child from the car seat, carries her through an empty street. She is too weak to hold on to him. Her head bobs against his chest.
The next morning there are two letters again, forwarded by Patrick from Bonnington Square. The handwriting is his mother’s. The first letter contains a single sheet on wh
ich his mother has copied a poem:
William Blake
Hy het veronrus in die late
nagte deur Londen se strate
rondgedwaal; en is vereensaam van die mens
teruggedryf tot by die grens
waar hy gesels met blom en dier en gees;
maar weet dat God in iedereen moet wees
met eienskappe ingeperk
teenstrydiglik in tand en vlerk,
in wurm en die roos, die lam, die tier;
dat Hy die hartstog is, maar ook die vuur
wat alles lok tot daardie gulde gang
waarna die moeë sonneblom verlang.
He is unsettled: she clearly remembers how he used to isolate himself in his room with the Blake book. He reads the poem again. Where did she get it? Who wrote it? Is it meant to catch him unawares, to soften him? The Afrikaans feels strange on his tongue. The poem has power, but it also irritates him, especially its religious slant. She has miscalculated; he is done with Blake, has been for some time. He flings it aside.
He opens the second envelope. Her handwriting is becoming unsteady, wandering across the lines. One drives past a park, she writes. A woman with a child is standing on a lawn. It could be any woman, any child. We are interchangeable, she and I. So too her child with mine. It could be any park, any city. That is all. She does not address him. She does not sign her name at the end.
Stunde Null is starting to make money from their gigs; Etienne’s friends no longer need to cover his living costs. They are getting an increasing number of enquiries from elsewhere, and Christof is making plans for a concert tour outside Berlin. To Bremen, and smaller cities near the Baltic Sea.
During the first weeks after Etienne’s arrival in West Berlin, he was penniless. His grant instalments are probably still being paid into his East Berlin account, but he no longer has access to it. Perhaps the gdr authorities have been confiscating the money. He doesn’t dare contact the film school in London about the payments. What if they want to recoup everything from him?
Now, with his portion of the earnings from their performances, he can also pay for a next round of newspaper advertisements. One about Axel, another about Berliner Chronik. Not just in the Berliner Morgenpost this time, but also in Bild. He arranges for the advertisements to appear repeatedly in February and March, every second week. His nights he spends searching in bars and clubs, armed with his fading Polaroid. He shows it to people, or sits around for hours scouring a sea of faces. The days he spends going from hospital to hospital. Sometimes sympathetic male nurses give him access to patient registers. He also tries to find out whether Axel is claiming unemployment insurance in Berlin. This is confidential information, but an acquaintance of his three friends works in a government office. This does not yield anything either; the fact that Axel’s surname is unknown renders the search impossible. To tentatively hook ‘Fleischer’ or ‘Schnur’ to his first name makes no difference. Etienne visits a police station, but they will only assist once someone has been formally reported missing, and if he was last seen in Berlin. They don’t get involved in lovers’ disputes, a policewoman with a wide jaw explains spitefully in the Berlinische dialect.
He doesn’t visit morgues, nor does he request death registers. Not yet.
Chapter 31
Etienne is sitting on his own at Anderes Ufer one afternoon. The blond waiter swiftly looks from side to side when he brings Etienne’s beer, bends over conspiratorially. ‘Are you still looking for him?’ Etienne regularly encounters the waiter on his search expeditions in bars and clubs. The man often observes him; Etienne has at times wondered whether he is following him.
‘Presumably you mean Axel. And, yes, I’m still searching.’
‘Perhaps you’re looking in the wrong places.’ He stands up straight, lets a dramatic silence ensue.
Etienne looks at him sceptically. ‘I think,’ he says coolly, ‘I’ve been pretty much everywhere. What’s the name of the place you have in mind?’
The waiter’s fringe falls over his eyes; he laughs sharply. ‘Not everywhere, I’ll have you know. And such places don’t have names. You have to know people . . .’
‘And now you’re going to inform me that you are one of the people one has to know.’
He nods. ‘You won’t believe who you encounter there. All the cockroaches slipping from the cracks, ghosts returning from the other side . . . This is your one chance.’
Etienne isn’t immune to the hope. ‘Where?’ he says. ‘And when?’
He meets his blond guide at Bülowstrasse u-Bahn station. At two in the morning. Etienne didn’t expect he would show, but he is standing there, waiting. Or not quite he: his transformation is so complete, Etienne hardly recognises him. He is wearing laced boots and a military harness of sorts, a kind of straitjacket. Nails are woven into his sleeves. He looks taller and tougher than Etienne remembers. His voice is an octave lower, his movements more brusque. Only the long fringe is the same.
They walk to Pallasstrasse. Underneath a ’70s block of flats is a large concrete structure. Etienne imagines how it would make Aodhan tremble.
‘A war bunker?’
His companion nods. ‘Built in the ’40s by women and child slaves. Three metres thick. Indestructible. The flats had to be built on top of it.’ Even the rhythms of his speech are different from before. Is this his true self? Is his camp waiter persona a guise that he casts off at night like a cloak?
A gate is opened electronically – a camera has registered their arrival. They wait for a while in front of a solid steel door, which is then opened just wide enough to let them in.
The music is deafening. Echoes clashing with echoes. The history of the last few hours’ noise is still darting and reflecting through the rooms, mixing with music from loudspeakers. It is impossible to say which noises are old and which new, whether you’re listening to sounds belonging to this moment or from an hour ago.
The concrete space, with a low ceiling, is packed with men. Apart from the bodies – some shirtless, most of them naked – there is just raw concrete. And stroboscopes flickering at high frequency. Etienne follows the blond fringe up a flight of stairs. The next level is identical. The same music, the same flashing. The music is industrial, iron upon iron, the violence of machines. In a corner a woman is sitting in front of a console with rows of buttons, like someone in control of a power plant. She sports an impeccable black bob. And, he notices when he approaches, a moustache. She looks at the bunker full of men as if they hail from the past, as if she no longer knows any of them.
Here and there the blond man talks to someone. Someone gives him a little bag of pills. Everything is revealed in stroboscopic moments – independent frames refusing to merge into scenes. The man puts a pill on Etienne’s tongue. His finger tastes of insect poison.
They go up to the next floor. The same. Bodies in grey flashes, the music even louder. The higher they go, the warmer and stuffier it gets. Etienne touches the damp wall. The blond disappears among people. Around Etienne bodies are moving epileptically, writhing sweatily. No one is talking; no one is making eye contact. Two men are pissing against the concrete; the stream is running between Etienne’s feet, under his shoes. There are no toilets here, no taps or windows. Just pills and bodies and concrete. For the first time, Etienne thinks, he understands his erstwhile lover Aodhan. Here he would be fully at home.
He blinks his eyes, shakes his head. The pill is kicking in. Everything sharpens. He can now hear the tiniest sounds above the music: sweat being parsed through pores, lashes brushing up against each other, cement dust whirling up from soles.
He walks up a third flight of stairs. Once again, identical. The same music, the same flickering light. Men are copulating in groups like machines.
Someone approaches Etienne, shouts in his ear: ‘It’s not for humans, this place!’
Etienne looks aro
und. What are they then? Automatons?
The man leans over again. ‘I mean, the Nazis built the bunker for weapons and supplies. There’s no ventilation. No oxygen supply. Can you feel it?’ Etienne looks at the two men next to his interlocutor. Square, strong bodies. Their mouths lock, muscular tongues find each other. It is not a kiss, Etienne realises, but a battle: they are sucking the air from each other’s lungs. He can now feel how heavy his own breath has become.
Light is blooming in Etienne’s forehead. A bouquet of blinding blossoms. He tries to shake the light out of his skull. Yes, he wants to say, I can feel it. But his tongue is too heavy.
‘The people who organise these parties,’ the man shouts, ‘told me that the bunker can sustain about a hundred and fifty people for twenty-four hours. Then everyone suffocates in a huge pile!’ A shortage of air, Etienne realises, that is why everyone is so roused, wanting to devour each other.
He leans over, tears his tongue loose from the floor of his mouth: ‘But there are far more than a hundred and fifty guys here!’
The man shrugs, shouts in Etienne’s ear. They roughly calculate how many people are coming, he says, calculate the hours. Everyone has to be out by six in the morning. ‘But, fuck it, nobody here is a scientist. You yourself have to decide whether you want to risk asphyxiation!’ Etienne can feel his lungs burning. The flashing inside his head is synchronised with the flickering in the room. The thoughts being illuminated by the flashing light won’t fall into any pattern. After each party, the man continues, they open up the few small vents and let new air circulate for a month.
The man takes him by the arm, pulls him up the last set of stairs. Up here there are fewer people. The music is even louder. Everyone is copulating; there is a smell of fresh blood in the air. The man takes him to the furthest wall. Before them is a roster of blocks, like drawers in the wall. Each with a steel handle, numbered from one to eighty-four. ‘Look,’ the man shouts, and only now does Etienne notice he is naked. ‘An escape route!’
