The Third Reel

by S J Naudé

  Behind them Axel stumbles out of the Kombi. He is wobbly; strings of hair hang in his eyes. He will have to finish shaving his head, Etienne thinks. Axel puts on dark glasses.

  ‘Cool,’ he says. He clambers onto the Kombi’s roof, surveys the world with his legs planted wide apart. ‘Tomatoes for Africa.’

  ‘For Europe,’ Christof mumbles. ‘For Europe.’

  Etienne imagines a crowd where the tomato plants now stand in such lush and silent profusion. At seven o’clock tomorrow morning, workmen will arrive to erect the stage, Christof explains, walking around and touching the leaves. At four the gig will start. Just after five will be the eclipse. Christof is aimless, anxious. He is addressing the tomatoes, rather than Etienne and the others.

  At the entrance everyone is given cheap plastic sunglasses – protection against the sun’s anticipated ring of fire. The tomatoes cause chaos. And joy. The early arrivers giggle when the hairy leaves rustle against their jeans. Plants are crushed underfoot, people start throwing tomatoes at each other, pips and juice splattering.

  The opening band is called Namenlos. They play their first song; Stunde Null is waiting behind the stage. Mindless copycats, Etienne thinks. Echolalic music.

  There is a single prop in the middle of the stage: a huge grey-green sound recorder. A mute piece of equipment from some government office or other, built – so it seems – to withstand a nuclear war. Christof – ‘our technical boffin’, as Frederick refers to him – tracked it down somewhere in Berlin and had it delivered.

  They look at each other. Then the three gazes settle on Etienne. He isn’t sure what he should read into them. A plea? A threat? How does it happen that the three of them always simultaneously make the same demands? And that – this he is only realising now – a collective chill can emanate from them as suddenly as collective warmth?

  Namenlos ends their session, leaves the stage. Smoke is pumped out of machines, enfolds the instruments. The four of them jump light-footedly onto the stage, one by one. Screams rise from the crowd. While they saunter to their positions, the huge sound recorder’s two reels start turning, magnetic tape tautened between them. Loud, declamatory male voices can be heard: speeches by East and West German politicians interrupting each other, talking over each other until it becomes sheer cacophony. No single voice can any longer be distinguished from the others. Etienne enters with an extended drum roll, foot on the drum hammer’s pedal. Sparks fly when he rubs steel files over each other. Frederick emerges from the smoke behind the synthesiser: an ominous note is growing, a siren straight from hell.

  They play. Play. As none of the echo-bands can. They recycle noise from the void. It merges with the sounds of cars on highways, tractor engines and power plants’ furnaces. New noise ensues, killing old noise. And then it starts all over again. They have to let go of everything – extinguish everything – that preceded the noise. There is no longer any history, nor any future. No bodies and no consciousness. Everything is sound.

  The surging crowd grinds the tomatoes to a pulp. Stunde Null play ‘God’s Idiots’. They play ‘The Language of Men and Machines’. There is a moment of silence; the eclipse begins. The four of them look at each other, then start playing ‘Sonnenfinsternis’. The moon punches a hole right through the sun. Below them everybody is going into a frenzy. A black cloud shifts over the whole of Germany, making everyone deaf.

  The evening air lays a lulling hand on Etienne’s forehead. But it isn’t evening; it is afternoon. They are playing to drain the sun of its warmth. At the height of the eclipse they keep an impossibly long and cold note. Vibration from the blood. Then they let go. They chase the moon off, bring back the light.

  Etienne sees only one face in the twilight crowd: Axel’s. Around him, people are rising and falling, as if under a vast sheet. Axel isn’t wearing any glasses, is looking at Etienne with naked eyes. Etienne plays his drums for the tree resin dripping from Axel’s back, for the childlike scribblings on his skin. For how small he looks underneath the German sky.

  Around Axel, dozens of people have stripped their clothes off. Ready to follow the music’s commands, to march straight into the flames.

  It takes a while before Etienne realises he is the only one still hitting his drums. The other three are watching him in silence. Somewhere they have lost each other. They know he is now playing for Axel only.

  The crowd has been wounded, Etienne thinks as he touches his painful erection. They are covered in blood and slimy scraps of flesh. Like a scene of mass surgery – an open-air operation room, patients who start wandering when the anaesthetic fails. But what is actually clinging to them, he realises, is tomato pulp.

  His three friends’ eyes have become cold. They no longer know him. Etienne looks out over the heads, finds Axel’s face.

  The lyrics of the last two lines of ‘Sonnenfinsternis’ linger on: ‘Everybody knows this is Nowhere / Follow the fire and it will guide you home.’

  III. LABORATORY (Elsewhere, April–October 1990)

  Chapter 36

  Yesterday morning, when Etienne looked out from the descending plane to the washed-out horizons, smoke and blonde grass, he could already sense the dry autumn silence. In the northern hemisphere, South African landscapes had started resembling, in his mind, pictures from a children’s Bible, or the mountain peaks and lakes in European paintings. Of such intimate light there proved to be no trace in the Highveld skies.

  Now, in Natal, where they are travelling, the light is different. After an earlier thunder shower, steam is rising from the tar. The hills are glistening beneath a double rainbow. Etienne’s mother joined him and Axel after they landed at Jan Smuts airport; in the afternoon the three of them took a flight to Durban. Today they have been driving from the coast to Pietermaritzburg, and from there southwards. Etienne is behind the wheel. They are approaching a village called Ixopo. Axel is alert in the passenger seat; little hairs on his upper cheeks catch the sun. In the rear-view mirror, Etienne can see his mother in the back: hunched up, motionless.

  The letter with the news of her illness reached him in Berlin via Patrick in Bonnington Square. Weeks after it had been sent. He borrowed money from several friends and booked flights for himself and Axel to Johannesburg. His mother’s neighbour, Frans Vermeulen, had apparently written the letter; his mother had dictated. Vermeulen also brought her to the airport to meet them. Etienne remembers the man from his childhood: a senior civil servant, now retired. Robust and ruddy, with heavy lids. Etienne was surprised by his meekness at the airport, as if Mandela’s recent release from prison had robbed his body of its power. And Etienne could see how Vermeulen found him disorienting: the fact that he spoke Afrikaans, but was so obviously out of place – so lean and pale and stark. Vermeulen stared at Etienne’s black clothes, perhaps smelling something on him: the air of Berlin’s u-Bahn tunnels, or the stale silt of ancient river beds below the city. Vermeulen also gaped at the oak roots on Axel’s neck, and the rough ink marks on his arms. Etienne, too, shrank back when he looked at Axel there in the southern light. As if for the first time. His body had suddenly acquired a new kind of power.

  Etienne’s mother’s lips were chapped and pale. He could see right through her irises. Her hair had turned white. She was stiffening, changing into stone. Before each act, and each sentence, she momentarily lingered or froze. The control centre was now located somewhere outside of her. She was listening to a voice whispering messages in her ear.

  She only had eyes for Etienne. She watched his every movement – putting down the suitcase, brushing a hand over his shaved head – with astonishment. While Frans was leading her to the departure hall for domestic flights, Etienne and Axel in tow with the luggage, she kept looking back. In the letter that Etienne had written her from Berlin, his first in about four years, he had told her he was bringing Axel along. Whether she received it, or could still comprehend it at the time, he doesn’t know. There was n
o reaction when he introduced Axel to her. She regarded him as if he was a porter, turned back to Etienne.

  She lifted her hand: ‘Give me your cream cheese. Let me bury it.’

  Etienne frowned, involuntarily turned to Vermeulen.

  Vermeulen whispered behind his palm, too loudly: ‘The illness makes her jumble words. She means: “Give me your luggage. Let me carry it.”’ Her outstretched arm kept reaching towards him. Etienne instantly resented Vermeulen in his role as interpreter.

  Some distance beyond Umzimkulu, Etienne turns east, towards the distant coast. Axel’s eyes are closed. His mother looks as if nothing could ever trouble her again.

  At Jan Smuts airport, Etienne almost bumped into two policemen. He stopped in his tracks, his father’s voice in his ears: If I had known what you were planning, I would have handed you over to the military police myself. The policemen weren’t the moustachioed, heavy-buttocked men one might have expected. Boys, rather, young and unsure. The German Shepherd that one of them had on a lead completely overshadowed its owner. He could smell Etienne’s adrenalin, jumped at him. The sinews in the young man’s arm tensed when he yanked the animal back. Etienne looked the policeman – police boy – straight in the eye.

  His mother is drifting in and out of sleep, Etienne notices in the mirror. Next to him, Axel’s jaw has gone slack. He stops for fuel. He might as well have been travelling alone.

  She wanted to see Etienne one last time, his mother (or rather Vermeulen) had written in the letter. And she wanted him to travel with her to Natal: a nostalgia trip. At the airport, Vermeulen tried explaining which places she had intended visiting. Earlier, before the brain cancer had started terrorising her sentences, she had apparently made him promise to ensure that the trip happened.

  The three of them – Etienne, his mother and Axel – spent the day before in Durban. Planning, crouched over city maps in a stuffy hotel room. He tried to jolt his mother’s memory, to make her recall street and place names. He mentioned schools in Pietermaritzburg, where she had spent her high-school days. She momentarily perked up when she heard her alma mater’s name. He started listing neighbourhoods in the hope that they could scale down to the address where she had lived in her youth. She interrupted him, started verbalising her own kind of map. Keyless, with landmarks of smells and tastes: ‘Down the hill you walk, until you smell jasmine dog and bananas. Left, then, to the river’s bitter algae and mackerel . . .’ Or: ‘Right at the heavenly shrub, straight ahead until the sea air stings you and you can taste salty moss. Turn under the pepper hedge, where sweet chlorine tickles noses . . .’ Routes that she once walked to school, or to sports fields or a bus stop? To a shop or park, or a friend’s house? While she was stringing together unfathomable scents and flavours, she pointed out positions on the map. That was where they would be searching.

  Their chronology is inverted: they keep travelling further into her past. This morning it was her Pietermaritzburg youth. The places where Etienne had made crosses on the map, and where in situ his mother perked up in apparent recollection: an austere face-brick home (had it replaced her childhood home?), an empty pavement (had there once been a school bus stop there?), a golf course (built over her old school hockey field?).

  Whether the places themselves had changed, or whether the illness had eroded her sense of direction, nothing looked as it should have. Landmarks had disappeared. The smells his mother had described the day before didn’t match the landscape. As if to compensate, smells from Etienne’s own schooldays unexpectedly mingled in his nostrils: slow afternoons smelling of grass and sandwiches and teenage sweat.

  This afternoon they are heading for the domain of her childhood. Or what might be left of it. Most of the land around here is covered by government plantations. Etienne struggled to find a place for them to spend the night. They are travelling in a tiny rented Japanese car, on a narrow track. Somewhere they have missed a turn-off. Etienne opens his window, makes a u-turn. The body scrapes against a tree trunk. Branches protrude through the window into the cabin; bits of bark sift onto the seats. The smell of pine displaces the smell of plastic. Etienne hangs his head out the window, searching in the mist. Water drops roll down his cheeks. Then, at last, he spots it: a vague sidetrack across a carpet of pine needles.

  The car emerges from the fog; the plantations give way to indigenous forest. A dimly lit industrial building appears in a clearing and, next to it, a row of chalets. They stop, get out. There is a fungal smell in the air. Muscular roots appear and disappear from the soil like the humps of sea monsters. Etienne wipes pine needles from the bonnet.

  A woman wearing Wellington boots emerges from the industrial structure. There is a little mongrel dog at her heels.

  ‘A mushroom factory,’ she answers Etienne’s question. ‘We only harvest and package what we pick in the forest.’ They are the only guests. She takes them to one of the chalets. Even inside one can smell the mushrooms.

  The woman keeps standing uncomfortably in the door. ‘Is there somewhere we could buy food?’ Etienne asks. ‘We were hoping for a restaurant or shop . . . ?’

  She shakes her head. ‘Wait, I’ll make a plan.’ She disappears, comes back with a basket. She lifts the corner of a cloth, shows them the mushrooms, each as big as a man’s hand. ‘There is cooking oil in the cupboard.’

  She disappears behind the factory, the little dog like a shadow behind her. Etienne rinses the forest soil from the fresh mushrooms under the kitchen tap.

  ‘Here are little helpers,’ his mother says, holding out the matches. ‘To light the cassanova.’ She points at the gas stove. Etienne lights the stove, cuts the mushrooms in slices, fries them in a pan. She sits down at the kitchen table. Axel lays the table, sits down opposite her. The two of them look at each other in silence.

  Etienne serves the fleshy slices with glasses of water. His mother looks uncomprehendingly at her knife and fork. Axel leans over, cuts her slices into smaller pieces.

  ‘A little reindeer,’ she demands. Etienne thinks of animals in the forest. She is impatient now: ‘To eat the anemones!’ Etienne thinks of the sea; his frown deepens. Axel gets up, fetches a teaspoon from the drawer. She takes it, smiles at Axel, then scowls at Etienne.

  They test the rubbery mushroom flesh on their tongues. The flavour is delicate, intoxicating. They have second helpings. Then more. It is like inhaling compost fumes. Their shoulders become drowsy, as if someone has draped blankets around them. To fend off a trance, Etienne gets up and boils water.

  All he can find in the cupboards is tea. Even that tastes of mushrooms. Like a forest that has been dried, ground up and soaked.

  Axel builds a fire in the hearth. The wet wood steams and crackles. Etienne feels his mother’s icy hands. He leaves her behind in the glow to go and prepare her room. He switches on a little heater and the reading light, folds back a corner of the sheet. A movement outside catches his eye. He shudders, pulls the curtain to close it. It falls noiselessly off the pelmet. For a few moments he stands helplessly with the curtain in his hands, listening to Axel unzipping a suitcase next door. He puts the curtain down on the floor, inserts a hand between his mother’s sheets, sweeps back and forth for insects.

  Earlier, at the airport, and also in the car, Etienne noticed that his mother was keeping a tissue tightly scrunched up in her hand. It is now lying on the bedside table. When he touches it, he realises it is firmer than tissue. He unfolds it. The creases have almost wiped out the image, but Etienne recognises it at once. The photo he had once sent his mother from London: a dead Victorian boy with his head on his mother’s lap.

  He hears his mother mumble in the living room. He goes to her, the photo still in his hand. She is standing in front of the fire; she is holding a glowing log in her bare hands. The flames are licking towards her eyes, as if her gaze is serving as fuel.

  ‘No!’ Etienne takes two long strides to her, knocks the log onto the r
ug, which he then rolls around it. The photo has fallen on the floor. He picks it up, throws it into the fire.

  She turns to him. ‘You have braken me.’

  He grabs her by the wrist, pulls her behind him to the kitchen, holds her hands under cold water. He opens the fridge’s freezer compartment. Her face contorts. Blisters are already forming on her palms and fingers. Etienne presses her hands against ice. He can see the wounds are serious. Axel comes running into the kitchen. ‘What’s happened?’

  Etienne just shakes his head. ‘Hold her hands against the cold.’ He leaves them in the glow of the open fridge, runs outside. The factory doors are closed. The mineral smell is overwhelming, as if there are crates of mushrooms in his head. He has no idea how to find their hostess. He can’t even recall her name. Rebecca? Andrea? Did she ever introduce herself? He stands next to the factory and calls: ‘Rebecca!’ His voice is deflected by the corrugated-iron walls, dulled by the trees. The name is absorbed by the foliage. He calls again. In the dim light from the factory he notices a footpath, starts walking along it. It leads around the back of the building.

  The little mongrel dog approaches, and behind him their hostess. She is wearing tracksuit pants and a dressing gown, flashlight in her hand. She is rubbing her sleepy eyes. ‘What are you shouting for? Rebecca is the dog’s name. I’m Andrea.’

  ‘Help. Please.’