The Third Reel

by S J Naudé

  He saw Nils once at a distance, a few months after the border posts had been flung open. It was on the Ku’damm, near the Gedächtniskirche. A bright, sunny morning. Nils was on the other side of the wide street. Etienne came to a halt, waited for Nils to catch his eye. He wanted to cross the road, but at that moment the traffic was too heavy. He wanted to ask Nils about his Japanese studies, about how it felt to be in the West. Etienne lifted his hand in a gesture of greeting. He wanted to tell Nils that his betrayal had been a trivial act, committed under the crushing weight of history, that he had forgiven him everything. He wanted to offer to help him. How raddled Nils looked. He was wearing East German shoes; that Etienne could see from afar. Nils pulled his head into his shoulders, kept his eyes on the pavement. Etienne let him go, spared him an encounter.

  Etienne looks at Axel. In this stagnant air things that seemed impossible in the northern hemisphere suddenly feel possible. He sits forward. He is ready to start talking. He opens his mouth.

  It catches him unawares when Axel beats him to it, and that, once he has started, he cannot stop.

  Chapter 38

  ‘How do you reckon you found Benjamin?’

  Etienne frowns. He has to pry away his attention from the words whirling in his own chest. He listens to the pine needles blowing against the mirroring windows like sand, smells the chemicals from the laboratories.

  ‘Benjamin?’

  ‘The two film reels, I mean. Berliner Chronik.’

  Pure luck? My dedicated – no, fanatical – search? is what Etienne wants to venture, but Axel’s tone suggests he knows better. Etienne waits.

  ‘Have you ever wondered about the clues appearing out of the blue? How unlikely it was that someone would come across your notes on forgotten noticeboards, or your obscure newspaper ads?’

  A needle in all the world’s haystacks, Etienne thinks.

  ‘It was me, Etienne. I let you have that first clue in London, led you to the dying Ariel.’

  Etienne scratches the chair’s plastic armrest. ‘Ariel? Surely you mean Bernhard Sauer.’

  Axel shakes his head. ‘It was Ariel himself who died there, in that building in Rotherhithe where you nicked the first reel.’ He looks at Etienne in silence for a moment. ‘Ariel was my grandfather.’

  Etienne looks past Axel, to the window in which they are being reflected like two strangers. The wind is getting stronger. He thinks of the tall tree that once burst through the window of an abandoned hospital. He hasn’t ever told Axel that he worked out from the invisible text in Irmgard’s diary that Ariel is his grandfather. It isn’t that part of the disclosure that strikes Etienne. ‘You are mistaken, Axel. The sick man’s name was Sauer.’

  Axel’s smile veers between patience and condescension. ‘Bernhard Sauer, indeed. Ariel lived under that name in England for decades. The alias under which he had fled from Germany. He never wanted his own name back.’

  Etienne feels bewildered. Before long, he too will start talking gibberish, just like his mother. He wonders whether she is still asleep under her grey blanket. Are her dreams being derailed, just like her sentences? He should go and see whether she is all right – whether she is breathing, whether the self-consuming brain is making her shudder with epileptic shocks. But the mystery surrounding Bernhard Sauer keeps him in his chair.

  Axel’s voice is clear. ‘I had visited him myself. A day before I sent you there. I had heard he was slipping away, had wanted to say goodbye.’

  Outside the pine trees are blowing wildly. The corrugated-iron roof sounds like a crowd of people gnashing their teeth. For a while both of them just listen, looking at the window bulging in and out with the gusts of wind. Axel continues. ‘There on his deathbed he mentioned the film reel for the first time, explained to me where—’

  ‘So, you knew each other?’

  Axel nods. ‘For years, yes. But I never let on that I was his grandchild. That I had Irmgard’s diary, or knew about the film. I had to get away from all that was familiar, I thought, had to start a life on my own, as someone without ties, without an origin. And, yes, I guess I was fooling myself. I subtly tried to sound him out over the years, but he never let slip a word about either Germany or Irmgard. I think he had wiped out his memory with sheer willpower. Other than the film reel, he hadn’t brought anything with him from Germany. And never tried to make a film again.’

  Etienne closes his eyes, imagines film melting into the cogs of a projector.

  ‘Anyway, Ariel sent me to a closet. Inside it was a suitcase, inside that the reel. I decided to leave it there for you, locked in the sideboard. I tied a ribbon to the lock, took the key. Then I sent you.’ Axel looks at the staffroom’s blind windows again, at his and Etienne’s doppelgängers sitting over there. ‘I’m sorry about the group of mourners you encountered there, Ariel’s fellow activists. I had had no idea they’d be there. I had just wanted you to meet him. My grandfather. Before he died. And for you to get your hands on the reel . . .’

  Etienne feels half-perturbed, half-cheated. Moved too. Questions pile up in his mind. Too fast, too many. ‘The second reel?’ he blurts out. ‘That I found with great effort, after all. The whole bloody process with your father, with Volker . . .’

  Axel stiffens. There is lightning in his eyes; his jaw muscles clench. Etienne likes it – it reminds him of the old Axel. But he knows how Axel can fall obstinately silent. And Volker’s name now hangs between them.

  Axel slackens again. ‘Do you really think Irmgard’s fifty-year-old diary, and a pretty aimless search in Berlin, mysteriously led you to the second reel?’

  ‘Wait,’ he says. ‘I need to go and check up on my mother. Stay here. Hold that thought.’

  Etienne walks swiftly down the corridor. Befuddled, he initially walks in the wrong direction. He turns around, finds the little room where his mother is mumbling in her sleep. In what way does her self-destructing brain affect her dreams? he wonders. Does it translate her confused sentences into poetry?

  When he gets back to the staffroom, Axel has gone. The moment has passed; the floodgates will likely close again now. Etienne walks the corridors, calls out Axel’s name in a loud whisper. He opens doors as he walks: offices, storerooms. Further down the corridor he can now see faint light. He walks briskly towards it. One of the laboratories’ doors is open: Axel is there, inside, his back turned to the door, brightly lit. Etienne goes up to him, rests his chin on his shoulder, folds his arms around his abdomen. Axel is handling a fresh pine twig in a stainless steel bowl.

  As if Axel has asked, he says: ‘Everything’s fine. She’s sleeping. But I don’t think much will remain of her in the days to come.’

  It has stopped raining. The wind keeps blowing. ‘The first thing that occurs to me when I think of my mother,’ Axel says after a while, ‘all that remains of her, is her coat sleeve brushing my cheek in the December Berlin air.’ A vein in Axel’s neck is throbbing against Etienne’s shaved temple. His voice is vibrating in Etienne’s skull.

  ‘Tell me about your grandmother. About Irmgard.’

  Axel smells the pine twig. It enters Etienne’s nostrils too, the smell of camphor and mint, of dawn. ‘I only know what my mother told me about her. And that too she had mostly heard from others.’

  ‘I want to know everything.’

  Axel sighs, starts telling. At some point in 1933, while they were rushing to finish the film, Irmgard had to decide whether she was going to flee Germany with Ariel. Her communist sentiments, and her collusion with Jews, weren’t widely known; her exposure was limited. ‘She was pregnant with my mother. Overnight she cut herself off from Ariel, as if they had never known each other. He fled, broken-hearted, left the country. She stayed. After that, she covered up her erstwhile collaboration with Schnur and other Jews and communists as well as she—’

  ‘Was that why she, as a blind woman, had been given such an unlikely role
on a film set? Because of her loyalties?’

  ‘I guess so. Communists would surely have helped each other. Or perhaps Ariel had had his eye on her from the outset . . . Anyhow, after the war she very quickly made it clear that she had seen the National-Socialist light.’ She became a Party member, Axel says, did everything that was expected of a woman who was loyal to the Volk. When things got tough during the war, and she had to keep herself and her baby fed and sheltered, she started helping to make propaganda films. For a while she worked as a production assistant on Leni Riefenstahl projects. Shortly after the war, when Riefenstahl was arrested, Irmgard disappeared. Her daughter Mariel, then nine years old, was left behind. Before her departure, Irmgard had arranged for Mariel to be adopted by a colleague of hers – one of Riefenstahl’s cinematographers.

  Etienne’s eyes are burning (are the laboratory lights slowly becoming brighter?). It is the first time he has heard Axel’s mother’s name. Etienne rolls it around soundlessly on his tongue: Mariel. He carefully considers his next question. Each answer may be the last. ‘Why was it necessary for Irmgard to flee after the war? To just leave her child – your mother – behind?’

  Axel shrugs his shoulders; his voice becomes quieter. About Irmgard’s motivations, he can only speculate. Perhaps she was afraid she would be arrested herself due to her collaboration with the Nazis. But then why have Mariel adopted by another Riefenstahl collaborator? Perhaps she felt ashamed and guilty towards Ariel and her one-time Jewish friends. Although most of them must have died, or been dispersed to the four corners of the earth. Perhaps she felt her daughter would be better off in Germany, and without her. A refugee’s life with a mother who had profoundly betrayed her father must hardly have looked ideal.

  Etienne is standing next to Axel now. They are looking at specimens in Petri dishes, touching fragments of bark and root like hesitant scientists. How long – and how many detours – has it taken to arrive at this conversation? How far have they had to travel – to the distant south, and deep into the hinterland – before Axel found it possible to talk? Something is changing irrevocably between them here amid the flasks and clamps and microscopes. Etienne takes the pine twig, from which Axel has since stripped most of the needles. He fills a test tube with water, puts the twig in it.

  He takes Axel by the hand, leads him out. They wander blindly back and forth in the dark corridor, repeatedly passing the locked plant pathology laboratory with its bottled insects: the borers, the egg-layers, the gnawers. Axel’s disclosures are now flowing in an unbroken current. The reason for his sudden trip to Berlin, four years ago, was that his mother, Mariel, had just taken her own life. That was the news he had received by telegram that December evening in London. Two weeks earlier his mother had boarded a train and travelled north, to Kiel, where she had swum into the Baltic Sea and disappeared. Etienne pictures a head moving away, becoming ever smaller between chunks of floating ice. ‘Nobody even reported her as missing. Least of all Volker.’ Axel almost spits when he utters the name. ‘It was the police who sent me that telegram. Only after she had washed up on the shore. They had had to search birth registers, had to force Volker to give them my address.’

  Etienne shuts his eyes, sees a grey body washed up on a grey beach.

  ‘When I arrived in Berlin, she had already been buried. A pauper’s burial, at the state’s expense. Volker wouldn’t even pay for that.

  ‘It was he,’ Axel says. His jaws clench. ‘Volker had killed her. Bit by bit. Over the years. Her life with him was a nightmare. Endless and unbearable.’

  ‘What would he do to her?’ Etienne asks cautiously. They are slowly walking down a pitch-dark corridor.

  ‘What didn’t he do . . .’ Axel hesitates; it looks for a moment as if those are his last words for the night. ‘Once,’ he then continues, ‘when I was small, he started going around the flat with a broom, smashing each of the smoke alarms on the ceiling. Then he tore the phone from the wall, crushed it under his foot. He locked me and my mother in the flat, soaked a rag in petrol, set it alight and threw it in through a window . . .’ Axel is picking up the pace in the darkness; Etienne has to lengthen his stride to keep up. ‘She did ultimately manage to extinguish it . . .’ Etienne listens to Axel’s footsteps. ‘At other times he would throw her against the wall. Or push her face against the stove and turn up the gas until she started choking.’ Then he slowly tells Etienne about his bleak childhood years. How Volker had taken him to skinhead rallies as a boy, the vengefulness and violence when, in his teenage years, Axel started refusing to go. He absconded from home as soon as he could. At seventeen. First squatted in Berlin, then left for London when he was twenty. He left his mother in that man’s hands. For that he can never forgive himself.

  When, shortly before Christmas 1986, he arrived in Berlin from London and saw Volker for the first time after his mother’s death, his first instinct was to kill him. It was too late to save his mother from his terror, but revenge was still to be had.

  Axel stops, leans his back against a wall in the dark. Etienne gropes blindly towards him. ‘I hadn’t planned it that way, but, when I arrived at Volker’s in Neukölln, I grabbed a kitchen knife and stormed at him. He was too fast for me, and too strong. He pushed me onto the floor, broke my arm. I hadn’t inflicted so much as a scratch. The police were called; I was arrested and charged. The rest . . . well, that you know.’

  Etienne’s blood is pumping through him in cold currents. When he tries to wrap his arms around Axel, he hits a bare wall. Axel has slipped away in the dark. Etienne finds him near the laboratory. For a long time, they walk around in silence. When they pass the sleeping quarters, Etienne listens out for his mother’s breathing.

  Axel arbitrarily tries doors; one of them opens. Damp heat hits Etienne in the face. Axel closes the door behind them. Moonlight falls onto their faces through a glass roof. Etienne can make out the shapes of rows of saplings, like a miniature version of the plantations they drove through earlier. Needles glimmer like silver fur. It is a glasshouse, a nursery. A warm mist is pumped in from somewhere. Sweat starts trickling down Etienne’s spine.

  Axel’s voice, when he continues, is softened by the humidity. His mother introduced him to Berliner Chronik early on. They didn’t have a projector, but sometimes, when she came to tuck him in on winter evenings, he would ask to see ‘pictures of the boy from the olden days’. Mariel would go and fetch the reel. Axel would insist that she tell the story of how Irmgard – her mother – used to show her the pictures in her bed. Then, as so often before, she had to explain how Irmgard had disappeared one day, how she had just left the reel on Mariel’s pillow. Axel would then, as always, embrace his mother, pressing the air from her lungs, beg her not to go away too. She would assure him, over and over again. To calm him, Mariel would open the reel’s case, just a little, so that he could sniff the vinegary smell. Then she would pull out a strip of film. ‘Slowly, with a sly smile. She would tell me: “Look how your eyes are widening!” And I would laugh and say: “You know I can’t see my own eyes. Look how big yours are!” She would then show me the frames against the light of the bed lamp, one by one. Just a shortish strip of film at a time, before she would wind it back and put the reel away.’

  Over a period of years, Axel goes on, he and Mariel worked their way through the entire reel. She made up stories for each sequence. ‘Because, face it, not much happens. You have to make it all up around the images.’ Afterwards she always had to go and wash her hands. ‘“It is toxic,” I had to hear every time. “Lethal.” I wasn’t allowed touch it myself.’

  These evenings were the best times of his childhood, Axel says. Just he and his mother there in his room, in a cocoon of light.

  Etienne and Axel are standing in front of a steamed-up glass door. Axel wipes a square clean with his palm, looks out. The storm has passed. Etienne touches his damp hair; it is still raining in there. The pine trees are glistening outside, so too the soil.


  ‘So, when we watched Ariel’s first reel in London, it was the first time that you yourself had seen any part of the film projected?’

  Axel nods. Etienne looks through the glass door. ‘And how come you had Irmgard’s diary in your possession?’

  ‘When I left for London, my mother gave it to me.’

  ‘Why?’

  Axel looks out, shrugs. ‘She didn’t say. Perhaps she suspected . . . knew she would, at some point . . . She wanted it to be preserved, I think. As when Ariel had originally divided up the reels. To spread risk.’

  Etienne’s heart is in his throat. ‘So, they had divided up the reels? Did your mother tell you that? And, if Ariel had taken one reel, and Irmgard another, which she then left for Mariel – who has the third one? Are there indeed three? Was the film ever completed?’

  Axel opens the glass door, walks out into the night air, still fresh with rain smells. Etienne scurries after him. Was he too greedy; has he now frightened Axel off? They stop, feel the spongy ground underneath their feet, look at the moon emerging from behind the clouds.

  ‘The first thing I did when I arrived in London was to look up Ariel. Earlier, when saying goodbye to me in Berlin, my mother had mentioned a name. “Ariel, your grandfather, who made this film, is now known as Bernhard Sauer. I don’t know him, but he’s in London.” She had given me an address.

  ‘I found Ariel – or Bernhard, as he introduced himself, and as I then called him – at that very address. I befriended him under false pretences. He was an activist, helping squatters who were subject to eviction. I pretended to be seeking advice on behalf of friends who were staying in a place that was to be demolished.

  ‘We became good friends. And he was generous, over the years. Helped me to get the place in Bermondsey Street after I’d been kicked out of another squat. Later on he even helped pay for me to go to nurse’s college . . .’