by S J Naudé
He takes the page from the machine, holds it up against the light. There is a watermark: the colourless lines of an oak tree. There it hangs, majestically uprooted. Upside down. A kind of sob rips through him, settling in his chest, waiting there.
He turns the sheet upside down, the address now at the bottom. The tree is now upright, the text the wrong way round. Oak branches reach upwards like the fingers of someone drowning.
Chapter 42
When Etienne walks back from Irmgard to his hotel, he thinks of Axel’s art. Of the awe it used to inspire in him in their London days. He remembers the afternoons of sitting around in the Bermondsey Street backyard with Axel’s acolytes, how they would all hold their breath for weeks on end. He recalls how the waiting would cause his blood to heat up.
As Etienne got to see more and more art in the museums and galleries of London and Berlin, the aura started waning. Axel tries too hard, he decided. His work either carries its heart on its sleeve or it is too obscure. What it lacks are simultaneous flashes of strangeness and recognition.
After Axel had restlessly experimented with materials for a while, in the weeks before Etienne left for Buenos Aires he’d started focusing largely on rabbit hearts. His friend the veterinary sciences student came to help set up the final installation. Only the three of them were present. Long gone were the days when the hordes would make their way up to a London attic. The vet-to-be brought a stainless steel bowl filled with fresh hearts. There were two video screens, electrodes and a buzzing electrical device. Axel sat in a chair, gave instructions. The hearts were serried in neat rows in an electrolyte solution. Electrodes were dipped into the fluid. One video screen showed a colourful tropical bird flapping about in their flat. The sequence kept showing in an infinite loop. On the soundtrack, a cheerful chirping and tweeting. The other screen showed a frightened rabbit sniffing around in an all-white room. Intermittently the little animal was kicked by a man’s foot in a shiny shoe. Coinciding with each kick, an electrical charge was administered to the hearts, which would beat violently once, and then continue shuddering for a while in an unsynchronised fashion. Some hearts stopped working after a while, like blown bulbs in a string of Christmas lights. After an hour or so, all the hearts would arrest and had to be replaced with fresh ones. Etienne stopped counting how many rabbits had had to die for the installation.
He arrives at his hotel. The cool interior is a relief; it is hot outside. He turns up the air conditioner, takes off his sweat-soaked clothes, strokes his shaven head and smooth body. He likes how strong and supple he has become. He thinks of the other materials Axel has been experimenting with in recent times: frozen flowers, his own blood and tears. Even night sweats wrung from a shirt – a few drops in a flask. When he became predominantly bed-bound, he compulsively started trying to tear his sheets into strips. He wanted to knot and plait the strips into voodoo-like dolls. But Axel’s body was flickering like a candle flame, his fingers no longer up to these tasks. He sat upright in his bed, gave detailed instructions, which Etienne (at last again the helper and disciple) clumsily tried to execute.
Synthesiser sounds are suddenly playing in Etienne’s ears. At first he thinks they emanate from another room. But no, they are inside his own skull. Quick, dry percussion. A thin note gradually flattening, then scratching with static. The image in his mind is that of a Finnish landscape. Ice, northern light, moonlight on the backs of steaming reindeers: his next synth composition.
Etienne suddenly feels deeply tired. The music in his head comes to an abrupt halt. He lies down, falls asleep.
He dreams he is standing next to a river in flood. His mother comes floating by. She has sunglasses on and is lying on her back, her feet sticking out of the water. She notices Etienne, smiles at him. ‘Come and take a swim,’ she says. ‘It is lovely here in the grey waters of time!’ He starts wading towards her. The water is icy. Something upstream draws his attention: a bloated cadaver. His father, he knows at once. It is floating towards him. He retreats quickly, pulls his feet from the water.
Downstream there is a weathered stone bridge, on which Axel is standing and waving. Except for the forceful oak’s root tips curling around his neck, his skin is unblemished. Axel, he suddenly knows with dream certainty, was born with that tree on his back. The currents rise; the bridge collapses. Axel tumbles into the mist.
The alarm clock shows it is ten o’clock. Only when Etienne gets up and sleepily peers through the curtains does he realise it isn’t evening, but morning: he has slept through an afternoon, evening and night. His flight departs in three hours. He washes his face, stumbles downstairs in a half-dazed state with a view to finding breakfast.
The concierge beckons him over. There was a phone call, the man explains in broken English. He hands over a note, which Etienne unfolds:
Time: 21h14
For: Etienne Nieuwenhuis
Room: 603
Message: Axel is dead
For a while Etienne keeps standing there without a word. He politely thanks the concierge, folds the note and hands it back to him.
He pays his bill, leaves his luggage at reception. He leaves the hotel, walks into the sharp sunlight. Everything is a shade of white. He walks through the streets, in whichever direction his feet take him. He encounters a grandiose entrance. He recognises it from pictures in the hotel brochure – the Recoleta cemetery.
He walks in through the gates, ignoring hawkers with maps showing famous people’s graves. The cemetery is surrounded by office buildings. It is like a miniature city, a city within a city: paths like streets, graves like homes. Most mausoleums are ornate. He seeks out an unremarkable modern one, sits down on its step. The glass of the little door behind him is broken. A breeze is blowing from inside: a cool, musty draught on his neck. He rests his head against the black marble door frame, shuts his eyes.
The smell of meat enters his nostrils. He opens his eyes. Before him stands a sunburnt, wrinkled woman. She shoves a cardboard box of roast chickens under his nose. Etienne takes from his pocket the money that he had kept for a taxi back to the airport, pays her, lets her keep the change. She hands him a chicken with her bare hands. When she has gone, he starts eating. He doesn’t have the slightest appetite, will never be hungry again. He eats messily and mechanically, defying his revulsion, ingesting the entire chicken. He chews and swallows, then picks morsels from his teeth with his tongue. He suppresses his gag reflex. He licks the bones clean, stacks them neatly by his feet. He closes his eyes again, bangs his head against the marble until he feels dizzy.
On the inside of his lids, the black wall next to his and Axel’s vegetable garden in Berlin appears. In a flash he is there, his nose pressed against the wall. His feet lift off the ground. Slowly he rises, until his eye is aligned with the bright spot.
It is a peephole, he realises. And there, on the other side – so close and yet not – Axel is standing. Alone and fierce. In a land of pure light, where, if Etienne were to join him, time’s strongest winds could never blow them from each other’s arms again.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to the University of the Western Cape for awarding me the Jan Rabie & Marjorie Wallace Bursary for 2014. This generous grant allowed me to write the novel full-time.
I am grateful to Pierre Brugman, Michiel Heyns and Marlene van Niekerk, who read drafts of the novel, and also to Fourie Botha, Beth Lindop and Fahiema Hallam of Umuzi. Thank you to Anne-Marie Mischke and Jenefer Shute for their editing, and also to my agent Rebecca Carter of Janklow & Nesbit. I am also indebted to Stevan Alcock and Evelyne Nerlich-Sinnassamy for patient conversations about life in (East and West) Berlin in the 1980s. Thank you to Deon and Marlene van der Westhuizen, in whose house in the Auvergne in France I wrote part of the book, and to Hannes Myburgh, on whose farm in the Eastern Cape in South Africa another part was written.
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