The Alphabet of Birds

by SJ Naudé

  ‌The Noise Machine

  The two men arrive simultaneously from opposite directions. Their taxis disappear down the street. They stand in silence in front of a steel door set in a long wall.

  The drive from his hotel on the other side of the city to these streets, with their warehouses and grey industrial yards, has left Chris dizzy. He gauges the other man’s accent when he speaks into the intercom. The vowels between his American ‘r’s are flat enough to be South African (Afrikaans?). The American South African (or South African American) is impatient, his shoulders pushing against the steel before the bolt retracts electronically. Behind the door is a concrete yard and a row of trucks. In the fading light, the man walks purposefully to a second steel door. Another intercom: the shoulder wedged in again, legs like levers.

  Chris is unprepared for the scene behind the second wall: a villa, 1920s or ’30s, in a large, treed garden, torches on the lawn. Light falls over them from the open windows. In the tall front door, Chris’s friend Frederike appears. Her shadow shrinks when she walks out to him, cheeks lit by torch flames, arms stretched out.

  ‘You’ve managed to find our estate!’ She puckers her lips in a pseudo-posh manner. ‘Here in the provincias different spatial rules apply, you know.’

  Her breath is all cigarette when she kisses Chris’s cheeks. He stoops over her, pressing her close. He has missed her, this Friesian woman, once a fellow student in London. He turns around, but the American has already been pulled into a small group of guests on the lawn. She takes Chris by the arm, leading him inside.

  ‘Come and meet Tita,’ she says. Her neck flushes.

  ‘It feels as if I know her like my own sister, Fred,’ Chris says. ‘Remember the descriptions in your letters?’

  Once inside, he needs to raise his voice. The vaulted ceilings of the reception rooms echo with the chatter and laughter of guests in summer outfits. There are tables with cold meats, cheeses, breads, yellow butter.

  ‘It is such a joy,’ Fred shouts up at him, ‘to be living with her in this place! Like contadini, like peasants, but in the heart of Milan, and in a huge villa, and to be surrounded by so many friends. Oh, here you are!’

  She grips the arm of a statuesque woman, drags her away from a posse of guests. Over her shoulder Tita gestures helplessly to her conversation partners. She turns to Chris.

  Fred introduces them. An incongruous couple, Chris thinks. Fred is now bent over a cigarette paper, wetting it with her tongue before rolling the tobacco, her eyes behind a dark, oily fringe. And next to her, blonde Tita: a living Giacometti, bones as thin as branches. They are both looking at him, their gazes devoid of expectation or demand. Rarely has he struck up a friendship as effortlessly as with Fred, and he recognises something of Fred’s benevolence in Tita’s eyes too, the same openness and joy.

  ‘Tita’s a concert pianist,’ Fred says, lifting Tita’s fingers with her cigarette-free hand. I know, he could say, you’ve been devoting paragraphs of your letters to her talent, but he only smiles and touches Tita’s fingers, which are hanging between them as if belonging to no one.

  Fred raises her nose as if smelling something that is burning. She drops Tita’s hand. She takes a drag on the cigarette and exposes a mouth full of sharp little teeth before scurrying away towards the kitchen.

  Tita stands closer to him. ‘Fred has told me a lot about you.’

  ‘Likewise,’ he says.

  They smile broadly at each other. The room is glowing.

  ‘What a wonderful house. Remind me, when did you move in?’

  ‘Fred moved in about a year ago and started fixing the place up. I’ve only been here a few months. We’re very happy,’ Tita says. ‘It’s unimaginable, of course, this place: a country villa amidst the industrial grit, two penniless girls in such a rambling old pile, a structure that Mussolini would have been proud of. But here it is!’

  She holds up her pianist’s hands in an improbable gesture, as if to support the entire building. ‘At night it looks more idyllic than it is – you should have a wander in the garden later, we’re on the canal – but during the day it’s a different story: shutters closed against the lorries and the factories, dust and ash settling on the garden … ’ She leans in slightly towards him, the scent of lemon rising from her skin. Her Italian cadences relax him.

  Behind her, Fred passes by with a pot of soup, her head in the steam. Against the vapour and the glowing light, Chris looks at Tita’s bone structure with astonishment: angular, like something from a Futurist painting.

  Fred rejoins them.

  ‘Tita was just telling me about the joys of your monumental house.’

  ‘A nest rather than a monument,’ she says. ‘A lesbian nest among the machines.’ She pouts grandly. ‘A crumbling barricade against the merciless march of production.’ The sharp little teeth shimmer as she laughs. ‘Like a warship that ran aground in the thirties, here at the edge of the canal … Oh, Chris,’ she says, taking his hand, ‘I have to introduce you to someone. There’s another South African here tonight – or, like you, a lapsed South African,’ she quickly corrects herself.

  ‘Tom,’ he says without hesitating. ‘It’s Tom, isn’t it?’

  She is taken aback. ‘Do you know him, then?’

  But he has surprised himself. He does not, in fact, know Tom.

  ‘Well, strange as it may sound, no, but he arrived with me, if I’m not mistaken. Don’t you remember?’

  The name has come from nowhere. He has no idea how he has attached it to the man – the Afrikaans American, or American Afrikaner.

  Fred is searching his face with a frown. Tita keeps smiling as if the entire universe’s contradictions are to be reconciled. Her fingers keep moving.

  Fred stops trying to figure out Chris’s response, but remains anxious. She slips her fingers through Tita’s.

  ‘Come, you have to play for the guests,’ she says.

  She leads Tita to the piano, climbs onto a side table and holds her short arms aloft. On the chair behind the shabby grand piano, Tita suddenly looks defeated. Hungry, thinks Chris; she is looking ravenously hungry. Gradually the guests quieten down.

  Everyone is waiting for Tita. Her hair ends are trembling slightly. She resembles porcelain in the moment before it breaks. She has completely frozen, arms by her sides, the keys untouched. No note will flow from her fingers tonight. Chris has to suppress his urge to go to her rescue.

  His eyes settle on the figure right behind Tita: a bony Northern European. He looks deeply uncomfortable. He has the kind of body, Chris thinks – his attention now divided between the man and Tita – that will never be able to give and receive unbridled love. At the edge of the silence, he notices someone else move from the corner of his eye. The figure slips out of the front door. Chris hesitates for a moment, then decides to leave the rescue action to Fred. He follows.

  It is quiet in the garden. He pursues the shadow around the corner and along the side of the house. At the base, the walls widen, like the pedestal of a neoclassical monument. He keeps his left shoulder against the granite. He opens his palm against the wall, looks up. This side of the house is almost windowless, amplifying the scale. Towards the garden wall some distance to his right, plants are weighed down by weeds. The man in front walks to the edge of the lawn, where it drops abruptly to the canal. The house, Chris notices, is built right to the edge too. The rush of water is audible.

  Chris keeps his distance, waiting. The glow of a lawn torch somewhere behind them illuminates the man’s back. He is standing on the lawn between the corner of the house and a birch tree growing over the canal, steadying himself against the tree with one hand and the house with the other. He leans forward and disappears.

  Chris freezes
. He quickly looks over his shoulder, half-expecting to see the bony Northern European in the glow of a torch behind him. But no one has followed them.

  Then he rushes forward. A few metres below him is the black water. The current is stronger than he imagined. It is too dark to see very far down the canal. His eyes search along the base of the house where it rises straight up out of the water. A movement against the wall, above the base, catches his eye. It takes a while before he realises it is the man, moving along a narrow ledge, body flattened against the granite. Further along, he can make out the profile of a balcony.

  Chris looks down at the water, tests the ledge with one foot. He takes off his shoes, puts them neatly together by the tree trunk and follows – toes on the ledge, fingers in a groove. Below him, water glides against stone as smoothly as oil.

  By the time he has reached the balcony, where the man is now awaiting him, his fingers have cramps. He is helped over the balustrade like someone rescued from drowning.

  ‘That was a rather foolish exercise,’ the man says laconically, the accent unstable.

  ‘Ditto,’ Chris says.

  The man shrugs his shoulders. ‘Second nature.’

  ‘What, foolishness?’

  Chris has now switched to Afrikaans. He can hear his own voice carrying across the canal. On the opposite side are bright lights against steel towers. Atop the towers, the megaphones of factory sirens glint. Half-light reflects off the water.

  The man smiles a sly smile against the reflections, as if saying: No, recklessness.

  ‘You are Tom,’ Chris says.

  ‘I am Tom.’ It sounds as if his tone is coupled with the raising of an eyebrow, but he has stepped back, into the deeper shadows, his face now a void.

  ‘Fred mentioned you.’ Chris leans forward onto the balustrade. The balcony hangs out over the water; it is made entirely of wood. Behind them, louvred shutters cover a door to the house. With Tom, he immediately senses, there is no room for the wearisome kind of questions and tales with which exiled South Africans sometimes approach each other when they meet in foreign parts. He detects no anxiousness on Tom’s side to share a history or feelings of alienation. He is nevertheless listening carefully to Tom’s dangerous voice, his abrupt utterances, to work out where they might have met before.

  Tom lights a cigarette without asking whether it would bother Chris or offering him one. ‘So, what just happened in there?’

  ‘Hard to say. Fred told me in a letter that Tita has recently been working through many nights on her PhD thesis. Perhaps she’s tired or stressed, maybe a little rusty when it comes to performing, rather than writing about, music. Or perhaps it’s the weight’ – Chris gestures vaguely to the ramshackle house above their heads – ‘that’s forcing the air from her lungs … ’ He is not sure himself what he is trying to say.

  ‘What was she going to play?’

  ‘No idea. Perhaps nothing, perhaps what we saw was the performance. She has all kinds of ideas about the boundaries of performance.’

  Tom takes his time inhaling the smoke of his cigarette, turns towards the shutters as if wanting to hear what is going on inside.

  ‘What’s she researching?’

  ‘History of music. The composer Luigi Russolo, apparently, and his influence on twentieth-century music. The title is something like From Russolo to Lachenmann, with a subtitle that I forget.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Tom says, and turns towards Chris, his tall body posing a challenge in the dark. He does not say anything. He seems to be taking delight in his own leanness.

  ‘I like Milan,’ Chris says after a while to break the silence. ‘I prefer it to the threadbare romanticism of Rome; I like the fact that the industrial decay here can’t be eclipsed by the glitz of the fashion houses. Milan symbolises the idea of modern Italy better—’

  ‘I don’t know either Rome,’ Tom says, ‘or Milan. This is my first visit.’ Chris feels the cold seeping into his feet. Below his soles, the wood is brittle and dry.

  After a while Tom turns back to the water. ‘During the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea,’ he says, ‘I was based in Asmara. As a photographer for an American paper. That, I thought back then, is how Italy looks. All those buildings from the thirties, the ice-cream-parlour colours.’

  ‘Yes, that I like,’ Chris says, excited about the direction the conversation is taking. ‘The European landscape through the lens of the colonial city, the idea that the former looks like the latter rather than the other way round. I’d love to visit Asmara. Mussolini’s architects apparently built it almost overnight. The old locomotives of the Eritrean railways, I’ve read, still carry the years of their construction according to the Fascist calendar. I also like the fact that the city’s modernist lines are disrupted by the life of an African city, by dark bodies, the chaos of war …’

  Tom blows slow smoke towards the water, drops the butt. The smoke drifts up, unfurls around them. For a few seconds their heads are out of focus. He is weighing me up, Chris thinks, and finding me too light.

  Drily Tom remarks: ‘The city is in fact almost untouched by the war. And it is clean and functional. Poor, though – the Brits stripped it of infrastructure when they took over. Asmara doesn’t in fact feel like Africa: at dusk people wander the streets with double-breasted suits and fedoras. Odd place.’

  Chris cannot get a grip on the character next to him. If it were light, he would be able to read something in the movements of his facial muscles. Nevertheless, Tom’s assuredness with his own body, the way in which he stylises even small movements, is starting to unravel a dim memory.

  ‘I presume you live in the US?’

  Tom nods, keeps looking at the water’s muscular black currents. (Is it starting to rise?)

  It takes a while before Tom speaks again. ‘I wonder whether these canals ever freeze over. Once I had to take photos for a local paper in Pennsylvania of a child who had drowned in a canal.’

  Now it is Chris who is turning to Tom.

  ‘It was mid-winter, in a small industrial town. She had been missing for a week. Children who had gone skating that morning, the surface strong enough for the first time, discovered her. She was lying in her red snow jacket under the ice, looking up. The children and I stood there with our heads together, looking down.’

  Chris turns towards the water. They are leaning forward, elbows on the balustrade, shoulders and hips touching. Tom’s face is moving into and out of the deeper shadows, unnerving Chris. Tom lifts his head and smiles an unpredictable smile against the glow, testing the wood with his foot.

  ‘I hope this contraption won’t collapse beneath us.’ And, as he is saying it, he inserts a hand under Chris’s shirt. With the lazy, indifferent insistence of a child stirring in its sleep, Tom’s fingers work their way up Chris’s spine to his neck.

  ‘Christiaan,’ Tom says, whispering heavily, ‘little Christiaan.’

  In the moment before Tom says his name (his vertebrae a string of coals), Chris knows exactly who it is: Tommie. Yes, Tommie from his school days.

  From his spine, his bones heat up. Above the water he is hanging from a skeleton of fire.

  Early evening. Christiaan and Tommie are cycling up the hill behind their neighbourhood. They are thirteen, perhaps fourteen.

  Tommie lives further down the street with his mother, in a far smaller house than Christiaan’s. His absent father, so he insists, is fighting terrorists in the war on the border. Tommie’s reckless aura has the boys in his class circling him like moths. He is smooth and brown as a chestnut in their midst, surrounded by a whiff of dusty sweat. His infamy is reaffirmed when the PE teacher punches him one morning when he refuses to change or train. He hardly moves a muscle when the fist makes contact and blood starts trickling through his lips. He balls his hands into fists, but does not hit back.

  At school, Tommie hardly takes notice of Christiaan, but at night he takes him on his raids in the neighbourhood. Occasionally Tommie blows up a postbox with firecrackers; here and
there he steals something from a garden. One evening he makes Christiaan wait in the street, hops over a wall and, after twenty minutes, brings back a radio, a box filled with records and a fistful of cash.

  Christiaan has a shiny new Christmas bicycle; Tommie still rides his old one from primary-school days, for which his legs have become too long. They pedal up the hill. Tommie’s body is swaying, his T-shirt flapping. It is almost completely dark.

  When the road starts flattening near the top, Tommie is far ahead of him. The houses fall away. There are only black wattle trees and the occasional blue gum. Christiaan is pedalling as if in sand. The skin on his back is cold. He is an open target. Years ago, he recalls, there was a serial killer who hid in the hills and managed, for months, to evade the police. The Panga Man. Every now and then he would creep up on lovers in their cars and slice them up with relish.

  Christiaan pedals until his lungs start burning.

  At the big reservoir, Tommie is waiting for him. He drops his own bicycle next to Tommie’s. They scramble wildly up the high wire fence. He reaches the top before Tommie, but when he rolls over the razor wire, it tears his shirt and draws a burning line across his ribs.

  They clamber up an iron ladder inside a concrete tube. Tommie is in front, Christiaan below him, more wary now. The clanging of feet on iron echoes around them.

  They emerge at the top and walk along the edge of the reservoir’s domed roof, arms stretched out, to where they can see the city lying beneath their feet. Tommie takes off his shirt. Christiaan hesitates, then follows suit. They lie down on their backs, feet against the low edge. The concrete is still holding the afternoon’s warmth. As always, the air is high and cloudless. The city is full of engines. Tommie lights a cigarette. He inhales the smoke. Then he brings it closer, until it almost touches Christiaan’s skin. In the glow they study the bloody ridge across his ribs. He holds his breath, waits for Tommie to trace it with a finger, but Tommie grins and turns away, shooting his cigarette in a long arc above the city lights. Before he loses his courage, he reaches out for Tommie’s temple, but Tommie jumps up. He crawls towards the middle of the dome. He gets up and stands on the highest point like a statue. Then he disappears. Christiaan waits for him to return. After a long while – the concrete having cooled against his skin – he realises Tommie has gone.