The Third Reel

by S J Naudé

  Gradually the bugs start finding their way. They ignore Etienne, aim towards Axel. He is emitting pollen aromas. Or insect pheromone. ‘I know only too well,’ Etienne says to the little swarm, ‘how the signals of that skin can throw you off, how it can meddle with the seasons.’ They land on Axel’s back, in his hair. Crawl into his sweaty armpits. He stops snoring, shakes his shoulders. The swarm is becoming denser. He sneezes, sits up. Rubs his fingers in his ears, blows bugs from his nose. Spits insects from his mouth, dusts off his shoulder blades.

  ‘Fucking horny ladybirds!’ Axel mumbles, stumbling to the bathroom. There is the sound of a thick stream of urine against porcelain. And of brushing and slapping. Are they flying into his hairy groin? Sliding down the gulley between his back muscles? Etienne smiles: he and the ladybirds share a secret.

  Axel falls back down on the bed, still sullen and indifferent with sleep. ‘Flying terrorists!’ he says, looking askance at Etienne. Then Axel yawns. ‘By the way, I forgot to mention – yesterday, when you were at film school, someone delivered an envelope for you.’

  ‘Who? Who’d even know I’m here?’

  Axel lifts a forearm, shades his eyes against the sun. ‘How should I know? Probably one of your stalkers, those loonies responding to your ads. When I got home, it was lying on the threshold. Like a foundling in a basket. It’s in the kitchen.’

  Etienne scoots down the stairs, finds the letter by the stove. His name is typed on the envelope. The note inside is assembled from individual letters cut from newspaper headings. Ominous, like a threat found on a car windshield by a victim in an American horror film. visit this adres today and youll find something that intrest you. An address in se16 follows. No sender name. He turns the envelope over. Blank. Something falls out, slips under the stove. He bends down, claws it out: a flat key. A bright red ribbon is tied to it.

  Upstairs he finds Axel, still in bed, still naked and surly. He shows him the anonymous note, and the key. Axel takes the key, strokes the ribbon. He turns it over once or twice, gives it back, shrugs his shoulders.

  ‘Well, I guess I should go and find out what it’s about. And, yes, it’s probably some wacko again . . . Coming with me?’

  Axel shakes his head. ‘Heading to the hospital.’

  ❦

  Etienne hasn’t been in Rotherhithe before. On either side of the road, corrugated-iron sheets stretch for several kilometres, forming a narrow, straight corridor parallel to the Thames. He is on a bicycle that someone once left by the well in Bermondsey Street. His lungs are burning. There is no one ahead of him, no one behind him.

  He stops, drops the bicycle, peeks through a crack in the corrugated iron. An expanse of barren soil. Etienne has heard other squatters talk about this. Blocks and blocks of social housing have been razed to the ground, ploughed into the soil to make room for private developments. It is Saturday; bulldozers and lorries are standing idle. Cloudlets of dust whirl above the disrupted earth.

  He rides on. An abstract trip: a line dividing the road, bicycle wheels singing, grey sky overhead. Except for the flickering ridges of the iron sheets, nothing indicates movement. Everything has fallen away – as if you are coming from nowhere and heading nowhere.

  Towards the end, the corrugated-iron plates open up into a circle, surrounding a lonely 1930s block of council flats – the only building still surviving. When he puts down the bicycle, a few frozen ladybirds fall from his clothes. The morning’s stolen summer hours are over.

  He looks at the address on his ominous note again, feels the key in his pocket and enters the building. On a board there are notices of protest action against the demolition of the building, as well as announcements of meetings. Someone who changes locks for free has posted an advertisement. A yellowed banner reads: Join the barricade, keep Thatcher’s demolition men out! As he ascends the stairs, rotting warehouses on the north bank become visible. To the south there is a network of ghost streets where surrounding buildings once stood.

  He rings the bell. A young Caribbean man opens the door, his hair woven into neat patterns. Etienne wants to say something, but the man turns and disappears. Etienne enters. It smells of medicine and bodies inside. For a while he stands dithering in a dining room. Figures are moving deeper in; there is whispering.

  Etienne walks hesitantly down the corridor, encounters a group of people around a bed. The curtains are drawn. He peers through the bodies. The man under blankets in their midst looks dead. And yet his nose is shielding short, shallow breaths like a falcon’s beak.

  Etienne leans over to a beautiful black woman in her thirties. ‘Who is it?’ he whispers.

  ‘How could you not know?’ She looks suspicious, as if he could be a Thatcher spy. ‘Who are you?’ The head of the man under the blankets turns a degree or two in their direction.

  Etienne takes the anonymous message from his pocket, unfurls it. ‘What does this mean?’

  She takes it, reads. She frowns, whispers loudly: ‘How should I know?’

  ‘Who is it?’ Etienne asks again, his eyes gesturing to the man on the bed.

  She rolls her eyes. ‘It is Bernhard, of course. Bernhard Sauer, who led the resistance against the eviction. If you’re not a resident or family, what are you doing here?’ The others apparently only hear the word ‘family’. They open up a tunnel, pushing Etienne gently to the front. The woman follows, her lips against Etienne’s ear. She is hardly trying to whisper any longer. ‘Why are you here? There is nothing to scavenge here. Go! We’re all here to show our respect.’ She looks around, announcing in a louder voice: ‘He’s not family, he’s an intruder!’

  Heads turn towards Etienne. He avoids the gazes. He is now in front, right beside the bag of fluid that is dripping into the man’s hand, which is blackened with bruises. The bedside lamp is so bright, it seems as if light is emanating from the patient. The sick man’s head turns towards Etienne. He tries opening his eyes; his mouth is gaping. ‘Shimmering days,’ he manages to utter. ‘And nights as black as wine.’ Or that is what Etienne hears.

  Etienne starts retreating. For a brief moment he was family; now hostility is spreading like a virus. He can feel it in the skins brushing against him. Are the grieving inclined to violence? The bodies are working him from the circle, closing in a cordon around the bed. He hesitates at the bedroom door. Through the bodies he can see the old man’s lips moving, as if tasting something for the last time. Someone is massaging his temples; another places a palm upon his chest. ‘A bruising of shadows . . .’ are Sauer’s last words, or the last words Etienne thinks he hears before slipping out.

  In the dining room he stops in his tracks. A prominent silver lock is fastened to the handle of a sideboard, a red ribbon tied to it. Etienne takes the key from his pocket: the ribbon is identical. His breathing quickens. He looks back down the corridor, then approaches and puts the key in the lock. It turns; the locks opens. In front of him, when the door opens, it is there, and unmistakable: a steel film case. His heart starts hammering. He looks over his shoulder, back to where loud sobs are now sounding. He grabs the case, rushes outside. He runs down the stairs, gets on the bicycle.

  Between the corrugated-iron plates, he pedals as fast as he can. He doesn’t encounter anyone before he is back in London’s ordinary streets. The steel container under his arm is cool against his ribs. Thatcher’s barren fields lie behind him.

  Etienne heads straight to the hospital, where Axel is. But when he reaches the abandoned Bankside power station, he can wait no longer. He drops the bicycle, opens the case, pulls out a section of the film and holds it against the light.

  At the hospital he storms into the reception and insists that Axel be called. The receptionist stares at the weathered round steel case as if it might be infected with flesh-eating bacteria.

  ‘You have to come,’ he says to Axel. ‘Home. Now. I have your grandmother’s film. How I don’t know, but I have it.
Part of it, at least. One reel . . .’

  Axel looks laconic in his stained uniform. ‘To do with that crank letter of yesterday, I presume. And you reckon it’s the real thing?’

  Etienne gets his breath back. ‘I looked. On the way here. After just a few frames I knew . . .’

  ‘And how did you imagine we were going to project it?’ In his excitement it has escaped Etienne that they don’t have a projector. He looks down sheepishly at the reel. Axel smiles, continues: ‘Not really my grandmother’s film, by the way – she wouldn’t even have been able to see it. I have to complete my shift first. And find us a projector . . .’ Axel is leaning against the reception counter. ‘Tell me, before I go, did you find it or did you have to steal it?’

  Etienne suddenly feels as ashamed as he had last felt in South Africa. Stolen, yes. From a dying man.

  ❦

  Later that night Etienne tells Axel about the narrow escape he had with the strange little crowd around the dying Sauer’s bed, about the key ribbon that matched the lock’s. Axel frowns, looks concerned when he tells him about the grievers. ‘I wonder whether your anonymous source had really intended that you should encounter that bunch . . .’

  The next day Etienne borrows a projector from the film school. He and Axel set it up in the Bermondsey Street backyard, aim it at a white wall. The light fans out over the well like a megaphone. Steam rises through the bright beam.

  Will it be the masterpiece he has hoped for? A revolutionary work, given the technological limitations of the time, one that would have recast the history of film? Will it be worth his hungry flights of fancy?

  These are the wrong questions, Etienne realises. Any questions are redundant. He can only empty his thoughts while watching. And be hypnotised slowly.

  The quality of the print isn’t good; the film has decayed. The screen flickers, sometimes turns black, then flashes white before the image returns. There is an underlying droning sound on the warped soundtrack, a dissonance that one feels on one’s skin rather than in the inner ear.

  The film starts with an aerial shot of Berlin. Irmgard’s diary says nothing of a plane or aerial shots, and they wouldn’t have been able to afford those anyway; it must be material from elsewhere. Probably, Etienne thinks, from a newsreel.

  Then feathery clouds appear. Berlin becomes hazy, then disappears behind the clouds. The droning isn’t that of an aeroplane engine. It is a soundtrack of avant-garde music. Violins and cellos, sometimes a hoarse trumpet. A mystery, Etienne thinks. He doesn’t remember Irmgard’s diary saying anything about music . . .

  Each sequence is preceded by a title frame. The first is Wintermorgen (Winter Morning): a shadowy room, a maid entering to light the fire and push an apple into the stove. Close-up: a young boy’s nose wrinkling under the blanket. In the next sequence, entitled Das Telefon (The Telephone), the camera moves through a dark Berlin flat (how smoothly the dolly glides, as if on ice). The viewer starts when a phone starts ringing tremulously in an ultra close-up. Schmetterlingsjagd (Butterfly Hunt) works with lengthy shots in tall grass: the perspective of a child running with a butterfly net.

  There are double exposures, frames shifting over each other, scenes bleeding into one another. Often, slow motion. ‘Where,’ Etienne asks rhetorically, ‘were they hoping to ever find an audience for such dreamy material? In a time of silly slapstick and stylised melodrama? And in 1930s Germany . . . ?’

  Etienne stands up, enters the projector’s flood of long-lost light with his eyes closed. Axel joins him, folding his arms around Etienne. A few stray snowflakes drift down and settle on their foreheads.

  Chapter 17

  Etienne knows he should be depositing the reel of Berliner Chronik somewhere safe. It should be preserved in archival conditions. At the bfi, for instance. But he cannot bring himself to do it. He considers returning to the flat in the barren lands of Rotherhithe – who knows, perhaps the rest of the film is there too. He doesn’t dare, thief that he is. And Bernhard Sauer – whoever he may be – must have died shortly after his departure, or even before he left. By this time, the flat must have been vacated; perhaps the entire building has been demolished. Also, his fervour for finding the rest of the film has subsided somewhat; he is breathing more easily.

  Axel rarely works at the hospital any more. Most of the time he is busy in the attic. Etienne finds the shuffling and knocking noises overhead calming. He still attends his film-school classes, but his confidence is low. His smaller practical projects are all failures. And over the next two semesters he will have to make two more films. He is expecting a high mark for his lost continental films seminar. But how he will pass the year overall, he doesn’t know.

  A telegram arrives for Axel. He reads it, then goes out to make a tele­phone call from a public phone. When he returns, he is pale and distracted. His lips are thin, his neck muscles tense.

  ‘I’m on my way,’ is all he says. He hardly looks at Etienne.

  ‘What do you mean? Where to?’ Axel shrugs off the questions. Etienne swallows. ‘When? Can I come?’

  ‘There are things I have to do alone.’ Axel is distant; the closeness of the last few weeks suddenly seems inconceivable.

  It takes Etienne a long time to fall asleep that night. In the early hours Axel presses himself against Etienne’s back, wakes him up. Etienne knows the ghost boys are listening from behind the wallpaper, their breath breezing coolly through the room. He pulls the blanket up to his chin. ‘It’s my mother . . .’ Axel says and swallows. ‘I’ll tell you more later. But you do have to come with me.’

  Etienne’s head is still thick with sleep. ‘What’s going on, Axel?’

  ‘Come with me. Just come with me.’ Etienne hasn’t heard such urgency in Axel’s voice before.

  ‘My situation, Axel . . . I can’t just . . .’ His mouth tastes of city rain. ‘Explain to me what’s going on, then I can—’

  Axel turns on his back. ‘I thought you wanted to come. You said so. Just last night . . .’

  ‘And I do. But you’re keeping me in the dark. What’s happened? Where would we be going? For how long?’ He waits in vain for an answer from Axel, then continues: ‘I can’t just abscond overnight. Surely you know that. My scholarship, film school, my asylum . . .’ Axel doesn’t answer, moves away. Etienne dozes off again. In Etienne’s dream, or perhaps just before he falls asleep, Axel says: Forget about everything here. Let go of it all. Come with me. He keeps repeating it. Come with me.

  Early the next morning, Axel visits a travel agent. Etienne isn’t allowed to join him. When Axel returns, he starts packing a suitcase. He is preoccupied and ignores Etienne, who is lingering and loitering. Etienne looks surreptitiously at the plane ticket lying next to the mattress. As he suspected: Berlin. And, he notices, a return flight has been booked to London in a week’s time. He breathes more easily, relaxes his shoulders. He goes down to the kitchen, makes a note of Axel’s flight details and warms his hands in front of the stove.

  That night, before Axel’s early-morning departure, it is Etienne who wakes Axel in the small hours. ‘Why am I not allowed to know anything? What’s happened to your mother?’ Axel doesn’t respond. ‘I’ll be here. In London. I’ll be waiting for you.’ Axel turns away.

  When they part company at Heathrow, Etienne curses the tears that he cannot stop. There are things he wants to say to Axel. Melodramatic, exaggerated things. Like: You are a blade in my side, an indispensable pain. You are my downfall and my lifebuoy, everything that is unbearable and immeasurable. But his lips remain shut.

  Axel doesn’t look Etienne in the eyes. He bends his head as if searching for heat in Etienne’s neck. Then he turns around and exits through the security doors without saying goodbye. Etienne follows his shape through ribbed glass; then he is gone.

  Back home, Etienne sits cross-legged on the attic floor. He looks up at the painting at a Dutch tilt. His wild alter
ego towers towards the heavens; the sparks exploding from his horns are as bright as a welding flame. He is wearing sunglasses. His lips are fuller than in reality. Why would Axel paint him in this way? As a sensual god (or devil or goat) towering above the earth, seeking friction in the weather systems up high?

  He gets up, wanders through the empty house. He finds his mother’s letters, which he had rescued from the Finns’ bony claws, in one of the rooms. He does not doubt that two streams of letters are still arriving dutifully at No. 52 in the Square. What might the Finns be doing with them? Throwing them in the lit hearth for a few moments’ heat? Using them for scrap paper, writing goth songs about blood and excrement on the back?

  He takes the letters up to the attic, sits down under the painting again. In the self-censored pile, only the first envelope has ever been opened. Earlier Etienne had read a few of the more intimate letters. He is ready for the rest. He opens one, reads how hurt his mother is feeling about his unrelenting tone, about how coolly he is renouncing his mother country. Does he have access to a phone? she wants to know. She will call. Or he can make a collect call. Any time. I will stay at home over the next month, waiting by the phone. In her next letter she writes that she will be visiting Etienne. His father initially agreed to finance the trip, but has since refused. She will borrow money from her sister. Disappointment, in the next letter, because Etienne isn’t responding. She will nevertheless buy a plane ticket. She asks that he send her a photograph. I want to recognise my child when I see him again. Gradually her tone becomes less needy; as time passes, she starts carrying her yearning more lightly. Or underplaying it. Even the handwriting is steadier. She speculates about what he does, what his days might be like. She suspects he is busy with his music. And he has probably met a British girl by now, one with porcelain skin? Is he studying? Little of what is happening in Pretoria would probably interest him. She nevertheless writes about the death of Selina, their maid of the past twenty years. How she hadn’t realised that she would be so moved, how she had wanted to attend the burial, but Etienne’s father had barred her from doing so – it isn’t safe in the township. She went there in secret, the only white woman. She stayed at the grave until all the funeral-goers had left. She left a chiffon scarf on the pile of soil. Why she did this, she doesn’t quite know. It felt to me as if I were standing next to your grave, Etienne.