by S J Naudé
The hff is accommodated in several old buildings. Once they must have been proud Prussian villas; now they sport dusty linoleum floors and mustard-coloured picture rails, walls painted in dove grey and brown.
He has an appointment with the school’s director. His office is spacious and looks out onto a garden. The wallpaper has yellow patterns from the ’70s. ‘Herr Nieuwenhuis. Willkommen!’ The director switches to passable English. ‘We are excited to have you in our midst. Your instructors at the London Film School speak of you with great regard.’ His tone is oddly grandiloquent. Etienne thinks of his low profile in London: the failure of his first film project, and of the subsequent two. The exchange programme was an opportunity to get rid of him. It is entirely credible that they might have sung his praises to Herr Direktor.
Etienne doesn’t skip a beat, starts explaining how he has long been yearning to study at a film school of the calibre of the hff – ‘Konrad Wolf,’ he corrects himself. Wolf, after whom this proud institution has recently been renamed, even though no one actually uses the new name, was (so his information file explained) an East German director, and had once been a heroic soldier in the Red Army. Etienne solemnly tilts his head. ‘The ideological and aesthetic values of this institution will certainly find favour with me, Herr Direktor.’ Two heads nodding, two frowning foreheads feigning sincerity: a little dance on either side of a wide desk. Etienne thinks of Mister van Rooyen, his erstwhile history teacher with his muscly buttocks, and of his father. He can adapt quickly. He doubts whether much will be expected of him here at the hff. The fact that he is here – the implied ideological camaraderie – is, he suspects, already more than enough.
The director pushes a button on a plastic intercom, summons Frau Finkel. She doesn’t return Etienne’s smile. She takes him on a tour of the buildings and lecture halls. He is introduced to lecturers in musty offices, and a few fellow students. Then he attends a film history lecture – an introductory overview of what they will be studying this semester. The way the lecturer ignores most Western film movements and directors astonishes him. Clearly, social realism is the only approach deserving of their attention.
When the class ends, Frau Finkel arrives to fetch him. She accompanies him to a seminar on scriptwriting for documentary films. The lecturer’s focus is objectivity, a ‘scientifically factual’ approach; the techniques he sets out are, however, those of propaganda. A video film by an alumnus is shown. It is about Experimentalbau – experimental building methods and housing. It starts with a report on the recent demolition of an old gas plant in Dimitroffstrasse (not far from Etienne’s lodgings, he realises when Stargarder Strasse is briefly visible in a wide shot) and its replacement by blocks of concrete flats. A super-modern planetarium has also just been erected on the same site. The film becomes a rising paean to the East German housing authorities and their indefatigable dedication to progress.
Etienne looks around him, at the demure students. They are listening in silence, not asking anything, nodding their heads. He thinks of the grouchiness, anxiety and anarchy of his fellow students in London, of their challenging questions and objections. Their entitlement, their self-confidence. Their vulnerability. Their messy hair, their punky outfits.
It feels as if he is back in South Africa. All the self-soothing and self-congratulating. All the forbidden thoughts hiding deep inside skulls.
Chapter 19
It surprises Etienne that one so rarely sees or hears children in this city. And it feels as if the heavy air hasn’t been stirred by wings in a long time: have the birds already migrated south for the winter, or headed off in a final exodus?
On his walks Etienne is greeted by blind windows, rotting Trabants and courtyards filled with rubble. The East German government has long wanted to implode Prenzlauer Berg’s crumbling buildings, Nils tells him. They want to bury them with the rest of the century’s rubble and erect new structures. Want to make everything new and grey. To restore old buildings is expensive. And it reminds one of other times, the wrong times.
Months have passed since he last saw Axel. He is starting to forget the texture of his skin. But the new city is fuelling his sense of loss. One morning, on the way to film school, he is walking underneath Schönhauser Allee’s tracks when the rumbling of a train conjures up Axel’s face. He retreats, presses himself against an iron pillar. He forgets where the pillar stops and he begins: steel, noise, flesh. Axel’s body enters his own, pressing the breath from his chest. When the rumbling subsides, Etienne has a painful erection. His legs won’t obey him, won’t ascend the stairs to the station. For the first time he wonders: is Axel dead? For the rest of the day, something keeps moving like worms between his ribs.
Contrary to Frau Drechsler’s instructions, Etienne uses the basin in his room. Perhaps water is seeping all the way to Saggy Cheeks’ flat, clumping the Hausbuch’s pages together, making the ink smudge. Perhaps the damp will rot the beams, causing the building to collapse. And will it trickle yet further, into subterranean archives, washing pages clean of their secrets?
The Berliner Chronik storyboards, including the rough sketches he has made himself, are stuck onto the wall with adhesive tape. To hell with Drechsler’s rules. The first reel of the film stays under his bed. Sometimes he recalls frames from it, but then realises they are images that he has conjured up himself in the apocryphal storyboards.
He secretly keeps a kettle in his room. In the two weeks since his arrival, he has tried a few times to start a conversation with Nils, has offered him some of the pure coffee he brought with him on the recommendation from one of his London lecturers – the film theorist – who previously visited the gdr. He was there in the ’70s, during the coffee crisis. Coffee hasn’t in fact been as expensive or as rare for a long time. Even so, Frau Drechsler only keeps cheap chicory coffee. Tonight Etienne is standing outside Nils’s door again, across from his own, with two steaming mugs. Nils lets him in, hesitatingly takes one. He takes cigarettes from his pocket, hb Filter, offers Etienne one. They light up; Nils opens the window to the courtyard. The autumn air is cool against Etienne’s forehead; the smoke burns his throat. ‘East Berlin is a place from which people want to escape . . . You’ve come here voluntarily. Why?’ Nils’s facial muscles tense up as he speaks. Each syllable is uttered with difficulty.
Etienne shrugs his shoulders, looks at the tree in the courtyard. ‘It’s better than where I’m originally from. Anywhere is.’
He asks Nils questions. About his plans, what he does for a living. There is a long silence before he responds. A muscle starts twitching in his neck. ‘Last year I was refused admission to Humboldt University. And the year before that.’
‘Why?’
He looks down at his cigarette. ‘Does one ever know? . . . My parents, probably . . .’ Nils leans against the window ledge. A first he is careful; then it starts flowing. He has always wanted to study Japanese. Now he is trying to teach himself from the few books one can find in public libraries. But he has no one with whom to converse in the language.
Nils stops talking, approaches the bedroom door, listens. He comes back, switches on his cassette player at low volume. Etienne looks at the handwritten list of songs on the cassette case. British New Romantic bands. Spandau Ballet, Adam and the Ants, Duran Duran. The recordings are woolly, recorded from the radio. Outside the classroom, Etienne has gradually realised, his fellow students are not quite such exemplary citizens. They were the ones who showed him where to find Western music on the radio. The frequencies of rias 1 and sfb, the West Berlin stations, are not calibrated on East German radios, but easy to find just left of ddr1 and Stimme der ddr – the voice of the gdr – with their local kitsch. Very little Western music can be heard officially. There are still quotas in nightclubs to play gdr music, Nils tells him. Music from selected Western bands is released in small quantities, but such music is easier to find on holiday in Czechoslovakia or Yugoslavia. Nowadays Etienne reco
rds music from the radio too. Since he left the pre-recorded cassettes that he brought from London in the sun one afternoon, they have been producing warped sounds. He resolves to bring back some proper recordings for Nils when he goes to West Berlin.
Etienne carefully enquires about Nils’s parents. Nils sighs, goes and listens at the door, comes back, turns up the music. His parents, he tells Etienne, made themselves unpopular in the ’70s. They were friends of Wolf Biermann—
‘Biermann?’
‘Before my time. Singer, poet. Marxist idealist . . . Back then he had a falling-out with the government. Wanted to change things from within the Party . . . They deported him to the West. My parents stayed behind, and . . .’ He approaches the door for a third time, opening it slightly. The radio can be heard in the kitchen – good news about the gdr, bad news about Western countries. Nils shuts the door again. ‘They were made to regret it forever. Later they became active in the Lutheran church, in the peace circles . . .’
‘So, now you’re being punished?’
‘Who knows?’ Nils says flatly. Etienne flicks his cigarette though the window. Nils extinguishes his own, closes the window.
There is a long silence. Etienne asks Nils about the minor mysteries of his daily routine: is it necessary to purchase u-Bahn tickets? Is there a proper variety of groceries somewhere, or do you always have to scour several supermarkets? Nils gives tips. Also, of his own accord, about how to recognise social types in East Germany by their shoes.
They sit down on the single bed. It creaks and squeaks. Nils looks at Etienne, smiles shyly for the first time. Etienne grips his shirt. Nils lifts his arms like a reluctant child having to change before bedtime; Etienne pulls it over his head. Nils is gaunt, and at least two metres tall. The skin is taut over the sinews; he doesn’t have an ounce of fat. Etienne starts counting the vertebrae with his fingers. Nils warily rests his head on Etienne’s shoulder, kisses him behind the ear.
In the centre of the flat is the Berliner Zimmer: a spacious, gloomy room. Close to the front door is the kitchen, Frau Drechsler’s bedroom and a bathroom. Diagonally across from the Berliner Zimmer is a short corridor with Etienne’s and Nils’s bedrooms and a second bathroom. Frau Drechsler clearly finds silence intolerable. When there isn’t radio chatter in the kitchen, a black-and-white television is droning in the Berliner Zimmer. The only time when there is silence – and then Etienne wishes there were noise – is when they sit down to dinner like an uneasy family. In this forced silence Frau Drechsler apparently finds perverse pleasure. Like a paterfamilias insisting that the children eat in silence before family prayers.
Tonight, after dinner, Etienne and Frau Drechsler are sitting in brown armchairs like a married couple. They are watching a documentary television programme that is applauding the uncompromising modernity of the state’s building projects. (The same director as the film he saw about the demolition of the Dimitroffstrasse gas plant?) It is Drechsler’s version of family prayers. She sits there nodding, as if someone is reading from the Bible.
There is a master plan for the city, one realises quickly, and a master narrative for the past and future. It is a simple story; it doesn’t take long to master it. You see a few documentary films, hear a political speech or two, and then you can recite the mantras. You close your eyes, visualise a crowd in a stadium. And there you have it. Your tongue no longer belongs to you. You have been successfully initiated into the chorus.
Etienne is a free walker. Unlike in London, where he had pushy guides, he explores Berlin on his own. City adventurers aren’t welcome in these parts. In a city where the rhythm of your feet should indicate a clear destination, his exploration is too random. How long, he wonders, before shadowy figures in brown coats start following him on his aimless meanders? Before they stretch open his jaws with an iron clamp and force the right words from him? Before, like the other figures on the streets, he purses his lips and pushes forward, straight into the wind?
To doubt is to betray. To be curious is to disrupt.
On a cloudy afternoon he walks down Karl-Liebknecht Strasse. It is muggy, too warm for autumn. He enters a shop that sells nothing but fur hats with ear flaps (the joys of central planning!). Soviet hats, made of the hides of Russian rabbits. Etienne is the only customer. The shop assistant (he looks like a Mongolian) pulls a hat over Etienne’s head. It squeezes his head; the roots of his hair start itching and sweating.
There is no mirror; he observes himself in the window. Behind his own reflection, a tram passes. A toddler steps into the shop, wraps his arms around Etienne’s legs. He gets a shock when he looks down at him: his eyes are filled with mature, knowing horror. The mother follows the child inside, pulls the child away. He keeps clinging, looking accusingly up at Etienne. At last he lets go; mother and child disappear in the street. The Mongolian is unperturbed, puts a bigger hat on Etienne’s head. Etienne enquires about the price. It is unaffordable. He shakes his head, leaves the shop.
He walks in the direction of the Brandenburger Tor, up to where he is barred by the inner wall. Behind it is the death strip with its watchtowers, then the Wall itself. He walks back to Alexanderplatz, where a gathering of the Freie Deutsche Jugend is in progress. He looks at the young men with their uniforms and flags, at their calves and shoulder muscles. Like young Voortrekkers in South Africa. Like cadets with their sturdy legs, their sweaty buttocks and armpits. Etienne looks up at the television tower’s gleaming blue sphere in the sunshine. It is time, he thinks, for a trip to West Berlin.
He has been here for a month. He first wanted to acclimatise to the drabness of East Berlin’s streets, to the fumes of Trabants and Ladas, had to settle into life at the film school, but now he has to start his search. He must find Axel, and he shall. In that walled half-city beyond the death strip nobody could, surely, disappear without a trace.
On the u-Bahn to Friedrichstrasse station Etienne observes a tattooed girl. No East Berliners have tattoos. Is tattooing officially proscribed? Regarded, at least, as antisocial behaviour? She has to be a day visitor from West Berlin, or perhaps from Prague or Budapest. The arm tattoo is a dandelion; the downy seeds are blowing away, up her arm, neck and cheek. There are a few lost seeds on the shaven temple. Behind her, through the train window, the Fernsehturm is visible, towering like a thermometer.
Etienne warily enters Friedrichstrasse station. When he came through here the first time, he got a glimpse of the extensive network of corridors and platforms. East and West Germany – and the overground and underground train systems of each – together in one complex. Like a termite nest in which the tunnels cannot cross. He walks into the departure hall – ‘Die Tränenpalast’ in common parlance, according to Nils. The palace of tears. Where families or friends who are separated by the Wall say goodbye to each other after day visits.
Etienne shows his refugee travel document at an initial control point. The official frowns, but he is waved past. There is consternation at the currency exchange counter when it turns out he isn’t allowed to take East German marks with him. And they aren’t exchangeable for West German marks either. He will be returning tonight, he explains; he needs his Ostmark. A guard approaches; Etienne lowers his voice. The cash isn’t being confiscated, the sullen clerk explains; he will be able to withdraw it again upon his return.
In one of a row of cubicles, each containing a passport official, his travel document is stamped. He has crossed over; he is in the West. He walks through a long corridor, then over the s-Bahn platform. Down a flight of stairs, through a tunnel to the u-Bahn. A maze. He looks up at the ceiling – if his calculations are correct, he is more or less below Friedrichstrasse. Above his head East German feet are walking in the street. Up there you are in one country, down here – a metre or two below them – you are in another.
Chapter 20
In the east something akin to dust settles in your thoughts: the more he scanned his West Berlin tourist guide
last night, the less any concrete plans took shape. Where does one start such a search? Hospitals? Some government office? Or will a team of spry German blokes from a police station help him scour the city for Axel?
He arbitrarily boards a West German u-Bahn train. He doesn’t know a soul here. His German is inadequate. He has hardly any money – he has just exchanged most of his remaining pounds on the western side of Friedrichstrasse station for a modest sum of West German marks.
He isn’t far from Prenzlauer Berg. But in a different world. Faster, filled with colour. And it has a different smell. He suddenly feels fiercely loyal towards East Berlin. He is missing the toxic fumes, the bitter smoke of autumn fires stoked with low-grade coal from Leipzig. He is missing Nils. (Not quite yet Frau Drechsler.) He observes his fellow passengers; everybody looks so shut off and self-satisfied. He wonders whether they can smell he is from the East. The punk across from him looks no different from his counterparts in East Berlin. Plus tattoos, that is. Etienne smiles; the punk bares his teeth. Beelzebub’s face is tattooed across his Adam’s apple.
A few nights ago, Nils took Etienne to an impromptu Ost-rock concert on a bomb site in Schliemannstrasse. Such gatherings are illegal. A frenetic refrain has been stuck in Etienne’s mind ever since: Arbeit, Brot und Wohnung für alle! Over and over the singer shouted these words, sounding increasingly raw and hoarse. The cord of the microphone ran amid feet, among weeds, past a car wreck, over a wall. One could imagine it winding further, through cellars and tunnels, under barbed wire and landmines, to a power socket in the West. Ost-punks danced and smashed beer bottles on the ground. The electric cable was getting trampled; the amplifier cut out. The voice kept shouting and the drummer kept thumping until his drums broke. Everybody danced, joining in the shouting. Etienne left, fearing that the Volkspolizei would arrive. For all he knows, that raw screaming is still continuing.