The Third Reel

by S J Naudé

  The three of them look at Etienne for a final verdict. ‘No,’ he says. ‘Nothing should be written on it.’ Frederick paints over it all. Then they spray paint the entire vehicle black, also the back windows. Like a craft designed to avoid radar detection.

  Matthias is driving, with Christof sitting next to him. The back seats have been taken out. Etienne and Frederick are lying on cushions on the steel floor. In the very back the instruments and sound equipment are stacked. To get onto the Transitstrecke – the strip of highway that runs from West Berlin through East Germany – they cross at Kontrollpunkt Dreilinden. Matthias’s face is sullen when they stop. The skin on Christof’s neck tightens; he sucks in his cheeks. Frederick takes Etienne’s hand. The East German guard sticks his head through the window, looks at Etienne and Frederick in their nest of cushions. The passports and titre de voyage are taken away. The guards return empty-handed, insist that they all get out. Etienne’s heart starts racing. The guard searches the front part of the cabin, then orders them to unload the instruments and equipment. When they start unknotting the ropes, the guard changes his mind. They have to get back into the Volkswagen. The guard disappears.

  They wait for ten minutes. Then another ten. Vehicles on either side of them are let through. Fog starts wafting from the trees next to the highway, wraps around the border post’s buildings. Then the guard approaches, carrying the passports. Etienne’s travel document isn’t with them. The guard looks silently at Etienne, hand on his gun. They wait. The guard’s gaze does not shift. A minute passes. Then another guard emerges from the fog, hands Etienne his travel document through the window.

  When they are through, they laugh with relief. A joint is lit and shared. Before long they are relaxed, floating. What a home this is, Etienne thinks, this cosy nest of friends. His brothers, comrades, protectors, co-conspirators, fellow noise-makers. How safe one feels in this ship, this lit tank speeding across the strange flat earth.

  It is cold. It should have been almost summer by now, but spring has waned again. Etienne lies back against the pile of cushions. He can hear his cymbals vibrating and resonating in the back. With his skilful hands Christof has connected an old domestic heater to the car’s electrical system. He is their technician, always setting up the sound equipment at gigs. The little heater is rattling against the car’s metal body. The elements are glowing brightly. Matthias has been selecting the music thus far, but now it is Christof’s turn. He inserts his cassette into the car radio, then lies down in the back next to Etienne and Frederick. Christof’s favourite post-punk bands are playing: Gang of Four, The Fall, Can, Bauhaus, The Birthday Party. Matthias turns up the volume. The three of them are singing out loud; Etienne only knows a few snatches of the lyrics.

  They stop at a petrol station to refill. Matthias waits for The Birthday Party’s ‘Release the Bats’ to finish before taking the key out of the ignition. The joint smoke lingering in the hollows of Etienne’s skull is making him dizzy. He looks up at a tower next to the parking area. ‘Stop staring like that,’ Christof says through his teeth. ‘That’s probably where the Stasi is stationed.’ They are hidden everywhere along this route, Frederick explains in a hushed voice. To ensure that East and West Germans don’t engage with each other, and that nobody gets into the boot of a West German vehicle. Or is folded double in a suitcase, or hidden in secret compartments beneath false bottoms.

  Etienne seeks shelter in the men’s toilets from the all-seeing eyes. The steel urinal is rusting and peeling in the shades of a faded baroque painting. His urine spatters against the veils of chalk and moss. He closes his eyes. From the cavities of his head, Axel addresses him. Etienne can’t hear what he is saying, just senses the droning of his half-formed words. The tone is dangerous. Then it is drowned out by his father’s voice, or the voice he had before his illness. That too fades, becomes only breath.

  Frederick’s breath, Etienne realises when he opens his eyes. Frederick is standing next to him; he places a hand on Etienne’s shoulder. Frederick’s stream of urine starts murmuring reassuringly next to his own against the steel. Etienne sighs; his head tilts backwards. Comrades in fragrant piss steam, the lukewarm fluid spattering against their hands. Frederick’s fingers clench around the back of Etienne’s neck, tousling his hair.

  Then it occurs to Etienne: a trap must surely be set for him. In an hour and a half they will be crossing the border to West Germany at Helmstedt. That is why he was allowed to cross at the first control point, he now realises: to coax him into East German territory. As soon as he gets to the second border, they will have him . . .

  Axel’s voice emanates from the bone of his skull, ominously: Have you considered that your three ‘friends’ may be collaborating with the East Germans? Think of how suddenly you met, of how smoothly and easily it has all progressed. How deep into your mind do you think they have managed to penetrate . . . ? Etienne shakes his head until Axel falls silent. Not as deep as you, he answers in his own skull voice. He and Frederick look at each other while zipping up. Frederick’s eyes are watery, mournful.

  Back in the Kombi, Etienne airs his suspicion that the guards may be waiting for him at the border. Matthias frowns. Christof presses his lips together like a scar. ‘Surely not,’ Frederick says.

  They drive on, the atmosphere now dampened. The radio stays off. The road is slipping by underneath them with a monotonous hiss.

  ‘Let’s tell each other stories,’ Frederick says. ‘The stories of our first loves.’ The tension eases somewhat. He nods in Matthias’s direction. ‘You start.’

  Matthias inhales deeply, looks in the rear mirror. ‘It was my last school holiday. Christmas time. I was touring France, hitch-hiking at night. Was mostly picked up by lorries.’ At first he wanted to see as many places as possible, he goes on, but after a while he started enjoying the lorry rides as such. Nights spent in dark lorry cabins were better than hanging around in tourist spots with backpackers who would drink until they fell over. ‘Paris? Didn’t do anything for me. Lourdes? Aix-en-Provence? Left me cold.’

  Matthias sinks deeper into his story. He travelled arbitrarily. North to south, east to west. Back and forth. Most of the lorry drivers talked. For hours on end. He too. The invisible nocturnal landscapes gave him the freedom to say things he hadn’t been able to say before. ‘At first I struggled to stay awake, but soon my patterns fell in with those of the drivers, my days and nights switched.’ He visited much of France, almost every corner, but saw none of it. Just blue tar and dotted lines in headlights. Road signs flitting past. The ghosts of trees on the side of the road.

  ‘Get to the story now,’ Frederick says, his face lit by the heater’s glow.

  One evening, Matthias continues, Adil from Morocco picked him up. And then he didn’t get off again. They drove back and forth between Paris and Marseilles, night after night. Adil had to spend weekends with his wife and child in Marseilles, but during the week they covered thousands of kilometres together. In the daytime they would sleep in a lorry park next to a highway. In the back of Adil’s cabin, in his cramped little bed. In each other’s arms, the tyres of lorries whining on the tar outside.

  It was consoling, the endless driving. Without heading anywhere, without arriving. Adil transported wine. Tons of it. Between Paris and Marseilles they had to pick up cargo in various wine regions. They never saw the scenic parts of cities or towns. They would always drive around the edges, through the outskirts. At dusk or in the dark. Whenever they stopped, it would be at industrial sites or warehouses.

  ‘You’re digressing again,’ Frederick says. ‘Get to the love part!’

  ‘One night, when we stopped at a warehouse in the Rhône, there was a commotion. Temperatures had suddenly fallen unseasonably. The black frost was on its way – the harvest was under threat.’

  Etienne’s head rolls against Frederick’s; he pulls up his legs against the cold.

  The owners of the wine e
states were desperately looking for hands. The men had to stoke huge fires in the vineyards to fend off the frost. ‘We had to run back and forth with armfuls of dry vine cuttings. Later we poured petrol onto the flames. Just before sunrise, I turned away from the fire with an empty petrol can in my hands. Adil was standing there. Shirtless and out of breath, at the edge of the glow. In that moment I fell in love with him.’

  Etienne is startled when Frederick shouts, ‘There you have it!’ in his ear. He has clearly immersed himself in the story. ‘And what became of him?’ Frederick asks. ‘Of Adil?’

  ‘He immediately realised that everything had changed. In the morning hours, when the harvest had been saved, we went to sleep in a barn. Just there on the cement floor, in a pile, men from all over. All of us high on petrol fumes. We were covered in soot, there was smoke in our lungs.

  ‘Adil and I opened up each other’s bodies, tasted the soot on each other. Right there between the others—’ Matthias brakes so hard that the three in the back shift forward. ‘Fuck,’ he says, ‘an animal crossing the road.’

  ‘What kind of animal?’ Etienne wants to know. He gets halfway up in a crouched position, looks through the windscreen, searching in vain for a shadow between the tree trunks.

  Matthias shrugs his shoulders. ‘God knows! Things here probably mutate. Radioactive deer, bush pigs glowing in the dark, wolves with iron claws . . .’ He changes gears, accelerates again. ‘Anyway. The next morning, when I woke up, Adil was gone. And his lorry. I never saw him again.’

  Etienne looks at Christof. He is vaguely starting to suspect that the other two know this story: a well-practised exercise.

  ‘Now you,’ Frederick says, putting his hand on the chest of Christof, who is lying next to him, half-propped up against the pillows.

  ‘ok,’ Christof says. ‘It’s not as good as Matthias’s story. It was in Vancouver. Midwinter. I was eighteen. My first time away from Berlin alone. I didn’t know a soul in Canada, stayed in a youth hostel. On the first night, I leave the hostel to check out the night life. It is cold, below zero. I randomly follow a bunch of guys into a club. One of them draws my eye. After a while I realise he’s not in fact part of the group – he sits around on his own, doesn’t take off his coat. Less than half an hour later he leaves again. I follow him.’

  ‘Yes, yes, and where to?’ Frederick is like a rude aunt. Etienne smiles in the dark.

  ‘First the man walks through the streets, then into a deserted park on a peninsula. My heart is racing, but I keep following him.’

  Through the Kombi’s windscreen Etienne can see signs above the road: warnings indicating that stopping is prohibited. Achtung! It reminds him of signs by the Spree River in West Berlin. Dozens of East Berliners have drowned there, or have been shot, while attempting to swim to West Berlin. Achtung! Etienne keeps hearing it in his mind like a refrain. Perhaps a song could be made of it.

  Christof continues. The man kept going deeper into the park, then turned off the path into a copse of trees. Christof kept following. The sea glistened through the foliage; he could see the man bending down, picking up something and putting it into a bag. Underneath Christof’s feet something cracked like glass. Ahead of him, the man stopped, turned around and listened to him approaching, helplessly making loud crunching sounds.

  ‘You know what you’re stepping on, don’t you?’

  Christof’s lips were half-frozen. ‘Ice? Broken bottles?’

  He shook his head, held out something towards Etienne. ‘Frozen frogs. They bury themselves underneath the leaves. Their hearts stop beating, the blood freezes, all the organs arrest. This is how they survive the winter.’

  The man held up a frog, took a leg between two fingers, snapped it off in a single movement, like the stem of a champagne glass.

  Achtung! flashes past the Kombi’s windscreen. From where Etienne is lying, he can see only the black sky and, now and then, the dimly lit warnings. He thinks of the speck of a head in the Spree, of water spattering where guards’ bullets hit the surface like pebbles, until the head slips away.

  They walked back together, Christof continues. The man kept picking up frogs, which were clinking gently in his backpack. He took Christof to his house. In his backyard there was a wooden lean-to with heated glass cages and dozens of amphibians. He was a zoological researcher at a university, he explained. He emptied out his backpack in a bucket. Inside the house, he put one of the frogs down in front of the fireplace. He lit the fire. Before long, the heart started fluttering underneath the thin skin. Minutes later, the frog started hopping about. While the zoologist’s fingertips started feeling Christof’s temples, he explained how frogs can also go into a summer sleep when it becomes hot and dry. How the mud then hardens around them, how the skin dries out and forms a cocoon. Months later, when the rains come, they crawl out of the crust, as if being reborn.

  The frog professor’s palms were as soft as an amphibian abdomen. His body was cool and dry, his stomach like dough. The croaking in the backyard kept Christof awake all night. Before dawn he crept out without looking at the glass cases again. That night he returned to Germany.

  Matthias shakes his head. ‘What a sudden ending. Where’s the love? It sounds to me like a narrow escape rather than—’

  ‘Creepy, yes,’ Frederick says and smiles contentedly. ‘So fucking creepy.’

  It is Frederick’s turn. He was visiting his cousins on a farm in Friesland, he starts telling, where his mother is from. And (surprise, surprise) he too was eighteen. It was nearly Christmas. The cold was so bitter on that flat piece of land that one’s bones became brittle. He shared a room with his two cousins with their large, cautious hands. One was a little older than he, the other a little younger. There wasn’t any central heating. Fires burnt in hearths through the night; the sheets smelled of smoke.

  One night his uncle woke them up. ‘The newborn lambs are dying,’ he said.

  ‘I’m from Berlin. What do I know about dying lambs?’ Frederick mumbled from under the blanket. His uncle hustled them out of there. He threw woolly hats and blankets after them, stayed indoors himself.

  The blankets, it turned out, weren’t for them but for the lambs. The neighbours’ sons had been commandeered too and strolled sleepily towards them. There wasn’t a shed or barn. The boys had to make a fire.

  ‘Lambs, schlambs!’ Christof’s head hinges on his long, scarred neck. ‘Where does love enter the picture?’

  Etienne is now almost certain: they already know the stories. Their pleasure in the retelling is obvious. The interruptions and commentary, the pseudo-frustrations, are all part of the ritual. The lambs had to be caught, Frederick continues. It wasn’t difficult; they were sluggish due to the cold. The boys wrapped the animals in the blankets, rubbed them, blew warm breath in their noses. The large fire was stoked with peat. Before peat is lit, Frederick says, it smells like seaweed, hay, moss, tree sap. His nostrils widen as he describes the smell; when it burns, the smoke has the aroma of tar and autumn leaves, of bitter tea. They sat with the struggling, bleating lambs in their arms, clumsy as if holding babies. Their faces were lowered towards the lambs’ noses, self-conscious and bemused by the gentleness that was suddenly expected from them.

  The ground on which they were standing was peat too. It was dry enough to catch fire right underneath their feet. And then the peaty fumes erupted in flames too. In the blink of an eye they were standing in a firestorm. The heat was unbearable – one’s primary urge was to run naked into the icy night. Lambs screamed and wriggled. Frederick’s older cousin grabbed a kettle that had been on the fire, poured the water into the flames. It was useless. The entire world was on fire. ‘My younger cousin and I dropped the lambs, and wrapped the blankets around ourselves. We tried running through the flames, but flinched and retreated. Then we looked at each other, took each other’s hands and just went. When we emerged from the flames, we saw my uncle runn
ing towards us.’

  Frederick’s head rolls against Etienne’s. It feels as if the story is being transferred directly to him at the point where their scalps touch.

  ‘My cousin was trapped in the circle of flames. Neighbours came running with buckets of water, tried putting out the flames with hessian bags. My older cousin, when he finally appeared, was badly burnt. He stood there naked and shivering, crying like a child. He wouldn’t – couldn’t – let go of the scorched lamb in his arms. They had melted into each other, their heads equally black. The ambulance men had to come and peel the dead animal away from him.

  ‘When dawn came, we went home, my younger cousin and I, dead tired. We crawled in bed, got out of our clothes under the blankets, consoling and stroking each other. There was a shared memory – not only his or only mine – of writhing lambs. Everything smelled of wool, our skins were oily with lanolin. We cried, sought comfort in each other’s bodies. He was warm and smooth, my cousin, his tongue sweet . . .’

  Etienne looks back at the vibrating jumble of their instruments and equipment. It is as if it is on the verge of blaring out a dark piece of metal rock: a wild orchestra without players.

  ‘The neighbours’ two boys didn’t make it. The firemen found them hours later, when the last flames had been extinguished. The next morning we got up and watched them remove the bodies. My cousin and I had not yet washed – his soot was in my hair; mine was smeared over his chest. The two boys’ bodies were shrunken like dead spiders. They must have clung to each other as they died. The firemen couldn’t prise them apart, had to put them on a single stretcher. The firemen kept looking down at their own hands, black with human ash.