by S J Naudé
Andrea has brought antiseptic ointment, which she is applying like a layer of fat. Etienne’s mother is pulling away; Axel has to hold her down like an animal on a veterinarian’s examination table. She looks at him accusingly; he is gently whispering to her in his heavy accent. Etienne is standing to the side, can’t hear what he is saying. Andrea has taken a sheet off Etienne and Axel’s bed and torn it into shreds, which Axel is winding tightly around each injured hand. The little mongrel dog keeps interposing itself, as if he wants to gnaw on the raw palms. Only when the dog starts licking Etienne’s own fingers does he realise he too got burnt when he slapped the log out of his mother’s hands. He puts his hand in his pocket. Andrea takes Etienne aside. ‘You have to go to a hospital in Pietermaritzburg,’ she says. ‘The wounds are deep; the next step is infection. I’ve seen it. Our factory workers sometimes burn their hands in the mushroom drying ovens.’
When Andrea has left, they sit on the sofa in front of the fire, Etienne’s mother in the middle. She looks at Etienne, then at Axel. She leans her head against Axel’s shoulder. ‘Do you know how much I missed you?’ she says to Axel, puts her wounded hands in his lap. ‘All those years you spent out there in Siberia, in the tundras. I placed you in Jesus’s hands, left it all to him. Thought He would wrap you in His arms. What else could a mother do? He left you behind in the snow, walked away from you. And from me. Yes, Jesus’s fields of ice have robbed me. There is nothing left. Even the smallest little feet have been scorched by the cold . . .’ She holds up her hands, looks at them in amazement. ‘Here was an accident,’ she says croakily. ‘Shattered candles!’
Etienne’s heart is thumping. Her outburst takes his own words away. It is the most she has said since his arrival in South Africa. Axel lowers his head, rests his cheek against hers.
Etienne gets up, walks past the log’s scorch mark on the rug, goes outside. He hears a generator thudding somewhere. His mother’s new sentences sound different. The encounter with the flames has clarified her language on the surface, but has scorched away meaning. Does she have more control over her words than she is pretending to? Is she taunting him, testing him?
Etienne tries to close his and Axel’s curtains; but they are stuck. When they lie down, Axel turns away. He coils up in the fetal position, knees almost touching his chest. Is he blaming Etienne for his mother’s twisted formulations, for the blisters on her hands? Etienne loosely folds a hand over Axel’s buttocks. Dim light from the factory falls in through the window, across the sheetless bed.
He thinks of his mother’s words: ‘braken me’. He tries to match it with other words, searches for companion words – ones that remotely rhyme with or mirror it. Counterparts. Broken me? Hated me? Taken (something from) me?
Forsaken. That is the word at which he halts while the shadows of bats outside the window flit across their bed and arms. They resemble light more than shadows, these darting shapes. He can feel them glimmering on his skin.
He tiptoes out into the corridor, listens at his mother’s open door. In between slow breaths she makes little noises, like an injured puppy. Here too patterns are darting across the walls and bed. Bats are crackling under the overhangs outside. They are bringing tidings, which are spreading like a virus.
Chapter 37
‘Leave me alone,’ she says. ‘Let me knot my hemlock.’ She is sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea. Andrea has brought rusks for breakfast. Slowly, Etienne thinks, he is starting to learn the codes of her short circuits. She means to say, ‘Let me dip my rusk.’
‘Please, Mother. You need a doctor today. We can come back tomorrow. I promise.’
She purses her lips, vehemently shakes her head. ‘We have to go and find the fort. It is the last gates.’ She means the home of her childhood. And that it is her last chance.
This is why they have travelled to this outpost, to search for the little settlement where she spent her primary-school days. During his childhood days, Etienne had to listen endlessly to stories about this idyllic place. Inkungu. The name had a mythical aura. She would respectfully whisper each Zulu syllable. Her descriptions were lush: a cottage of corrugated iron, surrounded by indigenous forest; Italian prisoners of war working as loggers and walking past the house in the afternoons, singing Verdi arias; deer grazing in the garden, rabbits hopping among the ferns . . .
She wants to find the remnants of that four-roomed cottage. And the road on which the singing Italians used to march home. These were the wishes that were channelled by her mouthpiece Frans Vermeulen. How accurately the man managed to convey her needs is unclear. He hadn’t had the presence of mind to ask her the right questions before it was too late. On Etienne’s detailed regional map there is no ‘Inkungu’ to be found – whether a village, station, farm, river, road or mountain. Now he has to navigate the slippery spaces emerging in between his mother’s memories, Vermeulen’s interpretation of them and a landscape that has changed over decades.
They depart after breakfast. Andrea introduces Etienne to a government forest ranger, who has agreed to be their guide. There is a sector of the plantation called the Inkungu Forest, he says. If anything remains of the settlement, it must be there.
As they drive through the neat, hushed pine forest in a double-cab pickup, Etienne looks furtively at Axel. The year in Hannover had stripped him of his fervour, left him half-dazed. Over the last few months he has been expanding around the waist. There is now a fleshiness beneath his chin. The air here is doing something to him, though, slowly restoring his power.
Etienne and Axel lead a quiet life in Berlin. They live in a spacious albeit musty flat in Charlottenburg, for which they pay a nominal rent. Etienne has had asylum status in Germany for the past two years. Sometimes he stands in as a drummer for bands, which earns him some money. Axel gets an unemployment grant. He no longer makes art. There is little left between them other than shared recollections: of cities, of themselves in those cities. Something melancholy lingers when they kiss coolly before Etienne switches off the light at night. Berlin’s night breath is tepid against their skins.
Etienne and the three West Berliners’ paths diverged after the eclipse concert near Bremen. Etienne and Axel took a train back to Berlin. The other three travelled northeast in the Kombi, in the direction of the Baltic Sea. More gigs were lined up in Lübeck and Kiel. How – and whether – they managed without their drummer, Etienne never found out. The morning before the Bremen concert, Etienne had painted Stunde Null on the side of each drum. In red letters. When they drove away, he left his drums in the Kombi, let them go. Like a little family of refugees, those drums had made it from Pretoria to London to Berlin to Hannover and Bremen, and ultimately to the grim northern seas.
Once or twice thereafter, Etienne saw Frederick at a distance – in Oranienstrasse at dusk, or late at night in a bar. Each would half-heartedly lift a hand in greeting, twitch a corner of the mouth, quickly look away again. And once he saw Matthias and Christof. At a distance, in a crowd of people at an industrial gig. They didn’t acknowledge his presence. Nor did Etienne make eye contact with them – Axel was with him. He knew Matthias and Christof wouldn’t have thought much of the band. In his mind, he could hear their stern analyses, constantly interrupting each other: Copycats. Johnny-come-latelies. Amateurs. Nothing’s been the same since the Wendung. The industrial scene is fucked. Etienne took his hand off Axel’s neck, put it on his own heart. For a moment he wished he were there, between Matthias and Christof, feeling the heat of their shoulders. And that Frederick could bathe him again, put him to bed like a child. Or fiddle with his hands in Etienne’s lap. That the four of them could write just one more song together in a freezing courtyard or on a snow-covered roof. Or could speed through the East German night in a black Kombi again, while they seduced him with far-fetched stories.
The disappearance of Etienne’s three friends from his life has changed the city irrevocably. Their world – the Oran
ienstrasse factory with its echoes, the objects they would pick up in rail yards and recycle as instruments, the music writing sessions, the afternoon glow of their flat on Chamissoplatz, the late-night cafés they used to frequent – constituted West Berlin for Etienne. Now that he has lost them, each building looks different. Every street, every courtyard and every station.
On top of that, the tearing down of the Wall has robbed him of his Berlins, his two half-cities. Matthias and Christof would be justified in their grievances: the music scene isn’t what it used to be. Everyone suddenly thinks they can grab a machine or saw or drill and make noise. Everyone thinks they can croak amid a shower of sparks and call it industrial music. And Etienne is no longer in the select company of the rats and cockroaches that used to slip back and forth freely through ghost stations’ cracks as if through cloacae. Everything and everyone flows freely now; a secret border-crosser he is no more.
A year or so ago Etienne heard from mutual acquaintances that, although Matthias and Christof were still together, Frederick had withdrawn himself from them after the concert tour. As soon as they arrived back in Berlin, they dissolved Stunde Null. What had looked like the beginning of great things, there in the trampled field of tomatoes, turned out to be the moment when everything had started to fall apart.
‘Huge swathes of indigenous forest were wiped out here in the 1960s and ’70s,’ the ranger explains, while taking them deeper and deeper into the plantations. They stop sporadically to unlock gates. He knows of places where there are anomalies in the geometric plantation patterns – rocky ledges, or the remnants of structures. ‘I don’t know every tree and clearing,’ he says. ‘These are large areas. But let’s see what we can find.’ At their first stop, the rows of trees are interrupted by concrete foundations. Upon closer inspection the ranger shakes his head. ‘Agricultural remnants. Old drinking troughs, perhaps. Or silos for feed.’
Etienne’s mother pays him no heed, looks around. ‘All the roads are seeming elsewhere. Everything is circling beyond the equator.’ Her sentences sometimes start as comprehensible formulations, but then become derailed. Sometimes the constructions are clear on the surface but lack meaning. Sometimes one can extract meaning from the shuffled words, but, as soon as you start taking it as a private language with rules, rather than gibberish, you realise your mistake.
Dark clouds are amassing. Axel takes out a video camera, aims it skywards. Etienne had initially planned to film the trip, a record for his mother. At the last moment he decided to leave the camera in Berlin. He was surprised yesterday when he realised Axel had packed it. The ranger looks up too. Axel switches off the camera. They drive further.
The forest roads are indistinguishable. So too the rows of trees, plantations and sectors. Etienne has long since lost his sense of direction. They stop again. Another disruption in the plantation’s patterns. The ruins they encounter were once stone enclosures for animals. ‘Spaceship’s nemesis,’ Etienne’s mother says and shakes her head.
At their third stop, she sniffs the air like a deer. As if the ground has suddenly caved away underneath her feet, she falls over. Soundlessly, on a thick carpet of needles. For a moment Etienne expects her to disappear under its surface, as if in quicksand. The illness’s terror: first the words, then the balance. Axel is there first, helping her up. The ranger takes her other elbow. Her tears are flowing freely. Is she unsettled by the fall, or has she recognised something? But how? There is no trace in this dead forest of the cool, secret cocoon of leaves that she had once described, of mossy children’s swings, squirrels on a tin roof, birds flapping against filtered rays. Etienne holds out his palms. It has started drizzling. His mother stumbles back toward the vehicle, as if wounded. Axel helps her get in.
Etienne picks up the camera. He walks away, through the trunks, towards another clearing. He clears away some pine needles with his foot. And there it is: rusty steel emerging from concrete foundations. He squats, wipes away more needles. Four rooms are drawn in front of him, as if on paper. That’s where he comes from too, this chunk of concrete. This invisible house. He lets the lens glide slowly across the concrete.
The heavens open. Rain pours down onto his shoulders. He switches off the camera, runs back to the vehicle.
They stop at a ford. When they crossed it earlier, there was a trickle of water. Now raging torrents are flowing by. Etienne’s mother is mumbling something. He leans over to hear her above the rushing water. ‘The lush thickets of blood,’ is what she has to say.
The pickup gets stuck in the mud. The current tugs at the vehicle. ‘We’re too heavy,’ the ranger says. ‘You’ll have to get out.’ They stand there and get soaked while he is reversing with spinning wheels.
The storm keeps raging. The ranger is drinking beers with men in white coats. The only woman among the white coats is left to deal with Etienne, his mother and Axel. ‘We rarely get rain this time of year,’ she says. She is their guide, is taking them on a tour through the facility. Halfway through, Etienne’s mother sinks into a chair in the staff tea room and almost immediately falls asleep. They leave her behind; the tour continues. The woman shows them two laboratories. In the first one there are dozens of plants in pots. Spatters of green against an expanse of white. There are test tubes and microscopes on long tables, pine needles and spores in Petri dishes. And shards of bark, trunk and root. Projects involving genetic modification and cloning, the woman in the white coat explains. Then she takes them to the plant pathology laboratory: microscopes, glass plates with fungi, stunted twigs, pale pine needles and speckled bark. In bottles on shelves, preserved beetles, worms and larvae are floating in fluid.
After they had been forced to turn back at the ford, the ranger brought them here for shelter: the government forestry research laboratory. Etienne wonders what his mother would make of these words. She hasn’t said anything since their last stop in the plantations.
Outside it is still raining. The ranger reappears, interrupting their tour. They won’t be able to drive back tonight, he explains. He will spend the night in the pickup. ‘And she will help you out with a place to sleep.’ He points to the researcher.
When the tour is over, Etienne goes to the staffroom to wake his mother gently. She looks up at the ceiling. ‘Hostile seas,’ she says. ‘Fireflies are peeping holes in the night’s crimp.’
The researcher leads them to a room with stacked beds and cheap grey blankets – probably accommodation for cleaners. Even in here one can smell the pine needles. The linoleum floors are polished to a high gloss. Their guide keeps lingering uncomfortably: ‘Let me know if you need anything.’ She is awkward in her role as hostess of sorts, clearly not used to considering others’ needs. She leaves them on their own. Etienne feels disoriented. They sit in silence in the sharp light.
His mother holds out her hands. ‘Broken knives and winter’s harp.’ Etienne gives up on the deciphering. The gap between what she is saying and what she wants to say is apparently widening. And yet, here and there he unexpectedly does understand something, or so he reckons. ‘Cluttering clusters of hurt,’ she now says. Pulsating with pain? Her hands are becoming infected, of that Etienne is certain: they are red and swollen around the wrists; the strips of improvised bandage are stained yellow. The plan was to wrap her hands with fresh strips when they returned to the mushroom factory, and then, tomorrow, to find a hospital in Pietermaritzburg. Now they are stranded on a laboratory island. And the rain isn’t stopping. Etienne realises how hungry he is. He should have asked the researcher about food. Except for the mushrooms last night and a few rusks this morning, they haven’t eaten in two days. His mother has fallen asleep in her clothes on one of the narrow beds. Etienne leaves Axel with her, wanders the corridors, randomly looking for something to eat. There isn’t a soul around. The ranger is probably asleep in his truck. Where the researcher and her colleagues have gone is anyone’s guess. The rain isn’t sounding as loud against the panes. Etienne tr
ies to look out through the staffroom’s windows. All he can see is his own reflection.
Axel joins him. ‘I am so hungry,’ he says. He rummages around in a cupboard, finds some Marie biscuits. They sit down on plastic chairs, nibble in silence.
Biscuit and spittle mix cloyingly on Etienne’s tongue. He looks at crumbs sifting onto the thin carpet around Axel’s chair, shakes out a few pine needles from his trousers’ turn-ups. Suddenly he smells mushrooms again. Tastes them. It is a guilty, uncomfortable flavour, like the meat of a human or favourite pet. Despite this, for the first time since that afternoon among the pulped tomatoes near Bremen two years ago, Etienne feels something loosening up in his chest.
Axel lies back in his chair. Etienne thinks of their silences in Berlin over the last couple of years. They had wanted to make a new beginning in West Berlin, in their Charlottenburg flat. They never talked about London, about the period during which they had been separated from each other. Or about the jail in Hannover, or the reason Axel had been there. Still not about Etienne’s youth in South Africa. No word would ever be spoken about Axel’s father or mother, about Ariel or the Benjamin film. Hardly anything about Irmgard. Never a word about Etienne’s three friends who had driven away in their Kombi and left Etienne and Axel behind in a devastated tomato field.
Etienne often did think back to the accusation in Frederick’s eyes when he climbed into the Kombi without saying goodbye. Of Matthias’s unrelenting seriousness when he loaded the instruments. Of Christof’s stiff neck, which he was scratching as if wanting to rip out his oesophagus. He sometimes thought of the months with Frau Drechsler and Nils, of the film school and the archive. He would sometimes dream of the ruin of a hospital on an island. He never visited Potsdam again, never looked up his old street in Prenzlauer Berg. Or his handlers, guides and subverters in the guise of Fraue Drechsler, Fuchs and Keller. He never set foot in the planetarium again.