by S J Naudé
The stars are brightening; the last fleecy clouds disappear. Etienne enquires about the second reel, and the manner in which he found it. He doesn’t mention Volker’s name again.
‘When my mother gave me the diary as I left for London, I asked her whether I could take the reel too, even though I knew it was her most treasured possession. She smiled. “You know it’s poisonous. I’ll keep it for you. Come back at some point. Come back for it.”’ For a while Etienne and Axel stand in silence. ‘How it found its way to you? That did entail coincidence.’ When he was released from jail, Axel goes on, he didn’t have a penny to his name. In Hannover he started scouring the newspapers for work in Berlin and stumbled upon Etienne’s advertisement about the film. He wanted to let Etienne have the reel. After his mother’s death, Volker had obtained control over it. Axel couldn’t bear the thought of engaging with Volker again, but it was his only option. He borrowed money from Horst and Ulrich, offered it to Volker to contact Etienne about the reel.
‘You got in touch with Volker again? Rather than directly contact—?’
‘A colossal angel. A shipwreck from the sun.’ They both stiffen. It is Etienne’s mother’s voice, sounding clearly behind them. It is absorbed so swiftly by the pine trees that Etienne wonders whether he has actually heard it. But Axel looks around too. There is an open window hardly twenty steps away – the room where she is sleeping, apparently.
Etienne’s urge is to go towards the voice. He turns around. Axel takes him by the arm. Etienne extracts himself from the grip, starts walking, though not towards his mother but into the plantation. He can hear Axel following.
Etienne walks fast and far, then leans against a trunk. Above them an owl is calling. She has my mother’s voice, this owl, Etienne thinks. She is begging me for something. Or warning me. Axel catches up with him, gets his breath back. He continues his story, his voice now urgent. Before Axel handed over the money to Volker, he had made him promise not to tell Etienne Axel’s whereabouts. ‘I had wanted to contact you directly, but I couldn’t. Everything was different, everything was wrong . . .’ He pushes up his sleeves, holds out his ink-stained arms in the moonlight. ‘Do you get it? What prison had done to me? My skin was scribbled on like the Berlin Wall. I constantly had septic sores on my back. I was penniless. I was living with Horst and Ulrich in that hole in Hannover, sniffing and injecting crap all day. I was borrowing more and more money from them, couldn’t find work or pay them back—’
‘But I could’ve done something, Axel, could have helped—’
Axel pinches his lips together, looks into the pines, as if spotting a nocturnal animal. His voice changes. ‘You still don’t get it.’
‘Get what?’
‘How angry I was?’
‘Angry?’ Then, softly: ‘At me?’
‘If you had said yes, that night in London, that one time in my life when I truly needed someone . . . If you had come with me to Berlin, you would’ve been able to help, would’ve stopped me. And I wouldn’t have tried to kill Volker. And then none of this would’ve happened. None of it.’ Axel pushes his sleeves down over his wrists, bows his head forward.
Etienne sits down on the wet pine needles, his legs half-paralysed. How could I have known, Axel? he wants to say. How could I have recognised your cry for help if you didn’t explain anything? It came entirely out of the blue, like a clap of thunder. And do you have any idea how constraining my circumstances were? But what difference would it make?
Axel sits down too. He is crying. For a long time, they listen to the wind blowing through the pines. The damp seeps through to Etienne’s buttocks. He is exhausted. If it weren’t for the cold, he would fall asleep right there.
A long time passes before Axel takes a deep breath and goes on: ‘It may sound strange to you. May surprise you. That I’m so angry.’ He is speaking slowly, reluctantly. ‘These are the kind of things that I told myself in jail. Or that the needles told me when I was lying in the dark, tattooing myself . . . It helped. To have someone to be angry at.’ Each needle-prick like an ireful word, Etienne thinks. Each tattoo like a long, reproachful sentence. A body covered in ink tirades. Axel keeps nodding his head slowly. His voice is low. ‘And yet. I wanted to lead you to the second reel. I didn’t hate you.’
Etienne doesn’t know what to say. Does Axel expect him to express gratitude? In the treetops above them, the wind is picking up. For a while, they just listen. ‘What I struggle to get my head around is the lengths you went to to set up a treasure hunt for me. On such a scale. Across so many boundaries – cities, countries, political fault lines . . .’
‘You overestimate me. I only pulled a few levers as and when they presented themselves. But it’s true that I did understand something about you. How necessary it was for you to search, to find. I knew how urgent your need was to exchange your childhood for something else. Frame by frame.’ Etienne is startled. You are mistaken about my project, he wants to say. But he suddenly wonders: what is left behind when you cut out a part of your life like a tumour and try to replace it with light? ‘Or perhaps I underestimate myself.’ Axel lifts his chin, smiles weakly. ‘You know how I like tricks, setting up installations. The bigger the scale, the better.’ His smile becomes a grimace.
Etienne is wrapping pine needles around his fingers. Whether I know you is doubtful, Axel, he wants to say. But he turns towards the German. ‘So tell it to me straight: is there a third reel? If so, where is it?’
Axel’s voice is now clear and strong. ‘When Ariel and I were whispering to each other shortly before his death, I called him “Ariel”, rather than “Bernhard”, for the first time. I told him: “Ariel, I am your grandchild, your daughter Mariel was my mother. Irmgard, your lover, was my grandmother.” That was why he let me have the reel. I guess it wasn’t reasonable to confront him with so much in that moment. I could see how it overwhelmed him . . . After I had fetched the reel, he urgently wanted to talk, but he was like a stalling engine. He could only grind his teeth, tighten his neck muscles.
‘I asked him bluntly: “Where is the rest of the film? Is there more?” Irmgard is what he whispered. “She knows where it is. Find her. She was the one who divided the reels. Get the other two, put all three of them together. For the first time, there will then be a film . . .”
‘Here’s the thing, Etienne.’ Etienne looks up in the half-light. Axel has never called him by his name before. ‘For forty-five years, no one has known where Irmgard is or whether she’s still alive. Logically she would have divided the reels among three people. Ariel clearly took only one. Irmgard too, and this she later gave to Mariel. Where the third one is? That only Irmgard knows.’ Axel lifts his hand, almost touches Etienne’s cheek, then drops his arm.
The air has a gleaming quality: empty and disinfected. Etienne looks at the steam rising from Axel’s shoulders, as if he is dissolving. Axel starts coughing. It is a severe coughing fit; it seems as if it will never stop. Etienne thinks of all the silences, all the detours that have led them here. Axel finally catches his breath. They get up, start walking without a word. Not deeper into the rows of pines, but back to the laboratories’ light.
Chapter 39
When the date of their departure from Johannesburg back to Berlin arrived, Etienne was reluctant to board a plane. His mother’s oncologist couldn’t say whether she had three weeks or three months left to live. ‘These things are not to be foretold,’ he intoned in a biblical-histrionic tone. It turned out to be three days. Etienne had hardly arrived back in Berlin when he received news of her death. Her hands had still been in bandages. To Etienne’s chagrin, it was Frans Vermeulen who called him with the news. ‘And nevermore a mother’s caring hands will stir,’ the imbecile declared.
Etienne didn’t return for the funeral. There was nothing left for him in South Africa now; he would not travel there again. He made a copy of the video from their trip, sent it to Frans Vermeulen. Without
any accompanying explanation. Etienne had never looked at it himself. It would contain nothing more than the soundless images of rain clouds, pine trees and the old foundations of a corrugated-iron house. Vermeulen could do with it what he would. He could play it at the memorial service that Etienne wouldn’t be attending. He could bury it with her. Or he could throw it out with his rubbish.
When they got back from South Africa, it turned out they had left one of their windows in Charlottenburg open. The flat had been filled with fresh air in their absence, with the smells of spring. They decided to keep the window open all summer long – to let the breezes and the bumblebees in, to let ivy grow into the flat from the courtyard. They also resolved to find a place to start planting vegetables.
After Axel’s night of revelations amid the test tubes and plantations, Etienne still had a lot of unanswered questions. And new ones kept cropping up. But, as far as Axel was concerned, the subject was closed: ‘Now it’s all about us. About who we will become. I’m going to make art again. You, music.’
When Axel takes a shower in the mornings, the sun shines into the bathroom. For the first time in a year, Etienne joins him under the lukewarm spray. He soaps up Axel’s back and shoulders, over the tree tattoo and the grid of overlapping words and marks. Axel is becoming thinner again; his hip bones are starting to show. Sunrays filter through the ivy in the courtyard, casting green light onto his groin. There is now calm in their home, a new tenderness. That which had been burnt and engraved into Axel’s skin has lost all meaning, and all power.
Once their flat was a grand bourgeois home. The ceilings have been crumbling for decades, the paint peeling. The two reception rooms are connected by double doors; each is large enough for a banquet. After they returned from South Africa, Axel set up his studio on one side. He is working on a new installation. As usual, Etienne doesn’t ask questions about it; he does, however, see the materials that Axel is now trying out: rotting plants, ice, tufts of fur from species at risk of extinction. And bloody rabbit hearts, freshly slaughtered from their hosts. A friend of Axel who is a veterinary student supplies the fur and hearts. Axel immerses the hearts in salty solutions, tries to get the hearts to beat electrically. He also plays around with the camera, wants to incorporate video into the new work.
And now Axel needs butterflies. And they need to be alive. One sunny morning, they take a train to the Bodensee. They take videos of each other: shirtless, flying through the tall grass, nets in their hands. Etienne looks at the butterflies through the lens; they are flying towards the sun, outside time, intoxicated by the summer scents. Etienne finds it hard to think of them as material. Axel puts them in a butterfly cage, careful not to damage the wings. Etienne hopes he isn’t planning to pin them on a board.
The second reel of Berliner Chronik is safely stored away, is no longer mentioned. The double doors between the two main rooms remain open. On Etienne’s side, he is trying out a synthesiser, which he has bought second-hand. His ears are hungry again, but his hands are clumsy: it has been years since he last played the piano. All day long he experiments with the electronic sounds, while inconspicuously watching Axel working in the other room.
They could live here forever. The light can brighten and fade, the seasons can drift through the courtyard, their friends can come and go. So too the swallows overhead. To have Axel here with him will be enough.
The safer Etienne feels with Axel, the warmer the glow in these rooms, the more dangerous he can allow the music to become. He closes his eyes, translates what he sees. A pale green dawn in an icy region, columns of soldiers on a black highway, bodies piled up in a mass grave. As Etienne turns knobs and modulates frequencies and amplitudes on the synthesiser, the notes emanate from deeper and deeper inside a glacier – the sound of the forces bearing on the ice when the colossus shifts in infinitesimal increments. It is summer in Berlin, but the music is frozen. ‘Black Ice’, he calls his first electronic composition.
In the three months since their return from South Africa, they have burgeoned into guerrilla gardeners: on a bomb site down the street, they have started fertilising and planting. The site has high blind walls on three sides. First they cleared away the chunks of concrete and warped steel that they were able to lift and carry, then worked compost into the soil. They started with carrots and potatoes. Then came the beetroot and tomatoes. Sometimes city animals would dig up a carrot or two. Sometimes human animals would beat them to it, harvesting a few beets before Etienne could get to them, but such raids were rare.
The yield is good; ripe vegetables lie waiting in the warm loamy soil. After a morning’s work in the flat, each on his own side of the double doors, they go out to harvest whatever is ripe and then return to cook. Vegetables in water, with a little salt. A Buddhist meal. They don’t need much more. In the mornings, Etienne gets up early and cooks oats for Axel until they are gluey. They have stopped eating meat, stopped drinking alcohol. They are planting new crops: beans, sunflowers. Their days are becoming purer.
And yet: Axel is losing weight. Etienne can feel Axel’s shoulders becoming sharper when he folds his arms around him or when they turn in bed at night. When Axel is asleep, Etienne fingers his ribs. And Etienne looks at him in the shower steam; he no longer looks like his dangerous London self. The oak tree on his back is fading: a winter tree now, shrouded by fog. The excess kilograms have melted away, and then a few more. His shoulder knobs are protruding. His palms are as dry as paper.
One morning Etienne confronts Axel over breakfast. They are sitting in the kitchen, looking out over the courtyard, at the crow’s nest of bicycles in the racks below.
‘Why are you becoming so thin?’
Axel looks at his coffee, shrugs his shoulders dismissively, coughs out the window. ‘I am so busy with my project. I’m concentrating, not getting time to eat.’
That isn’t true, Etienne wants to say. We’re eating, we’re looking after ourselves. See how I’m flourishing.
As far as Axel is concerned, the matter is closed.
In the mornings, when Etienne wakes up in their white bed, he smells grass and dew and flowers. But smells are never unambiguous in this city. Something is always hovering behind it. He turns to Axel. The sun is in his hair, which is now the longest it has been since Etienne met him. Etienne suddenly knows what is floating behind the scent of blossoms: the smell of injury, of a fresh wound.
Etienne yanks off the sheet, expecting something raw. There is no blood; their skins are unbroken. He studies his own body. He has become sturdier: his chest, so scrawny in his London days, is now muscular, his arms quite powerful. Axel is tall and skinny next to him. The rough ink marks on his skin are fading like forgotten graffiti on concrete.
The day before, Etienne noticed that Axel quickly gets out of breath. It was a perfect afternoon. They were working in the vegetable garden, digging and planting until blisters appeared on Etienne’s hands, until sweat ran down their sides. Axel, he saw from the corner of his eye, had to sit down every now and then, a little spade in his hands. They had their best harvest yet. Armfuls. Some of their neighbours in the street have recently started clearing and planting their own patches. A bartering market has been developing: beet for onions, carrots for artichokes. They take home a greater variety of things these days, enjoying steaming vegetable feasts. Everything they eat now comes from the gardens.
They drink black tea in the morning, sit in silence, their heads touching. After breakfast they follow the sun, from the kitchen to where it later streams into Axel’s studio. Slowly, tentatively, he then starts working on his installation. These days, when he isn’t fussing with his synthesiser, Etienne is allowed to watch Axel work. He may even sit right next to him. Etienne gets little tasks, as Axel’s phalanx of helpers in London once did.
Etienne wakes up after midnight. Axel’s sweat is soaking the sheets, despite the summer air drifting through the room like a cool sigh. Etienne tries
to refresh him with damp cloths on his forehead and cheeks. He lies awake, listening to Axel’s body. The food from the Berlin earth (this soil that is so sated with ash and bones) does not help to keep Axel healthy. Etienne lies wondering in the dark, trying to avoid the worst scenarios. Is Axel really eating too little? Does he need more protein? Red meat and poultry? Why is Etienne himself such a picture of good health, then?
When Axel’s fever hasn’t broken by morning, Etienne takes him to hospital. The doctor at accidents and emergencies diagnoses him with double pneumonia. They admit him.
The nursing staff insist that Etienne should leave, but he refuses. He overstays visiting hours, keeps vigil by Axel’s bed.
‘How pathetic of me,’ Axel says. ‘Pneumonia in summer.’ He is overcome by an uncontrollable coughing fit. ‘Fuck, here I go,’ he says, laughing in between coughs, ‘this is how it all ends.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ Etienne says. ‘We’ll get you healthy and spry in no time. We’ll grow more vegetables, drink even more water, get more sun, more exercise. We’ll go and live in the countryside, where the air is cleaner.’
Axel smirks. ‘In the deep East, yes. Near Leipzig or Dresden, I’m sure, one can pick up a patch of land for a song. Saturated with radioactive waste. With a vegetable garden where tomatoes glow in the dark.’ Etienne feels relief at the spark of cynicism.
The next morning a doctor takes Etienne aside. ‘He needs to be tested, your friend,’ the doctor says. ‘For that which he fears most. His immune system is compromised. I suggested it to him yesterday, but he refused. I will leave it to you.’ He walks away, leaves Etienne behind in the corridor.
Etienne doesn’t say anything to Axel. Three days later, he is discharged. Etienne goes to harvest a bag of vegetables. He buys a basket of other ingredients. He starts making soups, stirring wheat kernels and barley into them, and handfuls of herbs. He grinds oil-rich nuts, bakes breads.