The Third Reel

by S J Naudé

  He sees to it that Axel eats every day, tries to fatten him up. His body is making increasingly sharp angles nevertheless.

  This is how they spend their time over the next month:

  In the mornings they sit opposite each other at the kitchen table. The days are sweet and generous, as Berlin summer days can be. They keep following the sun – or, on cloudy days, the light – through the bright rooms. They see the clouds drift by in each other’s eyes. They listen to the pigeons in the courtyard. They let their breathing rhyme when they lie down in the evening, synchronise their turning at night. They never close the curtains, let the Berlin night smells drift inside. Sometimes they see glimpses of themselves in the panes of open windows, then laugh at the ghosts gliding over there.

  They have forgiven each other everything, if there was anything to forgive. And they forgive each other in advance anything that may yet happen. They rarely see friends any more, mostly just the people arriving to plant vegetables in their neighbouring patches. They do not want for anything, do not need anyone else on earth. Etienne is alert to each of Axel’s everyday acts. He looks at the little muscles in his forearm when he brushes his teeth, the wrists as thin as twigs. When Axel stands on the sunny side of a sheet when they are folding it together, he watches his transparent profile. He concentrates when Axel gulps down a glass of water: the turbulence of bubbles, the light playing on his fingers, the knuckles like pebbles, the beating Adam’s apple.

  After dinner they go for long walks, hand in hand. Around Schloss Charlottenburg, through Schöneberg’s streets. They hardly hear the music emanating from bars, ignore the din of voices from cafés. They pay no heed to the furtive glances at the messy ink marks on Axel’s arms. The city winds blow against their cheeks. They listen to the leaves, which will soon start to fall, and to the silences of the colder, higher currents.

  They are spending more and more time at the guerrilla garden. If you sit still for long enough, the late summer feels more intense here than anywhere else, and more intimate. Etienne pulls out the weeds that are coming up everywhere. Axel just watches. Etienne listens to Axel’s breathing, mindful of signs of acceleration or slowing. His heightened attention makes him aware of other presences. Puddles of rainwater attract dragonflies from fountains elsewhere. They fly around, coupling in aimless, jerky trajectories above the water. Etienne wonders how the penetrator and penetrated synchronise their direction and the flapping of their wings. Or do they immediately regret their physical attachment, pulling in opposite directions until they uncouple violently? Mice scurry in corners. Ants navigate in long queues between chunks of concrete, sluggish in the rain-heavy air. ‘Everything that lives is welcome here,’ Axel says distractedly, his voice feeble. ‘That goes for the gnats too, and the rodents, the carriers of disease.’

  Their gardening neighbours look up when Axel speaks these words. They bring Axel handfuls of pumpkin and squash flowers. On the way back, Etienne pricks his ears for the buzz of human lives in the buildings above them. Everything sounds different now that he is making electronic music. He first has to recognise the human noises, then isolate them. He wants to strip the city, distil everything to something cleaner and simpler.

  At home Etienne stuffs the delicate flowers with honey and cream cheese, but Axel’s digestive system doesn’t tolerate it. The rest of the afternoon he spends going back and forth between the toilet and his bed.

  Their garden is lusher than ever. And beautiful: their sunflowers are in full bloom and there are bean blossoms too. The yield is far more than they can use. They take some to friends and neighbours, take bowls of cooked vegetables – accompanied by beer – to give to alcoholics in a nearby park. They swill the beers, heads thrown back, mouths wide, then toss the vegetables under the bushes when Etienne and Axel start walking away.

  Apart from the alcoholics, Etienne and Axel also feed the squirrels and pigeons on their strolls. A few crumbs are left behind for the rats. Late afternoon they sit in the guerrilla garden again. There is a new, rough-hewn wooden bench. They look out over the profusion of bean stalks, pumpkin leaves and beets. There is a host of new gardeners; a whole new community is forming here. On Saturdays some of them now erect tables, selling produce to passers-by. Etienne and Axel don’t know all the people who are adding patches any more; there is hardly any space left. They sit there until dusk. Here and there someone is still half-heartedly digging or weeding. The last of them departs; just the two of them remain.

  These days, Etienne always brings a blanket for Axel, for the evening chill. When he wraps it around Axel’s legs (he waits until deep dusk, otherwise Axel is too self-conscious), Axel says, into the dark, rather than to Etienne: ‘It was the best summer. I could not have asked for anything more.’ He starts coughing; it takes a long time before he stops.

  Chapter 40

  Etienne is caught unawares when he turns over the package that he has just picked up at the post office for Axel: the sender is Volker. He considers getting rid of it. What can be sent by Volker that won’t cause anguish?

  He does, after all, take it home. Axel looks at the sender’s address, opens it without a word.

  ‘My mother’s things,’ he says. There is a pile of envelopes, a diaphanous little scarf. Axel brings the scarf to his face, quickly sniffs it.

  Etienne swallows. ‘Why now?’

  ‘I let him know.’

  ‘Let him know what?’

  ‘That the time is approaching.’

  There is a high-pitched noise in Etienne’s ears.

  Axel continues: ‘You want to deny it, but you know it as well as I.’

  Etienne swallows, swallows again. He leaves the flat, walks to the vege­table garden. He starts digging wildly and blindly. How hard the soil was when they started, and how thoroughly and deeply have they fertilised it. The tears flow; he can hardly see what he is doing. When he is done, he realises he has dug out everything. Beets and carrots lie in the sun with deep gashes; some have split open. There are crushed, bloody tomatoes.

  He returns in the dark. Axel is sitting at the kitchen table. ‘You have closed it,’ Etienne says. ‘For the first time this summer.’

  Axel looks at the closed window, as if he too is surprised by it. ‘I had to. A bird flew in here. Earlier, while it was still light. I chased it out with a broomstick. It was bright: yellow chest, green and blue wings. The colour of summer elsewhere. I have it on video.’ He gestures towards the camera, still lying on the table. ‘A tropical bird. Probably escaped from a cage. Or very lost.’ He looks up at the ceiling, and then out into the corridor, as if following the bird’s trajectory.’ Then he looks at Etienne. ‘You know, Volker didn’t teach me much. He did, however, once teach me a few names of exotic birds from the south. One evening we returned from one of the skinhead rallies he used to drag me to. He was so pumped up that he started thumping my mother without warning. When she lay on the floor, and had stopped whining and shielding herself, he lost interest and turned towards me. Broke both my hands.’

  Silence rises from the courtyard. Not a plank in the wooden floor creaks. ‘For weeks, while the bones in my hands were healing, Volker kept me out of school. One day he brought me a book about bird species. The first and only book in that house. He sat down next to me, we leafed through the pages together.’ Axel looks at Etienne. ‘I kept asking questions. As long as he was showing me bird pictures, I reckoned, he couldn’t get angry. I was wrong. He became livid because I kept returning to earlier pages, kept asking the same questions. He flung the book against the wall, snapping its spine . . .

  ‘The page facing upwards showed two tiny birds. Their names are all I can remember. A tomtit from New Zealand. And then the Cape penduline tit. From your world. The smallest bird in Africa.’ Axel shakes his head. ‘But the bird that flew in here was something else.’

  For a while neither of them says anything. Etienne clears his throat, points at the l
ittle pile of paper in front of Axel on the table. Sky-blue. a4 size. Typed letters, he can see from where he is standing.

  ‘So, you had let Volker know that you . . . are ill . . . And then he sent your mother’s documents.’

  Axel nods. ‘Letters, yes. And this.’ He shows his hand. The little scarf is wrapped around his hand like a bandage. He brings it to his lips, smells it again and again, as if the scent is on the verge of evaporating.

  Etienne starts with the letters that Axel has already worked through. From Irmgard, it appears, to Mariel. Written from Buenos Aires, where she is living. The letters start in 1959. The first few letters are addressed to My Daughter. The content of these letters is a disappointment. They read like a banal diary. Platitudes, Irmgard’s daily life in Argentina: her cat, the prices of groceries, her noisy neighbour. An unsettling episode about her getting a trained guide dog. The dog is so useless that she has it put down after a few months. I know I could have given it back, she writes, it could probably have been given to someone else on the waiting list. But it had to be punished. Otherwise the emotional tenor is neutral. The glimpses of a doubt-ridden inner life that were discernible in the production diary are absent here. There are a few questions to Mariel – about where she is living now, whether she has a boyfriend yet. Etienne works out that Mariel must have been in her mid-twenties when the first letter was sent.

  By the fourth letter, Irmgard begins with My Daughter Mariel. Ariel with an m in front of it, it strikes Etienne now that he sees it on paper. There are no longer questions; it is apparent that Irmgard hasn’t been receiving responses to her letters.

  Etienne reads faster, starting to work through the letters that Axel hasn’t read himself. They exchange piles, slowly work through everything. It is the first time, Etienne thinks, that they are working through clues together, that they have equal access to information. It is the first time he isn’t embarking on some dead-end search on his own or following a trail of crumbs that Axel has sprinkled. They read through the last few letters together – written in 1988, after Mariel’s death. When they are done, their joint disappointment is palpable. There are no clues. Nothing about Berliner Chronik. Axel, Etienne then realises, might have been hoping for something else – personal revelations about his mother or grandmother. He suddenly feels guilty about his fixation on the film reels.

  Something is bothering him, flickering just out of sight. He looks at the Berlin address on each letter again. It isn’t Volker and Mariel’s address in Neukölln, but he does recognise it: Herr Bösel’s address near Alexanderplatz!

  ‘Do you still have the envelopes?’ Etienne wants to know. Axel listlessly points to the paper bin.

  Etienne finds them. The letters are addressed to Mariel, although the address is Bösel’s in East Berlin. In each instance, this address has been scratched out, and Volker and Mariel’s address has been written in. Each letter carries both an Argentine and East German stamp. It had travelled from Argentina across the Atlantic Ocean to East Berlin, from where it was posted again to West Berlin. What a long paper route to deliver Irmgard’s drab reports of her life in Buenos Aires into Mariel’s hands . . .

  ‘What,’ Etienne wants to know, ‘does this Bösel have to do with anything? Why were the letters sent via his address?’ Did Bösel have the answer all along? he wonders. Had the secret of the third reel been right there, right in front of his nose, in that cheerless little Alexanderplatz flat? It makes him dizzy, all these answers that remain just out of reach. Etienne realises he has never told Axel about his visits to Bösel. He had dismissed it as just another false trail.

  Now he recounts the story of his visits.

  In response, Axel produces a sheet of paper from under the table. His voice is breezy. ‘I don’t think you’ve seen this yet. The first letter.’

  Etienne looks at Axel, shakes his head in light rebuke. Once again, Axel has only released what should be the first piece of the jigsaw puzzle at the very end. Just when Etienne thought they had, for the first time, obtained equal access to the same facts. Is Axel addicted to leaving a trail for him to follow, to setting up labyrinths? To seducing him and then making him wait? Axel may be getting thinner and weaker, but his taste for riddles remains undiminished.

  Etienne takes the letter from Axel. The date is October 1983. It is a letter from Irmgard in Buenos Aires, sent to Bösel’s address. Not addressed to Mariel, but to a woman called Norna. A new name, although it vaguely rings a bell. Etienne looks quizzically at Axel. ‘Norna?’ Axel gestures with his head towards the letter. Etienne reads further. The letter is blunt, even brusque. I know, Irmgard writes to Norna, that you may be astonished to hear from me after all these years. Irmgard then makes clear that she isn’t writing to explain anything or ask for any sort of forgiveness. She isn’t writing to thank Norna for bringing up her child either. It is you who should be grateful for having Mariel – a child’s love is not to be taken for granted. She wants to know how Mariel is doing. And Norna should send her Mariel’s address. It is her right as mother to contact her daughter. If Norna won’t help her, she will contact Bösel directly. Your husband and I were, after all, once in the best film production team ever.

  Axel produces yet another piece of paper from below the table, hands it to Etienne without a word. Etienne shakes his head again; Axel smiles mischievously, feebly. It is a letter from Norna to Mariel.

  I include a letter from your mother, from Irmgard. She and I haven’t been in contact for years. Since she entrusted you to me as a fragile nine-year-old, I have never kept anything from you. And hence I won’t keep silent now about the fact that she wishes to contact you. I could give your address in Neukölln to Irmgard, or I could just forward her letters to you. Or I could let her know that you don’t want to hear from her at all.

  ‘Apparently she wanted Norna to just forward Irmgard’s letters,’ Axel says. ‘Irmgard clearly never had direct contact with—’

  ‘So, let me get my facts straight: Norna brought up Mariel after Irmgard had left Germany? Norna and Bösel had a relationship? And Bösel had once been the Berliner Chronik cameraman?’

  Axel looks tired; his head is drooping. ‘Norna was one of Riefenstahl’s cinematographers, I think I’ve told you this before. And, yes, Bösel was indeed the Berliner Chronik cameraman. He wasn’t Jewish, but nevertheless left Germany shortly after Ariel. When he returned after the war, he looked up Mariel, who was in Norna’s care, in Berlin. Perhaps Irmgard asked him to check up on her, who knows. In any event, this was how Bösel and Norna met, fell in love and got married. Bösel and Norna then brought up my mother. But when my mother was a young woman, when it was still possible to move relatively freely, she left with Volker for West Berlin. Norna and Bösel stayed behind in East Berlin. When the Wall was built, my mother and her stepmother were separated.’

  Etienne lowers the letter. ‘So, Mariel and her biological mother ended up on different sides of the Atlantic Ocean. And Mariel and the woman who had brought her up, on different sides of the Wall.’ Etienne thinks for a moment, shakes his head. ‘But Bösel was alone when I visited him. Twice. No sign of Norna.’

  ‘Norna died in 1987, hardly a month after my mother’s death. When Irmgard’s letters to Mariel kept arriving at Bösel’s address after Norna’s death, he apparently kept sending them on to Neukölln, having lost his clarity of mind.’ Etienne suddenly remembers where he has seen Norna’s name before: written on a photo in Bösel’s flat, the very flat where Axel’s mother spent some of her childhood.

  Etienne gets up. He wants to ask: Are there more pieces in the jigsaw puzzle? Every time he thinks the last piece has been found, it turns out the puzzle is bigger than he thought. But the time for such questions has passed. He can see how drained Axel is. He helps him to bed – his hand around Axel’s waist, Axel’s arm around his neck. Then he sits down alone in Axel’s studio.

  Etienne thinks of the letters, the distances b
etween continents, the borders and silences. Of love and soundless violence. Axel’s breathing in the bedroom is hardly audible. Like the breath of a little bird.

  At dusk the next day Etienne and Axel walk to the wooden bench by the vegetable garden. Axel is virtually weightless these days; his movements are like those of a sloth. When they sit down, the wall at the back – the windowless side of a block of flats – draws their attention. Overnight, someone has painted it black. The layers of graffiti that were there before have been wiped out. Right in the centre of the dark square is a white dot. From the bench, it looks no larger than the full stop after a sentence. In truth it probably has the diameter of a fist. Is it meant to depict approaching light? The fading sun? Is it just a spatter of bird shit?

  The longer they look at the wall, the stranger its effect on Etienne becomes. One would have thought such a black wall would imply an occlusion, a dense veil. But it feels deep, like the ocean at night.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Axel says, ‘I should colour myself like that. From my crown to my toes.’ He holds out his arms in front of him, looks at the cordage of fading words on his grey skin. It is the first time since their night in Hannover three years before that he is drawing attention to it.

  Something is written on the dark wall, Etienne notices. At the bottom, just above the soil. He gets up, walks over there. From the corner of his eye he can see the blanket slipping from Axel’s knees. Axel gets up too, walks over and squats next to him. It exudes a gloom, the black paint, an enveloping fogginess. It is cool against the skin, and creepy. Etienne screws up his eyes to read in the half-light. He is expecting something weighty. German history encapsulated in a single word. Something like Trauer, perhaps. Or Gram. But no. In tiny bright white letters it says: Leuchtkäfer. Firefly. He steps back, tilts his head, looks at the dot shining up there. Paint that glows in the dark. A needle prick of phosphor in the Berlin dusk.