The Third Reel

by S J Naudé

  Chapter 41

  It is sweltering in the Buenos Aires airport. Etienne changes money at a currency bureau. In his pocket is everything that he had left after paying for a return flight, using his savings from moonlighting with Berlin bands. He has just about enough for two nights in a hotel.

  He takes a taxi. It is full of dents; the driver is an oily character. On the way to the city, a tyre bursts. The little car veers over two lanes, comes to a halt on the narrow shoulder.

  Etienne stands waiting on the dismal strip of land between the highway and sewage works. The sweating driver is changing the wheel. Every time a lorry drones past, the taxi totters and sways on the jack. Sewage fumes whirl around them.

  After they had read through Irmgard’s letters in Berlin, a deep exhaustion overcame Etienne. His obsession to find the last reel was waning; he could feel the fire in his chest burning low. To visit Bösel again would only require a u-Bahn ride to Alexanderplatz. The unspoken question was whether Irmgard might still be alive, and whether anyone would go and look for her in Argentina. Axel was too fragile to travel and Etienne couldn’t leave him behind on his own.

  The next morning, Etienne went to Bösel’s flat. Confused, witless old Bösel. (Or was he in fact as cunning as a fox?) It was the first time since Etienne’s departure from East Berlin, more than two years earlier, that he was back on Alexanderplatz. There were new security doors in front of the building entrance. Etienne pressed the intercom. No response. He slipped in behind a resident. Upstairs he knocked on Bösel’s door, then on his kitchen window. Nothing. He stood on his toes, tried peeking in, turned the doorknob. There was a cobweb in the corner of the door. Since the Wendung, it hadn’t been unusual for flats in the East to stand empty.

  One afternoon, two weeks later, Axel insisted: he wanted to go to the garden. Axel had been in bed for the last few days, with fluid dripping into him from a transparent bag. A nurse was now coming in three times a week. Axel’s sheets still smelled of the previous day’s sun, when Etienne had washed them and hung them out on the balcony. In the course of the morning, Axel had startled Etienne by addressing him by his own name a few times. ‘Axel, please bring me some water.’ Or: ‘Axel, I have to go to the toilet.’ When Etienne said: ‘I am Etienne. You are Axel!’ Axel chortled gleefully and rubbed his hands.

  Etienne shook his head. ‘It isn’t wise to go out. Not in this weather.’ There was something cold in the air; the clouds were moving in.

  Axel tried to laugh, coughed drily. ‘Wisdom, hey! What I would be able to do with that!’

  Axel kept nagging until Etienne swaddled him in a blanket and carried him down the street. He was so light now, so light. All he wanted to do was to go and stick his hand in the soil. Etienne sat down on his haunches, with Axel like a pet in his arms. When Axel buried his hand under the clods, his body shuddered as if an electrical shock was shooting up out of the Berlin earth.

  Back at home, Etienne laid him down. Axel was out of breath, even though Etienne had been carrying him. Just clinging to Etienne with his lizard skeleton had drained him utterly. Everything made him weary now: uttering half a sentence, breathing.

  The whirling clouds yielded only a few fat drops of rain. When the clouds had dispersed, Etienne dragged Axel’s bed into the sunshine. Axel closed his eyes, angled his cheeks towards the light. Etienne thought of the sunflowers turning in unison in the guerrilla garden.

  ‘You have to go,’ Axel said, his eyes still closed. ‘To Buenos Aires.’

  Etienne sat down on his bed, vehemently shook his head. ‘I’m staying right here.’

  ‘I want you to go. Not for your sake, but mine.’

  Etienne couldn’t rely on his voice. ‘I can’t leave you here alone. You know that.’

  He had a nurse, Axel insisted. And their neighbour, whose garden was next to theirs, would help to look after him too. Etienne looked closely at Axel. Trying to read him was like interpreting a deep river, or the currents of the sea.

  Axel opened his eyes. ‘The clouds are almost . . .’ he said, then nothing else.

  He fell into a deep sleep. They were spending their nights in separate beds now, to prevent Etienne from injuring Axel in his sleep. Axel would stay at home until the end, they had decided – no hospital or hospice. The nurse would show Etienne the ropes.

  Etienne paced around the flat all night. Or did Axel want to find the last reel before it was too late? Did he expect it to contain a secret, expect that it would delay something, or fend it off?

  The next day Axel once again insisted: Etienne had to go. Etienne obstinately pursed his lips. ‘Under no circumstances.’

  ‘Please,’ Axel asked. He smiled wanly. ‘Your last instruction from me. Your last clue, your final task.’

  ‘Please,’ Etienne said and turned away. ‘You cannot send me away. Not now.’

  ‘I’m asking you from my heart.’

  ‘Is that what you want? Really want?’

  ‘I have to feel the last reel in my hands before . . . I’ll wait for you. You can fly back straight away. You only need two or three days. I’ll be here when you return. I promise.’ Etienne didn’t ask: What kind of control are you presuming? Axel lay back against his pillows under the onslaught of Etienne’s gaze, his smile fading. ‘I’m not up to this, Etienne . . . I can’t engage in a debate with you, or in battle. Not now.’

  Did Axel want to spare him his deathbed? he wondered again. And, if so, should he give in? Would that be the ultimate sacrifice? To allow Axel to believe he was protecting Etienne? Etienne had to get out of the flat. He wandered the streets, sat down on the bench by the vegetable garden. Insects sank their little stings into strawberries and sucked up the sweetness. He couldn’t linger, had to get back to watch over Axel.

  Back home, he closed the bedroom door and phoned Axel’s doctor. In a muted voice he wanted to know: ‘How long will it still be?’

  ‘Hard to say,’ the doctor said. ‘I would measure it in weeks, but that would be guesswork.’

  He phoned the nurse too, who saw Axel more often. ‘Perhaps a few more months,’ she said and then had second thoughts. ‘I give him two weeks, perhaps three.’

  Once again, Etienne couldn’t sleep, kept roaming through the rooms. In the morning hours, while Axel was dreaming without a sound, he went out again, sat down in the park, among the sleeping alcoholics. When the sun dawned over the reeking bodies, he decided: if that was what Axel wanted, really wanted, and for whatever reason, he would do what Axel asked of him.

  When he departed two days later, Etienne left a vase of sunflowers in each of the rooms. On either side of the bed, flanking Axel, were the nurse and the neighbour. When Etienne walked out the door, Axel and the neighbour were deep in conversation about seeds, about everything they were going to plant in the coming season.

  Later, on the plane, high above the Atlantic Ocean, he thought of his and Axel’s silences. Of the muteness from which a spark had originally sprung up between them. At first he had wished Axel would say more. Gradually he became used to the silences, started treasuring them. Over the last month, as Axel started shedding the kilograms and became more haggard, his sentences emerged more easily. As the crisis of the illness deepened, silence started displacing his words again. Only the cool ash of earlier conversations kept sifting down.

  Etienne granted Axel the last few sentences. His final request, a few hours before Etienne’s flight – in the early morning hours, both of them only half-awake – was for a Christmas tree. ‘We have to get one this year, a pretty one. To decorate with lights, here in the flat.’

  This one night Etienne had permitted himself to sleep next to Axel again. The body beside Etienne was now a parched seed. When Axel spoke, Etienne was still half-asleep, and flummoxed. It wouldn’t have surprised him if Axel had instructed him to go and cut out dogs’ hearts or collect material at a crematorium or sewage plant. To go and
sift through rubble in a bunker or abandoned hospital, or search for something in the city’s deepest entrails or among the detritus on its margins. But a Christmas tree? It was unimaginable that such an object could feature unironically in their home. And it was, in any event, still October.

  ‘Promise,’ Etienne mumbled. ‘A tree. Before I leave.’ He thought of perfectly cloned pines in South Africa, of plant fragments in a white laboratory. He slipped into half-sleep again, aware of his own weight, afraid that he would break Axel if he moved. When dawn broke and he opened his eyes, his first thought was that he had woken up next to a stranger.

  The last thing that Etienne noticed when he walked out carrying a suitcase, while Axel was lying between his carers in the sunlight, was one of the rough prison tattoos on Axel’s forearm. Only now, many hours later, in the sharp Argentine light, does Etienne remember that night’s conversation and realise that he failed to keep his promise to bring home a Christmas tree. He can only hope that Axel’s request had been made in a state of delirium and that he forgot about it immediately afterwards. Or that he understood that Etienne’s promise had been made in the fog of sleep.

  He wakes up at the break of dawn. He doesn’t eat breakfast. Time is limited. He is just here for two nights; he needs to return to Berlin as soon as possible.

  Here he is now: in front of Irmgard’s door, in a dilapidated building close to his hotel. The lift is out of order; he takes the stairs. They look out onto a narrow courtyard. There is no bell by her front door. He knocks. Knocks again. Without a sound, the door swings open. There she is.

  She looks more like a spider than someone’s grandmother. Her hair is like the down on a fruit; her scalp is covered in sun blemishes. She comes right up to him, feels his face with both hands.

  ‘Can I come in?’ He speaks softly, as if his words – his very breath – could injure her. ‘I’m here to discuss an important matter with you. The issue of—’

  She steps back, lets him in. His eyes have to get used to the dark. The flat faces the gloomy courtyard. The thick velvet curtains are half-drawn. The smell of onions and turned milk makes him want to retch.

  He stands in the centre of the room, turns around. ‘I have to explain,’ he says, ‘why I’m here.’

  She walks forcefully into a bookshelf, makes a little animal noise. A few books fall on the ground.

  Etienne is too far away, but involuntarily stretches out an arm. ‘Are you ok?’ She ignores him, sits down. Etienne picks up the books, sits down too, on the edge of a chair. She smiles. Or rather, her mouth flattens into a lipless slit. Etienne explains: who Axel is, his own connection with him. And the saga of his search for Berliner Chronik. By this time, the story is smoothly polished. He can build it up in modular fashion, leaving out or adding parts depending on his listener. He speaks slowly, patiently.

  When he is done, his blood suddenly starts pumping with deep red anger. He doesn’t know why he is talking so gently to her. He would, in fact, like to wipe the imbecile smile from her face, punish her. ‘You should also know,’ he says, in a loud voice now, ‘your grandson is dying in Berlin. Amid rabbit hearts and sunflowers. It was his last summer, his last planting season.’ Etienne is surprised to hear himself cry.

  Her smile does not change. She waits for Etienne to finish crying. Then they sit in silence.

  His voice is lower again now. ‘Do you understand why I’m here? Have you taken in what I just told you? If you want to do one thing for Axel, then give me the third reel. Or tell me where it is. I have to go back, to help him die.’

  She giggles a little, spits something out. On her lap, slick with saliva, lies a Donald Duck figurine. It has apparently been in her mouth all along. She gropes towards it, puts it back in her cheek.

  The wind has been taken out of his sails. She is in her dotage, hardly present. How does she manage on her own in this place? He looks around. Everything is well-organised; the smells suggest food is sometimes prepared here. She looks reasonably well looked after. There is a television and video cassette recorder, surely not for her own use. She must have a carer.

  ‘Shall I try again, speak more slowly? My German isn’t the best. Perhaps your own German is a little rusty? I don’t, alas, speak Spanish.’ She giggles again. The Donald Duck falls onto the floor. She feels around under her chair, whimpers. Etienne goes and picks it up. She puts it in her mouth, lets it protrude like a dummy. Etienne goes to the bathroom to wash his hands. Donald Duck is murky and slimy and has clearly been living in her mouth for a long time.

  He switches on a floor lamp next to her chair. Do blind people switch on lights at night? For the first time he sees old bruises on her arms. In shades of yellow and green. A fresh blue contusion on her cheek. Is somebody abusing her? Or are her thoughts so far gone that her memory, and with that her ability to navigate, is wiped out every night? Does she bump into furniture and door frames every morning, which she has forgotten overnight?

  Next to the bookshelf is a little desk. He switches on the reading lamp, keeps watching her from the corner of his eye. Her face follows his movements. She is sucking furiously on the Donald Duck.

  On the little desk, in the glow of the lamp, there is a shiny black typewriter with a sheet of paper in it. The machine dates from the 1920s or ’30s. On the right, above the keyboard, it says filia. Were the production diary’s pages typed out on this keyboard? Did these keys and type levers make the invisible words that Etienne had to coax out of the paper fibres with a pencil? And is this the machine on which letters were written to Mariel, even after her death?

  Etienne leans over. The date is 18 December 1989. A half-finished letter – her last? He catches sight of something stirring: when he looks down, he sees another page. It has fallen into the crack between the desk and bookshelf. Little flurries of air are drawn in underneath the front door, and the paper’s edges are trembling.

  He bends down, picks it up, holds it loosely up against the light. It is almost entirely black, with just the occasional sliver of white. The page is as thin as a butterfly wing. The corners curl inwards, as if on the verge of rolling the page into a scroll. When he brings it to his eyes, he instantly knows what must have happened. Every morning, after her memory has been wiped out overnight, she would be under the impression that there was a clean sheet in the machine, that she was starting a new letter. From scratch. The letters are so densely typed over each other that the ink covers the paper almost entirely, making it bleed into a single stain.

  Who knows what she might have written here, against what she was railing or agitating, what she was lamenting or mourning? Which yearnings may have drowned in this ocean of ink, which love letters, missives of hate and revenge, or political manifestos? Which ravings, revelations, nuggets of wisdom, lunacies, confused utterances, clarifications, seductions or insults? Which nonsense-words and -sentences? Outpourings, perhaps, to Norna, Bösel, Ariel, Mariel. Or to the film production team of Berliner Chronik. To Leni Riefenstahl, or the Führer himself. Or, God knows, an dem Deutschen Volk or to the destroyed Jewry. To actors or famous film directors, to let them know how much she had enjoyed their films as a blind woman. To everyone she had known or never met: thousand-word letters to every human on earth. Everything that she had been unable, alone over decades in an Argentine flat, to say to someone. A black scream. History condensed on a page. A library on a single sheet of paper.

  What grace, Etienne thinks, to be able to forget in this way. To be able to wipe out – overwrite – the daily histories with new sentences, to make everything that has ever happened sink back into the paper, into a vacuum of ink. To make all your predecessors’ tracks disappear – and your own.

  He carefully puts down the stained page, like an archival document. In places it is starting to disintegrate, like an old curtain. He looks at Irmgard, motionless in her chair, her lips a bloodless wound. He looks at his fingertips. They are stained grey.

&nbs
p; He turns to the incomplete letter in the typewriter, pulls the sheet out. Olympia, it says in golden letters on the paper table. He sits down opposite Irmgard again. She is making smacking sounds while sucking on Donald Duck, like a child drinking from its mother. He reads. The letter is addressed to Norna. There is only one paragraph. It is clear and flawless, apparently written in a moment of clarity.

  I am writing to ask, now that the Wall has fallen, that you should give the last reel of Berliner Chronik to Mariel. The reel that Bösel took when we all went our own ways in ’33. Mariel must keep it and look after it. She already has the second reel. I will be writing to Ariel too (yes, I have his address in London, and it won’t be the first time we correspond) and will ask him to send her the first reel as well. The whole film together again: the bones of a broken body. Perhaps Mariel has a child herself, someone to whom she could leave the film. The reels must never be separated again. If there isn’t a child, she should give it to the archives. Although God only knows what was left in Germany’s archives after everything had been blasted apart and the remnants plundered and carried away and divided and

  Here it ends. The white space underneath the sentences is blotted with insect shit: the flies continued to write from the point where she had stopped. The typed letters are themselves deformed by tiny spots of excrement. They have been editing, the flies. Deleting and adding. A new, cryptic history, Etienne thinks. Determined by the insects. Addressed to the dead, for deciphering in the underworld.

  He looks at Irmgard: sitting there, sucking.

  These sentences were apparently written after the months of manic typing on the page that is so heavy with ink. When a gust had at last carried the black sheet to the floor, she must have realised there was no paper in the machine, must have replaced it. Or, who knows, perhaps her carer had decided it was time for a clean page.