The Dark Room Read online

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  The army recruits heavily from Helmut’s neighborhood and the surrounding areas. There are plenty of young men here, all willing to die for Führer and Vaterland, in the service of the next one thousand years. Helmut still counts himself among them, aches and yearns for uniform, active service, Kamaraden. But he knows, he knows. Because of his arm, his fault, his flaw, he is left behind, while everyone else moves on into the Lebensraum beyond.

  He withdraws further, speaking less. Gladigau trusts his steady, quiet boy; takes on more work outside the little studio; leaves Helmut to mind the shop alone for long periods of time.

  Paris falls and the Führer returns triumphant to Berlin. Helmut’s parents go into town to watch, without asking Helmut, leaving him behind. He spends the evening at the station, watching the crowds flood in, off the trains and onto the trams, into the city center. A few quiet, solitary hours later, they pour back through again, alive and glowing, off to their homes in the suburbs and outlying regions of Berlin. Helmut waits at the gates until finally he sees Mutti and Papi step off their tram and make their way to the station to collect him. They are both smiling, tired but joyful, like the rest of the crowd. Linking arms, the family walks home, Helmut in the middle, Papi on his good side, Mutti on his bad.

  He feels their pride, knows he isn’t part of it, turns away from their faraway eyes.

  The first bombs fall on Berlin. A single attack, and for Helmut the novelty is frightening but thrilling. After the deep, distant thumping in the earth subsides, the sky to the south is lit a brilliant orange. Helmut’s bed rattles gently with the explosions, but far less than it does when the trains go by. His parents wake him. Berlin burns on the horizon, the fires clearly visible from Helmut’s bedroom window. Mutti and Papi sit with him on his bed and watch. Mutti asks if he is afraid, but Helmut shakes his head, glad of the quiet company, the warmth of his father’s legs so close to his own cold feet.

  Gladigau is displeased by the amount of film Helmut is using on the station project. He tells him to concentrate on the construction work and stop taking so many photos of people. Helmut starts stealing occasional rolls of film, and sneaking out two cameras at a time. The weather is colder, and Helmut wears his old overcoat again. By checking in the mirror in the back room, he confirms that he can carry a second camera secretly under his coat by positioning it on his right side. The hang of his arm disguises the slight bulge made by the lens. He has to hold his right shoulder more stiffly than normal to stop his arm swinging too much; but in the back room and the alley on his way home, Helmut practices walking with his arm at this angle until he develops a more natural gait.

  In the cold, dull days of late winter, the station is finally completed. The little row of shops, including Gladigau’s, are spruced up for the grand reopening. The two empty shops have their boards torn off, their windows replaced, and new displays put in. Helmut spends an afternoon helping the other apprentices make the faked shop fronts presentable. In the months since their owners left, no one has paid them any attention. Helmut doesn’t like their dark and damp interiors, the black graffiti, and the broken glass grinding underfoot. But he does not complain because Gladigau has entrusted him with his first major assignment: photographing the opening.

  The light is not as spectacular as on the day they caught the banners on the wide city boulevard. But it is a bright day for the time of year, and Helmut is confident about his compositions and his exposures. The dignitaries arrive and make their speeches to much cheering, and Helmut finds an excellent position in the heart of the flag-waving crowd for the opening of the new station gates.

  This last set of photos are really very good, and both Helmut and Gladigau are pleased. Although the station-house façade is in reality rather square and plain, in Helmut’s photos it looks almost elegant, and full of the energy of the flag-waving crowd. The stationmaster orders postcards to be made and displays them in the station kiosk. Gladigau receives a percentage of the sales, and Helmut gets a modest pay raise and the promise of more assignments. For his birthday, Gladigau gives him the folding camera, and his parents buy film and chemicals from Gladigau, at cost. Helmut now has his own shelf in the darkroom storage cupboard. All four of them eat ice cream in the café by the station and toast Helmut’s future career with the chopped nuts and whipped cream that are becoming more expensive with every passing week.

  Unaccustomed to conversation, Helmut is exhausted by the company that afternoon and is little more than monosyllabic once the food arrives. Gladigau is used to a comfortable silence with his apprentice and so he thinks nothing of Helmut’s behavior. But his parents are embarrassed by what they see as rudeness: his mother by his lack of table manners, and his father by his son’s large stomach and pasty cheeks.

  Gladigau suggests a photo of the birthday meal. Sets up a camera, instructs the waiter, and sits himself next to Helmut on the left of frame; mother and father are on the right. When she finds a space for it on the wall, Mutti notices that this is the first family picture in which Helmut is not between his parents. Gladigau looks cheerful, Papi a little tired and serious, and Mutti thinks she looks shy. A touch embarrassed, perhaps. Helmut still has his hand on his spoon, and his napkin tucked into his collar. It is difficult to tell with his soft round cheeks, but something in her son’s expression suggests to Mutti that he has not yet swallowed his last mouthful of ice cream.

  The war is not even two years old, but it reaches into every aspect of daily life. People are reminded not to waste food; extravagance is frowned upon; resources must be conserved for the common good. In the family portraits which Helmut frames and wraps, there is often a woman in black. In the wedding photos the groom is usually in uniform. New babies are brought to the shop, the pictures to be sent to fathers at the front. And soldiers come in to leave a portrait behind for mothers, sisters, or sweethearts to cherish.

  Helmut sees more of Berlin now, out on assignments for Gladigau. He still goes to the station every day to count the trains and keep a watchful eye on the comings and goings, but he also ventures farther afield with his camera in his spare time.

  The late spring days of 1941 are cold and largely dull. Not great weather for a photographer, but Helmut is keen to improve his skills. He saves what he can from his wages, managing enough for a roll of film each week. Gladigau allows him long lunch breaks, and even occasional half days out, if his duties are done. On Sundays, with Gladigau in the darkroom to guide him, Helmut spends hours printing up his precious negatives. Rows and rows of tiny experiments on Gladigau’s leftover paper, all strips and scraps.

  Almost all of the prints have people in them, usually considerable numbers of people, too. Helmut gravitates toward crowds, busy streets, enjoys capturing the milling, moving mass. Gladigau admires Helmut’s photos, squinting and nodding at the prints pegged up on the lines across the darkroom to dry. That’s Berlin, he says. All that life. He points out the sense of movement in the pictures, clears his throat and tells Helmut he has a true photographer’s eye.

  The compliment is heartfelt, jealous, and not easily voiced. Gladigau’s chest feels tight in the chemical dark. His apprentice, however, shows little sign of hearing the praise, standing silently next to him, running his pale, critical eyes across the prints with a frown.

  Later, after Gladigau has gone home and Helmut has finished cleaning up, he lays out the dry prints on the counter and looks at them again. Next to him is a new notebook, begun six weeks ago and already almost filled with his cramped script.

  Helmut’s project has moved out of the station and into the city beyond: not just photographing, but also counting, cataloguing, monitoring. Any street with no people on it is noted in one column; streets with between one and ten people in another; between eleven and twenty in another; and any street with more than twenty people is photographed, and the count then tallied from the print.

  Week by week, the empty-street columns get longer, the busy-street columns slowly shrinking away.
Each time he goes out, Helmut seems to find fewer crowds to photograph, can spend more time, more exposures, on each busy street. Composition, detail, content have become important, the photos no longer simply documents. Helmut prefers the pictures, no longer enjoys his notebooks, finds them eerie and strange.

  That’s Berlin, he says, hand on his notebook. But his eyes rest on the prints. He can see the war in the queues outside shops, and the ever present uniformed figures. But tonight he can also see the photos through Gladigau’s eyes. An ordinary busy city. Lively and full. He enjoys the pictures as Gladigau does: the faces, arms and legs, the many hats on many heads. He doubts his notebooks, and enjoys that, too. Feeling safe in his city again. His Berlin, his home.

  By midsummer, Helmut has amassed a significant portfolio. One morning when he gets in to work, he finds Gladigau smiling in the studio, and his Berlin prints lined up on the broad table against the back wall. Gladigau has trimmed the paper scraps neatly, selected his favorites, and laid them out in chronological order. Hand on Helmut’s shoulder, he walks his protégé along the table and points out his steadily improving photographic skills. Better and better, every week. They leave the shop closed and talk through the morning. Gladigau is proud, and Helmut is, too. Especially when Gladigau selects his favorite photo and asks him to make a new print for the window display.

  Inspired, Helmut starts to think about depth in his framings; foreground and background; throwing the focus; leading the eye. He experiments, using longer exposures to convey a sense of activity, figures blurring in their workaday haste. Over the next few weeks, Helmut also becomes more adventurous with his perspectives and elevations. Come September, he thinks nothing of climbing buildings, lampposts, lying on the ground, or taking pictures through the windows of moving trams.

  It is a glorious autumn morning, and Gladigau has a wedding to shoot. He presses a roll of film into Helmut’s hand as he leaves. Go out for an hour or two, he says. Fill it all. A shame to waste a day like today.

  The magnetic pull of crowds takes Helmut to the marketplaces, school playgrounds, the busy shopping streets. He takes a photo or two, moves on, the shop forgotten now, the light so beautiful, drawing him farther afield. He wanders a series of mostly empty back-streets, and then picks up and follows the sound of voices. Loses himself in the alleys between tenements, finally tracing the source to a vacant lot.

  There are trucks and uniformed men shouting and pushing. There are a hundred, perhaps a hundred and fifty, people, some milling, some striding, some standing still. Helmut crouches behind a low wall and begins to take pictures. Through the lens he sees possessions scattered: clothes, pots, boxes, sacks kicked and hurled across the muddy ground. An officer stands by a jeep screaming orders, sharp voice frightening Helmut farther back behind the wall. He wipes sweat from his palms onto his trousers; fingers weak, he rests the camera on the bricks and looks quickly around.

  There are more people watching. Gathered in the entrance of a tenement on the far side of the vacant lot. They are much closer to the crowd than Helmut, but he is afraid to cross through the rushing and pushing, to join them. The shouting is louder now, the truck engines firing up. Helmut reaches for his camera, frightened, but also worried that the scene will pass him by.

  The gypsies are divided and loaded into the trucks. They shout back at the men in uniform, gold teeth bared. Children cry on their mothers’ hips and hide beneath their wide, bright skirts. Girls bite the soldiers’ hands as they pull the jewels from their ears and hair. Men kick those who kick them and are kicked again. Women push away the hands which push them, and one runs but doesn’t get far and is soon unconscious and in the truck with the rest of her family.

  Helmut is afraid, exhilarated. His hands sweat and shake. He clicks and winds and clicks again, photographing as quickly as the camera will allow: not quick enough. He reloads, curses his fingers, feeble and damp, fumbles and struggles with the focus.

  In the viewfinder his eyes meet the eyes of a shouting, pointing gypsy. Others turn to look: frightened, angry faces in headscarves, hats, and in uniform, too. Helmut’s heart contracts. He remembers the soldier in the station and hides his face with his hands. He hears a shouted order to stop, stand up, but he can’t, he can only turn and run.

  The camera drops to his chest, lens jarring against his ribs, strap tugging hard at the back of his neck as he twists away from the angry eyes and voices. The ground his foot finds is broken. Helmut’s knee gives way and he stumbles, hurtling forward, one arm flailing, the other hanging loose, useless and heavy, pulling his right shoulder to the stony ground. He holds the camera up and away from his falling body to protect it.

  The landing comes swift as a razor cut, and with the same bright shock, then pain. Helmut is on his feet again and running, not daring to look behind. Back through the mostly empty alleyways, along the backstreets and across the market square. He runs to Gladigau’s, too scared of standing still to stop and look for a tram.

  The cobbles shift below him, walls, windows spinning away. Terrified, he vomits, jerking to a stop. Retching, coughing, hauling air into his lungs. No one shouts, no one follows him, but Helmut has the pointing fingers, the pushing, screaming pictures behind his eyes, and the panic drives him on again. Back onto home ground, behind the station, through the alley, arm throbbing, camera inside his coat, thudding against the fat of his soft white stomach with every heavy step.

  Back in the shop, there is no knock at the door and no questioning voice. Just cameras, frames, the darkroom, the till. Safe and familiar, and all still there. The sweat turns cold and slowly dries on Helmut’s back and legs, and the vomit forms flakes on his coat and chin. He sits, quiet and still, behind the counter until Gladigau returns. In the half-dark his employer nags him for leaving the closed sign up all afternoon.

  They work in silence together well into the evening, unloading the cameras, cleaning, processing, and printing. Although his arm still aches, Helmut’s hands have stopped shaking. He develops the pictures of the gypsy camp but does not print them while Gladigau is there. They share a glass of schnapps and Helmut stays on after his employer goes home, printing and reprinting long into the night.

  At first he can only cry. Angry tears: the panic of the day turned to rage. Turned against the photos, against himself, his failure to capture the scene.

  Then he reasons with himself. Switches on the light and lays out the photos on the darkroom floor. He crouches and examines the prints again, imagines Gladigau with him, hand on his shoulder, guiding words in his ear.

  Helmut remembers the scene, but with Gladigau’s eyes, and he sees that the photos are unclear. That these photos could easily be passed over as a few people milling about in an empty lot. That they convey none of the chaos and cruelty which had his hands shaking and sweating, and which had spurred him to fill almost two rolls.

  Helmut tells himself: he isn’t used to taking photos of frantic activity like this. Crowded streets, station openings, all of these things he is good at because he can take his time, find the right spot for the camera, and do multiple exposures of similar compositions. He also concludes that black-and-white film was really not suitable for the subject matter. The bright skirts of the gypsy women are just drab rags in his photos and don’t swirl and dart like they did that afternoon. The dark SS uniforms blend into the soot-black walls of the buildings, making them almost invisible. Helmut knows he was too far away to capture details. He blows up the image, but the grain evens out the angry lines on the face of the officer who was screaming orders by the jeep, and he barely looks like he is shouting. Helmut remembers the crowd calling and crying to the people inside the trucks, who in turn called and cried to the crowd. In the photo, he sees a still, silent, and oddly calm group, and the arm reaching out of the truck window is just a small blot, only distinguishable as an arm when he examines the negative under magnification. The woman who was knocked unconscious hardly looks like she is running in Helmut’s photo of her attempt to escape, a
nd he didn’t manage to include the soldier behind her in the frame in his hurry to get the shot. He thinks he must have been reloading while she was being dragged back to the truck, and the shot of her being bundled inside is so badly out of focus as to be indecipherable.

  Helmut searches and searches, but the shot of the gypsy looking into his lens, pointing and shouting, the shot which scared him into running away is not among the photos. Nor is it among the negatives, which are uncut. He doesn’t understand it, rages again, throws the long strips of negative to the floor, before picking them up and looking through them for a third, and then a fourth time. Finally, he reasons with himself. Got to the end of the film and didn’t know; panicked; ran away before the shutter released. Coward.

  Helmut stuffs the prints and negatives into a paper bag, not caring about creases and scratches, just wanting to go home. He knows he should keep the pictures for Gladigau, show how he made use of his time, but he is ashamed. He stands for a while with the bag in his hands, and then decides. An error in the processing. He will lie and say that he fogged the roll. Pay for it out of his wages, make up for it with other pictures, another time.

  On his way home across the back court, in the dark, Helmut throws the bag and its hated contents into the trash can.

  The army is victorious. Again and again: beyond Poland now, spreading south and ever farther east. Claiming the good, dark soil of the Ukraine, the oil in the Caspian, the vast expanse of the Steppe.

  Gladigau buys a radio, and he and Helmut listen to the triumphant broadcasts as they develop and print and clean. Helmut smiles with his employer in the red darkroom, eyes on his work, ears filled with news, shouting voices, the bombast and the drums. But he never turns on the radio alone.

  Helmut takes photos. Fills the spring and summer months with experiments, adjustments, improvements. Pleasing his employer, enjoying the praise, seeing with his own eyes how his photos get better and better.