The Dark Room Read online

  At home he retreats from the table as soon as his plate is clean. Sometimes his parents go out, to neighbors’ flats, to meetings, but mostly they sit up in the evenings, Mutti knitting, Papi smoking, reading aloud from the newspaper or the Party magazine. Helmut climbs into bed when the sky darkens, leaving the curtains open, watching the night spread across the city, waiting quietly for sleep to come. From behind his bedroom door, Helmut can’t make out words, just the sharp, insistent tone of his father’s voice. He marks time by the passing trains, drifting away with their familiar clatter, and is usually asleep before Mutti comes in and pulls the extra blanket over her son. In the morning, Helmut rises early, often before dawn. He eats a hurried breakfast alone by the kitchen window, his back turned to the room. Avoiding his father’s eyes, his parents’ conversations, the clipped, saluted greetings of the neighbors on the stairs.

  With Gladigau he feels secure. Even when his parents’ talk turns to whispers, when the neighbors return his silences with angry stares; even as the autumn chill deepens and the word Stalingrad is no longer spoken with pride, only hushed, bewildered fear; even during those long, strange months, Helmut learns to enjoy the afternoons with Gladigau and the radio voices. The certainty of victory, the comfort of routine.

  The year turns, and in the dead of winter, a surrender changes everything.

  Spring and Helmut is not surprised to see people leaving openly, having sensed an exodus all along. But he is shocked at the numbers; the slow drain now a hemorrhage: crowds at the station, more and more familiar faces leaving every day. Over the dinner table, Mutti passes on goodbyes from friends who have left, and Papi nods firmly, says it is right that they go, the women and their children, says that they must be kept safe, and that the ones who stay must be brave. The neighborhood gradually empties of children, and the back court is unusually quiet in the summer months. The young families are all gone before the bombs begin falling in earnest, and one dark autumn morning Gladigau reads aloud from the newspaper that over a million people have left.

  When people speak of leaving, opinion is divided. Helmut listens to conversations as he photographs, on the station platform, on the ever emptier market streets. Some are fiercely loyal to Berlin, and Helmut enjoys their rhetoric. Others fear for their lives, their children’s future: voices tight and quiet, eyes watching for listeners, whispering predictions of the horrors to come. Go. Helmut hears them in snatches. As far as possible from the capital, from the Ruhr especially, away from any city. They fall briefly silent as he passes. All of Germany is a target. For the British, the Americans, too. Helmut lists the murmured names, already hit or sure to be soon. Aachen, Krefeld, Duisburg, Oberhausen. Regensburg, Dortmund, Gelsenkirchen, Mülheim. Essen, Wuppertal, Jena, Münster. Cologne, Kiel, Rostock, Kassel. Fingers pressed white against their lips, the people whisper death in Hamburg, firestorms and bombs. Closing their eyes, they breathe their fears. Everything gone. Helmut listens. It will be worse the next time. He doesn’t believe them. Leipzig or Dresden. They must be wrong. The bombers will come for Berlin.

  Gladigau returns late from Herr Friedrich, a regular client. He comes into the darkroom, where Helmut is mixing chemicals, and sits down on one of the high stools. Gladigau watches his apprentice work for a while, and Helmut becomes confused and self-conscious under his employer’s eyes; spills on the clean worktop and has to measure everything twice. He is grateful when Gladigau finally speaks.

  Herr Friedrich’s sons fell in Russia at the beginning of the year. Gladigau knew them both, watched them grow up through his lens. Friedrich’s daughters-in-law have left Berlin now, with his grandchildren. Out in Mecklenburg at the moment, they may go down to the Schwarzwald soon. In any case, Friedrich plans to join them. Gladigau recounts the story and speaks absently of shutting up shop before the winter sets in. Business is poor. The customers still in Berlin have other things on their minds. Gladigau plans out loud while Helmut wipes the surfaces down, ready to start printing. He can have his job back once things get better, of course, and hasn’t his father perhaps spoken of arranging for his wife and son to go somewhere safer for a while?

  Helmut stops working and stares his employer full in the face. Gladigau is shocked into silence by the direct gaze, and still Helmut does not drop his eyes, insulted, ashamed to hear his employer suggesting such cowardice. He is not a child, he is not a woman. He does not want or need protection. Helmut returns the insult by questioning Gladigau’s loyalty to the Führer, and the two of them stand under the red bulb, in the sulphur smell, and print the day’s photos without exchanging another word.

  Helmut is in bed when the second wave of bombing begins.

  His parents go out for the evening. Mutti comes in to kiss him goodbye, but she doesn’t tell Helmut where they are going, nor does he ask. He can see his father through the partly open bedroom doorway, standing half inside the flat and half outside in the stairwell, impatient to be off. His mother closes the bedroom door behind her, and though it is still early, Helmut turns off the light.

  He dozes for a couple of hours, then lies awake and listens for the rattle of a freight train to carry him off to sleep again. Instead, he hears the faint beginnings of a noise he can’t identify. Distant, persistent, and now that he has heard it, he can’t block it out again. Without knowing what the low drone is, Helmut lies still and listens to the hundreds of Lancasters carrying their lethal tonnage into the sky above Berlin.

  Moments after the siren sounds, the tenement comes to life. Mothers bundle children out of bed and old people pull on their thick socks. The stairwell is full of people. Helmut can hear them rush to the cellar: sharp voices, quick feet. He knows he should go with them, but doesn’t want to be near their fear and their hurry, so he stays in bed. He has heard people describing the incendiary bombs, Christmas trees falling from the sky, lighting the bombers’ path to their target. He watches from his window but there is nothing to see yet, just a black sky above and a dark Berlin below. The block warden pounds at his door, but Helmut doesn’t answer because he hears the clattering boots of the Flackhelfer on the stairs. The boy is only fourteen, and yet he works with the antiaircraft gunners on the tenement roofs. Both hammer at the door now, and shout, but Helmut will not suffer the humiliation of a fourteen-year-old’s orders. He pulls the blankets tighter around his legs, and only when he is sure that both the warden and the boy have gone does he put on his shoes and his coat and venture out into the stairwell.

  Helmut hears the drone under the siren now. Becoming louder, becoming a roar. He stands with his hand in his pocket, fingers firmly wrapped round the camera, makes his way cautiously down the empty stairs.

  The first bombs hit when he gets to the second floor. They are not very close, but the impacts tear into his legs. The building shifts, and Helmut is hurled off balance. Plaster falls on him in chunks and dust, and in his mind’s eye a thousand pots and pans tumble down the stairs to cover him as the kitchen cupboards in every apartment empty their contents to the floor.

  Shock and pain. Everything moves fast now and Helmut can’t keep up. He doesn’t run to the cellar; instead his legs carry him out into the street. The first fires are starting in the neighboring districts and Helmut runs away from the heat and the light. Not fast enough. He knows he is not fast enough, because now the bombers are here. The roar. Directly overhead. Skimming the tops of the tenements, vast and frighteningly close, they follow Helmut’s bare and bobbing head as he runs.

  He takes a zigzag course through the pitch-black streets to escape them, can feel himself screaming, but can hear nothing save the roar of fire and bombs and planes.

  The impacts resurface from deep underground, kicking into his hips, his spine. It rains tile and brick and glass, and Helmut cannot see where he runs, the flat pounding of antiaircraft guns in his ears, noise blackening sight. He is blind but not out of breath. His throat is raw and his face is wet, and he runs in the darkness while the street shudders under him, buildings reeling, each footfa
ll as heavy as a bomb.

  A body runs in front of him, black shape toward him. Helmut hears the curses, feels the hands on his coat and the man’s breath in his ear. Torn off course, swung off his feet. A bomb. Two arms. The grip. Helmut twists and screams and is pulled underground. From outside dark to dark inside, but just as loud.

  He spends the rest of the raid in a cellar full of strangers. They are silent and still while he lies on the floor and cries. The adrenaline makes him shake, involuntary shudders, uncontrollable, and he is afraid and ashamed, feeling the people stare.

  After the noise subsides they are all cold. The man who pulled Helmut down with him says this is good. The fires have not reached this part of Berlin at least. After that they are quiet again. Wet eyes, small movements in the black.

  Helmut leaves the cellar without saying goodbye. He has come a long way from home in his flight, at least two or three miles. He doesn’t know where he is, and everything looks different. Bricks where there shouldn’t be, gaps where there should be walls. Helmut feels his way down the first street, to the first corner and on, finds his route blocked by chairs, glass and window frames, an empty, unmade bed. Picks his way around the rubble and onto cobblestones again, toward what he hopes is home. It takes him some time to find his way back. The streets are deserted and deathly silent. His eyes get used to the dark, but the quiet is unsettling, and he feels dizzy and sick. Helmut’s footsteps echo loud against the tenement walls and he regrets leaving the wordless company of the cellar.

  Slowly people emerge, tiny gray shapes against the black walls. More and more, until the streets are swarming. People fleeing from torn buildings, lost and searching through the dark, new mountains of stone. The sky above the roofs is brilliant with fire, and the streets have become progressively brighter as Helmut nears home. He hears the clattering of the fire brigade bells and walks through streets alive with disoriented people, their clothing ripped and sometimes charred, many of them walking barefoot through the rubble. No matter where he turns, Helmut cannot escape the sound of children crying. He is sweating now in his coat and pyjamas; blinking against the hot air and the soot, thinking, Berlin is full again. Full of children.

  His tenement building is still standing, but it is on fire. He watches the firemen working for an hour or so, waiting. No Mutti, no Papi. The skin on his cheeks and on his earlobes prickles, itchy and sore in the heat. No familiar faces at all.

  He waits, doesn’t know how much time passes, but still his parents don’t come home. Afraid to ask, he stands stock-still, staring up at his former home, only moving when he is pushed aside. He is not allowed into the back court to see if his bedroom is on fire, so he walks instead down to Gladigau’s.

  The windows in all of the shops are broken, and there are people running from the grocer’s on the corner, arms full, coat pockets bulging. Gladigau’s shop is a mess and the lights are not working, so Helmut finds candles and secures the window as best he can with scraps of wood and cardboard. He searches through the contents of the drawers scattered on the floor and finds that not much is missing. Gladigau’s display camera is gone from the window, but that hasn’t worked in years, and the stock of empty picture frames have almost all been taken, too. The looters did not make it through the heavy darkroom door, although they did hurl Gladigau’s good chair against it. The chair is in pieces on the floor, but the door is hardly dented. Helmut has his keys in his coat pocket and he lets himself into the darkroom and makes a bed out of Gladigau’s magazines and white lab coat. He blows out the candles and lies down on the American women of his adolescent fantasies, their white thighs and small breasts crumpled under his dreamless sleep. The darkroom is black and silent, and he sleeps late into the next day.

  • • •

  Helmut is surprised when Gladigau does not come and open the shop as usual. His clothing stinks of smoke and the skin on his face is sore. He drinks some water from the darkroom tap and goes out, still in his pyjamas, coat buttoned against the cold. On the street, people pass with bundles and handcarts piled high with belongings. The station building has been damaged, but the bombers have missed the tracks. People congregate on the railway platforms waiting for a train to take them out of the city. Helmut looks and listens, but the people are all unfamiliar.

  The smoking, wet shells of the tenements are still warm when he passes them, those walls left standing now steaming, his old home dripping black water and hollow inside. Helmut cries. People everywhere are crying, but still he feels ashamed. Tears streaming from his eyes, stinging hot on his raw skin, he covers his face with his hands, looking out through blackened fingers. Without his Mutti, without his Papi, Helmut stands alone.

  He can’t let them find him crying, he must be brave. He tries to stop the tears, but they keep coming, running down his cheeks into his mouth, bitter on his tongue. Helmut waits, watches for his parents, walks through the neighborhood, returning again and again to the shop, the station, the empty place that used to be home. He searches for his mother’s face among the drifting people, sees his father’s and hides his coward’s tears. He wipes his eyes on his sleeve, stands tall, looks back again, but the face is gone. Replaced by another, and another. Gray beards, tired eyes, drawn cheeks. None of them Papi’s.

  In the late afternoon Helmut arrives in Gladigau’s neighborhood. The buildings here are unscathed. The solid, clean lines of blond stonework are imposing, far larger than the houses of his own district. Helmut is shocked by the grand, smooth windowpanes, and the white of the curtains. Where he lives everything is broken and torn, layered in smoke, soot, and dust. The stairwell in Gladigau’s building is dry and cold, the dark wood of the banister shining, soft day falling in from the skylight above. Helmut knocks at Gladigau’s door, breathing hard from the climb. He stays on into the evening in case Gladigau returns, but no one either enters or leaves the building, and there are no cooking smells or radios or footsteps crossing hallways or children crying.

  Helmut leaves at midnight, afraid of the quiet, afraid of another air raid, spends another night alone on the darkroom floor. Disoriented in the pitch black, unsure if his eyes are open or closed. Helmut lies on the boundary between asleep and awake, walks through shattered walls and finds his parents holding hands. Reaching out, stepping forward, the walls falling, he loses them again.

  Helmut dreams of lenses shattering at the shutter’s release. Exposures of fragmented glass, shards of picture, prints seen from the corner of an eye. Papi’s fingers, Mutti’s eyes, her arms. Helmut reaches and the negatives crumble in his hands, black glitter-dust on his palms.

  Exhausted, he crawls until he finds the darkroom door. It is morning again, and, comforted by the light, Helmut sleeps under the counter in the abandoned shop.

  Days pass, wordless, cold. A soup kitchen is set up at the wrecked tram junction, winter clothes handed out, new boots and coats. Helmut washes the soot and sweat from his pyjamas in the darkroom sink, cleans the shop and secures it against looters, locking everything of value in the darkroom. Ledgers, till, order books, the remaining frames. Helmut closes the business, hanging a handwritten apology to the customers at the door. Charcoal on cardboard, softening, smearing in the autumn rain.

  He takes no photos that winter. Camera, film, chemicals, paper, all safe behind the darkroom door. Helmut knows they are there, a small, comforting presence among the loss. He mourns. Alone, the coldest weeks go by. Sirens, bombs, fire, and hunger. Helmut sees corpses pulled from the rubble and runs away. At night his dreams bring confusion, and he wakes, expecting Mutti, routine, Gladigau, warmth, his father’s pipe smoke. He starts each winter day crying, covering his face with his hands.

  Wet breath, wet cheeks, wet palms, the tears flood on.

  In daylight it makes more sense. He sees the change in the city. The blocked streets, the missing buildings. Craters and mountains where once it was flat. Helmut can feel the difference between then and now, the pattern of the city shattered every night and the changes becoming part
of each new day. He watches the people: chalking street and shop signs on the remaining walls, walking on and over and under and through. Slow progress across the rubble: ankles twisting, feet slipping, legs disappearing up to their knees. Still they go on.

  New paths are beaten, old routines are dropped. After the bakery is bombed, the bread arrives in trucks.

  Preferring to stay in familiar streets, Helmut finds a cellar to sleep in. It feels safe to him: tucked away in a tiny back court, the tenements around it all empty, in ruins. He finds a stove in the rubble and installs it on bricks by the cellar steps. Takes the heavy top bolt from the darkroom door and makes his new home secure.

  In the nights when bombs fall, Helmut lies awake in his cellar and listens. If the impacts are close, he shouts into the noise, just like the night he ran from the bombers. Feeling his throat burn with his screams, hearing nothing but the blasts, the air thick with planes and flak. Warm with fear and then cooled by sweat, he makes a fire in the stove at dawn and sleeps in the quiet early light. If the bombs are far away, Helmut finds the distant thump and whine almost comforting, like the freight trains which had accompanied his adolescent sleep.

  This far noise is preferable to silence. In the nights when the city lies quiet, Helmut is invaded by the dreams of his darkroom night, sharpened by hunger and cold. The broken windows are thick with frost, and Helmut peers through the glittering pane at his father, hand on Mutti’s shoulder, sitting in front of him. The ice melts, the image clears in the warmth of Helmut’s breath on the pane, then clouds again. Fogged, smudged by his reaching fingers. Gone.

  Without work and without photography, Helmut’s days are empty and long, and the hours are drawn out through lack of food. He tries to sleep, but dreams drive him out of his cellar and onto the street, and his cold legs carry him to the station. There is a new guard, and Helmut takes his time, making friends, talking about the trains, just like he did with the old guard when he was a boy. The new man doesn’t like Helmut. His persistence, his crooked arm, his dirty coat. But after Helmut points out the tenement shell that used to be his home, the guard takes pity on him, listens to him more closely, lets him into the station to watch the trains. On cold days he sometimes takes a mug of thin soup out to the strange young man by the tracks. He asks after his family and nods appreciatively at Helmut’s descriptions of a hardworking Papi, a devoted Mutti, a dutiful only son. Helmut watches the trains come and go as he speaks, lets his voice drift on and on, eats his soup, doesn’t look the guard in the face. And because the guard suspects that Helmut’s parents are not evacuated but dead, he also gives him regular work sweeping the platforms. Helmut doesn’t get paid, but is fed a meal in the station canteen, and is also given a coat to wear with the railway insignia on the breast pocket.