The Dark Room (3 page)

The slides come back in small cardboard frames from the lab. Alone in the shop, Helmut holds the last and best one up to the window. The luminous street held between finger and thumb. Bright swastikas burning out against the sky, and the wind caught in the scarlet folds on the photo.

Close inspection of his notebooks confirms Helmut’s suspicions. The station is being used more frequently. He imagines the whole country on the move: people, goods, street signs, and cities rushing by. At the same time he feels, fears, Berlin is emptying. He hasn’t seen any of the boys from school since he started work and so imagines them at the front. A sudden rush of deaths and departures shocks Helmut’s Mutti into pale silence, and her son absorbs her mood. Frau Biene on the next landing has lost both sons in Poland, and moves back to Bremen, taking Edda, Helmut’s onetime platform companion, with her. Herr Maas from downstairs leaves for the front; Frau Maas takes the children south to her sisters. Two weeks later, another neighbor, another soldier, is killed, and another
of the shops next to Gladigau’s is boarded up, the owners gone without warning.

Business at Gladigau’s is not so brisk. Some of their regular customers have become irregular, and there are fewer occasional jobs coming in. There is enough to keep Gladigau busy, but Helmut has more idle time. While his boss is working, he goes through the order books, making lists of people he hasn’t seen for more than four weeks, crossing them off again if they return to the shop. Every week new names are added. Helmut is worried. He decides to keep a rough tally of arrivals and departures at the station. To monitor comings and goings, keep a check on the slow drain of people out of Berlin.

Evening at the station. Helmut stands with his notepad, and a troop of soldiers hurry past him to the platform, a sudden wash of gray. Most of them are older than he is, but Helmut is acutely aware of each young soldier, youthful faces passing his own. He steps back three, four paces, stands with his weak shoulder against the tiled station wall. Ashamed of his own lack of uniform, ashamed that he is standing still, going nowhere, he buries himself in his notebook and scribbles numbers that mean nothing, names of cities without reference to trains.

His notebook is snatched, his arm pinned to the wall. He is asked questions, but sees only the uniform he lacks. The voice and the shock blend with the soldier’s gray coat, and Helmut is confused. Passengers stare in silence, and he thinks perhaps he should stay quiet, too. He looks away from the shouting face, turns to the tiles on the wall he was leaning against, is being pressed against now.

The guard is there. The shouting stops. He is explaining to the officer about Helmut’s hobby, the officer is loosening his grip on Helmut’s arm.

Helmut apologizes, though he isn’t sure what for. The officer lets
him go, but keeps hold of his notebook, and Helmut keeps his hot cheek pressed to the cool tile wall. The guard whispers something to the officer as he walks away, pointing at Helmut. The officer stops and turns back, explains to Helmut loudly and slowly that his notes would be dangerous in the wrong hands, and the passengers watch the scene. Some are drifting now that the officer has finished shouting, but Helmut feels their eyes still fixed on him, combined with the officer’s glare. In the silence, he braces himself for the slap, kick, punch which never comes. The officer walks away along the platform, with Helmut’s notebook in the pocket of his uniform coat. The guard pats Helmut gently on his crooked arm, still aching from the officer’s grip. The passengers disperse as silently as they stared. Helmut walks home across the back court, down the alley, up the stairs, and writes everything he can remember of his notes into his scrapbook before it is too late.

After this he tries to work from memory. It isn’t difficult for him to make mental notes of train times, arrivals and departures. He knows the timetable patterns so well that alterations are memorable. The difficulty comes in tallying the people. He knows he will never get exact numbers, but even rough estimates are impossible without making notes. He begins carrying a scrap of paper in his sleeve and a pencil stub in the palm of his hand. He can jot notes quickly, concealed behind the mail sacks, or even slip into the bathroom between trains and add up his scrawled columns. The problem with these hasty notes is accuracy. Helmut doesn’t trust them. The figures reveal an increase, if anything, in the numbers arriving in Berlin. He reasons that some of them might move on from other stations, or may only be visiting, but still, they do not concur with Helmut’s impression of an ever emptier city. Frau Steglitz and Frau Dorn both have husbands and sons in the army now. Their flats are empty, lonely, so they move out of the city, nearer the munitions factories,
where there is work. The lawyer who handles Gladigau’s unpaid accounts has also gone, without leaving a forwarding address.

The first spring of wartime. Helmut’s birthday has come and gone again, with a kiss and a cake from Mutti, after Papi has left for work. Helmut has not been back to the recruitment office, and has received no letter requesting him to return. His father sorts through any post that comes in the morning, and Helmut always feels a twinge of guilt that there is nothing for him. Sons in every block around them are leaving or preparing to leave. Fathers, too, if they are young enough and not doing essential work. Helmut starts doing exercises again.

Alone in his box room, he lifts his arm out in front of him, as high as it will go: just below shoulder height now. He steps forward and presses his palm against the wall. Steps forward again, pushing his hand up the wall with his good arm, and so on and so on, forcing his arm up above his shoulder. The ligaments in his elbow and shoulder strain, the skin around his shoulder blade burns. Everything resists. Without the wall, without his good arm, he gets no farther than his shoulder. There is no pain, it is simply as if the air is too heavy.

Helmut picks stones from the back court and hangs them in a canvas bag from his outstretched arm. Each day another stone, each day for two, three, four turns of the egg timer. Still the air is too heavy. Still he cannot face going back to the recruitment office. Still he cannot look his father in the eye.

Papi brings wine home, has a surprise. A promotion; more responsibility; better pay. He fills his pipe after dinner, explains his news to wife and son. The eastern expansion, he says, has been swift. Helmut watches as the smoke climbs over their heads, waits for the
blue-soft smell, and hears his father tell of the new workers, come to the factory from all over Europe. Papi is to have a week’s holiday before he starts his new post. Helmut is to ask Gladigau for leave. They are to go to the coast as a family for the first time ever.

Helmut refuses to take off his shirt on the beach. The most he will do is roll up his trouser legs and walk in the shallows. He has become fat. Soft and white. His right arm and shoulder are strong from his exercises, but he knows the rest of his body is weak. The extra layers of flesh do not fill out his chest. They hang in shameful, dimpled creases around his armpit, no muscle to give them shape.

It is a hot spring, and sweat shines in his hairline, on his eyelids and his neck. He is always flushed, and the sweat quickly turns stale in the armpits of his shirts. His mother washes them each night, but the smell lies deep in the weave and the seams, and Helmut is ashamed.

Gladigau has lent Helmut one of the new folding cameras: About time, he said to Papi, that the boy learned to take photos. Privately, over his evening schnapps, Gladigau imagines Helmut a suitable heir to his modest business empire. In the light of day, he does not entertain such fantasies, but he still lends the boy the camera, and in so doing, he saves Helmut’s holiday. His parents take walks, and he struggles behind them, damp and pink. Taking photos gives him an excuse to stop and rest. It absorbs him, distracts him. Logging exposures by light meter and by instinct. Views, grasses and shells. He tries alternative framings, keeps the sun behind him, and strives always to maximize depth of field.

Helmut is happy, the holiday a success, his parent’s worries about his usefulness eased: he could be a photographer like his boss.

Helmut returns to the news that the station is to be rebuilt. Gladigau is pleased with his apprentice’s holiday photos, and sets him the task of capturing the construction work on the station. Gladigau hopes to be able to sell these photos as postcards.

Helmut is nervous under the weight of his first assignment, and feels conspicuous setting up his tripod on the corner opposite the station gates. Trams jangle past, and he imagines the passengers’ eyes on him. Pedestrians seem to linger, casting their eyes in the same direction as the lens. Helmut cloaks himself in activity, busying himself with exposure calculations and adjustments, squinting and frowning as he has watched Gladigau do so many times before. He holds the light meter in his left hand, his right jammed onto his hip to prevent it from hanging in front of his chest.

Nerves give rise to miscalculations, and Helmut’s first set of professional photos are underexposed. No great tragedy, Gladigau consoles his protégé: under is better than over; they can coax the detail out in the printing; he will show him how. Helmut, however, winces at the grain in his prints and begs his employer to let him have another go. Gladigau is pleased by this enthusiasm and allows him one hour’s photography two afternoons a week until the station is finished.

Progress is swift and by midsummer a new platform has been added and the expansion of the station house has begun. Helmut becomes bolder, taking photos openly, and with a variety of cameras and stocks. He also begins to take photos inside the station. The guard grumbles at first and reminds him of the angry soldier, but Helmut promises he won’t focus on trains, only construction work and people. He begins to explain his project, but the guard quickly loses interest. Helmut doesn’t tell him the full story. This he keeps to himself. In his photos he is documenting the expansion of the station, but he is also monitoring the exodus. His method is simple: he remembers the sequence of trains in an afternoon and memorizes how many exposures he has taken of each arrival and each departure. Then he counts the people on the prints. The complicated equations he calculates in his room at night confirm his deepest suspicions. Berlin is slowly losing people.

•  •  •  

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.