The Dark Room (6 page)

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.

The war-torn begin to arrive back from the eastern front, scarred and tattered, missing limbs and eyes. Sometimes they beg on the platform, sitting on raggedy blankets, quietly displaying their injuries,
and Helmut always reports them to the guard. It is illegal and shameful: Helmut rages that they should disgrace their uniforms in such a way. The heavy padding of his station coat disguises his lopsided shoulders well, and he tucks his right hand into the deep front pocket, becomes adept at sweeping with his left. He concentrates on his work, making short, thorough jabs with the broom, and the guard praises his spotless platforms. Helmut is proud, conscientious, returns his uniform reluctantly each evening when the guard locks the station gates.

In February, the British stop bombing Berlin and the Americans take over. After some raids, the trains stop running for a day or two, until the tracks have been repaired. Even on these days, Helmut goes to the station and sits on the platform in his coat. The cold and hunger and the nights spent screaming often leave him drained and disoriented. In the quiet under the shattered glass of the station roof, he slips in and out of sleep, dreaming trains full of silent people, all leaving Berlin in droves, always eastward. These dreams are not as violent as the ones Helmut suffers at night, but they unsettle him, so he takes to pacing the empty platforms to avoid sleep as long as his hungry legs allow.

The summer of 1944 brings a brief respite from the bombing while the Allies concentrate on recapturing France. In the calm, Helmut helps out more at the station, cleaning the offices as well as the platforms. The guard gives him oats or potatoes to take home, and Helmut borrows a pot and bowl from the station canteen, teaches himself to cook. The nights are shorter and milder and the nightmares less acute, stopping altogether for weeks at a time. Now he is not so tired, he can do more, and he starts taking photos again.

The days are warm, and the summer mornings and evenings provide dramatic light to inspire Helmut and his photographer’s eye.
The low sun is gold on the stone walls and rubble, and casts long, crazy shadows through the ruins, across the pockmarked pavements and squares. He rises early, leaving his cellar before dawn, following the same ritual each morning. He unlocks the darkroom, selects a camera, allocates a ration of film, and then sets out to capture the strong, wide skies and the ruined Berlin. The lonely clock tower of the Kaiser Wilhelm Church, and the rubble of the Tiergarten nearby. The grand hotels on Unter den Linden reduced to skeleton structures. Their chandeliers glittering in the debris, tapestries hanging loose and torn. Helmut contemplates taking them away to adorn his cellar home, but they are sodden, heavy, and stinking from the spring rains.

He trades Gladigau’s paper and printing chemicals for food and more film, storing his negatives on the stone shelves of his cellar, neatly marked and arranged in rows. He curtains off a small area behind the sacks and rags of his bed, and spends his evenings developing his films. Helmut numbers and catalogues the negatives in the same leather-bound book he had used to monitor Berlin. Script laid out in columns, as neat and small as possible, saving space, saving paper, keeping his system simple and clear. Everything ready for the victory, for peacetime and printing.

His life is solitary, and his photos devoid of people, but Helmut is not unhappy. Berlin, now empty, ceases to worry him. He walks everywhere, covering vast tracts of the city with his carefully rationed exposures, getting out as far as Potsdam and Brandenburg during the long midsummer days. He sleeps in bombed-out buildings if he’s gone too far to walk home before sunset; works out his routes around the soup kitchens; avoids hunger as much as possible. He doesn’t appear at the station for days, but the guard learns not to worry about him. Helmut doesn’t tell him about the photos, and after a while the guard learns that Helmut will not appear with a bright dawn, but on dull days he will be back. And he always makes up the work.

•  •  •  

Helmut falls in love with his underground home, enjoying his expeditions into the city beyond, but always glad to return. He devotes one exposure from each roll to his cellar, and builds up a portfolio of glowing stove, cracked and shimmering windowpane, cozy rag-and-blanket bed. In one photo, there is a wash line full of Helmut’s clothes, dripping puddles on the broken flagstones of the ruined back court. Helmut examines his negatives, holding them up against the sun, recognizes the pyjamas he was wearing the night the bombers came and his parents went away. He trains his eye. Can tell a good photo from a negative now, judges shape, composition, shade. He learns to invert; white for black, dark gray for pale. Mutti and Papi slip out of focus as Helmut lets the memories slide, the edges soften away. He thinks of Gladigau. Lists his best pictures, looks forward to showing him the prints.

When the days grow shorter and the bombing resumes, Helmut returns to the patterns of the previous winter. Sleepless nights and days dozing on the platform. The darkroom locked and remaining films lying undisturbed, waiting for spring. He hibernates with them until the final, dying days of winter arrive.

The order comes for the last stand of the German people and Helmut is finally given his chance. He runs and tells the guard, who grips his good shoulder, whispers it will soon be over. Helmut agrees, surprised. All he can remember now is war.

He doesn’t get a uniform, but a tattered overcoat, an armband, and a shovel are his to use and keep. The few guns are given to the youngest boys, who are sent up onto what remains of the highest buildings. Juvenile snipers practicing on broken bottles, cats, and rats in the ruins.

Helmut fetches his camera out of the darkroom and is never without
it, photographing as much as he can. He wants to remember it all, this best time of his life. Zhukov is on his way, with the vast Soviet army and the Mongol hordes from the Steppe behind him. They surround Berlin, isolating the city, as they have isolated and annihilated German outposts from Stalingrad ever westward, but Helmut is confident of victory, can see nothing beyond the glorious triumph, which he will be a part of, and commit to film.

Occasionally a train comes through the station, invariably crowded and covered with refugees. On the roof, spilling from the doors and windows, and with more people running alongside it on the platform, leaping on, grabbing hold of windowsills, guardrails, anything, the other passengers too weak, too listless to raise a hand. The trains never stop, grinding slowly, slowly forward, sometimes so slowly they seem to be still, but Helmut focuses in on the wheels and sees that they are always turning.

Helmut’s duties are vague, sporadic. His fellow defenders of Berlin meet daily and carry out their uncertain tasks. Making the roads impassable, piling rubble, digging holes. They are trained to fight with whatever they have. The old men in their good hats, holding their improvised weapons in determined hands. They hoard ammunition and pass it on to the snipers, most of it unsuitable for the boys’ guns.

When he has no orders, Helmut goes to the station and watches the refugee trains passing through. Half dreaming in his pile of sacks, the years folding in on themselves, he sometimes wonders if he should try his luck for the price of a bag of licorice. If the trains come through in the morning when the light in the station is good, Helmut takes photos. If it is evening and too dark, or the afternoon shadows too long, he walks alongside the train, displaying his armband as once he had displayed his arm. He speaks the
Führer
’s rhetoric through the train doors and windows; fate and bravery and the glory of the
Götterdämmerung
, striding alongside the refugees. Some people spit, some curse or cry, others agree, still others join in.
Mostly they ignore him, staring beyond the glass of the carriage windows, beyond Helmut, with their dull, bruised eyes.

The refugee masses flood back through Berlin on foot, too. Feet caked with mud, cheeks hollow with walking. Helmut takes their photos and welcomes them home, but, like the trains, they don’t stop. Resting in the hollows of bombed-out buildings for one night, maybe a day, or perhaps even two, but rarely longer. Lifeless, but driven forward by the threat from the east. They describe an army the size of a continent, angry and brutal and without mercy. These people speak of punishment, and bring with them a faint sense of deserving. As they pass they tell tales of emaciation and ashes, of stinking smoke and pits full of bodies. Some say they have seen these things, others dispute it. Their voices halfhearted, matter-of-fact. Vague, hungry, and weak.