The Dark Room (2 page)

Helmut does not concern himself with engine numbers or types of carriage. He likes times and destinations, arrivals and departures. He likes to watch the people, in groups and alone, with trolley-loads of baggage, or carrying nothing. By their other-city walks and clothes, he can tell if someone hasn’t been to Berlin before.

Helmut is not always alone by the high fence. His encyclopedic knowledge of the timetable impresses many of the other little boys. He also makes friends with the guards, quizzing them on arrivals and distances through the turnstile bars. Soon he is allowed onto the platform, where he collects the punched tickets from the passengers
as they disembark. Those who notice his arm and his patched clothes sometimes slip a groschen into his hand. Helmut is faintly embarrassed by these gestures: certain his parents would disapprove, uncertain as to why. But he never refuses the strangers’ gifts: the ability to buy sweets is a powerful weapon in the war for friends. He uses his access to the railway station and his small bags of licorice well. As favors bestowed, not pleas for acceptance. The neighborhood children often come calling, clatter down the stairs behind him, across the back court to the tracks.

The family photos show a healthy boy, already quite tall, standing between his parents, both seated slightly in front of him. He has a sailor suit on, the regular uniform for boys on Sundays and holidays. His right arm rests on his mother’s shoulder, and he is standing so that his left side favors the camera slightly. The combined effect is to minimize his lopsided chest, to mask the crooked hang of his arm. For three or four years, the family adopts a similar pose, variations coming in the clothes, Helmut’s height, and the gradual graying of his father’s beard. The family looks content, healthier, cheeks plumper than in previous years. For all the artful masking of a son’s disability, they are relaxed. Still proud, still a unit, gradually growing into a kind of prosperity.

Puberty and the Third Reich arrive simultaneously. To Helmut’s shame, not only does he grow hair on his body, but the fluff that should be under his right arm grows higher, more visible, under his collarbone. The strange sinew-twist below the skin on his chest becomes more pronounced as his muscles become more defined.

All boys do gymnastics now at school, but that only makes Helmut’s restricted arm movement more conspicuous. He wears a long-sleeved jersey, not an undershirt like the rest. Some stare at him as
they change, still others push into him as they pass in the long school corridors. Most of the time, it is not discussed.

Helmut is good at his studies and has a few friends at school. At home, he still spends most afternoons at the station, usually alone. Some evenings he finds the neighborhood boys in the back court on his way home. Helmut stands with them a while as they wrestle and joke, and they ask him about the trains but only half listen to his replies. They have joined clubs to which Helmut is not invited, have grown more interested in the gangs and street fights, and licorice isn’t the draw it once was. Occasionally one of the neighbors’ girls will join him on the platform. Edda Biene, waiting by the mail sacks, sucking her long plaits, watching Helmut greet the disembarking passengers, gathering his tickets. The hang of Helmut’s arm has become more pronounced with puberty, and increased prosperity has made the passengers more generous. Helmut knows if he saves for a few days, and takes Edda for an ice cream in the shop next to Gladigau’s, then she might let him hold her hand, or even show him her legs in the stairwell on the way home.

He knows he is fit, feels he has a strong heart and good lungs and swift legs to offer his nation. He also knows he is imperfect.

Helmut has left school now. Other boys go to work, learn trades, but Mutti persuades Papi to let their son stay at home. Just for a while, he’s not ready yet, still just a boy. Helmut’s Papi sighs and agrees.

Mutti takes in washing now, and Helmut does a share of the folding and carrying, but for a year or so, his days are largely spent drifting between station and home. Quiet and content, his head full of timetables. Eating the warm lunches Mutti cooks for him, gazing across the kitchen table to the window with his daydreamer’s faraway eyes.

Papi is irritated by his son’s idle behaviour. At Gladigau’s, business
is good. He has new cameras, better film stock, and needs an extra pair of hands. Papi knows this, takes his son aside, suggests he make himself useful. Helmut is eager to please his father, and come the autumn he seizes his chance. Out before breakfast to greet the first train, Helmut finds the pavement glittering with a thick frost of glass. The early crowd pick their way carefully through the shards to the station gates, past Gladigau, whose windows are unharmed, but who stands and stares, pale in the November light. Helmut takes his keys, finds a broom, and sweeps without saying a word, and Gladigau appreciates this. The boy is now the obvious choice.

Papi persuades this time, and Mutti relents. He can work Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons, and also Saturdays, if there are errands to be run. Employer, father, and son work alongside one another: quiet, busy, efficient. Gladigau likes the boy and treats him well, teaching him, nurturing him, though never indulging him.

Helmut likes the darkroom. The soothing sound of the gently running tap, and the alkaline smell of the chemicals. He has the light on only when he is cleaning, likes to mix and load in the red of the safelight or the deep, rich dark. The portraits taken with the big studio camera are Gladigau’s forte, and neither Papi nor Helmut are allowed to touch the sheets once they have been exposed. However, Gladigau also experiments with the new cameras and their long spools of film, and because Helmut is thorough and methodical in his work, he is allowed to process these negatives. He winds the long rolls off patiently, fingers working skillfully without the aid of eyes. He times the baths well, after discussing the exposures with Gladigau, and the old man is pleased and proud of his apprentice’s understanding of the work. Although his employer always makes the prints himself, he does allow Helmut to do experiments of his own with leftover chemicals and discarded negatives. On slow afternoons, when the darkroom is free, Helmut teaches himself to print
on scraps of thick photographic paper, which he seeks out of the darkroom shelves and drawers.

In the cupboard in the small back toilet, under the bottles of developer and fixer, Helmut uncovers the American magazines that Gladigau has kept neatly folded in brown paper. The bolt has a screw missing, so Helmut sits with his boot wedged tight against the door. Black-and-white photos of women, draped in veils, in half-light. Helmut does not understand English, but he does understand the references to films, to f-stops, cameras, and lenses. German film and German cameras are the best, he knows, but these American women are very good, too. Rounded stomachs, small breasts, long, wide thighs. Some of the photos have been taken outside, and the women are swimming, their bodies rippling water and light.

When he is not working, Helmut daydreams about his job. The subdued lighting, the running water, his rigid right leg. The white skin of the American women and the loose bolt on the toilet door. At night he conjures the images against his bedroom ceiling as the long, slow freight trains clatter below, a soothing rhythm of sleep.

To the east, new land is found; old land is found again. So many things are better now: brighter, healthier, cleaner. Helmut sees it in his parents’ faces, knows it is enshrined in law. He feels it in his legs as he strides to the station; the freshness of spring and promise of summer tell him: larger, wider, stronger.

He could be called and carried by it, and perhaps even cured.

At eighteen, Helmut goes with three of the neighbors’ boys to the draft board. All of their faces tight, and eyes bright with the adventure that lies ahead. Despite his flushed cheeks, Helmut has a cloud in his belly which he cannot shift. The doctor is not unkind, and Helmut is glad of the private room, the two minutes’ grace he is
given to blink back his boy’s tears. The other boys slap him hard on the back, tell him he’ll be in with them next time round. Perfect officer material. They don’t ask him to come and share a schnapps.

He walks home, fast and by the back routes. Imagines each man he sees is on his way to the front, while he is going home to his mother. Helmut locks himself in his box room, stares out of the window, up at the sky over Berlin. He musn’t cry; that would be further humiliation. He knows Mutti is sitting tight and still in the next room, listening, guessing. His fists are balled tight in his blankets, and the windowpane swims shapes before his eyes.

His father is silent for a long time. Helmut listens at the door and hears no sound from either of his parents, hands growing clammy in the dark. When Papi finally speaks, it is a relief. No more wasting time at the station, in daydreams. He is not a child now, not a girl, he needs to start earning his place in the world. Helmut’s father stopped exercising with his son a couple of years ago, and now he tells his wife to stop, too. The ritual has become embarrassing to mother and son. Too physical and too pointless. Mutti feels the loss of daily proximity, but repeats to herself that it is for the best, until she believes it.

Helmut’s parents join the Party; the
Führer
joins the family portraits on the wall above the sofa. In the first days of war, Helmut’s father finds a well-paying job managing the floor of a new factory on the outskirts of Berlin. Helmut gets a full-time job with Gladigau.

The last family portrait is taken. Helmut is now an adult, after all. Gladigau jokes with Mutti as he sets up the camera. The next pictures will be of a wedding, and the christenings which will follow. Mutti flushes, Papi says nothing, Helmut busies himself with shutting up the shop and closes his ears. The moment passes.

For this last photo, both men stand, father and son, and their wife and mother sits proudly in front of them. Both have one hand on each of her shoulders, and Helmut has his left arm around his father’s back. The encircling warmth of the family.

Since this is their final sitting, Gladigau also takes an individual portrait of Helmut. Captured from the chest up, left shoulder angled toward the camera, his gaze directed up and right of frame by Gladigau’s outstretched finger. Helmut has the trace of a smile around his slim lips, and the downward tilt of his chin makes him look shy, girlish. Though his hair is dark now and combed down with water and some of his father’s pomade, it still has a boy’s curl about it.

Gladigau is pleased with this individual portrait. He props it up against the till as he takes his evening schnapps. Examines the heavy brows, and the pale eyes set deep in their sockets; remembers the boy with the sharp cheekbones and brittle-looking wrists; approves of the calm young man he sees in front of him now. Gladigau selects a plain frame, but one from the top price range, and wraps Helmut’s likeness for his mother to collect.

Mutti sits on the bed and holds the photo on her lap. Stays still like that for half the afternoon, heart beating unexpectedly fast. She covers her son’s right eye and looks only at the left, the eye nearest the camera, and finds the root of her uncertainty there. She thinks it might be the muscles of the lower eyelid, tightening slightly at the moment of exposure. Or perhaps just a trick of the light: the two sharp, white pinpoints in the eye, creating the illusion of pain. Closer inspection of the family picture reveals no such information, so it could simply be that her son, a shy young man, was nervous sitting by himself, for his employer. It was an extravagant gift, after all, and unexpected. And the frame.

The picture is not displayed in the living room, where visitors might see it. His mother keeps it on her bedside table, and later lays it carefully away in a drawer.

•  •  •  

War has everyone bound tight with purpose. Helmut’s mother and father spend long evenings talking on the landings with their neighbors. Coffee and schnapps, leaning against the doorpost. Voices raised and lowered again, opinions offered. What is to come, what might be.

For Helmut, this is a lonely time. Not many young men have gone yet, but still he feels the shame of being at home. He keeps out of the way of neighbors whose sons are fighting, keeps to himself more and more, and his mother and father allow him his silence and his solitude.

He still goes to the station, before and after work, and sometimes at lunchtime, too, but he no longer collects old tickets. The passengers’ charity is humiliating now, and the risk of abuse too great. Helmut hides his arm as best he can, folding it over his chest, or leaning his right side against a pillar. In place of the tickets, he notes times and destinations, arrivals and departures. He has a small leather-bound book, the kind Gladigau uses to note his exposures. The timetable has changed quite a few times since the war began, and Helmut uses this little book to keep track. At home, in his box room, he sticks his old ticket collection in a scrapbook and writes the prewar timetables out from memory.

Gladigau has not used color film before. One of his regular clients has persuaded him to use it for her daughter’s forthcoming wedding, and the first samples have arrived in the early post. Employer and apprentice examine the accompanying leaflets over a morning cup of coffee. An hour later Gladigau steps into the darkroom, announces he will shut up shop at lunchtime, invites Helmut to go out with him to test the new stock.

They take a tram to the heart of the city, Helmut gripping the
tripod between his legs as they round corners, Gladigau peering out of the windows, looking for the most colorful street. It is a clear autumn day, crisp and fresh. Helmut watches the sun and shade on the buildings they pass, thinks the photos must surely turn out well with light this good and strong.

Once in the center of town, they get out and walk until they come to a wide street lined with red banners. This is it; Gladigau is certain now, and Helmut can’t help but agree. Smiling, smiling, looking up and around: he has never been so far from home, and has never been in a street so broad and bright and long. The cold wind has weakened his fingers and so setting up the camera takes longer than usual. Gladigau is excited, fussing with his light meter. The banners beat like sails above their heads and to the horizon, and Helmut is dizzy with light and cold and color and joy.