The Dark Room (33 page)

At home he does his grading in the kitchen, in the living room, wherever he can be with Mina and the baby. Lying on the blanket next to Dilan, pens and exercise books spread out over the floor.

—She’s sleepy. I’ll put her down.

—
I’ll do it. Can’t we just wait a bit?

—She needs a routine, Micha.

—
We could go for a walk. You and me. She can sleep in the stroller.

—It’s dark.

—
That’s okay.

Mina looks out the window.

—Okay.

—How is she? Dilan?

—
Great. Beautiful. Putting on weight.

Micha and Luise meet and eat lunch together every other day or
so now. Without discussing it: it just happens. A regular time, after school, in a café near the hospital. Luise always in a hurry, but always there just the same.

—You okay?

—
Yeah. You?

They sit in a window booth. Glass steam-edged against the cold spring days outside.

—I really don’t think we can ever know.

—
So you keep saying, Luise.

—Yes, I know. But what I mean is that we won’t get anywhere. If we just keep asking that question.

—
You’re the one who’s still asking. I know what he did. I want to know if he felt guilty about it. It’s important.

Micha clears his throat, irritable.

—
I’d like to look at the photos again.

—Oma’s?

—
Yes. Before and after the war.

—So. You’ll have to go to Oma’s, then.

Micha doesn’t answer. Searches through his pockets for his cigarettes. Hasn’t been to see his Oma for over eight months now.

—Yes. Well. No point, anyway.

—
What?

—I looked at them. You can’t see anything.

—
When did you look at them?

—After you came back. After you told me.

—
With Oma?

—Yes, of course with Oma.

—
She saw one was missing?

—Yes. From the honeymoon pictures. We looked all over the flat for it.

—
I’ve got it.

—Oh. Of course.

Luise stirs her soup.

—Anyway. They don’t show anything, the pictures. They’re family shots, you know? Celebrations. Always happy. You can’t see anything.

Micha stares at Luise. Doesn’t know whether to believe her. Doesn’t want to believe her.

—
He always looked away from the camera, though. Did you notice that? After the war.

—So?

—
Doesn’t that say something to you?

—No. I don’t think that’s true, anyway. I’m sure there are pictures where he looks at the camera.

—
No. Name me one.

—Micha. God. Wedding anniversary. Thirtieth. Oma and Opa together in the Kirchenweg house. In the garden.

Micha tries to remember it. Still thinks Luise is wrong.

—
So you don’t think he felt guilty?

—No. I mean, I don’t know. We can’t ever know. I’m just saying maybe he never really knew what to think himself.

—
He killed people.

—Okay, Micha. Just listen. Maybe that’s true. People do terrible things. It was war. I’m not excusing it. Not at all. But it was war, and it was cruel and confusing and he couldn’t tell right from wrong anymore, and he did something terrible.

—
Yes.

—So, when people do these things. Maybe. I don’t really know, of course, but maybe sometimes they believe in these things, or they become them, or maybe sometimes they don’t. They just do them and then they go on.

—
That’s it?

—What do you mean,
That’s it?
You haven’t even thought about what I’ve said.

—
I don’t want to.

Micha tries to remember the photo again. The Kirchenweg garden. Can almost see it. Can’t see Opa’s face.

—I’m just trying to help. Both of us.

—
I know.

Mina goes back to work: part-time, see how it goes, she says. They time it to start at the Easter break, so Micha can be at home to get Dilan used to the nursery routine. At first for an hour or two, building up to lunchtime, and then early afternoon, ready for when Micha will come and collect her after he finishes at school.

After he has settled her in, Micha waits in a café opposite the kindergarten, not wanting to go back to the flat alone. There is washing to be done, tidying, shopping, but he will do it later, when Mina comes home, listening to her talk about her day. He reads his way through the morning, eating, drinking, watching the waitresses chat behind the bar, the other customers come and go. It is a relief to pick Dilan up again, wrap himself in her smell.

Micha wonders if his Opa took comfort in his children, and then his grandchildren, too.
Mutti and Bernd. Luise and me.
Micha remembers Opa’s arms, his lap, his soap-cigarette smell. Dilan shifts in the sling strapped to Micha’s chest. He pulls off her sock, inspects the small toes and smaller toenails, rubs the foot, pulls the sock back on.
He didn’t deserve to feel comforted.
Micha thinks it, and it feels right, but it also feels impossibly cruel.

The week passes and the day comes that Micha is to leave Dilan until after one. Walking from the train, he changes his mind. The too-long morning ahead, he turns the stroller around, carries it back down the steps, and runs down the platform to catch the departing train. Dilan blinks at him, dark-eyed, as he takes them past their stop, and on into town, where he changes trains and leads them to the main line station.

He buys pretzels from the kiosk, changes Dilan’s diaper in the women’s restroom, and gets them on the first available train to Hannover, even though it means a change at Kassel and a twenty-minute wait.

—
I’m looking for Steinweg.

Micha tells the taxi driver above Dilan’s screams. She is hungry, and he’s already given her the bottle from home. The driver takes them there, driving fast along the wide streets of the center and the unfamiliar suburbs, postwar housing blocks.

Micha stands on the pavement with Dilan propped on his hip. He has never been here, only seen photos. Knows the house number just like he knows so many other cluttered details of his family’s past.
Not the pieces that matter.
He has no idea now what he hoped to gain from coming here; his Opa’s first home after prison, after his crime. The house stands solid, respectable, suburban, impassive.
Lived in by somebody else.
Micha stands outside, confused, afraid, his hungry daughter screaming in his arms.

The childhood times he remembers are all good. Even when the drunken rages are included; the letters Opa burnt; the photos in which he looked away. Even now, with all his certainty about what Opa did, where he did it, the faces on the museum wall he might have done it to, Micha tries, but he can’t make it all add up to anything. Guilt, remorse, pride, defiance, shame. Nothing definite. Nothing for Micha to pin everything to.

Facts, events, places stand separate, distinct, and Dilan screams.

Micha straps her into the stroller, walks away from the house in search of a shop or a café, a place to buy water, some formula, somewhere to warm it all up. Dilan won’t stop crying, and he is afraid.
Over two hours home on the train.

The streets are just one house after another and Micha can’t forget Kolesnik’s bleak answers. No guilt and no forgiveness either.
No point in sadness.
In any small human emotions.
What did Luise say? People just do it and then they go on.

Micha walks, Dilan cries, he finds no shops.

All this time.
Since the start of it all at the family dinner, on Oma’s balcony, in the library, reading and writing things down. Micha has thought for months now that there might be an end to this, but
here in this unfamiliar suburb, with his hungry, angry child, he knows that for all these months he has been wrong.

—
Even when I cry about it, I’m crying for myself. Not for the people who were killed
.

Mina frowns for a while, dangles the bright starfish over her daughter’s face. She is still angry about yesterday, the fact that he went off without saying anything, without food for Dilan, without proper thought. Micha can see Mina collecting herself.

—That’s okay, isn’t it?

—
Do you think so?

—I don’t know.

Dilan’s hands reach, fall away again. The red and yellow starfish jangles, tiny bells on each of its points. Soft toweling body squashed between Mina’s fingers. Nails bitten to the quick.

—
Who do you cry for?

—When I see things about the Holocaust?

—
Yes.

—You. At the moment. Me. Her. I’m going to walk a bit, get her off to sleep.

Mina moves slowly back and forth along the path in front of the park bench, with the baby leaning on her shoulder. Micha looks at the small face lying against the soft wool of her mother’s coat. Cheeks pink in the cold morning air, lashes like black ink lines on her skin.

—When I was young I used to think it was awful, all the children who lost their parents. You know that photo? The little boy running along the road in Belsen when the Allies came? All alone.

—
Yes.

—Now I think about the parents who lost their children. Children were killed first in the camps, no?

Micha nods.

—I think how terrible that must be. To survive after that. To have to live without them.

The baby is asleep. Micha wants to hold her. Knows it would wake her. Mina stops walking, starts swaying gently, side to side.

—You look at things differently. Everyone does. You loved your Opa. You found out something terrible about him, maybe you feel like you can’t love him now. You have to cry about that.

Mina lays the baby down in the pram, and Micha rocks it with his foot, tucks the blanket over his daughter’s feet.

—I know that’s all very logical.

—
Yes.

—Difficult to be logical.

—
Yes.

—He still did all those nice things you remember, though. He still loved you.

—
I can’t think about that, Mina.

—No.

She pulls the bag off the pram handles, searches for something among the jars of cream and bundles of diapers.

—
What would you do?

—What do you mean?

—
If it was your Opa.

—Honestly, Micha. I don’t know. I’d maybe piss on his grave. Sorry. I don’t know. I probably wouldn’t want to think of the good things either.

You look at things differently.
Micha repeats Mina’s statement to himself, but it makes no difference. Doesn’t make it easier at all. He thinks about himself, this is true.
Selfish.
But what Micha finds far more difficult are the others he thinks about, too.
Opa, and Jozef. What they did, and they each lived a whole life afterwards.
Micha always finds them in his mind’s-eye maps; replays the choices they made; follows the unraveling lines.
Years and generations. No way to change it. Never enough sadness and no forgiveness.

It revolts him that he thinks of them. Doesn’t tell Mina, because he knows it would revolt her, too.

It is late. The baby is asleep. Micha stands in his pyjamas in the dark hallway and answers the phone.

There is an echo on the line; long distance. A voice he doesn’t recognize speaks in halting German. A familiar heavy accent.

—This is a telephone call from Elena Kolesnik.

It is a woman’s voice, but not Elena’s. Micha hears Elena speak in the background. The voice on the phone translates.

—Am I speaking to Michael?

—
This is Michael. Is that Elena?

—Yes, she is here. She wants to tell you something. She says you should sit.

—
Yes.

Micha stays standing.

—Elena says that her husband has died. She is very sad for you. For herself, but also for you.

—
Kolesnik?

—Yes, Jozef Kolesnik. He died in his sleep and she laid him to rest today.

Micha hears Elena repeat his name. She is crying. Her voice sounds closer now, she has the receiver. Elena Kolesnik speaks to Micha in Belarusian. He understands only her husband’s name. She breathes deeply and Micha can feel how sad she is, can see her standing in the narrow hall, holding the telephone and crying.

—
I am sorry, Elena. I am sorry about Jozef.

But the other woman is on the phone again now.

—Elena says she would like you to come. She would like you to see the grave.

Micha can feel Elena’s silence, can picture her in the kitchen doorway, waiting for his reply. He thinks of a thousand reasons to say no.

—
Please tell Elena I will come.

The woman translates. Micha imagines Elena Kolesnik listening, wonders if she is smiling, what she is feeling.

—
I will come in a couple of weeks. I will book a train and write to her.

When Micha goes back into the bedroom, Mina is dozing, and the baby is lying next to her, arms flung over her head. He watches them a while, and then whispers, careful not to wake them.

—
Jozef Kolesnik is dead.

He will tell Mina in the morning.
That will be soon enough.

BELARUS, SPRING 1999

The journey is familiar now. Micha is prepared for the waiting, the slow trains and the crowded bus. It is not difficult for him to remember that Kolesnik is dead, that he won’t be seeing him, and he is surprised at that. Micha thought he would expect the old man to be at the bus stop, that it would be a shock to walk to the house on his own, but it isn’t.

Elena Kolesnik is on the porch, waiting for him. She waves as Micha comes around the corner, and he waves back. There is another woman with her, a younger woman. Micha thinks she was probably the voice on the phone.