The Dark Room (5 page)

The army is victorious. Again and again: beyond Poland now, spreading south and ever farther east. Claiming the good, dark soil of the Ukraine, the oil in the Caspian, the vast expanse of the Steppe.

Gladigau buys a radio, and he and Helmut listen to the triumphant broadcasts as they develop and print and clean. Helmut smiles with his employer in the red darkroom, eyes on his work, ears filled with news, shouting voices, the bombast and the drums. But he never turns on the radio alone.

Helmut takes photos. Fills the spring and summer months with experiments, adjustments, improvements. Pleasing his employer, enjoying the praise, seeing with his own eyes how his photos get better and better.

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 footfall 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.