The Dark Room

by Rachel Seiffert

  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.

  BERLIN, APRIL 1945

  Helmut assembles his brigade on the rubble they have been piling up all afternoon. Their heroic barricade, backbone of the Reich. The sun is lower now, and the light just right. He takes one photo of them, and then one of the others takes a turn behind the camera so Helmut can be part of the group in the next exposure. With the fat boys and the boys with bad teeth, the old men and amputees. Helmut has a shovel in his left hand, and his right arm hangs loose and twisted, crowding his chest, which has narrowed again with the hunger of late wartime. All of the group look tired, most of them look serious. But the three or four who are looking at Helmut—their photographer having his picture taken—they are all smiling.

  Helmut stands between them, relaxed, shoulders crooked, his face upturned and proud. The city behind him is destroyed and soon to be divided. In a matter of days, a suicide will speed the Soviet invasion; the small mound of broken building beneath his feet will mark the line between what is British, what is French, and Helmut will not recognize his childhood home in the Berlin which is to come. But in this photo, Helmut is doing something which he never did in any of the many pictures lovingly printed by Gladigau over the course of his childhood. Helmut is standing high on his rubble mountain, over which Soviet tanks will roll with ease, and he is smiling.

  Part Two

  LORE

  BAVARIA, EARLY 1945

  Lore lies on the edge of sleep in the dark bedroom. She heard a noise a while ago, fell asleep, then woke again. Lying still, with the night wrapped quiet around her, frost-flowers blooming across the windowpane. Lore’s limbs are warm and heavy. She’s not sure now if she only imagined it, watching the walls and window and ceiling unfolding, and beyond them, the room of dreams.

  A door slams, and the walls are back again, solid along the edge of her bed. Keeping her eyes closed, Lore listens. Hears her little sister breathing. Whispers.

  —Liesel? Anne-Liese?

  No reply: just the long sighs of sleep. Lore drifts. One minute, two minutes, ten. She doesn’t know how long before she hears the noise again.

  Doors and voices. Lore is sure now, eyes open, waiting for the crack of light from the hall. The house stays dark; the whispers come from downstairs; she slips out of bed to listen.

  —What is happening?

  —It will be fine. Over soon. You will see.

  Vati is here. In uniform at the foot of the stairs. Mutti has her arms around him, a soldier stands to attention in the open doorway, and behind him Lore sees a truck parked in the road. The cold night slips over the threshold and through the banisters, settling around Lore’s bare feet. Her father fills the hallway. Her mother’s hands grip at his sleeves and he calls her my Asta, strokes her hair, and she cries without tears. Mouth opening, lips twisting against the small, strained noise.

  —Vati!

  —Lore. My Hannelore. She’s grown again.

  Lore’s forehead pressed against his shoulder, Vati laughs and Mutti runs a nervous hand across her face.

  They work quickly: Vati emptying drawers, Mutti filling bags, the soldier loading the truck. Lore stands at the front door with Liesel. Sleepy and bulky, dress buttoned over her nightshirt, and a coat on top of that. It is dark, difficult to see, but her parents don’t turn on the lights. The baby wakes. Vati picks him up and sings to him, Mutti watches for a moment and then goes upstairs to wake the twins.

  Lore’s sister holds her hand, stares at her father, her baby brother.

  —We called him Peter, like you, Vati.

  —I know, Lieschen.

  Her father smiles. Lore watches him, too. Still Vati, but somehow different. From the photos. From the last time. Not this Christmas, the one before. He meets Lore’s eyes.

  —Come on. I’ll get some blankets. We’ll make it cozy for you in the truck.

  They drive for what feels like hours. Out of the village and into the valley. Mutti wordless with Vati in the front, Peter asleep in her lap. No lights. They drive in the darkness and the engine noise.

  Lore sits in the back with her sister and brothers, on top of all their bags. Liesel sleeps, mouth open, the twins stare at the back of their father’s head. They are silent, sitting shoulder to shoulder, leg to leg. Heads swaying with the motion of the road, eyes glassy with sleep and surprise. Lore whispers.

  —It’s Vati.

  And they nod.

  They stop in a yard that glitters with frost. There are people with lanterns, and two beds in a strange room that smells of mud and straw. When Mutti blows out the lanterns it is no longer dark. There is a long window on the far wall, and Lore can see her father; his shoulders; a hunched, black outline against the gray dawn. She is cold in the bed with Liesel. He finds her an extra blanket, tucks it around her, and when he kisses her good night she smells his sweat, feels the stubble on his chin.

  —Where are we?

  —A farm. A safe place.

  He whispers, Lore drifts.

  —A good place to sit out these last weeks.

  When she wakes again it is light in the strange room and he is gone.

  It is a nothing-time between war and peace. Like treading water. Or holding your breath until a bird flies away. Weeks pass, spring arrives, windy and blue, and Lore’s days are long and shapeless.

  The farm sits on the banks of a slow stream, tucked into the foot of a hill. Deep in the green of the valley. Lore knows there are armies on the march. Russians from one side, Americans from the other. In Hamburg they had the apartment, with the long garden and a maid. Even in the village, after evacuation, they had a whole house. Now they are here, and they are six in one room. Pushing the beds against the wall in the mornings, pulling them out again at night.

  Lore watches the cloud shadows drift across the mountainside, remembers her father’s midnight visit in snatches, like a dream. Over soon. You will see. Months fall by and nothing changes. She does her chores, adjusts herself to the waiting, the war will be won soon. Only a matter of time.

  The weather is glorious. Liesel and the twins spend their days outside; in the yard at first, but that soon gets boring, and they venture out into the fields beyond. Mutti worries when she can’t see them; paces the room and then shouts when they finally come home.

  Most days, the farmer’s wife brings food. Bread, dumplings, sauerkraut, eggs, and milk. Sometimes there is bacon, or small, shriveled apples from last autumn. She stands broad in the doorway and saves her smiles for the baby and the twins.

  In the afternoons, Peter sleeps, Mutti and Liesel darn the holes in their stockings, and the twins play under the table. Unable to contain themselves, they fill the room with their whispering games.

  On clear days Lore can make out a small town in the far crease of the hills: the pencil-lines of smoke from the chimneys, the darker smudge of a spire. Lore listens for gunfire from the other end of the valley. Sometimes she opens the window a little, in case the battle noise is too faint to make it through the glass. Eyes searching the cloudless sky for the Luftwaffe, she imagines bombs in the valley, fire and death. Hears only birdsong.

  At night, after Mutti blows out the lamps, Lore pulls an edge of curtain back from the window. In the morning, she opens her eyes to the chink of blue sky above her head. The last and first thought each day is of Vati, strong and clean-shaven, and of the end of the war. In the quiet dark of the curtained dawn, Lore imagines the valley transformed by victory. From high on the mountain she sees the parade through the villages, the fields thick with flowers, the slopes awash with people, sunshine in her eyes, hands holding her hands, voices raised in song.

  Dusk, and Lore helps Mutti put the children to bed. Through the window she sees the farmer coming, and behind him, his son. Mutti pulls on her coat and Lore
goes to the door but Mutti shakes her head.

  —Stay in here. I’ll be back in a minute.

  She goes out and Lore pulls the door over behind her, leaving a gap just big enough to watch the three figures standing in the yard. The farmer has brought bacon, a small sack of oats, but he also wants to talk. Lore can’t hear what he says, but she can see his mouth set in the same blunt line as his wife’s. He points down the valley, and Mutti’s fingers fly to her face. The farmer’s son shifts his hard, flat gaze away from Mutti and spits on the ground. When he looks up, Lore feels his eyes on her and she ducks away from the door.

  —Where’s Mutti gone?

  Liesel is up and standing at the door. She leans her bed-warm body into Lore’s, shifting her to one side. Reaches for the handle, but Lore catches her arm.

  —She said we should stay inside.