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Authors: Rachel Seiffert

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Lore

Winner of the
Los Angeles Times
Book Prize for First Fiction

Finalist for the Booker Prize

Longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction

A
Globe and
Mail Best Book

“Lyrical … explores the experience of ‘ordinary’ Germans—the descendents of Nazis and Nazi sympathizers—and poses questions about the country’s psychological and political inheritance with rare insight and humanity.”


The New Yorker

“Stunning…. Seiffert writes with such extraordinary elegance that it takes your breath away. Her voice stings with aching precision yet possesses a glorious innocence that can trouble the simplest of words. The effortlessness of her language is remarkable given the complexity of perspectives she entertains…. The tension of being implicitly involved in a history one did not necessarily condone is stretched agonizingly taut through Seiffert’s quiet exploration of the subtle complexities of competing perceptions within a self, within a family, within a nation.”

—Camilla Gibb,
The Globe and Mail

“Excellent.… A very readable, imaginative attempt to hold essential truths in living memory.”


The Economist

“A page-turner of a first book…. Not only does [Seiffert] fully address one of the most dismal episodes in human history, but she does so with a nuanced approach that encourages insight even as it prompts debate.”


The Vancouver Sun

“[An] assured novel.… The title supplies the metaphor by which these stories are related: They are stages in a photographic exposure, and Germany itself is the darkroom in which the truth slowly comes to light.”


The Washington Post

“Provocative and accomplished.”


The Times
(London)

“Rachel Seiffert’s storytelling is completely absorbing and finally overwhelming in its detail, its relentless action, and its beautiful, shy eloquence. [Her novel], in its strategies for approaching the unwatchable, the unseeable, is brilliant, and in its closing pages, it brings to light a set of images that no reader is ever likely to forget.”

—Charles Baxter

“An exceptionally good debut, combining moral courage and seriousness with tremendous sympathy.”


Financial Times

“This extraordinary novel is suffused with pain … an important book … a powerful commentary on the moral issues of the last century.”


Sunday Express

Rachel Seiffert
LORE

Rachel Seiffert was born in England in 1971 and now lives in Germany.

VINTAGE CANADA MOVIE TIE-IN EDITION, 2013

Copyright © 2001 Rachel Seiffert

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2013, and simultaneously in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Canada as
The Dark Room
by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, in 2002, and in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House Inc., New York, in 2001, and subsequently in trade paperback in 2002. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited.

Vintage Canada with colophon is a registered trademark.

www.randomhouse.ca

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Seiffert, Rachel
    Lore [electronic resource] / Rachel Seiffert.

Previously published under title:
The dark room
.
Electronic monograph in HTML format.
Issued also in print format.

eISBN: 978-0-345-80799-1

    I. Seiffert, Rachel. Dark room. II. Title.

PR6069.E345D3 2013    823′.92    C2013-900544-7

v3.1

Contents

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Part One
 
HELMUT
BERLIN, APRIL 1921

Birth. His mother cuddles him and cradles him and feeds him his first meal. Happy to hold this life she has felt within her all these months. He is a little premature, but not too small, and his miniature fists grip fast to her fingers. She knows him already, and loves him. The midwife takes her husband aside when he arrives home from work. Heads him off before he reaches the bedroom door. Unlike his wife, he never gets to look at his son and feel him perfect, to love him prior to knowing his fault.

The clinic is busy, the doctor brisk but sympathetic, recommended by the midwife. The new parents are told it is a congenital condition, but not serious. Put simply, their son is missing a muscle in his chest. Provided he is given regular physical therapy, he will certainly be able to write and do all the tasks required in everyday life. He will never have full use of his right arm, of course, and manual labour will be impossible, but the absence of a pectoral muscle need not be a significant hindrance. He might even be able to play sports in time, though they are not to raise their hopes too high.

At home they watch their baby closely while he gurgles and kicks in his drawer-for-a-cot. His curved limbs and long toes, creases of new skin. He is beautiful, and the new parents smile at each other, each ready to laugh if the other will. They remove their son’s little undershirt and inspect his chest and his right armpit as he moves. He is thinner on one side than the other, it is true. But both arms
pump just as vigorously when he is fed or tickled, and he is robust and lively.

Mutti cries: There’s nothing wrong. Papi puts his arms around her, still watching his son. They sit together on the bed for a long time, breathing, while the baby sleeps. And they name their tiny boy Helmut, bright nature, because that is how they see him. Perfect enough, and that is just fine.

Life between wars is harsh: food plain, luxuries scarce, living space small.

Helmut’s Papi is a veteran, and still coughs in the night and in the autumn, when the weather is damp. He is older than his wife and grateful for his chance at happiness, so he leaves the house early, every day, finds work, again and again. The flat he comes home to is always clean, with at least one of the two rooms kept warm. And since Helmut’s Mutti is a clever housewife, there is always something on the table.

Both parents are very happy with their one child, and take precautions against having more, showering their love on Helmut, who laughs much more than he cries. The mattress the three of them share is wide and warm, and though he is now talking and walking, a separate bed for Helmut seems extravagant, uncalled for, a shame. Mutti grows herbs on the windowsill, and flowers, which she lets her son tend; and if Papi is not too tired when he comes home, he will sing a bedtime song or two for the boy. The morning and evening exercises are a game Helmut plays with his parents. He is to think that all boys do this, to be strong like their fathers. That all families are as happy as this.

In the hot summers of early childhood, Helmut’s Mutti takes him on the long journey north to the coast while his father works on in the city, at whatever he can find. Helmut is brown as a nut within a week, and his hair sun-blond. He plays, naked, in the shallows
with other children, and Mutti makes friends with other mothers on the beach. She never draws attention to her son’s chest, to his arm, and when the other women don’t seem to notice, Mutti chats more freely, relaxes, lies back and enjoys the company and sun.

Summer nights in hostel rooms full of whispering mothers. Bedtime stories for sleepless children, confidences and shared cigarettes by a window open to the hot dark sky.

Helmut feels his mother climb into bed, smells the fresh smoke in her hair. Closes his eyes again, falls asleep again. Thumb in his mouth, sand under his fingernails, salt beach taste on his skin.

Helmut’s father has found regular work with Herr Gladigau, who owns the photography shop at the station. Three or four days a week of assured income. Papi cleans the darkroom, changes the chemicals, and minds the shop when Herr Gladigau has appointments to attend. Gladigau likes his new employee, trusts him. He is childless, a widower, and enjoys the contact he has gained with a young and happy family. He can’t afford to pay as much as he would like, as much as Helmut’s family needs. To compensate, he offers to create a photographic record of family life. A portrait sitting every six months is the initial agreement: while the boy is young and growing quickly. Mutti is excited, Papi slightly embarrassed, but also pleased. They arrange the first session for the following week.

The print Papi chooses has Helmut standing on his father’s knee, pointing with his right hand toward Herr Gladigau’s decorative palms, which are on the left-hand side of the picture, next to his mother. Both of his parents are looking at him and smiling. A blond boy, growing out of babyhood, his right arm at full stretch, at shoulder height, perhaps just over. A normal pose for an inquisitive, active child, though unconventional for a portrait.

Gladigau favors the more sedate pictures taken earlier in the session, in which all the sitters face the camera and have their hands
folded in their laps. But his employee is quietly adamant, and Gladigau can find no reason to refuse his request. He chooses a simple frame from the middle price range and wraps the portrait neatly.

The carefully patched clothes and prominent cheekbones in this and the following portraits are painful for Gladigau to see. Papi is with him almost daily, with the same face, same jacket and shoes. But in the photographs, in the darkroom, it is all too plain, sharp, clear: the cabbage-and-potato diet, the mend-and-make-do of the man’s life, his wife, his son with the crooked arm. As soon as he can, Gladigau makes Papi’s job full-time.

There is enough money now to move into a better flat. The tenements near the station are well maintained, light and clean, and Helmut, now grown out of his parents’ bed, can have a box room of his own. Their new neighbors are friendly and house-proud, and there are plenty of local children for Helmut to play with. At first he is shy, preferring to watch the trains pull in and out of the station. Long mornings spent gazing out of the kitchen window, while his mother sings behind him as she cooks and cleans. Soon, though, he takes to watching the trains from the landing, and then the back steps. Before long he has forgotten the trains and runs around the back court with the other children, playing riotous, overlapping games of hide-and-chase and catch.

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