They work in silence together well into the evening, unloading the cameras, cleaning, processing, and printing. Although his arm still aches, Helmut’s hands have stopped shaking. He develops the pictures of the gypsy camp but does not print them while Gladigau is there. They share a glass of schnapps and Helmut stays on after his employer goes home, printing and reprinting long into the night.
At first he can only cry. Angry tears: the panic of the day turned to rage. Turned against the photos, against himself, his failure to capture the scene.
Then he reasons with himself. Switches on the light and lays out the photos on the darkroom floor. He crouches and examines the prints again, imagines Gladigau with him, hand on his shoulder, guiding words in his ear.
Helmut remembers the scene, but with Gladigau’s eyes, and he sees that the photos are unclear. That these photos could easily be passed over as a few people milling about in an empty lot. That they
convey none of the chaos and cruelty which had his hands shaking and sweating, and which had spurred him to fill almost two rolls.
Helmut tells himself: he isn’t used to taking photos of frantic activity like this. Crowded streets, station openings, all of these things he is good at because he can take his time, find the right spot for the camera, and do multiple exposures of similar compositions. He also concludes that black-and-white film was really not suitable for the subject matter. The bright skirts of the gypsy women are just drab rags in his photos and don’t swirl and dart like they did that afternoon. The dark SS uniforms blend into the soot-black walls of the buildings, making them almost invisible. Helmut knows he was too far away to capture details. He blows up the image, but the grain evens out the angry lines on the face of the officer who was screaming orders by the jeep, and he barely looks like he is shouting. Helmut remembers the crowd calling and crying to the people inside the trucks, who in turn called and cried to the crowd. In the photo, he sees a still, silent, and oddly calm group, and the arm reaching out of the truck window is just a small blot, only distinguishable as an arm when he examines the negative under magnification. The woman who was knocked unconscious hardly looks like she is running in Helmut’s photo of her attempt to escape, and he didn’t manage to include the soldier behind her in the frame in his hurry to get the shot. He thinks he must have been reloading while she was being dragged back to the truck, and the shot of her being bundled inside is so badly out of focus as to be indecipherable.
Helmut searches and searches, but the shot of the gypsy looking into his lens, pointing and shouting, the shot which scared him into running away is not among the photos. Nor is it among the negatives, which are uncut. He doesn’t understand it, rages again, throws the long strips of negative to the floor, before picking them up and looking through them for a third, and then a fourth time. Finally, he reasons with himself. Got to the end of the film and didn’t know; panicked; ran away before the shutter released. Coward.
Helmut stuffs the prints and negatives into a paper bag, not caring about creases and scratches, just wanting to go home. He knows he should keep the pictures for Gladigau, show how he made use of his time, but he is ashamed. He stands for a while with the bag in his hands, and then decides. An error in the processing. He will lie and say that he fogged the roll. Pay for it out of his wages, make up for it with other pictures, another time.
On his way home across the back court, in the dark, Helmut throws the bag and its hated contents into the trash can.
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.