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.
In the late afternoon Helmut arrives in Gladigau’s neighborhood. The buildings here are unscathed. The solid, clean lines of blond stonework are imposing, far larger than the houses of his own district.
Helmut is shocked by the grand, smooth windowpanes, and the white of the curtains. Where he lives everything is broken and torn, layered in smoke, soot, and dust. The stairwell in Gladigau’s building is dry and cold, the dark wood of the banister shining, soft day falling in from the skylight above. Helmut knocks at Gladigau’s door, breathing hard from the climb. He stays on into the evening in case Gladigau returns, but no one either enters or leaves the building, and there are no cooking smells or radios or footsteps crossing hallways or children crying.
Helmut leaves at midnight, afraid of the quiet, afraid of another air raid, spends another night alone on the darkroom floor. Disoriented in the pitch black, unsure if his eyes are open or closed. Helmut lies on the boundary between asleep and awake, walks through shattered walls and finds his parents holding hands. Reaching out, stepping forward, the walls falling, he loses them again.
Helmut dreams of lenses shattering at the shutter’s release. Exposures of fragmented glass, shards of picture, prints seen from the corner of an eye. Papi’s fingers, Mutti’s eyes, her arms. Helmut reaches and the negatives crumble in his hands, black glitter-dust on his palms.
Exhausted, he crawls until he finds the darkroom door. It is morning again, and, comforted by the light, Helmut sleeps under the counter in the abandoned shop.
Days pass, wordless, cold. A soup kitchen is set up at the wrecked tram junction, winter clothes handed out, new boots and coats. Helmut washes the soot and sweat from his pyjamas in the darkroom sink, cleans the shop and secures it against looters, locking everything of value in the darkroom. Ledgers, till, order books, the remaining frames. Helmut closes the business, hanging a handwritten apology to the customers at the door. Charcoal on cardboard, softening, smearing in the autumn rain.
He takes no photos that winter. Camera, film, chemicals, paper, all safe behind the darkroom door. Helmut knows they are there, a small, comforting presence among the loss. He mourns. Alone, the coldest weeks go by. Sirens, bombs, fire, and hunger. Helmut sees corpses pulled from the rubble and runs away. At night his dreams bring confusion, and he wakes, expecting Mutti, routine, Gladigau, warmth, his father’s pipe smoke. He starts each winter day crying, covering his face with his hands.
Wet breath, wet cheeks, wet palms, the tears flood on.
In daylight it makes more sense. He sees the change in the city. The blocked streets, the missing buildings. Craters and mountains where once it was flat. Helmut can feel the difference between then and now, the pattern of the city shattered every night and the changes becoming part of each new day. He watches the people: chalking street and shop signs on the remaining walls, walking on and over and under and through. Slow progress across the rubble: ankles twisting, feet slipping, legs disappearing up to their knees. Still they go on.
New paths are beaten, old routines are dropped. After the bakery is bombed, the bread arrives in trucks.
Preferring to stay in familiar streets, Helmut finds a cellar to sleep in. It feels safe to him: tucked away in a tiny back court, the tenements around it all empty, in ruins. He finds a stove in the rubble and installs it on bricks by the cellar steps. Takes the heavy top bolt from the darkroom door and makes his new home secure.
In the nights when bombs fall, Helmut lies awake in his cellar and listens. If the impacts are close, he shouts into the noise, just like the night he ran from the bombers. Feeling his throat burn with his screams, hearing nothing but the blasts, the air thick with planes and flak. Warm with fear and then cooled by sweat, he makes a fire in the stove at dawn and sleeps in the quiet early light. If the
bombs are far away, Helmut finds the distant thump and whine almost comforting, like the freight trains which had accompanied his adolescent sleep.
This far noise is preferable to silence. In the nights when the city lies quiet, Helmut is invaded by the dreams of his darkroom night, sharpened by hunger and cold. The broken windows are thick with frost, and Helmut peers through the glittering pane at his father, hand on Mutti’s shoulder, sitting in front of him. The ice melts, the image clears in the warmth of Helmut’s breath on the pane, then clouds again. Fogged, smudged by his reaching fingers. Gone.
Without work and without photography, Helmut’s days are empty and long, and the hours are drawn out through lack of food. He tries to sleep, but dreams drive him out of his cellar and onto the street, and his cold legs carry him to the station. There is a new guard, and Helmut takes his time, making friends, talking about the trains, just like he did with the old guard when he was a boy. The new man doesn’t like Helmut. His persistence, his crooked arm, his dirty coat. But after Helmut points out the tenement shell that used to be his home, the guard takes pity on him, listens to him more closely, lets him into the station to watch the trains. On cold days he sometimes takes a mug of thin soup out to the strange young man by the tracks. He asks after his family and nods appreciatively at Helmut’s descriptions of a hardworking Papi, a devoted Mutti, a dutiful only son. Helmut watches the trains come and go as he speaks, lets his voice drift on and on, eats his soup, doesn’t look the guard in the face. And because the guard suspects that Helmut’s parents are not evacuated but dead, he also gives him regular work sweeping the platforms. Helmut doesn’t get paid, but is fed a meal in the station canteen, and is also given a coat to wear with the railway insignia on the breast pocket.
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.