The Dark Room by Rachel Seiffert Read Free Book Online Page A

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