The Darkroom of Damocles

by Willem Frederik Hermans

  ‘You’ve done a wonderful job. Not only have I turned into someone else, you have too,’ he said. ‘Know what I mean?’

  She put her hands against his chest and pushed him away.

  ‘I think you’re crazy.’

  ‘Yes I’m crazy, crazy about you. I can’t imagine you wouldn’t let me thank you with a kiss.’

  But she pushed him further away: ‘It sounds so silly when you put it like that!’ As his hands were gripping hers he was unable to pull her to him.

  ‘You don’t mean that,’ he said. ‘But I won’t insist.’

  ‘Just as well. I hope I can take you at your word.’

  He laughed some more.

  ‘Before the week is out I’ll be back, perhaps even the day after tomorrow.’

  She pulled her hands free and left the cubicle. He followed her, putting on his coat as he went.

  ‘Your collar’s not right,’ said Marianne, smoothing it down for him. ‘Come on, I have to switch the light off. They’ll be wondering upstairs what’s keeping me.’

  She tugged at a cord and the lamp in the cubicle went out, but the rest of the room was still ablaze with light.

  He followed her into the narrow corridor.

  ‘You know,’ he said with his mouth close to her ear, ‘I’ve done every heroic deed in the book, enough to get me decorated three times over, but until now I never knew what I was doing it for.’ He buried his nose in her soft, long hair.

  She turned to face him. Her expression was more serious than it had been all evening.

  ‘After all, how many people really know why they’re against the Germans? The dominees in London safe and sound behind their microphones, they know exactly what it’s all about: Justice and Faith and Queen and Country. But none of that stuff means anything to me. I’m only against the Germans because they’re our enemies, because I refuse to surrender to an enemy. I’m only fighting in my own defence. War as such doesn’t make any sense, there’s not a single ideology worth taking seriously. Freedom! they cry, as if freedom were something that ever existed. All very well for people making lots of money talking into a safe microphone, not for the rest of us. Being exploited is the one thing I really won’t have. I won’t be told what to do by people I didn’t ask for advice. I didn’t ask the Germans for anything. That’s why I want them kaput. It’s as simple as that.’

  They were at the door. She began sliding back the bolts. The moon was shining and a slab of light slanted in through the display window just in front of Marianne, so that all he could see was the white smock and the glistening hair framing her face. She pushed the door open.

  ‘It’s five to eleven. You’d better be quick or they’ll catch you straightaway, my little hero.’

  He took her hand and she let him pull her forwards. But the shadow of the door frame fell across her face, so that only her body was clearly lit. Osewoudt bit his lip and gripped her hand more tightly than he meant to, and his arm began to tremble.

  ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can.’

  She made to close the door but he was still clinging to her hand. Suddenly she pulled him close, kissed him on the forehead and the next thing he knew he was out in the street and the door was shut. He heard the click of the safety lock. He took a step sideways, put his forehead against the window, shielding the sides of his eyes with his hands. He stared and stared, but couldn’t see anything move inside, and anyway his view was largely obstructed by the short curtain at the back of the display.

  He started banging on the glass, thought to himself that this was ridiculous, turned back to ring the doorbell. Then he took something out of his inside pocket.

  The safety lock squeaked and the door opened.

  ‘You again? You’d better get cracking, it’s almost eleven!’

  ‘There’s something I forgot to ask you. Would you do me a favour?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Go to Amsterdam tomorrow morning, early, to Oudezijds Achterburgwal, number 28, Bellincoff Ltd. Ask to speak to Mr Nauta. If he’s not there, try and find out when he’ll be back. If there are any Germans about say you’re from some firm or other, doesn’t matter where, and that you’ve come to choose some feathers for a hat. Tell them you’re a milliner’s assistant and you need feathers for a client. But if you get to talk to Mr Nauta himself, begin by asking him why he hasn’t been answering the phone. If he has a satisfactory explanation you can carry on. But if he says he doesn’t know what you’re talking about, tell him to watch out, because Ria and her mother-in-law have been arrested by the Germans. Ask him where Elly is. Just ask after Elly. But if it turns out there’s nothing wrong with the phone, give him this ID card. Put it in a sealed envelope first. Give him the envelope and tell him: from Henri. If he asks any questions, just don’t answer them.’

  He thrust Elly’s new identity card into her hand.

  Zoeterwoudsesingel did not have an even and an uneven side, the houses were numbered consecutively: 70, 71, 72. On the far side of the canal, which followed the zigzag course of the town’s old defences, was a stretch of parkland with huge weeping willows.

  Number 74 sat exactly in the crook of an angle in the zigzag waterway. The house was quite different from the houses to the left and right, which stood slightly further back. The windows and eaves were decorated with lavish woodcarving. There was no garden at the front, but next to the doorway there were iron railings enclosing a flagged space hardly big enough to park a baby’s pram in.

  The house next door was full of doctors, all of whom shared the same name. Their nameplates were set one above the other by the entrance.

  Labare opened the door in person. He was about forty, and had a dented appearance, with hollow temples, hollow cheeks covered in a thick stubble of a mousy shade, and grey, spiky hair. He wore slippers. He extended an ink-stained hand and said: ‘My name is Labare. Come in.’

  ‘I’m Joost Melgers,’ said Osewoudt, and shook the proffered hand.

  He was quickly ushered upstairs. Labare drew him into a small, narrow room.

  In it stood a narrow bed with a dingy white counterpane, a straight-backed chair and a small table with an enamel basin and jug. On the wall: a framed picture of a family of ginger apes partially clothed as humans.

  Labare sat down on the bed, and with a weary wave of the hand indicated by turns the chair and the space beside him on the bed. In his other hand he held a flat tin box.

  Osewoudt sat down on the bed.

  ‘Look here, Melgers, it’s like this. You can sleep up here as long as nothing’s going on, but in emergencies you’ll have to stay in the basement. These are all strict orders. We have no time for amateurs, jokers, show-offs or blabbermouths here. There have been enough accidents already. Have you heard about the Dreadnought group? It’s the firing squad for them all next week. That lot talked too much, they all knew exactly who the others were. The Germans rounded up every one of them in an afternoon at the same address. So we don’t go in for chit-chat here. Like to roll yourself a smoke?’

  ‘No thanks. Allow me to offer you an English cigarette.’

  ‘You’d better hang on to those.’ Labare opened the tin box and rolled a very thin cigarette with pitch-black, hair-like tobacco.

  ‘So in an emergency,’ he went on, ‘you go straight down to the basement. There are bunks there too. Besides, that’s where all the work is done. It would be safest if you stayed down there permanently, but that’s a bit hard …’ He paused. ‘A bit hard … You might as well come down with me now. Could I see that Leica of yours?’

  Osewoudt got out the camera and handed it to Labare. Labare crossed his legs and examined it with head bowed. He kept the roll-up between his lips, the smoke curling around his hollow temples. He was breathing through his mouth and began to cough.

  ‘Not bad, new model. No close-up lens?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’ve never had one.’

  ‘Never had one?’ Labare looked at him
as if he thought Osewoudt had lost it, or even deliberately destroyed it.

  ‘So what in God’s name have you been doing with that Leica? Oh well, it’s none of my business.’ His voice tailed off. ‘Rank amateur,’ Osewoudt heard him mutter. Labare stood up with a sigh, then spoke out loud again: ‘And is that Summar the only extra attachment you’ve got? No ninety-millimetre lens?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You obviously have a lot to learn. Follow me.’

  Halfway down the stairs to the basement Labare stopped abruptly.

  ‘Take a look behind you, Melgers.’

  Osewoudt turned to look.

  ‘See that rope?’

  Osewoudt saw the rope.

  ‘If you pull that rope a whole contraption of iron bars comes down behind the door, a kind of grating, but much heftier. So anyone wanting to force the door from the outside has a hard time of it. That’s what it’s for, understand? No, don’t pull the rope now, because once the bars are down it takes more than one man to get them up again. More than two, in fact. The windows in the basement are heavily barricaded too. So that could get very nasty.’

  Labare went on down the stairs. ‘Very nasty,’ he repeated. At the foot of the stairs he stopped again, thereby obliging Osewoudt to remain standing one step up. Labare said: ‘As you can see, it’s very cramped here. We have to make the best of what little space we have. So we knocked up all these cubicles from hardboard. What’s in those cubicles and what goes on there is none of your business. None. What would be the point of you knowing, anyway? It never does anyone any good to know about things that are none of their business. No good at all, especially not with the tricky kind of work we do here.’

  He began to wriggle his way into one of the narrow passages between the board partitions.

  ‘Getting around is a bit of a squeeze for me, but it won’t be a problem for a small chap like you. I’ll take you to where you’ll be working, and then I’ll show you where the emergency exit is, too.’

  Osewoudt walked, or rather sidled, behind Labare. The passage became so narrow that it was impossible to advance by putting one foot in front of the other in the normal manner. Moving sideways, scraping between the partitions, they came to a black curtain no wider than the passage.

  ‘You will have noticed,’ said Labare, ‘that every light bulb has a smaller one beside it that isn’t switched on.’ He pointed to the ceiling. ‘Emergency lighting, in case the current fails. We’ve thought of everything. No messing about here.’

  He pushed the curtain aside, took a step forwards and then stopped to hold it open for Osewoudt. Osewoudt looked past him.

  The cubicle beyond the curtain was painted black all over: ceiling, floor, walls and even shelves, which were stacked with canisters and brown bottles. There was no window, not even a boarded-up window, but there was a small washbasin and a folding bed.

  ‘In here,’ said Labare, ‘is where you’ll be doing most of your work. I might as well explain right away. This is the darkroom. Nothing like a darkroom for shedding light, eh? Now don’t go thinking that the things that come to light are any business of yours, just concentrate on making it happen. You can do it with your eyes shut, in a manner of speaking.’

  He reached for a black ebonite container rather like a jam jar, but slightly wider and not as tall. He removed the cover and took out a reel.

  ‘This thing is your developing tank. Unfortunately it’s the only one we have, so you can’t develop more than one film at a time, and developing plus washing takes a full hour. All those boxes contain films that need developing. There must be about eighty, as there’s been nobody to process them for the past fortnight or so and new films come in every day. We have a huge amount of documentation. But even when you’ve developed a film you’re not done yet, because you still have to thin it. You probably don’t have a clue about the technical side of photography, like most people who snap merrily away, so I’ll tell you how it works.’

  He shut the ebonite container and put it back on its shelf, then leaned back with his elbow resting on the same shelf to facilitate his standing delivery.

  ‘A film, Melgers, consists of two things, mainly: a strip of celluloid which we call the emulsion base, and on top of that a thin layer of gelatine, which we call the emulsion. The emulsion is the photosensitive layer. Now, in thinning, we separate the emulsion from the base. The problem with that is the instability of the emulsion – once the gelatine falls apart the image is lost. So before we start thinning we have to toughen the gelatine layer.’

  He took a bottle from the shelf.

  ‘This is used for washing the film. When that’s done we can start prying the emulsion off the base. We make sure the gelatine comes off in one piece, without tearing. That gelatine layer is extremely thin. Once it’s properly dry it can be rolled up so tight that it can easily be hidden, inside a propelling pencil for instance. Not that we have any of that romantic stuff going on here. We thin down films mainly to save space. I can’t abide romantic notions of any kind in this business.’

  To mark his switch from the technicalities of film processing to philosophy, Labare slid the bottles together on the shelf and rolled himself another cigarette.

  ‘You must think of this as an ordinary job, you don’t want to get carried away thinking there’s a war on and you’re a hero or anything like that. Obviously, we have to make safety precautions and stick to them, but it’s the same in peacetime, too. Down mines, in chemical factories. That is how you should see our safety precautions, it’s as simple as that. We have no use for heroes. What is a hero? Someone who’s careless and gets away with it. We have no use for careless people. I don’t need men who keep shtum when they’re interrogated by the Germans, but men who’ll spill the beans – it’s a question of making sure they don’t have any beans to spill, that’s all. Because if someone does know something, try holding a burning cigar to his balls and nine times out of ten he’ll talk, and in the one case where he doesn’t, well, he’ll be stuck with burned balls for the rest of his life, which would be too bad.’

  Osewoudt cackled shrilly, Labare laughed too, but inaudibly, only moving his lips, and he said in a nasal tone: ‘Yes, my boy, that is how you must think of it.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘If anything happens, the first thing you do is pocket the finished films and switch on the light to expose the rest: they’ll go black. You do that at the first signal. The second signal means it’s time to leg it. I’ll show you how it works.’

  Labare put out his cigarette under his shoe and walked off. Osewoudt went after him, this time through another passage, one wide enough to walk down normally. It ended at a door.

  ‘This door opens into the neighbours’ house. Got that?’

  Labare took Osewoudt back to the small darkroom, and said: ‘You can start now. You know where everything is.’

  * * *

  Osewoudt switched the light off, opened one of the canisters, had no difficulty loading the film on to the reel. He put the reel in the ebonite container, closed the lid, switched the light on again and began the procedure as explained to him.

  While the successive baths took effect in the ebonite container, he sat waiting on a low packing case, elbows on knees, head bowed. Now and then he looked at his watch, undid the strap and fastened it again. It was very quiet, no sound from outside penetrated the darkroom, and there didn’t seem to be anyone else in the basement besides himself. He reflected on all that had happened in the past week, starting with that phone call from Elly last Monday. He counted the days. It was Friday now! I have to be in Amsterdam tomorrow at five, make that phone call: number 38776!

  Dorbeck has made a new man of me, he thought.

  Not until half past eight that evening did Labare allow him to leave the house.

  ‘I ought to keep you indoors all the time, really, as I have a feeling you’re a risk outside, but I had one chap staying here who went clean round the twist being stuck inside twenty-four hour
s a day. And that was a sight more risky for us.’

  Osewoudt had developed and thinned ten films, which had taken him ten hours straight. He hadn’t even had a proper meal, just a piece of bread from time to time without interrupting his work.

  The fresh air had a sweet smell. He couldn’t recall the air ever smelling so sweet. He took deep breaths to empty his lungs of the lingering stench of chemicals and cigarette smoke.

  Ten minutes later he rang the bell of the narrow hairdresser’s shop. The glass in the door was not curtained, so he could see Marianne coming from afar. Rather than a white smock she had on a white blouse with a dark skirt.

  He shook hands with her, and hesitated: I’d like to kiss her, he thought, but didn’t.

  ‘Hello Filip.’

  She sniffed the air a few times, inaudibly; all he saw was her nostrils flaring.

  ‘You smell of formaldehyde.’

  ‘You smell of perfume. I wouldn’t know what kind, though, I know nothing about perfume.’

  ‘Cuir de Russie. Formaldehyde reminds me of the dissecting room.’

  ‘Then it may not be such a good idea for me to come in,’ Osewoudt said as he followed her up the stairs. ‘I don’t want you mistaking me for someone else.’

  ‘Don’t worry, you’re not that pale.’

  Then he asked: ‘So how did you get on? Did you go to Amsterdam? Did you pass on that message for me?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  They went into a warm room, small but not particularly narrow, more or less square.

  ‘Who did you speak to? Mr Nauta himself?’

  ‘Yes, I did. There was nothing the matter.’

  ‘Nothing the matter, you say? What about the telephone?’

  ‘Your Mr Nauta said he’d had the phone taken out as he’s giving up the business. He doesn’t want to sell his feathers to the Germans, he won’t have Kraut whores wearing his feathers. Why Filip, you look surprised. I thought he was a nice old gent, digging his heels in like that.’

  Marianne laughed, reached out to him and began to unbutton his overcoat.