The Dark Room

by Rachel Seiffert

  —Have you seen the pictures, Tomas?

  —What pictures?

  Tomas blinks in the sunlight outside his cellar door.

  —The skeleton people. The dead ones.

  —Oh.

  Lore’s stomach feels twisted out of shape. She stands in the cellar doorway, holding Peter, who strains against her arms, reaching down to her apron pocket and the small knotted handkerchief of sugar. Tomas says nothing, bony hand shielding his eyes from the sun.

  —They have started punishing them. The ones who killed them.

  Lore’s chest pulls tight around her heart. Tomas nods, rubs at his forehead, the pale skin stretched over the bone.

  —You told Liesel they would.

  —I know. It’s started now?

  —Yes. I saw it in the newspaper.

  His eyes are paler than usual. Tomas turns away. He walks down the steps into the cellar gloom, one arm reaching forward as if to steady himself, fingertips brushing the crumbling wall. Mortar dust rattles to the floor.

  —Tomas?

  Lore follows him cautiously down into the cool dark, blind after the blue sky and midday glare outside.

  —The woman on the tram said they were real people.

  —Yes.

  —They were Jews. That’s what she told me.

  Lore’s eyes are adjusting, and she can see Tomas now. He has his back to her, and his shoulders are set square, like a wall, but she has to ask.

  —Tomas? You remember you told Jüri about all the fathers who are in prison now?

  —What?

  Tomas turns slightly to face her, and Lore sees his lips drawn back from his remaining teeth.

  —What do you want from me?

  Her stomach folds in on itself. His breath fills the room.

  Lore doesn’t go to the cellar for a week, waves Jüri off down the road alone in the afternoons. He stares at her reproachfully at mealtimes, whispers to her in the dark of the bedroom. Says that Tomas asks for her, wants to know why she doesn’t come.

  Lore lies awake while the children sleep, keeps the lamp lit by her bed. She fights against her closing lids, afraid of the pictures which sit behind her eyes, the threads which knot themselves together in the dark.

  She dozes in the daylight. On trams with Peter, waiting in the lines with Liesel and Wiebke, sitting at the table by the window with her Oma.

  Mutti and Vati and Tomas circle her thoughts, are pushed away, and then return.

  It is late afternoon and Jüri has not come home. Oma is awake and has asked after him twice already, worried that he may be playing in the ruins.

  —They are dangerous, Hannelore. I have told him to keep away from them.

  Lore goes to the end of the road to look for her brother. Waits twenty minutes, half an hour, but still there is no sign. She looks back to the house, sees Oma standing in her coat, watching by the iron gate at the end of the drive. Lore waves, uneasy. Shouts to her that she shouldn’t worry; that she will go and look for him; that she is sure she won’t be long.

  Lore watches from the tram, walks fast along the streets. She doesn’t want to see Tomas, wants only to find Jüri and then quickly go home. She calls for her brother, but there is no reply, and she draws ever closer to the cellar. She waits at the corner, but it is already so late. She clambers across the rubble, heart full of misgiving, head full of the hate in Tomas’s face. But when she slides down into the courtyard, Jüri is crouching in the cellar doorway alone.

  The stove is overturned, loose bricks have been torn from the walls, and the door hangs off its hinges. Jüri is pale and breathless, his eyes ringed dark like bruises. Lore sits down next to him and he presses his fingers into her skin.

  —What happened?

  —Tomas has gone.

  —Where has he gone?

  —I don’t know.

  —What happened?

  —We went out to get wood. He told me to wait at the corner by the station and said he would get some soup, and I waited, but he didn’t come back.

  —How long did you wait?

  —Two hours.

  —Maybe he had to queue?

  —But he broke the door, Lore. He did this. I know he did.

  —Did you have a fight, Jüri? Did he hit you?

  —No. He’s gone away. He was looking for his things. But I hid them.

  —What things?

  —He said you knew, Lore. He told me you knew. I said you would never tell, but he didn’t believe me because you didn’t come anymore and now he’s gone away.

  Jüri wails, holding on to Lore’s arm. His face is wet with snot and tears. He speaks and she can’t understand him.

  —You must never tell. Not even Liesel. Or even Peter. Not ever.

  —Jüri!

  —Promise? Please, promise you won’t tell.

  —What did you hide?

  Lore helps him lift the paving slab. Wood lice curl up and run for cover in the rubble and Tomas’s wallet sits snug in a hole at the base of the wall. Small and brown, the leather cracked and worn.

  —I only did it so he wouldn’t go. I didn’t want him to be angry. Will he be angry with me, Lore?

  Jüri is still crying. Lore pulls the wallet out of its hiding place and opens it with stiff, clumsy fingers, the contents dropping to the floor. At her feet lies a scrap of striped cloth with a yellow star sewn to one side. Underneath that is another piece of the same cloth, also torn, also fraying, and with a familiar set of numbers running across its grubby stripes. Still inside the wallet is a thin piece of gray card, folded over, and inside that is a paper, with a photo, and a large black stamp. Jüri watches as Lore holds the picture up to the light.

  —You didn’t know?

  —What?

  —It’s not him.

  The photo on the card is of a man with dark hair and sunken eyes. Smudged and worn and crumpled. Lore thinks it could be Tomas, at a glance. Even when she looks closer, she sees his blunt cheek, the run of his jaw. She spreads the papers and the cloth out carefully on the broken ground. Her wrists feel weak; the paper is brittle. The face in the photo has a soft mouth. Perhaps it isn’t Tomas, perhaps Jüri is right.

  —He took it. He had to have it. For when the Americans came to let everyone out.

  —Tomas stole these things?

  —You mustn’t tell, Lore. He said it didn’t matter. The man was a Jew, you see. He was dead already.

  Lore hasn’t stopped looking into the face. The gaunt features, the fine lips parted, eyes cast downward, lids almost closed. Dead already. Lore studies the paper, but the name has disappeared in a crease, lost in the nervous folding and refolding.

  —Tomas said the Americans like Jews, so he used these things to pretend.

  —He told you this?

  —He said you knew.

  Jüri crouches, with his bony knees pulled up against his chest, watching for Lore’s reaction. What do you want from me? Her stomach coils itself tight again, the saliva turns sour on her tongue. She spits, sits with her head between her knees, and Jüri shivers next to her.

  —Tomas said that people are angry now, so it’s safer to be a different person. I said he could be in our family and then no one would know it was him.

  Jüri’s eyes are red and his jaw pulled taut. Lore can’t listen to him anymore.

  —We will burn it.

  —He said he is my brother, Lore.

  —I know that. I know. We will burn it and then we will go home.

  Lore builds a fire in the rubble with bits of wood from the broken stove. She lays the dead man’s belongings on top, the wallet and the photo, the crease where his name was and the last scraps of his clothes. The flames lick around the edges of the cloth and the striped weave blackens first, then glows. The paper sits untouched on top for a long time, but at last begins to curl. The charred edges fold over the thin face in the photo, and when they fall away again the dead man is gone.

  The courtyard grows dark around the small fire. Jüri is still s
hivering, but Lore sweats in its warmth, sits away from it, pressed into a gap in the wall. What do you want from me? She tries to unravel Tomas and prisons and skeleton people; lies and photographs; Jews and graves; tattoos and newspapers and things not being as bad as people say. In the middle of it all are Mutti and Vati and the badges in the bushes and the ashes in the stove and the sick feeling that Tomas was both right and wrong, good and bad; both at the same time.

  Lore pulls on her boots as soon as the sun shows over the trees in the Meyers’ garden. Jüri has been asleep for an hour or two, eyes swollen shut with tears. Liesel sits up, but Lore tells her it is still too early for breakfast, she will come back and wake them when it is time. Her breath shows in the Meyers’ hallway, and she leaves footprints behind in the frost on Oma’s drive. Wiebke answers the door with sleep in her eyes and makes some bitter acorn coffee, which Lore drinks while Oma dresses. It is still not yet light when grandmother and granddaughter walk down to the lake.

  They stand at the pier, crunching the frozen sand under their shoes.

  —Why are Mutti and Vati in prison, Oma?

  —They did nothing wrong.

  The answer comes neither quickly nor slowly, betraying nothing. Lore searches Oma’s eyes, gray and calm. No anger, no question about last night. Back long after dark, covered in rubble dust and stinking of smoke. Lore’s secret presses against her lips, but Oma lets the moment pass in silence.

  —I told you before. Hannelore? I said it, and you must remember it.

  Oma takes Lore’s hand and her glove is smooth to the touch, slipping across her skin. The secret belongs to Jüri, too. And Tomas.

  —Everything has changed, Lore. But your father is still a good man.

  The days get cold.

  Liesel learns English words from the soldiers: butterscotch, chocolate, and, best of all, humbug, which makes her laugh because it sounds just like Hamburg.

  Jüri finds friends after a while. Boys his own age, and though Oma forbids it, he plays shouting war games with them in the wreckage. Lore watches him run out from the cover of the ruins, across the open street. He falls and lies still. Counting off the seconds on the fingers of one hand.

  Lore goes back to the cellar once. Looks for traces in the ashes and upturned boxes. She finds nothing, only the blankets in the corner where Tomas lay at night. Lore walks down the road, fills the bucket from the standpipe, and washes out his bedclothes in the courtyard. She cries, head full of badges and photos, feeling sick and alone.

  A tram passes, the noise recedes and the ruins are quiet again. Lore closes her eyes, arms plunged deep into the bucket, forehead pressed against the cool metal rim. She empties the cold water across the flagstones, takes rubble from the mountain around her, and buries the wet blankets under the stones.

  Mutti sends an address for Vati, and a photo of herself, smiling, sitting outside somewhere on a bench. Her hands are puffy, folded in her lap. Her face round, her hair cut short, and her clothes unfamiliar. Lore props the picture up against the wall in their small bedroom, and Jüri and Liesel crowd around to look at their mother, quietly taking her in.

  —She will come to the British camp next year.

  —Can we visit her then?

  —Maybe. I think so.

  —Will she look like that?

  —Of course she will.

  —What does Vati look like, Lore?

  —You don’t remember?

  Jüri shakes his head and yawns. Lore doesn’t allow herself to think for long.

  —He’s about this tall, and his hair is the same color as yours.

  —But my hair changes color. Blond in the summer.

  —And Vati’s does, too. Dark in the winter, just like you.

  Jüri asks questions at first, but soon falls asleep. Liesel listens to Lore and smiles at her for the first time in weeks. Lore holds her breathing steady, heart beating on and on. She describes a man as she undresses: one to fit with the new plump, happy Mutti, to replace the one who has been burnt and buried and bombed.

  The face watching her from the fire is Tomas. It folds away into black ash curtains and is gone.

  It is winter now and more than half a year since the end of the war. Lore’s birthday arrives; five weeks since Tomas left; two months since Mutti’s first letter; over four months since Jochen died.

  Jüri and Peter give her a hair ribbon each, which Lore knows Frau Meyer has cut from her curtains. Liesel is to bake a cake with Wiebke’s help, has been saving up her sugar ration for weeks. Oma promises Lore a pair of shoes, as soon as some are available, and has bought her tickets for the ferry as a treat.

  —One for you and one for Jüri, schatz. Peter can go for free.

  Oma walks with them to the tram stop and waves them off into town. They go past the stop for the cellar, and Lore watches Jüri but he does not look around. They take the tram all the way to the Hauptbahnhof, and then weave their way down through the city on foot. The sky is ash gray, flat and low. The cold reaches in through their clothes. Lore leads her brothers along the still canals in the city center, and then they turn and head for the lake. Doubling back where the bridges are down, taking shortcuts made possible by bombs.

  —There were buildings here before, Jüri. Between the canal and the lake, it was all buildings. See? You can still see how all the rubble is in squares.

  —When?

  —Before the bombs.

  —How old were you then?

  —The same age as you.

  —How old was I then?

  —The same age as Peter.

  The wind blows bitter across the lake, and Lore wraps Peter into her coat. They turn their backs on the dark water and wait at the Jungfernstieg for the ferry to take them home. The city center lies flat before them. Blackened and broken and crawling with life. Everything changing, the old being buried by the new again. Lore sits Peter down on the bench and points across the debris for Jüri.

  —They are going to build houses there. On top of where the rubble is now.

  —Why?

  —So people can live in them, silly. People can’t live in ruins for the rest of their lives.

  —Will we live in a new house?

  —Yes. We will.

  —With Mutti.

  —Yes, and Vati.

  —Vati’s in a prison.

  —Yes, but we will live together again when he comes home.

  They board the ferry and sit toward the back, out of the wind, which tugs at the tarpaulin below the rail.

  —Where is Tomas now, Lore?

  —I don’t know.

  Lore watches the tarpaulin, and the ropes snapping against the taut cloth.

  —Does he think about us?

  —I don’t know.

  —How old will I be when we live in our new house?

  Lore shrugs; her brother’s questions grate. She can see other passengers in front of them, sheltering from the wind, but beyond them is the empty foredeck.

  —As old as you are today?

  —I don’t know how long it will take, Jüri.

  Lore shifts forward and the wind bites at her face. The air is cold on her teeth as she speaks; it tugs at her hair.

  —Will you be as old as Tomas then?

  —No, because he will always be older than me, silly.

  Jüri laughs and Lore stands up. Jüri gets up too, but she tells him to sit with Peter. She steps out into the wind. The air rushes across the deck and hurls itself at her legs, and Lore’s skin shrinks back from her clothes. She takes hold of the rail to steady herself. The water is far below her and dark, churning slowly under the ferry. Lore lifts her head up away from it, keeping her face high in the icy blast of the wind, feels the air currents pull and twist around her limbs.

  She moves along the rail beyond the cabin, away from Jüri’s questions, and from Peter, and away from the other passengers, until she is out at the front of the ferry and hidden from view.

  Alone now, she takes the full force of the wind. Li
fting first one hand and then the other from the railing, standing firm, facing out to the shore.

  Lore looks forward to the silence at Oma’s, to Wiebke’s smiles, and Liesel’s cake. She looks forward to when there will be no more ruins, only new houses, and she won’t remember anymore how it was before.

  She stands on her own and the wind claws her skin, tears through her clothes. Lore doesn’t look down at the water, faces the far shore ahead. She unbuttons her coat and lets the wind rip it open, pounding in her ears. She stretches her mouth wide, lets the winter rush down past her lungs and fill her with its bitter chill.

  Lore hears and tastes and feels only air. Her eyes are closed, seeing nothing, streaming brittle tears.

  Part Three

  MICHA

  HOME, AUTUMN 1997

  It’s a long walk across the parking lot to his grandmother’s place and the young man’s feet get wet. The high-rise stands white in the green of landscaped lawns. When the sun shines, residents walk slowly in pairs along the yellow gravel paths, and his Oma sits out on her balcony, twelve stories high. On days like those, the young man will stop on the grass and, after counting eight windows down and three across, he will wave and wait for the tiny speck of movement in reply. Today it rains and the young man walks alone.

  This is Michael. His Oma’s name is Kaethe, and she was married to Askan.

  Oma Kaethe. Opa Askan.

  The nurse at the reception desk smiles in recognition as he signs himself in. His glasses mist over in the warmth of the lobby and water slips from his hair down his neck as he waits for the elevator to arrive.

  Just lately, Michael has taken to mapping his family. In lines, on trains, in idle moments, he will lay them out in his head: layers of time and geography, a more-or-less neat web of dates and connections to work over, to fill out the corners of the day.

  Oma Kaethe and Opa Askan. Married, Kiel, 1938. Two children. Mutti, Karin. 1941. And later Onkel Bernd. In Hannover, after the war. After Opa came home.

  Oma is at her door when Michael steps off the elevator. She waves to him from the far end of the corridor. I saw you coming, she calls. Walking in the rain. He takes his glasses off and Oma polishes them on her apron. She finds a towel for his hair and another for his feet. His shoes are left by the door, and his socks are hung on the heater.