The Box Read online

  Right, big brother. We were in on the secret when we were only four or five, and you’d just been born, Lara.

  Sorry, Taddel, we’re not up to where you come in yet.

  I don’t remember much else, or only hazily, as if through a pane of frosted glass, but the pictures are crystal clear, because up in the attic …

  We were still in the house on Karlsbader Strasse, where the only other tenants lived below us, to the right of the stairs: an old lady with her son, who was something important with the radio—I’m not sure whether it was Radio in the American Sector or Radio Free Berlin. And all the way down, almost in the cellar, was a laundry.

  But to the left of the stairs, all the way up to the eaves, the building was in ruins. Two or three burned-out apartments. And under the caved-in roof nothing but charred rafters, with a Keep Out! sign or something along those lines.

  In the cellar, where there’d been no fire damage, a cabinetmaker with a limp had set up shop. He must have been friendly, because he used to give me wood shavings that were as long and curly as the hair of the sixty-eighters would be later on, a fashion we ourselves picked up in the seventies, because we also liked …

  And the cabinetmaker with the limp was always locking horns with the woman from the laundry, who wasn’t just cantankerous; she was a witch. Even mother warned us, Watch out for her, children, she has the evil eye.

  I still remember that old witch cursing us because you’d found some dead pigeons in the rubble up in the attic and deposited them in front of the door to her laundry. They were half decayed, crawling with maggots.

  Picture this—you, too, Lara: she screamed that she was going to run us through the hot mangle, both of us.

  But our apartment, which hadn’t caught fire in the war, was a lot bigger than the one in Paris, where we lived in only two rooms because father and mother were always short of cash, and had to scrimp and save. But by now father had made some real money with his Tin Drum and could buy legs of lamb for us and all the people he invited to dinner, and could take a taxi into town when he ran out of ideas for the dog book he had in the works.

  Sometimes he went to the cinema in the afternoon.

  I need the distraction, he’d say.

  No doubt he had to take a break from his work now and then, to get some distance.

  At any rate, we even had a cleaning lady, and she was supposed to keep an eye on us while mother was teaching the children of French occupation officers to perform difficult dance steps and teeter around on their toes.

  That I don’t remember. But our apartment was nice, with light streaming in …

  We had five rooms plus a kitchen and a proper bathroom, and a long hallway, where we …

  And under the roof, in the undamaged half of the building, father had his studio, with stairs leading up to what he called the gallery.

  Our part of town had lots of buildings that were half burned out but had people living in them. And if our family went out walking on a Sunday and we came upon a ruin that had once been a fancy villa, with columns and turrets, you’d always say, Jorsch broke it, because whenever we got a new toy—a car, a ship, or a plane—no sooner had it been unwrapped than ping! it was broken.

  Well, I always wanted to see how things were put together and how they worked.

  Quality control inspector, our mama called you.

  At some point Marie’s Hans died. Marie was some ten years older than our father, am I right, big brother? Father must have been in his mid-thirties, but already so famous that when we went shopping at the outdoor market people would turn to look at him and whisper.

  It took a while for us to get used to that.

  Anyway, not long after her Hans died, old Marie came to Karlsbader Strasse with her box, and first snapped pictures of the outside of our building from all angles, and then all the burned-out apartments from the inside.

  She did it because father asked her to. When he said, Snap that for me, will you, Marie? she’d snap away.

  His special requests: fish skeletons, gnawed bones, that kind of thing.

  Right. Later on, when father had given up smoking everything but his pipe, I saw her take pictures of the used matches he left lying around.

  She was even fixated on his eraser crumbs, because every crumb contained a secret, she said.

  And earlier, Lara, it was the butts of his hand-rolled cigarettes, remember? Every butt was crooked in its own way, and lay there in the ashtray or wherever, with the burned-down matches …

  She took snapshots of absolutely everything.

  Maybe even of his shit, when no one was looking.

  It was the same story with our battered building, which was surrounded by trees, fairly tall ones, too, pines, I think.

  But Taddel still doesn’t want to believe what Jorsch and I saw when the two of us …

  … it was true, though. Whenever Marie snapped a picture of something with the Agfa box, it came out of her darkroom looking totally different.

  It was uncanny at first.

  Anyway, we didn’t tell a soul, not even mother, that we sneaked into father’s studio and saw the pictures … Not on his drafting table in front of the big window with the view; no, it was up in the gallery, where he had all his notes tacked to the rafters, all kinds of dogs’ names scribbled with a felttip pen …

  That was where he’d also pinned the photos from Marie’s darkroom, all in a row.

  What those prints showed seemed to come from a different roll of film entirely. We knew how the damaged side of the house really looked. To the left of the main staircase the doors to all the apartments were secured with padlocks, but father had persuaded the janitor to lend him the key, and he let us tag along when he had old Marie go through the building and photograph the interior.

  Everything that had been in those apartments at one time, all the furniture and stuff, was now nothing but junk. Spider webs everywhere, with nasty-looking spiders lurking in them.

  Holes in the ceilings …

  Water dripping …

  It was so spooky that Pat was freaked out. Didn’t dare to venture further into those dim caverns. Pigeon droppings everywhere.

  Blackened wallpaper was peeling off the walls, and you could see the newspaper people glued to the walls before the new paper was put on.

  We couldn’t read yet, but father told us what the papers said, about the things going on in the city and elsewhere long before the war, everyone fighting everyone else. Tales of murder and mayhem. And political brawls, as he called them. Look over here, children, he said, these are the cinema schedules. And here’s something about which government has been overthrown. And here a big fat headline about the latest assassination of a politician by right-wing goons.

  Of course the two of you grasped it right away, smart as you were.

  Sure. And father also read to us about how money kept losing value—the Inflation, it was.

  You’re right, Taddel. We didn’t really get it. We were too young.

  But later we did understand what inflation was about, much later, if you really want to know.

  The very next day father showed us the place on Koenigsallee where a murder described in one of those tattered newspapers happened. Here, he said, this is where those goons gunned down Rathenau in his open car, which regularly slowed for the curve …

  There was lots more in those newspapers: ads for shoe polish, funny hats, umbrellas, a big ad for Persil washing powder …

  Father peeled a few pages loose from the wall …

  … even then he was collecting anything from the past …

  And—picture this, Lara—in the apartment across from ours we found the remains of a piano.

  Actually, big brother, it was a real concert grand, like Jasper’s and Paul’s mother has in her music room today, which she plays only when no one’s listening, not even the cleaning woman, and certainly not father.

  At any rate, that piano was more than damaged. Its whole body was charred, its legs were
crooked, and the varnish was gone. The lid was missing, too. And the few slivers of ivory still on the keys could be lifted off easily.

  Which I assume you two did.

  You’re not kidding, Taddel.

  Not for us, though.

  For father’s collection.

  Those were big apartments like ours, with five rooms plus kitchen and bath. But all the windows had been covered with planks or sheets of fibreboard, so the only light came in through the cracks. It was dim everywhere, in some corners pitch-black.

  Still, Mariechen photographed everything with her box—a cracked toilet bowl, battered pails, a shard of mirror, bent spoons, fragments of tiles.

  Most of the things had melted in the heat or been hauled off after the bombing, if they were still usable …

  … or had been hacked into kindling right after the war because people had nothing left to burn.

  You say it was pitch-black? And even so Marie took pictures with her simple box camera?

  Well, she just did, Taddel. She didn’t even use a flash. Holding the camera at waist height, or sometimes kneeling down.

  Sure, if we’d been a little older, we’d have thought: It’s much too dark in here for taking pictures.

  The box can’t handle it.

  What a waste of film.

  But when we sneaked into father’s studio, while he was downstairs with friends again, drinking wine and schnapps and yapping about politics, no doubt, we saw the photos tacked to the rafters above his work area, along with the scraps of paper with dog names.

  Incredible, those images.

  At first you couldn’t believe what you were seeing: every picture as bright as day.

  Nothing blurred.

  Every piece of furniture as clear as could be.

  But in the pictures the apartments looked all shipshape and inhabited, though there were no people in them.

  What do you mean? Those wrecked apartments all intact?

  All neat and tidy, Taddel, that’s right.

  No yucky spider webs, no more pigeon shit. And one of the apartments looked especially cosy.

  The grand piano stood in the middle of the room, undamaged. Sheet music was open on the rack, and the keys had all their ivories in place. There was a sofa in the room, which Marie had photographed a few days before when it was falling apart, so you could pull the stuffing out and see the springs. Now it had nice plump pillows on it, round and square. And sitting on that sofa, propped between two pillows, was a doll with black hair and big eyes who looked something like our little sister. Like you, Lara, when you’d just begun to walk.

  And in one of the kitchens the table was set for breakfast for four, with butter, cold cuts, cheese, and eggs in egg cups. I can still see it, that was how sharp those pictures were. Every detail. Salt cellar, teaspoons, and so on, even though Marie hadn’t used a flash.

  And on the stove, which she’d made a point of photographing, a kettle was steaming, as if someone not visible in the picture, the mother, say, was about to make tea or coffee.

  All the flats seemed to be occupied. Some had thick carpets, upholstered chairs, a rocking chair, and pictures on the walls of snow-covered peaks.

  And clocks everywhere, so you could’ve seen exactly what time it was.

  If we’d been a little older …

  In one of those rooms, on a low table, stood a model of a castle, with a tower and a drawbridge. And scads of tin or lead soldiers. Mounted and infantry. Positioned as if they were fighting. Some were wounded, with bandaged heads. And on the floor a model train was set up, with the tracks forming a figure eight and a siding just before the railroad station. A passenger train pulled by a steam locomotive was in the station. It looked as if it was about to pull out, while on the siding another locomotive with a couple of carriages was stopped at a signal …

  It was a Märklin set. I still remember the transformer.

  At any rate, children, certainly boys, maybe even twins like us, could have played with the castle—that would’ve been me—and with the train—I assume that would’ve been you.

  But Marie had rescued only the objects—the toys, the furniture, a couple of grandfather clocks, a sewing machine …

  … a Singer, no doubt.

  That’s possible, Taddel; Singer sewing machines were in almost every household. All over the world. As I was saying, the breakfast table, the doll in the sofa cushions, the sheet music on the piano, and who knows what else: that was what she rescued from the past, without a flash. Only objects, nothing living.

  That’s not quite true, brother. There was one apartment, which in reality was all smashed and so dark I wouldn’t have ventured in there alone, but in the pictures it had the windows wide open, sun streaming in through white curtains, and among the potted plants a large birdcage. In the cage, on perches at different heights, sat two birds, canaries maybe, you couldn’t tell because Mariechen’s pictures were all in black and white. And in the pantry of another apartment a long flypaper strip, and because Marie had taken close-ups, you could see half-alive blowflies stuck to it, their tiny legs still intact … And in another apartment, full of massive pieces of furniture, a cat, in one picture asleep on an armchair, in another arching its back on the rug, as if it were about to hiss. In other pictures the cat was sunning itself among the potted plants. Wait—it was a striped cat. Now I remember: in one picture it was playing with a ball of yarn, or am I just imagining that? Because like father, I …

  The fact is, Pat thinks a cat was prowling around one of the apartments.

  At the time we didn’t know why father needed those pictures.

  It didn’t dawn on me till later: he needed the cat because he was working on Cat and Mouse, which involves a sunken Polish minesweeper, a few boys and a girl, and a medal for heroism …

  … and he slipped that in while he was grinding out the huge dog book, but for some reason couldn’t seem to finish it.

  It’s a fact that animals always played an important part in his books, including some who could talk.

  But when he had Mariechen photograph those apartments, all he said to us was, Some doctors and a judge lived here. I wish I knew what became of them.

  At any rate, we didn’t realize till later, if at all, that he needed those pictures so he could form a clearer image of the way things were in the past.

  That’s how our father is: he thinks purely in terms of the past, even now. He can’t shake the habit. Keeps having to …

  Old Marie helped him out with her magic box …

  See, we believed everything, Lara, just as you did later, all those things that didn’t exist but came out of the darkroom as if they had existed.

  And every time Mariechen loaded a roll of fresh film into her Kodak box …

  It was an Agfa. The label was right there in front, under the lens. How often do I have to remind you? First made in 1930. Before that, Zeiss-Ikon’s Tengor was the only box camera. Then the Americans got back into the market with the Brownie Junior, but not till much later, after the war. But Zeiss-Ikon won out with an inexpensive box called the Baldur, named after the chieftain of the Hitler Youth, which our father was in, too, running around in shorts. It cost only eight reichsmarks, that Baldur. They sold hundreds of thousands. There was also one they exported to Italy called the Balilla, made specially for the fascist boys. But Marie didn’t take those pictures with a magic or miracle box, as Lara says, but with her good old Agfa Box I. I can still see her with it dangling in front of her stomach.

  All right, brother, you win.

  I’m only trying to get the facts straight.

  At any rate, with her box Mariechen could not only look into the past but also see the future. While we were living in the half-bombed-out building, she produced a whole series of pictures showing what would be happening in politics on the Sunday you came into the world, Lara. I can still see mother holding up those pictures, one after another, above her bulging belly, which she sometimes let us put our ears to, and laughing
as Mariechen showed her what had come out of her box. I’m telling you, Lara, and you, too, Taddel: it was a huge herd of sheep. A good two hundred of them, slowly making their way from right to left, from east to west, that is. The shepherd in the lead. Marching beside him a ram with magnificent curved horns. Then picture after picture showing the other sheep. Bringing up the rear, the sheepdog. All heading in the same direction. And then, after you’d been born and Jorsch was sent to pick up the Sunday papers for father at the Roseneck news-stand, they carried stories about a shepherd who’d crossed the border near Lübars, bringing five hundred collectively owned sheep from the Soviet occupation zone to the West, and without a shot being fired, just as Mariechen’s box camera had foreseen.

  Father also read aloud an article that said no one knew what to do with all those sheep who’d fled the Communist camp to get to the capitalist side. Should they all be slaughtered, or what?

  That made him laugh, and then, while almost certainly rolling a cigarette, he claimed that a famous writer, an Englishman, would have celebrated his birthday on the twenty-third of April along with our brand-new Lara—if he hadn’t been dead as a doornail for hundreds of years.

  All right, brother. It’s true about the sheep. The business with the poet—I’ll let that pass. But a few months later, not long before our birthday, the Wall was built right through the city so no one could make it across any more, and that was something old Marie had not anticipated, box or no box.

  And we couldn’t understand why people were panicking and why our mother quickly packed our bags and whisked Lara and us away to Switzerland, which is where she’s from.

  Why did she do that, Taddel? Well, I assume she was frightened. More for us than for herself. War could have broken out again. Not far from where we lived, on Clayallee, the Americans were already there with their tanks and so forth.

  At any rate, father stayed behind in the big apartment and, as we found out later, wrote some strongly worded letters against the building of the Wall—he was that furious.

  It did no good, the letter-writing.

  But let’s suppose, just for the fun of it, he’d gone with Mariechen to Checkpoint Charlie, in the American sector, on a certain day and waited patiently, then said, Now! Snap away, Mariechen! she and her box would have caught a sports car with a Rome licence plate, and in the passenger seat …