Lore Read Free Page B

embarrassing to mother and son. Too physical and too pointless. Mutti feels the loss of daily proximity, but repeats to herself that it is for the best, until she believes it.
    Helmut’s parents join the Party; the
Führer
joins the family portraits on the wall above the sofa. In the first days of war, Helmut’s father finds a well-paying job managing the floor of a new factory on the outskirts of Berlin. Helmut gets a full-time job with Gladigau.
    The last family portrait is taken. Helmut is now an adult, after all. Gladigau jokes with Mutti as he sets up the camera. The next pictures will be of a wedding, and the christenings which will follow. Mutti flushes, Papi says nothing, Helmut busies himself with shutting up the shop and closes his ears. The moment passes.
    For this last photo, both men stand, father and son, and their wife and mother sits proudly in front of them. Both have one hand on each of her shoulders, and Helmut has his left arm around his father’s back. The encircling warmth of the family.
    Since this is their final sitting, Gladigau also takes an individual portrait of Helmut. Captured from the chest up, left shoulder angled toward the camera, his gaze directed up and right of frame by Gladigau’s outstretched finger. Helmut has the trace of a smile around his slim lips, and the downward tilt of his chin makes him look shy, girlish. Though his hair is dark now and combed down with water and some of his father’s pomade, it still has a boy’s curl about it.
    Gladigau is pleased with this individual portrait. He props it up against the till as he takes his evening schnapps. Examines the heavy brows, and the pale eyes set deep in their sockets; remembers the boy with the sharp cheekbones and brittle-looking wrists; approves of the calm young man he sees in front of him now. Gladigau selects a plain frame, but one from the top price range, and wraps Helmut’s likeness for his mother to collect.
    Mutti sits on the bed and holds the photo on her lap. Stays still like that for half the afternoon, heart beating unexpectedly fast. She covers her son’s right eye and looks only at the left, the eye nearest the camera, and finds the root of her uncertainty there. She thinks it might be the muscles of the lower eyelid, tightening slightly at the moment of exposure. Or perhaps just a trick of the light: the two sharp, white pinpoints in the eye, creating the illusion of pain. Closer inspection of the family picture reveals no such information, so it could simply be that her son, a shy young man, was nervous sitting by himself, for his employer. It was an extravagant gift, after all, and unexpected. And the frame.
    The picture is not displayed in the living room, where visitors might see it. His mother keeps it on her bedside table, and later lays it carefully away in a drawer.
    .  .  .
    War has everyone bound tight with purpose. Helmut’s mother and father spend long evenings talking on the landings with their neighbors. Coffee and schnapps, leaning against the doorpost. Voices raised and lowered again, opinions offered. What is to come, what might be.
    For Helmut, this is a lonely time. Not many young men have gone yet, but still he feels the shame of being at home. He keeps out of the way of neighbors whose sons are fighting, keeps to himself more and more, and his mother and father allow him his silence and his solitude.
    He still goes to the station, before and after work, and sometimes at lunchtime, too, but he no longer collects old tickets. The passengers’ charity is humiliating now, and the risk of abuse too great. Helmut hides his arm as best he can, folding it over his chest, or leaning his right side against a pillar. In place of the tickets, he notes times and destinations, arrivals and departures. He has a small leather-bound book, the kind Gladigau uses to note his exposures. The timetable has changed quite a few times since the war began, and Helmut uses this little book to keep track. At