Otto unwound about four feet of film leader from the front steel reel mounted on the projector, and began to methodically thread it around the sprockets and rollers along the film channel, pausing once to drink from a tumbler of scotch.
“She won’t come,” Dieter said, drawing the curtains.
The last Otto had seen of Ingrid was as she walked away from him, heading nowhere. That was many hours ago.
“She might,” Otto muttered.
“She’s not interested, Otto; she doesn’t want to be here.”
Otto closed the film gate and wound the excess leader onto the take–up reel. “Ingrid says you probably don’t remember anything from the home movies we watched last night.”
Dieter flopped onto the sofa, tumbler in hand. “I don’t.”
Otto studied his watch. It was eight o’clock. “So you don’t know who the baby was in the film?”
“No,” Dieter said, straight–faced.
“I think Ingrid knows something,” Otto said.
“Why do you say that?”
“I visited her today when you were at the library,” Otto said.
Dieter looked away awkwardly.
“We spoke about a number of things, including the film,” Otto continued.
Dieter sat forward and re–established eye contact with Otto, curiosity etched into his face. “And what did she tell you?”
Otto rubbed his chin and breathed in deeply. “Nothing much, but I sensed that she was constantly measuring up what to tell me, and what not to.”
Dieter swallowed a mouthful of scotch and stared at his hands embracing the tumbler, as though deep in thought. “What are you thinking?” Otto asked.
Dieter seemed to flush slightly. “Nothing.”
“How long should we wait?” Otto asked.
“I’m telling you, she won’t come. It wouldn’t surprise me if she’s booked a return flight to New York, the way she flew out of here last night.” He paused. “I think she resents us, Otto.”
“Why?”
He shrugged, like a petulant teenager. “Because we were given opportunities that we embraced and used to the full.”
“Studying abroad?”
Dieter nodded.
“She wanted nothing more than to marry Frederick, despite Dad’s advice. No–one made her,” Otto said.
“I know, but I still think that’s why she resents us. She made her choices and they didn’t work out. You and I have both done well.”
“That’s not our fault.”
“I’m not saying it is. But I think that’s how she sees it. She reckons we were favoured above her, got special treatment.”
Otto drank more scotch. What Dieter said was true; he could recall the numerous occasions when this subject had flared up and caused an argument. His beloved Morris Minor had been just one such point of envious contention.
“Why did she and Dad have such differences?” Otto asked.
Dieter shrugged thoughtfully. “It goes back a long way, Otto, but I reckon her marriage to Frederick had a lot to do with it. You remember how she reacted when I questioned her hasty divorce to marry Newman.”
Otto was shaking his head. “There’s got to be more to it than that. She’s being very… evasive.”
Dieter stood up and approached Otto at the projector. “More scotch?”
“Thanks.”
Dieter sighed deeply as he poured, appearing to be weighing something up in his mind. He lingered beside Otto.
“Otto, there’s something I need to tell you.”
Otto studied Dieter’s face, sensing the gravity in his voice. An expectant silence hung between the two brothers, neither able to break it, as Dieter seemed to struggle for the right words. Suddenly, there was a loud knock at the front door. Otto’s eyes widened.
“Ingrid?”
Dieter exhaled, deflated, and rubbed his eyes as Otto rushed like an eager puppy to open the front door.
“Have you started?” Ingrid asked Otto.
“No, we were waiting for you. Thanks for coming.”
Ingrid glided into the living room in a black coat and boots. She regarded Dieter for a moment and then seemed to decide that greeting him was inevitable.
“Hello, Dieter.” Her voice could have frozen alcohol.
“Ingrid,” Dieter replied. Eye contact between them was perfunctory.
“Anything before we start? Tea, coffee? Have you eaten?” Otto asked.
Ingrid removed her coat as she walked through the doorway into the kitchen and shook out her long, golden hair. “Actually, I’d love a bourbon tonight.”
“We have scotch, this isn’t New York.” Dieter shook his head.
“Don’t I know it.”
Soon they were all ready in the living room, Otto beside the projector, at the ready.
“Anyone want to say anything before we start?” Otto asked.
Brief silence.
“No, Otto, let’s just watch the film,” Dieter said irritably.
A blurry, square image, heavily lined and scratched, burst forth from the screen as the projector hummed and ticked, pulling twenty–four frames, seven inches, of film through the film gate every second. Otto adjusted the focus.
Two children cartwheel through spreading puddles of murky water in a garden. It appears to be raining, though the film is heavily scratched, jagged lines burning across the image like staccato lightning. The older child, wearing a skirt that clings to her wet skin, is far more proficient than the younger child who keeps veering off course, colliding on several occasions with the older child, legs landing clumsily on the girl’s back.
“Is that you, Ingrid?” Otto asked.
No reply.
The younger child is wearing shorts and both children are barefoot, long strands of wet hair plastered against smiling faces. The grass beneath the puddles appears slippery and several times both children lose their footing and fall into the water, to great displays of mirth and amusement. The younger child keeps glancing at the camera, smiling, revealing a missing front tooth.
The scene jumps to one of the children pulling on a black hosepipe in a makeshift game of tug–of–war, repeatedly losing their grip and landing on their buttocks with a great splash in the puddles of water. This becomes repeated so frequently that it eventually appears contrived.
“Where’s the baby?” Otto said.
A black car bearing the Mercedes–Benz star on the front grille draws up beside the pavement. A man wearing a homberg steps out with another man and a woman. Everyone is smiling effusively and the woman has bulging, protuberant eyes. They pose beside each other, woman in the centre, smiling self–consciously at the camera.
“That looks like Dad,” Dieter said. “Don’t know the other two. Uncle, perhaps? Aunt, friends?”
“She looks like she has a thyroid problem,” Otto said, analysing her physical appearance.
The scene jumps again. The older girl, wearing a summery skirt, is feeding milk out of a teated glass bottle to a lamb standing eagerly beside her, tugging on the rubber teat. The girl appears to be about thirteen or fourteen; confident and assured on camera. The scene cuts to the younger child stepping into a pair of giant wellington boots that reach up well beyond her knees. Bursting with smiles, the child takes huge, stiff–legged steps to lift the boots off the ground. The scene jags violently to the two children standing side by side as the older girl feeds the lamb. The younger child tries to attract the older one’s attention by playfully pulling her hair, but elicits no response.
“God, I hope we never ate that poor thing,” Dieter remarked.
“I think we might have,” Ingrid replied.
Then the younger child comes around the corner of the timber–framed house, chasing after the lamb but struggling to run in the enormous boots, giving even the spring lamb little difficulty in escaping. Up and down the garden they run repeatedly, until suddenly, in the background, a toddler in a nappy crawls into the frame from behind a flowering hydrangea.
“There it is!” Otto said excitedly. “The baby.”
The next shot is of the baby, full–screen, crawling with great concentration towards a bed of flowers. Curiously, the child perambulates with legs fully extended, resembling a dung beetle. As the child reaches the flowerbed one arm crumples and the toddler topples forwards into the flowers, rising somewhat startled a moment later. No tears. Then another view of the baby crawling straight–legged towards the camera at surprisingly high speed, determined to reach out and smudge the camera lens.
“I recall Mum and Dad talking about someone in the family who used to crawl like that, never on hands and knees,” Otto said.
Ingrid and Dieter, perhaps self–consciously, shuffled in their seats.
The baby crawls this way and that around the garden, even ascending steps at the front door before descending them backwards, very cautiously, all with legs out straight. In the background the two older children play with the lamb, one minute feeding it, the next chasing it.
“It was me,” Dieter said. “I crawled like a spider, Mum used to say.”
Otto froze, confused. “So, if that was you, Dieter, then who are the other two? Only one can be Ingrid.”
Dieter and Ingrid glanced across at Otto, their faces partially illuminated by the flickering greyscale reflections off the screen, like Nosferatu in a moment of ghoulish deliberation. Their eyes remained locked on each other’s for a moment, both Dieter and Ingrid appearing frozen by inertia.
The image on the screen changes dramatically to one of tall, inverted J–shaped concrete fence posts with barbed wire strung between them; barren, muddy ground; guard towers rising at intervals like square rooks on a chessboard; simple, dark wooden barracks with tiny windows; uneven stone paving on which soldiers in Wehrmacht helmets and jackboots patrol the perimeter and watch over the camp from their towers with rifles over their shoulders.
The stark depictions on the screen turned everyone’s heads as they stared, transfixed, at the unexpected scenes captured by Father’s Agfa camera, presumably held in his own hands.
“What the hell is this?” Otto said.
A work detachment of men clad in baggy striped clothing and linen hats fills a deep trench close to a tall barbed wire fence. Watched over by armed Wehrmacht soldiers the labourers toil with pickaxes and spades, deepening the trench and heaping what appears to be clay soil above their heads on the verge of the trench. Above them another detachment of men, wearing the same clothes and revealing thin arms and skeletal chests, scoop up the chunks of wet clay in bony hands and place them in steel wagons anchored on a makeshift rail track.
“Jesus!” Dieter exclaimed. “This looks like a labour camp.”
The camera pans unevenly across the detachment of labourers to the land beside the fence where the Wehrmacht soldiers are beating one of the prisoners, kicking and striking him with the butts of their rifles. Some of the soldiers look stern and angry; others appear to laugh as they smoke cigarettes. A rough splice jars the image, which jumps for several seconds.
Otto hastily depressed the loop restore button until the image stabilised.
A large brick building with two wide ramps rising side by side up to the third floor fills the screen. Rail tracks lead to the base of each ramp and on one side three steel wagons, as seen earlier, stand in wait. The camera pans around revealing a narrow gauge railway track and a wooden slatted goods carriage: Deutsche Reichsbahn Kassel 37723G is painted in white on its side. Panning around further the camera stops on a square metal signpost with white lettering painted on a black background: Neuengamme vereinigen Sachsenhausen.
“Jesus, it is a camp,” Otto blurted incredulously. “Neuengamme – never heard of it.”
“Why the hell was Dad taking this footage though?” Dieter said, staring open–mouthed at the screen. “Was this near Hamburg?”
Ingrid sat with her hands clasped firmly between her knees. Her face, though appearing confused, was a study in concentration.
“How much more is there?” Dieter asked, turning around to look at Otto and the projector.
Otto calculated from the three hundred feet of film remaining on the eight hundred foot capacity feeding reel how much longer the film would run.
“About eight; nine minutes.”
The scene changes suddenly to a large, swift–flowing, reed–lined river, a cityscape comprising tall buildings, spires and gabled roofing visible in the background. The water flows quickly past a timber quayside under construction, with dozens of emaciated men wearing striped prison clothing labouring under the unforgiving gaze of armed Wehrmacht soldiers. A sign on a wooden post reveals the river to be Die Elbe. A detachment of labourers to one side are digging a deep trench, several yards wide and deep, using simple hand tools, standing in sucking mud that has soiled their clothing up to their waists, and in some, beyond.
“That must be the Elbe River in Hamburg,” Dieter remarked. “Didn’t we used to live there?”
“Hamburg?” Otto repeated. Having been born in Lüderitz their former life in Germany was wholly unfamiliar to him.
“Uh–huh,” Dieter mumbled, staring at the grainy, scratched images on the screen. “Those people are starving – look at their faces, their necks.”
“I didn’t know there were camps in Hamburg,” Otto said.
“There were camps everywhere, Otto,” Dieter replied.
Another rough jump splice and the image is suddenly one of several little kittens climbing in and out of a pair of large, leather shoes on a wooden floor, grabbing at the laces with their claws, watched over lazily by an adult cat in a wicker basket. The boundless energy of the kittens is delightful as they jump on each other, chasing their tails and cavorting tirelessly.
“That was my cat, she was called Flaumschen,” Ingrid said, unexpectedly, her face lighting up and softening as she stared at the images.
“What kind of a name is that?” Otto asked.
“She was very fluffy, you see.”
The kittens are soon joined by a small brown Dachshund who stands tolerantly amongst them, seemingly reluctant, as though placed there deliberately for the camera.
“Oh God, I’d forgotten the dog… what did we call him again?” Ingrid said. “Kaiser, that was it – the king – because he was treated so royally in the house by Dad. He loved that mutt.”
The toddler is back onscreen, seated in front of a large glass bowl, holding a long wooden spoon that seems to dwarf the little child. The toddler’s face is smeared with dark smudges, presumably chocolate, emanating from the wooden spoon that is being ineffectually scraped in the bowl to remove every last tempting vestige of cocoa. Even the toddler’s white nappy is smeared in chocolate. The child’s face concentrates intensely on manoeuvring the cruelly long, flat spoon into its mouth, tongue snaking disobediently about. Suddenly the spoon drops to the floor, eliciting a silent howl of dismay from the toddler. A young girl steps forward, wearing a dress and ribbons in her hair, retrieves the spoon and hands it back to the toddler with a reassuring pat on the head, instantly quelling the tears. The girl looks straight into the camera and smiles. She looks remarkably like Ingrid, with similar facial bones, a pudgy nose and lightly freckled cheeks.
“My God she looks just like you, Ingrid. Is that you?” Otto said.
Ingrid did not look away from the screen.
The scene changes abruptly to the garden, where the older girl is propelling herself on a scooter with bulbous white tyres, one foot on the running board and the other pushing the scooter around in wide circles on the lawn in front of the hydrangeas. The younger girl stands behind her, grasping her waist tightly, and every time the scooter passes close to the camera the younger girl falls off the scooter in a controlled dive, rolling onto the grass. Then she smiles at the camera, revealing her missing two front teeth and hair covered in dried grass, before dashing back to hitch a lift from the older girl again. The theatrical dive is repeated over and over in front of the camera. The image begins to jump and heavy lines scrape across it as the quality deteriorates sharply. Suddenly it ends and the screen reflects clear white light.
Otto switched the projector off and the lights on. A silence beyond the sudden cessation of the rhythmic ticking and mechanical noise of the Bell & Howell projector engulfed all three Adermann children. Outside they could hear the howl of the south–wester as it gusted and swirled around the house, occasionally blasting the windows with a spray of desert sand that sounded like static electricity.
Otto was the first to break the silence. “We cannot go on ignoring what we’re seeing in these images.” He was perched on the edge of the dining table, swinging one leg absently, watching his pendulous foot in preference to looking at Dieter or Ingrid’s averted faces.
“Will someone please tell me what’s going on?” Otto said quietly.