The Darkroom of Damocles Read Online Free PDF Page A

to keep out two men, two men who had a message from somebody called Dorbeck which they wanted to pass on to Osewoudt in person. She had said he didn’t live here any more, that the name on the shop meant nothing. After that she had locked the door and lowered the blinds. ‘Clever of me, wasn’t it, my boy?’ She was greatly excited. He almost had to force her to go back to bed, and on the stairs she burst into tears, saying she had felt it coming and that it had to be stopped, stopped.
    â€˜You won’t help me! Packing me off to bed like this as if I’m ill! You’ll come to grief if you don’t listen to me!’
    She ranted on, but nothing she said gave him any idea of what the two men might have wanted to tell him from Dorbeck. When they did not return in the afternoon, as he had hoped, he decided they had probably only come to ask if the films were ready. Straight after supper he went down to the cellar, dissolved the developer and the fixing salt in tap water and lit the little red oil lamp. Muddled visions of German defensive works, artillery positions, airfields, photostats of secret weapons and other classified material flashed across his mind as he took the first film from its canister. His heart raced, he could scarcely breathe imagining everything that was about to be revealed thanks to a bit of simple chemistry, pictures that would be pored over by the Military Command in London. But when he started unrolling the film he broke out in a sweat. He gauged its length to be two metres. The celluloid was very stiff; it kept slipping from his fingers, coiling around him like a snake.
    He struggled on; no images appeared. He tried holding the strips up to the red light. Nothing happened, other than that the films, which were milky white to start with, turned completely black. Finally he hung them up to dry and went to bed. When he looked at them again in the morning all he could see was dark smudges. He cut the strips into sections and put them in an envelope, which he laid in the drawer under the counter. But because he assumed they’d be no good and didn’t want to appear totally inept, he did something that could be interpreted as a deed of desperation: he withdrew his working capital (600 guilders) from the bank, went to The Hague, stepped into a camera shop and within five minutes had bought himself a Leica, which he paid for in cash. He took the tram to Scheveningen in the hope of photographing German military installations: anti-aircraft batteries, army encampments and vessels being fitted for the invasion of England. But when he got there he saw very little of potential interest. There wereindeed a few ships in the harbour, but he had no idea whether they had anything to do with the impending German offensive against England. He photographed a few lorries on the off-chance, and also took a picture of the German sentry outside the prison. This was seen by the German. Instead of raising the alarm, he stood yet more stiffly to attention. Osewoudt returned home having taken no more than six photos, none of which he thought would be of any use. He was supposed to have sent off Dorbeck’s films the day before. As a last resort he took the envelope containing the botched negatives from the counter drawer, wrote E. Jagtman, Legmeerplein 25, Amsterdam on the front, stuck a stamp on it and dropped it in the letter box. For the next few days he left his mother in charge of the shop, only returning home at night to sleep. He wandered around taking photos at random, for what purpose he did not know. No Germans took any notice of him, which strengthened his feeling that he could not have photographed any location of significance, simply because he was so ignorant about military affairs. But in any case he would be able to show Dorbeck he had tried his level best not to let him down. After three days he felt he had sufficient grounds for a reprieve, should he be called to account.