Christopher Linforth

Darkroom

The air is different here, in this new life of hers. Ana knows the perception is temporary, a relief from the suffocation she felt before moving to Zagreb. For now, while she sits inside the darkness of her newsstand kiosk, she watches the returning soldiers across the square. They troop toward the central train station in the indigo light of dusk. Spotlights bolted to the ornate concrete façade shine downward, illuminating a world of angular faces, skin taut and slate-gray. The soldiers disappear through the station arches—she counts them, one by one. She fingers the Rolleiflex under her thick winter coat, belted to her abdomen so the camera will not slip. She rations her film, sticks to eight shots a day. While she waits for the right moment, she remains on her stool, the odd bulge hidden below the counter.

From her vantage point, Ana can photograph any of the commuters walking past. She prefers to take close-ups of patrons who steal from the kiosk, usually a magazine or a bar of nougat. She covertly encourages them—she waits silently in the dark, her presence barely discernable within the boxy structure. After a short while, she hears footsteps: a greasy-haired man leans over the counter. She shrinks into the corner, pleased the man cannot quite reach the cigarettes. As he withdraws his arm, she aims the dual-lenses through the fabricated holes in the coat’s lining and presses the shutter release.

That evening, after her shift is over, she rests the camera on her nightstand. One of her lovers wants her to take nude pictures of him. “Artistic images,” Grgur offers. Ana spurns his suggestion. The previous day she had refused to stow the camera in the drawer for her other lover, Henrik, who was paranoid Ana would send photographs to his wife.

From the bed Ana eyes Grgur’s sunken chest, the contrast with his fatherly potbelly and mound of silvery pubic hair. The age gap between them means something to him, a victory of sorts, but it means little to her. She lights a cigarette and takes a drag; he asks again if she will take his picture.

“It’s a waste,” she says.

“We ought to be celebrating.”

“You didn’t fight.”

“I did my part.”

“Nothing worth a picture.”

Grgur pulls on his grubby underwear and slacks in an exaggerated manner. Then he leans down next to her; his heavy-lidded eyes try to gaze into hers. “My wife is more adventurous,” he says. “And she’s old.” Ana puffs on her cigarette, then stubs the tip against his cheek. Grgur jerks up, his hand pawing desperately at the smudge of burning ash. “Kurva,” he says. He throws on his workshirt and jacket, leaves her flat in a rush. Ana goes to the window and kneels on the wide sill; she watches Grgur run up the block for the tram. She feels unsure of how much longer she can bear to stay in Zagreb. Since her father’s death, a year ago, she has been slipping between lovers and cities, switching jobs so no one knows her for very long. She taught for a while at her hometown school before being dismissed for striking a young girl. Prior jobs at a nursing home and a veterinary clinic ended similarly. Romantic triangles distract her from such matters and allow her to temporarily enjoy, as she does, the jumble of limbs. But lately she has grown tired of men and their selfish needs.

Ana returns to the nightstand and extricates the roll of film from her camera, sealing it inside a canister. She throws on her robe, ties the belt loosely, and picks up her Rolleiflex. She exits her flat to visit the pharmacy at the end of the street. At the counter, Ana hands the assistant the canister and asks her to develop it immediately. The assistant bristles at Ana’s tone; but then she seems to take in Ana’s half-open robe, the expanse of bare skin now on show. The assistant opens the drawer next to her and takes out a roll of Tri-X, placing the film on the counter. Ana scoops it up and sits in front of the large plate window and listens to the hum of the film processor. She knows she will break it off with Grgur and Henrik; the unpleasantness of each man has taken its toll, and she feels ready to be alone again. She loads the new film into her camera, then looks up to see shadows fluttering on the other side of the glass. The pharmacy’s fluorescent light washes over a group of drunken revelers. One of the men in a tan tracksuit laughs when he sees Ana. He comes to the window and grabs his crotch. He spits a few words under his breath. Ana stands, unfazed by this stranger; she runs her fingers down the front of her robe and unties the belt, exposing herself. “Is this what you want?”

The grin disappears from the man’s face. He glances around, then rejoins his friends across the road. Ana imagines he is a soldier, or ex-soldier, of the Hrvatska Vojska. The recent end of the war means little to Ana—her father did not live to see it. Both of them had distrusted the virulent patriotism that swept Croatia, the array of flags and graffitied slogans that proclaimed Za dom spremni!, the hatred for the Serbs. She sits back down and wedges the camera in her lap, wiping the dual-lenses with the hem of her robe.

A little later the assistant returns from the back room and calls Ana over. Ana unseals the packet. All twelve pictures center on the men. Their faces look grotesque and stiff and lifeless. She rips the stack in half and dumps the pieces in the trash basket. Leaving the pharmacy, she heads out of her neighborhood; she photographs a series of haloing lampposts and wet cobblestone streets, silhouettes of women on street corners. Beneath constellated light she explores the edge of Old Town, her instinct drawing her to the birds nesting on the banks of the Sava River. She walks along a dirt path in the darkness. After a while, she flops down on the riverbank; she takes in the course of the black, glassy water. She hardly cares if she falls in, her whole body submerged beneath the surface. She remembers that in the aftermath of the first ceasefire she went on a birdwatching trip with her father; they hiked to the cratered lake on the outskirts of Imotski. Together, they photographed pratincoles and swallows and all manner of plovers. Then they both went to the crater’s edge and stared at the water far below. As the sun hit the horizon, her father promised Ana the Rolleiflex after he passed away.

Before the end of winter, Ana converts her bedroom into a darkroom. She buys a secondhand enlarger, bottles of developer and fixer, plastic tubs, a red light bulb. She tapes black cardstock to the windows and invests in thick velour drapes. For hours, in the cold evenings, she develops her films and prints off the black-and-white pictures. Most are fogged images of tired male faces, gaunt features, cigarettes hanging on thin lips. In the background of several snapshots she sees the same woman near the sign for the train station. The woman wears a slick leather jacket, a knit hat, her hair poking out the back. She appears to be in her mid-fifties: her face distinguished by high cheekbones, a striking aquiline nose, a pair of moles below her lips.

In her darkroom bed, Ana thinks of the woman and her distinctive gaze. The woman always seems to be waiting for someone, a lover or dealer. Perhaps Ana herself. She has no memory of seeing the woman in person; the woman exists only on her negatives, in her prints, a presence she cannot feel or sense beyond the glossy surface. When Ana wakes in the blood-red glow, unsure of the time or her location, the woman’s face lingers, a ghost-image before her.

At the start of her evening shift, Ana pretends to tidy the carousels of postcards flanking each side of the kiosk. She riffles through historic landmarks of Yugoslavia: Mljet’s salted lakes, the Narodni muzej Srbije in Belgrade, a panoramic view of Dubrovnik. Her father had talked about his trips to places like these. Sometimes, he mentioned the women he met. As a child, she would listen to his soulful accounts of their bodies. His descriptions sounded like elegies, flesh he would never revisit. Afterward, he pressed gifts on her: onyx earrings, a single champagne flute, a leather-bound diary stamped with a woman’s name. In the following years Ana had come to the unpleasant conclusion that her father had stolen the objects from his lovers.

Later in the night, tucked safely inside the kiosk, Ana still clutches one of the postcards. She thumbs the matte surface: the hillside image has faded in the days of sun. The muddy off-color appears little different to her view of passing workers, gradations of polyester gray. Then a man stands in front of the kiosk. He wears a HV uniform and patrol cap, a rifle slung over his shoulder. He pockets a copy of Sportske Novosti. She takes his picture. He looks up; he seems to have heard the whir of the shutter. He pitches the newspaper at Ana and calls her a kurva. As he walks away, she releases the camera from the belt and tracks his image to the station. In the viewfinder, she sees the woman leaning against a lamppost, smoking a cigarette. Ana calls to her; the woman walks off, disappears into the crowd at the tram stop.

For the rest of her shift, Ana watches for the woman. She saves her film; she has three frames left, but that may not be enough to get a clear shot. She could show a picture to the other sellers near the station. Someone must know her. Ana ruminates on the identity of the woman over the course of the night, her mind drifting into a kind of half-sleep; behind her eyelids, she sees walls of gray fall away to reveal the woman standing over her. The woman’s face is smooth, featureless, coated with a layer of shiny plastic. Ana startles awake. There is no one on the street. She feels lightheaded, shaken, her throat tight; she locks up the kiosk and leaves. Outside the station, she can hear the electrical buzz of the overhead cables, the last tram of the night speeding away from her. She heads down the boulevard, toward her flat, trying to forget her vision of the woman.

Later, Ana stops at the pharmacy on her street. Through the window, she sees the assistant sweeping the floor. Ana raps on the glass.

The assistant looks up. “We’re closed.”

Ana presses her lips against the glass; a shiver of cold radiates through her skull. She asks for sleeping pills.

The assistant lifts her broom, lets the stiff bristles hover above a pile of dirt. “Do you have a prescription?”

“I need to sleep.”

“I can’t help you.”

“Just give me a pill for tonight.”

“Try milk with brandy.” The assistant goes behind the counter and flips a switch. The pharmacy blinks to black.

The monochromatic haze of Ana’s late shifts blur into a single continuous night. Faces appear warped, masklike, grafted from one body onto another. Though she still carries the camera with her, she has not taken any shots in days. She feels so tired she stays seated on her stool; her weary eyes lock onto the postcard of the hillside: the landscape seems familiar, a lost fragment of her childhood. She stuffs the postcard into her coat pocket and half closes her eyes. A handful of people gloss by the kiosk. Ana tracks their path toward the train station. One thin figure in a black jacket breaks from the group and stands beneath a lamppost; she taps a pack of cigarettes against her palm. Ana recognizes the woman from her pictures; she opens her coat a little and checks the viewfinder: the woman is there. Ana exits the kiosk, sneaks around the side, crosses the road to the woman.

“You’ve been watching me,” says Ana. The woman lights her cigarette; she says nothing. Scuff marks age her leather jacket, her lacy blouse underneath soiled with grease spots. Ana can smell the woman’s rank odor. She is taken aback by the woman’s heavily weathered face and the white roots showing at her hairline.

“I don’t have any business with you,” the woman says.

“Tell me what this is about.”

“Get away from here.”

Ana strikes the woman on the bridge of her nose. Instantly blood ribbons over her lips, the tip of her chin, somehow the cigarette hangs at the corner of her mouth. Ana slides a hand under her winter coat and presses the shutter release. Wanting more shots, she fiddles with the winding mechanism, cranking it around and around, finally feeling the film caught on the rollers. The woman draws the bloodied cigarette from her lips and holds it before her. She steps back and flees toward the train station. Ana chases after the woman but slips off the curb and falls onto the road; she feels a flash of pain in her back and lies there, waits for it to dissipate. Then she sees her coat has come fully open. Male voices shout urgently about cameras, sexual perverts, criminals, Serbian spies. Ana gropes for the Rolleiflex, which has come unbuckled from the belt. She tips the camera back, makes sure the dual-lenses are undamaged. A crowd gathers around Ana. They grasp for the camera; they paw at her face. She struggles to pull herself up. When she gets to her feet, she shoulders through the scrum of men; she hurries to the kiosk, sealing herself inside. She fastens the glass security screen and flips off the light. For a moment, she remains still, her mind uneasy. She knows her time working in the kiosk is over. She reattaches the camera, then cinches her belt. She waits for the line of soldiers to cross the square.

Before long, a tram rattles to the stop near the station arches. Ana heads out and hops the tram. She sits at the back of the car and rests her forehead against the square pane. Concrete buildings flit by in a cloudy haze. At her flat, she drinks a shot of rakija in her kitchen. As she clutches the bottle, she catches her reflection in the colored glass and looks away. She searches her pockets for the postcard, weaving her free hand through the holes in the lining. The postcard is gone. Part of her wants to return to the kiosk and the street, but she accepts it is lost, swept away with the rest of the city’s trash. She takes another swig to ease her pain. After drinking a little more, she decides to develop her last roll of film. In her darkroom, she switches off the red-light and removes the film from her camera. She winds the film onto the spool and drops it into the developing tank. She pours in the developer and screws on the lid. Later, after the film is taken out and dried, she makes a contact sheet and prints off several of the clearest images. She hangs them on the drying line. The photographs reveal sections of the woman’s appearance: a face caught between pain and anger. She looks scared, Ana thinks. A woman ready for this charade to be over. On the last picture, Ana notices a smudge on the woman’s finger. At first, she doesn’t quite understand its significance. Then she looks closer. She dashes to the telephone stand in her hallway and calls her lovers to ask them both to come over straight away.

Upon arrival at her flat, Henrik says he will leave, while Grgur proposes they photograph their impending threesome. Ana ignores both suggestions and ushers the men into her darkroom. Grgur and Henrik loiter near the door, squinting in the blur of red light. Ana plucks the photograph from the drying line and props it against the headboard.

“I don’t know whose wife this is,” she says. “But I’ve had enough.”

Grgur sits next to the print. A whitish nub, a burn welt, scars his cheek. “Maybe she will join us?”

“Unlikely,” says Ana. “I broke her nose.”

Henrik plays with the padlock on the door. “She’s not my wife.”

Grgur runs his hand over his slicked silver-gray hair. “It doesn’t matter who she is,” he says. “It matters only that we’re here.”

“She’s married to one of you.”

“Prove it,” says Grgur.

“I want your wallets,” she says.

The men demur until Ana threatens to call their homes and speak to their wives. Both men pass their wallets over and she dives through each, searching for pictures. Neither wallet has photographs, only state identification cards and a little money.

“Describe your wives to me.”

Henrik glances up. He clutches Ana’s photograph in his hands. “This woman looks more like you. An older version.”

“Enough of the mind games,” she says. “Answer me.”

Grgur sticks his wallet back into his pocket. “My wife’s thin, small-chested, older than me.”

Henrik rolls the photograph up in his hands. She thinks he has understood the strategy behind Grgur’s lies. “Mine’s white-haired. Very old,” he says.

“Perhaps the two of you are married to the same woman.”

Before the men can contest that thought, Ana retreats to the kitchen and comes back with her bottle of rakija and two glasses. She pours the drinks on the nightstand. Most likely her lovers will continue their ruse of innocence. They do not trust her but stay in the darkroom for the possibility of sex. She signals to Grgur and Henrik that they can get drunk. The two men do not seem to hear her; they sit together on the foot of the bed, smoking. They face the full-length mirror—they stare into the silvered glass, entranced by the puffs of gray smoke. Something about the way they regard themselves reminds Ana of her father. She leaves the darkroom and her flat, locking both men inside. She hurries to her old Fićo on the street outside. Amber light from the lampposts illuminates little pockets of the road that she follows as she drives.

Sunlight breaks over the horizon as she cuts off the highway and passes through the outskirts of her hometown. Stone houses line the narrow streets, which curve serpentine around one another. She cruises up and down the steep roads, almost lost, her sense of direction faded for a reason she cannot place. Years have passed since her last visit, that timeframe she thinks is accurate. Her mind acts sleep-deprived, slow and sluggish, the spectral imprint of that woman in her dreams still interfering with her circadian rhythm. Henrik was right that the woman resembles her, but Ana never met her mother or knew what she looked like; her father once told Ana her mother had run away. Institutionalized, she had always thought.

Ana heads to the cratered lake, a kilometer out of Imotski, and parks close to the ridge. Out of the car, Rolleiflex in hand, she makes her way to the lip of the crater. She stares down the side of the cliff into the dark water, thinking of what it takes to be one of the human birds who dive in during the summer, and also the jumpers who willfully plunge—once or twice a year—onto the rocks far below.

She kneels at the edge, lifts her camera, and peers through the viewfinder, the churn of water filling the frame. Her fingertip lingers over the shutter release. A cold wind blows around her, and she notices a lone pratincole swoop to the lake. She shoots a few pictures, the bird always out of frame. She tips the Rolleiflex; it feels weightless, shorn from her grasp. The camera spins as it tumbles down, then strikes the rocks, scattering pieces of the plastic body and shards of lens into the water.

Ana considers the perilous drop—whether she would survive a fall, unlike so many. Whether it mattered to her if she did not. She straightens up, feels the wind and the cold; she backtracks to her Fićo. Seated inside, she cranks back the seat, lies stiff, her eyes closed. Sometime later, after a formless, empty sleep, she speeds away, unable to recall starting the engine. She slips by her father’s cottage, stopping a distance down the road, letting the engine idle. She turns her head to see: the old place backlit, dark, uninhabited, his car absent from the driveway. It felt like a lifetime ago when she had sat next to her father’s gravestone, trying to understand why he had refused to search for her mother. She had confessed a desire to see her mother again, to talk to her, ask her where she had been. Ana had shied away from admitting her affairs with older men or the incident with her student. The young girl had claimed another’s pencil drawing as her own and written her name below the sketch, a house with crude figures peering out from the windows. She had stolen another child’s vision of a happy family. No one was allowed to do that.

Ana drives on, instinctively making her way to the school where she taught. The iron gates are open, the playground quiet. Parked at the side of the main building sits a handful of cars and she brakes behind them. Waiting there, even for a minute, feels like a mistake and she climbs out and goes into the building. The lobby is dark. She veers into one of the hallways. Square windows in each classroom door glow a clinical white. Ana peers through the glass panels, trying to remember the name of the girl. She had an old-fashioned name, like Dragica or Ljubica, but it was neither of those. Ana approaches the final classroom at the end of the hall. She pauses at the lit window. Inside, a dozen children sit in a horseshoe arrangement of desks. Ana cannot see the girl she hit, even when she enters.

“Where is she?”

The teacher freezes by the blackboard. “Who are you?”

Ana does not recognize the woman—her replacement—and suspects the girl is hiding. Yet, as she glances around, the children remain unfamiliar to her, their pale faces blank. They watch her. Then they lower their eyes. The teacher shouts policija to a man in dirty gray coveralls at the door. Ana takes another look around the classroom; she can feel pressure constrict her throat. She brushes past the janitor in the doorway and runs to the exit; she hears voices call out after her, the loudest asking her to stop.

Once in her car, Ana avoids checking the rearview mirror. She drives out of the playground, past the gates, and through the red stoplight at the end of the street, barely even thinking to breathe as she finds the highway. The line of black asphalt stretches out to the horizon, back to Zagreb and her lovers in the darkroom. They could have easily forced the padlock, but she understands they crave her; they want to be captured. As the engine stutters, sounding out its death throes, Ana recalls her first camera, given to her many years ago by her father. The Altix had a receipt in the sleeve of its black leatherette case—the box camera had belonged to a woman named Marija Horvat. Ana often wondered what had happened to the woman and why she no longer owned the camera. At night, as a child, Ana stood in front of the mirror, focusing the lens of the Altix. Why had the woman let such a precious thing go?

Christopher Linforth has recently published fiction in Epiphany, Grain, Fiction International, Notre Dame Review, Day One, and Descant, among other magazines. He has been awarded fellowships and scholarships to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.