The Karnau Tapes (17 page)

Sievers shakes his head. 'People strive so doggedly to prove that speech is of animal origin,' he says, 'as if only waiting for the collapse of all existing theories to restore their belief in its divine, inscrutable provenance. There are two possibilities: that the unintelligibly fluttering tongue is controlled by some unseen agency, projecting the voice and rendering it audible from afar, whirring like a weightless body in flight; or that speech resembles some earth-bound creature whose paws adhere to the ground as though suffering from excessive gravity, aroused by instinct and born of the inadequacy of the flesh.'

But what exactly happened to these tongues? An enforced return to the stage that precedes speech? Wolf children, that's what they call foundlings that are reared, not by their parents, but by wolf packs in the wilderness. Close to the beast, they know no language and never learn to use their voices in the human manner.

These ears here: gristly eavesdroppers vibrating with muscular impulses, listening intently, forever in motion; or, on another head, two rigid bell-mouths devoid of whorls and threaded with countless pulsing venules. Big earlobes, grown soft and flabby with age, alongside little, finely fashioned organs of hearing. Rays of sunlight illuminate another row of specimen jars: Stumpfecker's pickled larynxes, afflicted with ulcers, deformed by growths. The articulatory apparatus of a child born without vocal cords, though the cartilage and tendons that should have retained the cords are fully developed. Stumpfecker, as deft with the scalpel as a cook with an apple corer. A sunbeam has now irradiated a jar at the back of the shelf: shimmering floccules suspended in a murky, fermenting solution of formaldehyde — a defective brew, no doubt. It's impossible to tell what the jar contains.

*

Papa is now on fifthly. And sixthly. How many more questions is he going to ask? The audience keep shouting, 'Yes!' at the top of their voices. I wish they'd stop making such a din. It's awfully loud, my eardrums are almost bursting.

Seventhly, eighthly, ninthly. The floor's shaking, they're stamping their feet so hard and waving their arms in the air. Hilde and I can't see anything now that some of them have climbed on their chairs. Please hurry up and finish, Papa, I can't stand it much longer. My throat's all tight and my head is throbbing. We couldn't get out of here if we tried, not yet. We couldn't get out into the street and the open air, there are too many people in the way. 'Tenth and last,' says Papa. He actually said it.

Thank goodness, we'll soon be able to leave. Fresh air at last. 'Children,' Papa says, 'we're all children.' Is he going to finish up with a few words about us? Hilde looks at me, but Papa means we're all children of our nation. We all need warm hearts and cool heads, he says, but my head is hot, terribly hot. I draw a deep breath, but it's no use, there's no air left in here, just smelly breath and sweat. I don't know how Papa can go on shouting in this air.

'Nation arise,' he says, 'and let the storm break!'

I don't know how these people can still find the breath to sing the national anthem. Somebody touches my hand, which is all clammy. Mama takes my arm and says, 'That's it, Helga, we're going home now. Papa will follow, he won't be long.'

Hilde has already stood up. We go out into the air, the lovely fresh air. We're so deaf we can hardly hear Mama. 'Poor Papa,' she says, 'he hasn't had a single cigarette for two whole hours.'

Hilde's looking exhausted, as if she'd also found it hard to bear, as if Papa and the audience had scared her too. 'Did you see, Helga?' she says quietly, in a bewildered sort of voice. 'Papa's shirt was absolutely soaked by the end.’

*

The test subjects are slapped awake. 'Shine a light there!' Just dim silhouettes, they now live in permanently nocturnal conditions. It's strange: their sense of touch is so impaired that they ought by rights to activate their voices in the darkened ward, establish vocal contact with their fellow patients and explore their surroundings with the aid of echoes, but they do nothing of the kind. Their lips have ceased to form words and are merely things to be chewed. Like the sound of silence itself: the mute tongue reposes on the lower lip. The pinkness of their skin derives solely from breathing, from the imprint of air alone. We're recording them day and night, they can sense it even though they've never seen any of our microphones. They're no longer capable of standing, and no one feels like hauling those soiled bundles to their feet and escorting them to the latrines. They now have to defecate while seated, and every change of position causes their sodden mattresses to give off such a stench that we can no longer keep the windows shut, so on many nights the mattresses end up stiff with frozen urine. They, who lead an animal existence, have finally eluded us.

Noises disturb the nocturnal hush as the acoustic twilight of dawn approaches. But this is not the rustling of some animal by the roadside, not the stirring of dry leaves; these are dry throats at work. It takes a vast amount of time and effort to master one's own voice, at least to some degree, but how quickly people can lose what they have so laboriously acquired and how little effort it takes to obliterate everything until not the smallest trace of it remains. In just the same way, dogs cast discipline and training to the winds as soon as instinct reminds them of the world that existed before the advent of man.

The rattle of parched throats ... Quite young, they are, these youthful, blue-faced patients who seem to be choking on their own voices. They're becoming desiccated and drained by the endless stream that flows from every bodily orifice: not urine alone, but nasal mucus and tears. To what is it attributable, this immense loss of fluid? Clearly, people cannot cope with the sound of their own voices once they're fully exposed to them: in the long run, being compelled to listen to their naked, uncontrolled voices is more than they can endure.

*

There, another one did a wee-wee, a thin jet landed on the dark floor in front of me. There's a pool of it glistening behind the bars of the cage. I couldn't see a thing at first, not a thing, but my eyes are getting used to the darkness. The flying foxes are hanging upside down with their wings wrapped around them. Now one of them has woken up. He starts licking his fur, I can even make out his little tongue as he runs it over his pitch-black tummy. I've suddenly spotted another. I didn't see him leave the place where he was sleeping, but he's fluttering around the cage. The light's very dim. That's to make the flying foxes think it's night-time. Others have left their perches at the top of the cage. There's a whole swarm of them in the air, and the ones still hanging upside down are already unfolding their wings.

There's a flying fox sitting on the floor of the cage in front of me. Or rather, he's lying on his tummy with his wings spread out. He's sniffing around in the sand and turning his head from side to side. He crawls along a bit, but he doesn't use his short back legs, he uses his wings. He looks like a legless man strapped to a board with wheels screwed to it. He cranes his neck and listens, I can see his ears waggle. He's looking at me with his black, boot-button eyes. They're wide open and staring into the darkness.

'You see, Hilde, you didn't believe me when I said they really existed, flying foxes, and that a friend of Herr Karnau's actually kept some.'

'Rubbish, that's not true. It was you that didn't believe me when Herr Karnau told me about them.'

'Liar!'

'Say that again!'

'Ssh,' says Herr Moreau, 'not so loud, children, you'll frighten them.'

Herr Moreau is stricter than Herr Karnau. Mama didn't tell us, when we visited her at the sanatorium, that we were going to be allowed to go and see the flying foxes with Herr Karnau. We should really have gone home again in the afternoon. It was only a short visit, because Mama isn't really well yet, she's been away in Dresden far longer than usual.

Herr Karnau told us once that he doesn't get scared in the blackout, in fact he thinks it's nice when the sky above the city is dark, really dark, so you can see it better. But this darkness here is scary. The flying foxes seem to suck up all the light — all the air, too. It's like being in an air-raid shelter when the lights go out. As if there's not enough air, as if the darkness is squeezing the air out of your lungs and everything's closing in and you can't breathe any more. That's why people in air-raid shelters start singing, so they know for sure they're still breathing. The sound of their singing is just a sign that they've no need to be scared. It proves the air in the shelter hasn't given out, even though it's all dark.

*

'Remember those cigarette cards I gave you when you were a child, Hermann? You never tired of looking at one in particular. It belonged to a set called
Animals of the World,
or maybe
Distant Lands,
and it showed a colony of flying foxes asleep in a tree in Madagascar. Well, here we are after all these years, watching some real, live flying foxes. I always get the strangest feeling, as if that old picture had come to life — as if the creatures, when they wake up, are emerging from that cigarette card.'

Moreau whispers in my ear without taking his eyes off the flying foxes, which he brought back four years ago from a trip to Madagascar. He was my parents' friend originally, but I always felt as a child that I was the one he really came to see. Every time he turned up he had some new and exciting tale to tell — about golems, vampires and other creatures of the night. I still have a particularly vivid recollection of one of his stories: it was about a doctor who lived on a remote island inhabited by creatures midway between man and beast. Moreau's extensive knowledge of the animal world encouraged me to ask him innumerable questions, and it was he who later taught me to recognise animal voices and imitate them. I always thought of him as an old man, though he can't have been any older than I am now.

*

We've been left in Herr Moreau's sitting-room, just us children on our own. Helmut is exploring the room, looking at the pictures on the walls, the photos on the chest of drawers. He opens the top drawer, though I'm sure it's not allowed. We don't have anything to do, and we don't feel like playing a game. 'Hey,' Helmut says suddenly, 'look what I've found.'

He's opened the door of a big cupboard, and he's waving a bar of chocolate in the air. 'Look,' he says, 'and there's masses more. Did you ever see so many bars of chocolate in your life?'

No, never. And it's real chocolate, whole slabs of it, not those little pastilles in round tins that Papa sometimes sucks although they taste so bitter. We haven't had any sweets for ages. We're fed like soldiers these days, us children, and the food we get at home tastes even worse than it did before the war. People always said our parents kept us short, even then, and a lot of our guests used to stuff themselves at home before they came to a meal at our house.

'Think we could have one of them?' Helmut says. 'There'd be plenty left for Herr Moreau.'

The others look at me. 'Oh, please, Helga, just one.'

I give Helmut a nod and we watch him unwrap the bar with our mouths watering. The silver paper makes a lovely rustling sound. It's milk chocolate. The others make a grab for it, but Helmut hangs on tight. 'Don't, you'll break it. Let Helga divide it up so we all get the same.'

He hands it to me. There are eight squares in the bar and six of us. One square each leaves two over — two between six. 'Here, all of you, take one. We can divide up the rest when everyone's finished theirs.'

Nobody says anything, they all nibble their chocolate and look around the room. Hilde sucks hers like a lollipop, but you can also bite off little bits if you try, then it lasts longer. At home we get watery soup. When Papa comes home for a meal he sits there slurping it up without noticing how watery it is, and when we ask him something he doesn't look up from his plate, just nods and slurps even louder instead of answering. He doesn't care what he eats, so he never thinks of telling the cook to dish up something better. No wonder he stares at us sometimes, all surprised, and asks Mama why we're looking so pale. "When it comes to the last two squares, Helmut wants a bigger share than the rest of us because he found the chocolate. He stuffs a whole square into his mouth, which is unfair.

Helmut chews up the square and swallows it. We'll simply have to pinch another bar of chocolate from the cupboard. Herr Moreau has got so many, he'll never notice if two are missing. The only thing is, we'll have to get rid of the paper somehow. This time, to avoid arguments, we divide it up straight away. Helmut puts a square on his tongue, talks with his mouth open, and his gooey piece of chocolate falls on the carpet. It's not so easy to talk with something balanced on your tongue. Hilde drops a piece on the carpet too, and little Heide spits hers out for fun, without even trying to say something. We unwrap the next bar. Holde puts her head back and drops a square into her mouth. She nearly chokes, which makes her laugh. There's a box of chocolates in the cupboard. We decide to try them too.

'I hope they don't have any cognac in them,' Hilde says. 'Cognac tastes nasty.'

We open the box. The candies turn out to be nougat, and so soft they melt in your mouth even without being chewed. Hilde sits down in an armchair and Helmut holds one out. She opens her mouth, but just as she's about to close it he snatches the candy away and eats it himself. Hilde's quicker the next time, she bites his fingers, but not hard enough to hurt. Helmut goes round with the box of chocolates and pops one in everyone's mouth.

'What's going on in here?'

Herr Moreau looks at the brown smears on the sofa and the carpet, the torn wrappers on the floor. We don't say a word. The chocolate in Helmut's hand is starting to melt.

*

It's possible, by dint of a little will-power, to become inured to the most atrocious sounds. Before long, the pathetic whimpers that once gave you a blinding headache can be taken in your stride. So, indeed, can the terrible screams that fill the air day and night. You soon find them no more than a faint background noise capable of being drowned by a whisper — and this although you felt unable, in the early days, to make your own voice clearly heard above the din and had to begin each sentence several times over.