The Karnau Tapes (6 page)

But she doesn't respond, acts as if she hasn't heard because she's too busy drying Hedda's legs.

*

How loud it crackles, how my ears are crackling. The cold makes them crackle whenever I turn my head, whenever I speak. It must be my bones, or my eardrums. How cold it is. Winter's really here already.

We're out for a walk dressed up in our warmest things, hats and all, and the little ones are wearing their mittens. Herr Karnau's walking on ahead with me, and all at once Hilde and Helmut start chanting behind us: 'Helga's got a sweetheart, Helga's got a sweetheart!’

*

The children are laughing behind my back. I can hear excited whispers and fits of the giggles because Helga is talking to me on her own. Odd, because earlier today I got the impression that she'd sooner not have talked to me at all. It's as if the children had only properly woken up in the open air, as if they were still bemused by their unexpected change of quarters last night. Helga has become more communicative. She's talking quite freely, pointing out leaves on the ground and naming the trees they come from, asking me about my work and telling me about her home, her parents and schoolfriends.

*

Coco is tugging at his lead. The others crowd round Herr Karnau, they're all dying to walk Coco. Hilde runs off with him, her scarf fluttering in the air. The others dash after her, but I stay behind with Herr Karnau. I'm allowed to push Hedda's push-chair by myself; she's muffled up to the neck and her cheeks are all red. She calls after the others, doesn't listen to what the two of us are saying, just watches Coco bounding across the slushy field. Herr Karnau says, 'Homesick, Helga? Would you sooner have stayed at home? I often feel like that when I'm away from home. I never enjoyed staying with strangers as a child.'

Maybe Herr Karnau isn't as peculiar as I thought to begin with. He's being nicer to me, anyway, and not spending all his time with the younger ones. They're now playing tag with Coco.

*

Helga's a bright little thing. Many of the questions she asks, many of the words she uses and the remarks she makes are not at all what one would expect from a girl of eight. It's as if she were far older, as if she were already on the threshold of adult life, when a young person deliberately tries to shake off the language and conversational topics of a child. But she also keeps coming out with remarks that clearly advertise her age, as if she has involuntarily relegated herself, while speaking, to the same category as her brother and sisters. When that happens she looks up at me shyly to see if I've noticed. They're so touching, those moments, it's all I can do not to laugh. However, Helga would be bound to interpret such a laugh as a mark of grown-up arrogance.

I continually coax her to talk. I make a point of using some word she probably doesn't know yet, and, sure enough, she'll ask me what it means. Far from pretending to be omniscient, as an adult might, she's delighted when she learns something new. She'll try out the word in another context and ask if it can be used that way or if it's the equivalent of some word in her existing vocabulary. She listens intently to my explanations and statements of fact, which promptly give rise to more questions that require answers.

*

'What if Heide were a deaf-mute like the people you told me about? We don't know what they're like, after all, because we've never seen any. We wouldn't notice a thing at first because babies can't talk anyway. Wouldn't we be able to talk together, not ever? Would Heide be a cripple? That would be awful. Our mother had a crippled baby once, but it was born dead.'

'Are you worried about your new sister?' Herr Karnau says. 'But why say cripple, Helga? Cripple is such an unkind word. If Heide were deaf and dumb — I'm sure she isn't, but
if
she were — she would simply be a deaf-mute and not so very different from the rest of you. There is a difference, of course. Heide would have to learn sign language, and so would you and your parents. Then you could communicate with her by signs. It would mean a lot of hard work at first, because the rest of you children learned to speak without trying. Long before it utters a word, a baby that isn't deaf and dumb can hear its parents talking to it and each other, so it starts to speak by degrees — by imitating them. And even before that, what else does a baby do the whole time but try out its voice and see what effects it produces? That's what it's doing when it bellows or whimpers, chuckles or burbles happily to itself without trying to attract its mother's attention, or when it wakes up from its afternoon rest and screams because there's no one around to pick it up.

'Yes, the deaf-mute child has a hard time acquiring a language of its own. It's aware, to begin with, of every last gesture it makes to convey something, but before long its mastery of sign language is so complete that it communicates quite freely and spontaneously as long as it knows that its friends or brothers and sisters can understand it.’

*

How different it is, conversing with a child. I generally do my best to avoid conversations. Not because it bothers me if people address me of their own accord, but because I'm obliged to answer, to question or confirm what they say as if their sole intention were to make me conscious of my voice — as if it delighted them to make me demonstrate its unpleasant timbre.

My first encounter with my own voice goes back a long way. It was, I seem to recall, at a birthday party in my early childhood that I first heard it without speaking at the same time. Under parental supervision, my friends and I had recorded a few words on a wax cylinder and immediately played them back. Everyone present marvelled at this phenomenon: all the children's voices could be heard except mine, which was manifestly missing. And then I noticed that among the sounds issuing from the horn was an unfamiliar, unnatural voice that belonged to none of my friends.

It was a while before I grasped that it could only be mine. But my internal, cranial vibrations were altogether different from that childish voice. To this day, the sounds transmitted to my ears by my bones strike me as deeper and richer than those that reach them from some external source. I was dismayed. On the one hand I felt an urge to confirm my original impression by listening to the recording once more; on the other, I was glad that my friends had already started to play a new game in which I could unobtrusively join. They had forgotten all about the wax cylinder, whereas my own thoughts were still of the quivering stylus that had relentlessly explored those grooves and converted their sinuosities into sound — into the repulsive noise I never wished to hear again.

Since then, whenever I become aware of my unpleasant vocal timbre, I break off abruptly in mid-sentence, too embarrassed to go on talking. I'm nonetheless convinced that it should be possible to remodel the voice and approximate it to the internal, cranial sound by dint of practice, by carefully adjusting the larynx and pharynx, tongue and thoracic cavity prior to speaking. It must surely be possible to master the organ that any stranger can hear, the link between oneself and the outside world, the sound that sheds more light on a person's character than any other single manifestation.

Not that Helga, who now converses with me quite naturally, seems to have noticed this vocal defect. Perhaps she takes it for granted that my voice and its owner go together because she cannot know from experience how little suited they are. Even though the other children are chattering and frolicking behind us, I feel no desire for silence.

'Herr Karnau?'

Helga brings me down to earth with another of her questions. Has she been talking the whole time?

*

'Herr Karnau, are you one of a big family like ours?'

'No, I don't have any brothers or sisters.'

'So you've always been on your own?'

Herr Karnau doesn't know what to say. He's holding Hedda in his arms so the others can play with her pushchair. They're pretending it's a tank and wheeling it through the puddles. I'm holding Coco's lead. Herr Karnau may be right: I mustn't worry about little Heide.

Now we're back in the warm. Coco's fur is cold, it smells of fresh air, and we've brought a cloud of coldness into the kitchen with us. Our cheeks are as red as the baby's picture on those jars of baby food, the laughing baby with the golden curls and chubby cheeks. Herr Karnau hasn't asked us about our homework again. Shall we play collecting for charity? The little ones don't like that game because they have to put make-believe money in our collecting boxes, mine and Hilde's, while the two of us pretend to be standing outside the Hotel Adlon in our fur-lined jackets. We did that with Papa last year, before Christmas, and everyone stared at us. That's why the others are still jealous.

We play families instead, but no one volunteers to be the Mother. No one wants to be the Mother because she has to spend most of the time being ill in bed. Although she's at a health resort with lots of nice fresh air and no work to do, she's made to swallow pills whenever she has a fainting fit. Once, when she's out for a drive, the car goes round a bend and she falls out and breaks some bones and gets concussion. We're all very worried about her, especially the Father, because he was driving too fast. Everyone wants to play the Father in spite of that, because he doesn't feel bad about it for long and he gets to order everyone else around. He has his own secretaries and he's always very busy. Hilde can be the Father today. She picks Helmut and me to be her secretaries. The little ones can be the children.

The Father paces up and down his office, dictating a new speech. It's all about relentless candour, the voice of the people and ice-cold truth, and Helmut takes it down in shorthand. He can't write yet, not properly, so he only makes squiggles on the paper. Hilde speaks much faster than Helmut can write. 'If things are going badly,' she says, 'let's admit it. Let's call a spade a spade.'

The children don't have anything to do at present. The Father decides they're actors in a depressing film about a hospital, so they all have to pretend to be lying in bed and keep quiet. 'That's enough medical films,' he says. 'Too many medical films are a bad thing.' But Helmut, who's supposed to pass the order on to me, gets it wrong. 'That's enough mental films,' he says.

We all laugh at Helmut's mistake and call him Tran, of Tran and Helle, the two film characters invented by the Father himself. But Helmut doesn't think it's funny and changes jobs. He refuses to join in again until the Father is ready to censor some films. The children can now join in too, they're allowed to be present at the screening. There are mountaineering films, newsreels, and children's films, which even the Father finds amusing. Hilde tells us the story of a Mickey Mouse film. Finally the Father says, 'Stop the projector. This film is banned.’

*

I listen at the door. The children have forgotten about me, forgotten for the moment that they're staying with a stranger.

Might it be worth leaving them to play and devoting the half-hour before supper to my project? My collection of sounds is steadily growing: I've already managed to compile about a hundred examples of the strangest utterances. Some are everyday noises, vocal manifestations of which their authors are seldom aware. There's a vast range of sounds to be monitored, especially now, in the autumn: throat-clearings, little coughs and sniffs that are heedlessly emitted by the sound source but mercilessly recorded on disc. My collection includes some genuine treasures, for instance this recording of a brothel behind the lines, which was given me on the sly by an acquaintance. People must be monitored even when making love. Those sounds engraved on wax are unrepeatable because the brothel was closed down soon after they were recorded, for fear of disease. According to my friend, it even employed the services of dogs trained to copulate with the aid of soiled underclothes.

Is my map of vocal nuances subject to any limitations? Is there anything I would
not
record? Yes, the voices of these children while defenceless, as they are now, because they believe themselves to be alone and unobserved. Everything else is grist to my mill — anything and everything, the whole of the audible world. Every blank space must be filled for completeness' sake. Every space but one: these children's voices will not be entered on my map, where they would be exposed to all and sundry and, worse still, to the children themselves. I couldn't undertake any such exposure without rendering myself guilty of distorting their childish voices into the constrained mode of speech that would inevitably result, because the five of them would find their own voices just as alien as I myself did at their age.

*

Hedda has already fallen asleep beside me, and the others have also settled down for the night. A shame, because I'm not the least bit tired. I'd have liked to talk to them about Herr Karnau — about little Heide, too. I can't sleep, I'm too thirsty. I'll go to the kitchen and get myself something to drink. Very quietly, so as not to wake the others. I won't put the light on, I'll tiptoe out in my bare feet. Not a sound.

Somebody's talking in Herr Karnau's room, I can hear voices through the closed door. But Herr Karnau's all by himself, surely. Or did he have a visitor and we never noticed? Perhaps he's just listening to the radio. That's not German, though, I can't understand a word. Is he listening to an enemy broadcast? No, it doesn't sound like that, not loud and clear like a news-reader. News-readers don't break off in the middle and leave long gaps — they don't keep sighing in between. It's weird. The kitchen's all dark, I'm afraid to go in there now.

The sounds are getting louder and louder. Herr Karnau must have someone in his room, he simply must — someone in pain. Now the man is screaming. Why is he making those awful noises? I want to go straight back to bed, but I can't move, I can't stop listening. No, those aren't words, it's someone being hurt. Maybe it isn't a person at all, maybe it's an animal I can hear, howling like that. My heart is really thumping. Is Herr Karnau torturing his dog? No, that's not Coco, it must be a human being. Now he's making choking noises, gasping for air, whimpering horribly. Why doesn't Herr Karnau do something, why doesn't he help the poor man?