The Karnau Tapes (9 page)

Not a sound, all gone, the tape is blank. I stand there mutely while the officer continues to chew me out. He's right, of course: I should never have slipped up like that, but I hadn't allowed for an erasing function. The nature of discs, the recording medium I'm used to, is such that it's quite impossible to reabsorb voices into silence by reversing the turntable. You hear the sounds backwards as they return to their place of origin, the throat, accompanied by a distorted intake of breath. A disc has to be melted down before the voice it bears is irrevocably silenced.

A dismal evening. Uneasily perched on the window-sill in my billet, I flip a cigarette-end into the street below. Will they recall me to Berlin, now that the recording has been obliterated because of my mistake, my stupid blunder? Will the firm send a replacement who's more
au
fait
with Magnetophon equipment? Could this have cost me my job? A pity, because I intended to devote one of my free afternoons to visiting the German University here, where they're assembling a large collection of skulls like that of Joseph Gall, who embarked on his study of comparative anatomy as a young man in this very city, Strasbourg, in 1777.

More by luck than judgement, I managed to restore some of the officer's equanimity this afternoon. My private research has evidently bred a much improved ability to distinguish between voices, because I instantly picked one out as some men were walking along the corridor past my office: it was the same siren voice, the air-raid voice that had etched itself into my ear this morning. Without thinking, I blurted out, 'That man out there — he's the one on the tape. It must be him, the voice is identical.' I didn't at first realise what I'd done by making this remark: visibly gratified, the officer called Security and had the man arrested. A little later he told me in a genial tone that I was
some
use, at least, because I'd unmasked a local Germaniser as a member of the French Resistance. My emotions are mixed. On the one hand, I would never have thought myself capable of such a denunciation; on the other, it may tip the scales in my favour when they come to decide whether or not to report my blunder to Berlin.

The air is exceptionally warm tonight. The strains of a brass band are wafted from far away, so it seems, by a gentle breeze. The sound fluctuates, reverberating from distant streets. The music grows louder. With a sudden explosion of noise, the band emerges from a side street followed by a detachment of Brownshirts marching in step. They, in turn, are followed by a group in regional costume and some civilians who have joined the procession
en route.
Many windows are open, and the din invades the rooms behind the fluttering curtains. Across the way, curious residents are already leaning on their window-sills and gazing down into the street. Many wave. The window of one darkened room is closed and the curtain drawn as if by some ghostly hand. The window-pane at my back begins to vibrate. The night air resounds to the blare of trumpets and the rattle of snare-drums. They're passing the house now. The colour-bearer's flag, propelled by a head-wind, slaps him in the face.

The marchers break into a folk-song, and the local inhabitants, their cheeks soon hot and flushed, loudly join in the first verse. An entire family sings along, clustered together in a small kitchen window. Clearly visible in their open mouths are tongues, teeth, even threads of saliva. Down below them, noisy expulsions of breath mingle, elbows collide, men jostle one another and break step, their eyelids beaded with sweat in the torchlight. Now they're out of sight. The music fades, the spectators retire into their living-rooms. No sound save the agitated twittering of a bird roused from sleep as it flies across the street. A last, smouldering cigarette-end glows in the night-dark roadway.

*

As a treat we've been collected from school and driven into town. 'Don't we have to go home and have lunch with the others?' Hilde asks.

Papa's chauffeur looks at us in the rear-view mirror. 'No,' he says, 'the two of you are going to spend the afternoon in town with your father. The weather's so nice, he's taking an hour off work for you.'

I wonder if it's only Hilde Papa wants to see because he's still angry with me, and the chauffeur is only taking me along because he doesn't dare to send me home alone. Hilde rummages around in her satchel, looking for her hairbrush. 'Aren't you pleased, Helga?' she says. 'We're going into town with Papa. He's bound to buy us each a present.'

No, Papa doesn't look angry with me any more. He gives me just as nice a smile as he gives Hilde when he admires our clothes. 'Regular young ladies, you are. I can really take you out and about these days, you're so well-behaved and grown-up. What would you like to do first? Have lunch right away and then go shopping?

We say we'd sooner go shopping first. The sun is shining, and people stare at us as they go past. They all know Papa by sight from photographs or newsreels. A lot of them actually shake his hand and say a few words. We're on our best behaviour, so we say good afternoon politely. In the toy shop Papa lets us look around for as long as we like. We choose some new clothes for our favourite dolls. No, Papa definitely isn't still angry about yesterday.

Then, when we think we're going to a cafe, Papa takes us to a jeweller's instead. To buy something for Mama? 'We're looking for a wrist-watch for a young lady,' he tells the shop assistant.

He smiles at me. Which of us did he mean, me or Hilde? The woman brings out some watches and puts them on the counter. I like the one with the red strap because red is our colour, Papa's and mine. I'm sure it's not for me, though, it must be for someone else. Papa gives me a nod. 'Let's see what it looks like on your wrist, Helga.'

Carefully, he takes the watch from the velvet cushion and straps it on. He's only trying it out to see if there are enough holes in the strap. It looks nice, the kind of watch I'd like for Christmas. 'Want to try another?' Papa asks.

I shake my head. Papa takes me by the chin. 'Don't pout when someone wants to give you a present. You need a new watch, don't you? You're a big girl now, even if you do still act the goat sometimes, like your little brother and sisters.'

'But it was Helmut who — '

Papa's eyes flash, so I stop in case he decides to take the watch back after all. Then we go to a cafe. We each have an ice-cream sundae, but all that interests me is my watch. Hilde admires it too, she's pleased for me. The red strap is nice and shiny, and it's even got a second hand. 'But take more care of this one,' Papa says, 'and see your little brother doesn't get his hands on it. You'd better keep it somewhere safe when you're not wearing it — don't just leave it lying around.’

*

How absurdly naive of me to decide against recording the children's voices and forbid myself to sit them down in front of my microphone, only to hear them on the radio soon afterwards, vigorously endorsing their father's speech in aid of the winter-clothing drive. My misgivings were naive indeed, because the children addressed their audience with total unconstraint and self-assurance. Even as I listened to the broadcast, they must have been listening to themselves at home and hearing their own recorded words. How puerile, how hypocritical of me to leave a blank space on my vocal map, when those children have grown up in daily contact with every kind of gadget — with the telephones and teleprinters, film projectors and record-players, all of the latest design, which form as permanent a feature of their parental home as do armchairs and cuckoo clocks elsewhere. Their entire house is populated, not by unpredictable creatures that suddenly ring or buzz, clatter or light up, but by trusted companions.

To them the recording studio in the basement is simply another room where their father sometimes allows them to watch the sound engineers at work as a special reward for good behaviour or good marks in school, so their knowledge of certain technical matters may actually be superior to mine. The private cinema, too, is a familiar place where, on many a festive evening, their parents and guests watch home movies of them romping in the grounds or fondling pet fawns. Or even playing little parts for which they have zealously memorised the dialogue and directions, so eager are they not to be surpassed in histrionic ability by their favourite actor — an actor with whom they playfully compete, a family friend who takes the lead in these home movies and joins them in singing his latest screen hits, which every German child knows by heart.

So my misgivings — my assumption that they would be as dismayed to hear their own voices as I was as a timid child — were just another pretext for concealing my own cowardice. Although every man's voice sounds different when issuing from a loudspeaker than it does to himself while speaking, it doesn't necessarily follow that he finds it abhorrent, or that he will keep breaking off in mid-sentence because he involuntarily hears his voice twice over, once inside his head and once engraved on a disc. The children are thoroughly conversant with this phenomenon and think nothing of it. It doesn't inhibit them from continuing to speak freely, whereas my own voice seems to become more and more unnatural, as if the sound inside my head is coming, by degrees, to resemble its recorded counterpart.

I was too cowardly to admit that this hiatus in the relationship between me and my voice is far from being an experience common to all children, that this abhorrence does not afflict everyone, only me, and that my voice may be alone in sounding so unnatural when coming from a loudspeaker. I was also too cowardly to concede the children's ability to live with their voices without inevitably becoming vocal cripples in the course of time. They have nice voices, that's all, and listening to them on disc will change nothing.

So my scruples have turned out to be envy, pure and simple. I was reluctant to cut a record of the children's lovely young voices, reluctant to give them the pleasure of willingly speaking into my microphone, proud and excited that a few words from their lips should be recorded on disc. So excited, perhaps, that their voices might have cracked while speaking, interrupted by laughter or protests as they elbowed each other away from the microphone, half in play, because each child wanted its voice to be the most clearly audible of all. I was unwilling to let anyone become acquainted with those young voices without knowing the children in the flesh, without having had to expose his own voice to the give-and-take of childish conversation. No one was to be allowed — in the far distant future, when death had overtaken the children themselves or their childish voices, which are anyway doomed to change in adulthood — to hear a single sound of their making.

Or was there an even deeper reason for my scruples and self-restraint? Did they betray a fear that every recording process, every modulated groove, may whittle away a child's voice? Am I wrong, and can the recording of a voice do more than explore a person's innermost being? Does it inevitably subtract something, so that, once engraved on disc, what has been recorded exists only as a sound, a timbre, on that black shellac film? Does every recording rob us of a fragment of our voices, no matter how small?

Hence, too, my instinctive fear as a child of having my voice recorded and my uneasiness on hearing it afterwards. It was as if, without my even suspecting it beforehand, something inside me had been broken off and were now at someone else's disposal.

Do I fear for this miserable voice, tinny though it sounds and useless though it may be, when it seeks, by means of a certain inflection, to convey some emotion that cannot be put into words? There's no word for that secret fear, but my clumsy voice, such as it is, may strike just the note that expresses what it means to be more afraid of voice-stealing than of anything else on earth.

So my plan to compile a map of vocalisations has sprung from an unconscious impulse to confront danger head-on. I go and stand near the recording machine, never for a moment taking my eyes off the microphone lest some insidious word, some laugh or sigh, should escape my lips and engrave itself in the wax. And I'm the person in charge of the cutting stylus.

*

Mama's hairdresser does us. It's awful, having our hair cut. The little ones think it hurts. Hedda always cries, she screams as soon as the hairdresser does up the cape at the back, and she only has to catch sight of the scissors to start jiggling around on the chair and jerking her head away. The hairdresser almost gives up. She tries to hold Hedda steady with one hand so the scissors don't slip and cut her or the haircut goes wrong. That would be bad, because Hedda would have to sit still all the longer. Afterwards she has a red blotch under her chin where the hairdresser's great big hand has had to hold it tight. Now it's Hilde's turn because Holde's hiding somewhere in the house, or maybe she's run out into the garden. Holde comes next as a rule, but the hairdresser won't wait any longer. She sends for Hilde because she wants to finish us off as soon as possible. She can see we're all scared and it makes her nervous.

At last she calls me in. The floor is covered with bits of hair from the others. She wraps the cape around me and shampoos my hair, taking care the foam doesn't get in my eyes and make them sting. Then she fetches her comb and scissors. I can't help clenching my teeth. The hairdresser starts at the back, where I can't see anything, just feel the scissors tweaking my hair and hear them clicking away. Some hair falls to the floor — not too much, I hope, because I don't want to stop wearing plaits. I can't look, I can't move or she'll prick me. My ear — why is she snipping around my ear all this time? I feel as if I'm right inside my ear, I can feel every little puff of air, I can feel the coolness of the scissors, I can almost feel the metal on my skin. I hope she won't be much longer.

We always get a reward for having our hair cut: Mama sits with us while we're having tea on the terrace. Mama has had her hair done too, it smells nice, it's fair and wavy and shines in the sunlight. That's the hair-spray. We girls aren't allowed to use hair-spray, not yet. We're glad when the hairdresser finishes cutting our hair and drives off again.