The Karnau Tapes (11 page)

Now, from the bed across the room, the third patient joins in the conversation. He makes almost indecipherable signs in such quick succession that Hellbrandt is clearly at a loss to follow them and translates only scraps of what the deaf-mute's hands convey with ever-increasing vehemence. For safety's sake, he removes the smouldering cigarette-end from his patient's lips. 'Far worse than all the vibration,' Hellbrandt interprets, 'is the lack of communication while we're operating at night. No radio, and we're in mortal danger of failing to notice when we're under fire. One of my comrades loosed off a flare because he couldn't stand the darkness any longer — because he was scared of being all alone. He was hit at once. I can see him now, all lit up with his red mouth open in a silent scream . ..'

Hellbrandt tries to stem the flow, but the wounded man is past stopping. His features are violently contorted, his eyes fixed and staring. Hellbrandt stops translating, he's too busy trying to calm his patient, who now, although he can hear nothing, presses his palms to his temples and, with a supreme effort, utters a series of pitiful sounds. He waggles his tongue and shuts his eyes. Oblivious of his surroundings, he begins to weep. Hellbrandt, standing over him, holds his twitching wrists together. At last the patient subsides. With a vague gesture he sinks back against the pillows and lies motionless. Anxiously, Hellbrandt prepares to give him a shot. The man's face is bluish, possibly moribund.

Although the callous way in which Hellbrandt speaks of his patients makes my flesh crawl, no one who sees how devotedly he tends these special cases can fail to grasp, quite suddenly, that his cold-blooded tone is just a front, and that the aims he pursues here, at his place of work, are not what they seem at first glance. Superficially, his idea for a deaf-mutes' battalion was quite consistent with the attainment of final victory, but his real, underlying concern was to save lives in danger. Logically speaking, if the attribute that differentiates man from beast is speech — an ability to use the voice in such a way that the series of sounds it produces can convey extremely complex ideas — then deaf-mutes, who have no voices, are not, strictly speaking, human. It follows that, under the eugenic laws now in force, they belong to the category of living creatures unworthy of existence. And that, at the present time, means certain death. Under Hellbrandt's aegis, the poor things have at least some hope of survival.

No one will ever see through this subterfuge. Hellbrandt is an apt teacher, not an opportunist like my departmental chief, who's always out for himself and never averse to gambling with human lives if it helps to buttress his own position. Hellbrandt would never falter in the face of a colleague's reprimand. He doesn't care what other people think of his work or whether they laugh at him behind his back. It's all the same to him: if they want to slaughter him here, let them try. He'll stick it out to the last, here at the front, for as long as he can help his deaf-mutes. It's really worth taking a leaf out of Hellbrandt's book. Behave like a worm and you ask to get trodden on. Who cares about my snide colleagues? Who cares what they think in Berlin? All that matters here is to stand firm. All that matters here, in direst danger, is my vocal map and the opportunity to chart uncharted territory.

*

Papa has just come home, I can hear him talking to Mama downstairs. 'My new sports convertible is an absolute dream,' he says.

'Not so loud, please, the children are asleep.'

'But it's still broad daylight.'

'Now don't go waking them up.'

'I bet they aren't asleep yet, nothing like. I bet the girls are lying there wide awake and bored to death.'

'No, don't go up there now, it can wait till tomorrow.'

'But they'll love the car. Surely you wouldn't begrudge them a trial spin?'

'Please don't disturb them.'

'Why not allow them a little treat occasionally? They hardly know us, we so seldom do anything together.'

'They've got school in the morning.'

'They're doing so well in school, they'll manage.'

Papa bustles into our bedroom. 'Come on, you two, up you get. Get dressed, we're going for a spin.'

Hilde and I have been listening hard to see who would win in the end. We knew it would be Papa. We jump out of bed and get dressed as fast as we can. We dash past Mama. Papa's downstairs already. He spits on the windscreen and wipes off some fly blood. 'Hop in quick,' he says. 'We mustn't be too long or your mother will get some more worry lines.'

We drive through the gate and out into the street, where Mama can't see us any longer. The new car is lovely, far nicer than the other ones we've got, with a hood that folds down. Papa puts a cap on. He must have taken our headscarves and scarves from the drawer and stuffed them in his pocket without our noticing, because he reaches back and hands them to us. He needs a cap to stop the hair fluttering in his face while he's driving, and we mustn't catch cold. He points to the wing-mirror. 'Look,' he says, 'a cobweb. It wasn't there before. Let's see if we can go fast enough to blow the spider away.'

We're past the Wannsee already. It's a warm evening, but the car feels cold now that Papa's driving faster and faster. The spider's web stirs. Is the spider coming out because it knows Papa won't allow it to make its home in his new car? We're heading into the sunset. Hilde's shouting for joy. Papa isn't looking at the sunset, he keeps looking at the spider's web. Incredible how far a spider can travel when it spins its web on a car. Now it's coming out from behind the wing-mirror, legs first, then its big black body. The spider's ugly legs are clinging really tight to the mirror. I hope it doesn't manage to crawl back as far as us. Hilde shakes Papa's shoulder: 'Faster, Papa, faster, we don't want to see it any more.'

Papa drives even faster to blow it away. The wind is whistling in our ears. 'Just you wait,' Papa shouts. 'We'll get rid of the creature even if we have to drive to Magdeburg.'

The spider is clinging to the driver's door with all its might. Papa isn't thinking about anything else, only the spider. His lips have gone all thin and hard, and his face doesn't move a muscle. Looking in the mirror I can see the chinks between his teeth as he stares at the spider, as he squeezes the pedal with his foot to make us go faster, as he drives straight on, on and on, overtaking one car after another. He's so set on his battle with the spider that his fur-trimmed motoring cap suddenly looks silly, as if he's used to living in Siberia, or as if the soft fur is there, like an egg cosy, to prevent his head from smashing.

I'm beginning to feel sorry for the spider, it's trying so hard not to let go. It slips a little and automatically unwinds a thread, scrambles back up the thread and tries to get behind the mirror again. I don't want to watch it any more. It'll soon be dark, but we keep on going. Are we on the way back, or are we really getting near Magdeburg? Hilde nudges me and points: the spider has disappeared at last.

By the time we get home there's nothing left on the driver's door but a few sticky threads with some little insects trapped in them. Papa is pleased he won. He's glad we like his new sports car, too.

*

The sky shudders, the fractured road surface makes the tyres vibrate. The car lurches along, rumbling over stretches thinly coated with gravel and toiling through slushy mud as it steadily, inexorably follows the rutted tracks of the supply route deep into enemy territory. My head brushes the sky, the grimy, nicotine-stained sky of cloth immediately above my head, whenever the vehicle skids into a pothole. Air buffets the windows with every detonation. The earth moves too, and the grey-brown, rain-swept dusk is tremulous with gunsmoke. The explosions convulse my entire body. My hands are shaking too badly to hold the cigarette clamped between my lips — even the glowing tip quivers as the shells burst — but the driver doesn't mind the thunder of the guns. He keeps his eyes fixed on the road ahead, and all he sees is the fragmented field of vision beyond the windscreen, with its smears and leopard's spots of mud.

Abruptly, the tyre tracks ahead of us are effaced by a blinding flash. The driver brakes to a halt. A shell-burst that has almost blown us to smithereens? No, just raindrops sparkling as they dribble down the windscreen in the glare of an oncoming motorcycle's headlight. We wait for the convoy behind it to pass. Every vehicle is adorned with a Red Cross pennant. It seems interminable, this succession of pennants so sodden with rain that not even a gale could make them flutter.

The headlights grope their way along the verges, and every truck that squeezes past illuminates an expanse of ditch. There among the debris and horses' carcasses, right beside the shattered remains of an armoured car, I see something moving on the ground. The passing headlights continually illuminate the same spot, so recognition soon dawns: some very young puppies, probably still blind, are scrabbling around in the mire. Now the mother appears out of the darkness, bent on keeping her litter together. Calmly but firmly, she grips her young by the neck, one by one, and drags them back into the lee of the armoured car, whence they emerge once more and totter over to the dead horses. Little wet balls of fur, they sit there whimpering until their mother comes to round them up again. An unexpected picture so close to the front line. An indication, perhaps, that this very spot marks the war's frontier: a last symbol of peace before we enter disputed territory, the forward extremity of the rear echelon, the last stretch before the bomb and shell craters begin. Some messenger dog must have paused in the thick of the fighting to mate with a stray bitch.

What kind of war is this? They shoot down pigeons here — blow them out of the sky. My neighbour in the dug-out insists that the birds carry cameras strapped to their bodies. 'They aren't just any old birds, Karnau, they're enemy artillery spotters, get that into your thick head. They're reconnoitring our positions. If they make it back to the Russian lines, it won't be long before the shells come raining down.'

The soldier turns away with a shake of the head. He's frying himself something to eat amid the mud and excrement. The others make hard-boiled jokes: 'Nothing like puppy meat to supplement our rations.' They crouch in their trenches, war written on their faces, night glasses trained on the darkness beyond the parapet. Me, I sit beside the radio operator on my boxes of equipment, deep in the quaking ground. The steel helmet they've issued me is far too big. I have to keep pushing it back or I can't see a thing beneath the rim. 'Tighten the strap, you clot.' The radio operator addresses me without removing his headset. Cigarettes glow in the darkness. I'm recording enemy radio messages and conducting regular monitoring tests: yes, faint though it is, the enemy radio traffic can be heard on tape with relative clarity. Divisional headquarters sends a runner to collect the tapes three times a day. Such are my present duties as a civilian supernumerary.

I haven't left the dug-out since I got here. I don't dare go outside, I'm so scared of the gunfire and the crowded trenches when an attack is in progress and the air billows sideways because a shell has landed near by — scared above all of the earsplitting, never-ending din. I've done my utmost to conceal this fear from the others, but my face, my set mouth and my silence, not to mention the way I screw up my eyes at every detonation, betray my state of mind to the others, many of whom are much younger than I.

The enemy transmitter has been inaudible for quite a while. I sneak outside, determined to overcome this intolerable fear, determined not to let it dissuade me from proceeding with my own work as planned. At my own risk, I intend to take advantage of a lull in the bombardment to make some recordings of a kind that has never been heard before: I propose to capture the sounds made by soldiers in battle.

A crosswind, rain. I conceal my microphones behind banks of spoil, in craters and along the trench, embed their bases in damp earth, run out cables, cower and curl up whenever a shell lands in my vicinity. Then back to the dug-out caked with mud. I plug in the microphone leads, don my headset and check reception, discover a loose connection in the left-hand ear-piece, adjust separate access to individual microphones located in the field, and listen: a rumble of gunfire, the groans of the wounded mingled with the hiss of the evening wind and rain. I test the tape-recorder, listen to a trial recording, wait impatiently for the blank section to end, and suddenly I hear it: the first voice, faint, distorted, scarred by its own violence. The tape goes taut and snaps, the voice breaks off in mid-utterance, the spool starts to race, the severed residue of tape slaps the recording head and controls, flutters with rhythmical, electronic ferocity. A surveyor of the human landscape, as it were, I resolve to wait until the fighting abates and nocturnal peace descends.

Before long, the complete absence of background noise enables me to monitor and record sound sources destined to dry up in the very near future. The whole of the nocturnal landscape comes alive with these dying soldiers' swan songs, the battlefield resounds to the cries of the wounded. Feverishly eager as a child, I keep switching from one sound source to another, reaching into the box of blank tapes from where I sit and reloading the machine. Mine is a map of vowels. It will immortalise young soldiers with mangled faces long after their last postcards reach home, long after heroic words are murmured over their shattered corpses, but only, to be on the safe side, when the latter are defenceless and can no longer drown them with a spine-chilling death rattle.

I switch to the trench: heavy footsteps and a downpour. Suddenly, members of the unit come crowding into the dugout. Left ear: the voices of those around me, muffled by the headset. Right ear: cries and a patter of hailstones from the scene of the most recent fighting. I save the remains of a soldier's exhausted voice, capture the ultimate extremity of that voice and preserve it for the bereaved. Over to the position nearest the enemy: a whistling, roaring sound. It draws nearer, swells within fractions of a second to a splintering crash. Then, just as it reaches maximal volume, transmission ceases: the microphone has been buried or blown to bits.