The Karnau Tapes (12 page)

The night song slowly fades, but the magnetised particles on the tape flicker on, steadfastly adjusting themselves to the sonic situation of the moment. Faint though they are, the noises in the headset rend my ears. I must go on listening, stay with those noises to the end. Unplug and switch over: each of the men left out there can now be clearly distinguished, chins as stubbly and voices as ravaged as the ground on which they lie dying — the ground across which I myself so recently stumbled. They're here in my ears, the men who will remain out there. Their bodies are lying beyond redemption in the lethal danger zone, but their sighs are safe in here on tape. And my tape will relinquish those sighs to no one, no enemy however strong, even if he slowly dismembers and sieves the bodies overnight, so that in the morning, when the assault is renewed, sodden corpses will scarcely be distinguishable from churned-up ground: all will have been reduced to grey slush, nothing more.

Impressive though they are, these phenomena, their meaning is unfathomable; they relapse into darkness. Just before the end, voices regain their naturalness and abandon all their long-acquired self-control. Out they come once more, those crude, unschooled, amorphous sounds that issue from the very marrow. Setting up a parallel connection, I hear deep sighs in a wide variety of intonations, groans, gurgles, sounds of vomiting in the mire and murk, nuances of sound in which several layers of darkness have become deposited, and which spring from the darkness of their surroundings. The moribund are returning to their origins, no longer able to restrain their voices and suppress the cries that burst forth. Animal sounds pure and simple, these are neither fashioned by the larynx nor muted by the throat; they fill the entire oral cavity. Lips, tongue and teeth are incapable of holding these involuntary sounds in check and silencing them before they leave the mouth. What an experience! What a vocal panorama!

IV

'
WHAT
A
VIEW
!
WHAT
A
VAST
,
ECHOING
PANORAMA
—
RIGHT
here, in front of us! Breath-taking, isn't it, this rugged scenery? Look at those rocky gorges on the other side of the valley, look at the snow-capped peaks of that mountain range. They hurt your eyes, don't they? See how the sunlight bounces off the glaciers, the patches of snow running down to the tree-line, and the avalanche that has cut a swath through the woods. The fir trees are so dense, they seem to swallow up the light. How high are those mountains, I wonder, and how did anyone ever manage to survey them? They're so dazzling, even at this distance, they hurt your eyes. Imagine having to cross those sunlit stretches — you'd be lucky not to go snow-blind! The eye instinctively avoids them and concentrates on the level, shady expanses — there, where sunlight gives way to shadow on that alpine meadow sandwiched between the thickly wooded area on the projecting dome of rock and the peaks in the background. And what a sky! Like the clouds in a battle painting come to life. Do look, Helga.'

'Yes, they're very nice, the mountains.'

Mama likes this view, that's why she chose it as a background for our family photograph. I'm trying to look at it but I can't, not properly. I force myself to look at every rock, very hard, but I can't breathe properly either. Is it the mountain air? Do you have to breathe faster up here because it's so thin, or is it this tight collar and the necklace and my new frock? It's awfully uncomfortable, the frock, not to mention these stockings and my smart new patent leather shoes. The photographer has only come here because he says there are so few opportunities to photograph all of us children together with our mother. Mama also thinks it's time we had another nice picture taken for the newspapers. We line up in a row with Mama holding Heide in her arms. 'Children in front,' says the photographer, 'mother behind and in the middle.'

We always have to stand still for so long, smiling at the camera in a friendly kind of way. It's nice to have our picture in the paper, of course. My classmates always envy me, but they don't know what a bore it is, waiting for pictures to be taken, or how good we have to be at table, sitting there quiet as mice when Papa or Mama takes us out for meals at other people's houses. My friend Conni is a lot better off from that point of view. She doesn't go to as many big parties with her parents, but in the afternoons she can always play outside till supper-time with the other girls in our class. That's why she's got so many friends. Lots more than me.

Conni lives at Nikolassee, which is too far away for me to walk or even cycle. Her parents' house is quite different from ours. It's much smaller, for a start, but Conni doesn't have any brothers or sisters to pester her and expect her to share everything with them. The photographer tells me to put my arm around Helmut's shoulder. Is he going to be much longer? 'Something's the matter with Helmut's trousers,' he says. 'There's a crease on the left at the top, it casts a nasty shadow. Could someone smooth it out?'

The nursemaid comes forward and tugs at Helmut's trousers, but it makes no difference. 'Your pocket's bulging.

Have you got something in it?' Helmut glances at Mama, looking guilty. He reaches in his pocket and brings out what he's hidden there: a toy soldier. 'No tears, if you please,' Mama says sternly. 'You don't want to be photographed with your eyes all red, do you?'

The photographer snaps us at last.

These mountains remind me of Helmut's model Berghof, with miniature politicians standing on the balcony looking out at the view. Inside, the Berghof is like a doll's house for boys. It's where the little figures live and hold their conferences. Helmut's awfully proud of his Berghof, which is why he was so angry when someone broke a piece off the balcony railings. That boy did it, the one Helmut had to play with. He didn't want to play with him at all, but Mama insisted. 'If our hosts are kind enough to make us welcome in their guest-house,' she said, 'we must be equally nice to their children.' It isn't as if the boy is nice to us. He acts the Führer in his Hitler Youth uniform and orders us around the whole time, and he can't even speak properly. You can't understand his Bavarian dialect, anyway, or only the odd swear-word, like shit or bastard, or when he yells at us suddenly, to scare us. He's just like his fat, red-faced father, the Reichsmarschall. It's disgusting, the way he belches and grunts and snorts.

Mama's leaving tonight, she's off to Dresden for a rest cure. We thought she was going to spend the holidays with us, but she only came here to drop us. We're sad when Mama packs her bags. She says she'll telephone us. So will Papa, definitely, every evening. 'Can't we come to Dresden with you?' No, it's a sanatorium. Grown-ups only.

*

I scan the terrain, run my finger over individual areas on the map, a straightforward army-issue map with markings of the usual kind. Pencilled crosses indicate tank traps. My finger roams on, tapping as it goes. These wavy lines represent corduroy roads, most of them already severed by shellfire. My forefinger traces the course of a dotted line. This area is particularly important. At this point on its outer extremity I entered the danger zone after dark, worked my way forward from an unknown position on the periphery, and then, having first consulted an expert on the terrain, a shadow specialist, set off into the blue. Searchlights were the problem, I had to avoid their roving, probing beams. Now I open my hand and spread my fingers, covering most of the map, first with shadow, then with flesh: I've sown this entire area with concealed microphones and, thus, mapped it acoustically.

That is how the unfamiliar markings on the map, the clusters of triangles and widely scattered circles, should be interpreted. Not all my recordings lend themselves to precise classification, for instance under the heading of gasps or moans, because their quality has sometimes been badly impaired by feedback resulting from their incredible, unforeseeable volume. When evaluating them, however, I have clearly detected certain invariable features in the distribution of sounds. Consonants, for example, are very seldom uttered on the battlefield at night, and then only at longish intervals, so my primary focus of attention is vowel research. This area spanned by my thumb and third finger, whose tendons briefly twitch as I spread them, contains a concentration of the vowel A. As for this hatching here, it denotes that certain rare sounds are uttered mainly in the immediate vicinity of the enemy line, where few words mingle with the moans and groans of the wounded, be they calling for help or scraping together the last available fragments of a prayer. Here, far out across the trenches, is where men can no longer find the words, where they hammer on the doors of their vocabulary because the enemy is launching a surprise attack on the flank; where their husks of words disintegrate, vaporised by pain and excessive exposure to the din of the enemy bombardment. Then, shortly before a sound source is finally extinguished, there are no words at all, anywhere in the monitored area, though this may also stem from loss of hearing and diminished self-control: those unable to hear their own voices refrain from speaking.

I have become a voice thief, I have left the men at the front voiceless. From now on, I can do as I please with their final utterances. By recording, I appropriate a part of any voice I choose and can play it back without its owner's knowledge, even after his death. A voice thief can play recordings of the dead and pretend, to those who know no better, that they're the voices of living persons. My tapes are vocal excerpts. I can reach into any man's depths without his knowledge. I can extract anything from those depths and take possession of it, anything and everything down to the last, intimate breath exhaled by a dying man.

How the map paper crackles under my palm, how it curls as it absorbs my sweat, producing entirely new constellations of sounds in one corner: here, where open vowels impinge on gutturals, and there, beside the mark that indicates where a youngster in his death throes lost all vocal control. I must listen to that recording again, right away. It's an unimaginable screech such as no one ever before heard issuing from a human mouth. Mouth, did I say? It wasn't really an oral process at all. The whole throat was brought into play, outside as well as in. Windpipe and larynx played their part, but the epidermis resonated too — indeed, one could believe that every bristle on his chin contributed to the sound.

Where is the tape? This one is a chorus of death rattles, and this one, the label almost indecipherable because I wrote it in the field during a hailstorm, is of silence, a whole tapeful of silence recorded afterwards, when nothing — vocally speaking — was stirring. Damn, the card index has fallen off the table. Here, this must be the young man responsible for those exceptionally strident cries, if cries they can be called.

Not long now. Thread the tape in carefully, throw the heavy switch, fingers trembling with expectancy, and listen. Almost there, not another word, just listen.

That voice is all I want to hear. I play and replay it. A little further on comes a very special sound: just that youthful stranger's voice overlaid with my breathing, nothing but my own hurried breathing, because there's no one else in the room to listen, no one with me to look at the map and listen to my explanations.

*

We're back in Berlin at last. Papa meets our train, he's taken some time off specially for us. Hilde almost bursts into tears when Papa gives her a hug. He really did telephone us every evening on the Obersalzburg, and we wrote to him in Berlin. Once, when he'd read one of our letters, he sent us a great big telegram complete with a picture, and he called us just after it arrived. He was far too impatient to know how we liked the telegram to wait till we spoke that evening. He even sent some presents by courier plane for Hilde's birthday.

Mama's still in Dresden. Our nursemaid and the little ones have driven straight from the station to Schwanenwerder, but Papa takes me and Hilde to Lanke to spend a few days on our own with him. We've a lot to tell him: how we were presented with bunches of flowers, and how we could only drive very slowly, so many people were lining the village street to welcome us and Mama. By the time we got to the house the open car was full of flowers.

Hilde's grouchy. 'We spent the whole day sitting in the train,' she says. 'It was boring.'

Better than flying, though. I always feel sick when I fly.

At Lanke we have the whole house to ourselves and no little ones to bother us. They're a nuisance most of the time, always making fusses, never leaving us to play in peace. Papa lets us rummage around in his bookshelves and pick out a book for him to read aloud to us.

Hilde chooses Grimm's fairy-tales. We sit on the veranda, the three of us. It'll be dark soon. Mosquitoes come swarming up from the lake when it's dark. They're bound to bite us, we'll be itching all night.

'Papa, what does Germanisation mean?'

'Germanisation? Where did you pick that up?'

'I heard someone say it on the Obersalzburg. They were talking about Alsace. Where's Alsace?'

'Yes,' Hilde says, 'where is it?'

'Well,' says Papa, 'let's see. Alsace is over towards France, but it's really part of Germany. The French took it away from us, even though it's a hundred per cent German, but now it belongs to us again.'

'But what does Germanisation mean?'

'It simply means that everything in Alsace has been put back into German, school lessons, newspapers, government announcements, and so on. After all, why should Alsace be any different from the rest of the Reich? Some of the people there didn't like that. They were determined to oppose everything German, so we had to put a stop to them. They try to keep their activities dark, the traitors, but the police have unmasked a lot of them.'

'Shady characters, you mean?'

'Yes, you could call them that.'

'Men who kidnap children, are they shady characters too?'

'Yes, but you've no need to be scared of kidnappers, no one would dare to kidnap you. Kidnapping is a capital offence, your Papa made sure of that years ago, just so that you, my darlings, could feel safe.'