The Karnau Tapes (2 page)

Deaf-mutes are unrecognisable, whereas amputees can be recognised at a glance. The blind, too, can be identified by their dark glasses, by their canes and hesitant gait, by the lifeless gaze or empty eye sockets revealed when they raise their glasses to scratch their noses or wipe the sweat from their eyelids. But deaf-mutes defy recognition. Even if a deaf-mute fails to react when addressed, you may mistake him for a naturally taciturn person or assume that he simply hasn't heard you.

All these men incapable of speech, what expelled the voice from their bodies before birth? What do they have inside them, these voiceless ones? What resonates within them if they can detect no sounds, if they cannot hear voices even in their imagination? Is it ever possible to fathom what goes on inside such people, or does a lifelong void prevail there? We know nothing about deaf-mutes, nor can we vocal creatures elicit anything about their world. Yet these men have plenty to say to each other as I, unnoticed, walk past them. One deaf-mute's gesticulations break in on another's, and their flying hands fail to keep up with the sheer urgency of their conversation.

As for me, I'm a person about whom there's nothing to tell. However hard I listen inwardly, I hear nothing, just the dull reverberation of nothingness, just the febrile rumbling of my guts, perhaps, from deep within the abdominal cavity. It isn't that I'm unreceptive to impressions, or apathetic, or inattentive to the sights and sounds around me. On the contrary, I'm overly alert — alert as my dog and constantly aware of the slightest changes in sound and lighting. Too alert, perhaps, for anything to lodge in my mind because my senses are already perceiving the next phenomenon. I'm like the coloured leader affixed to the beginning of an audiotape: no matter how hard you listen, you can't hear a sound, however insignificant.

My dog is an example to me, not a mere companion. As soon as Coco hears me coming he gets excited, knows who will be entering the house when the gate is unlocked down below, recognises the way my soles scuff the worn stairs, knows exactly how the banisters creak when I lean on them, thrusts his nose into the crack beneath the apartment door and inhales his master's scent, scrabbles at the handle with his paws, jumps up at me with his ears pricked when the door finally opens; then, and only then, does he hear me speak his name. That's what one has to learn to do in the acoustic hinterland: to listen to the state of the air an instant before the first word is uttered.

A belch. Someone sitting near me in the tram has belched, and the hairs on my neck bristle even before the nature of the sound sinks in. I scan the reflections in the window for the passenger in question — it has to be a man somewhat older than myself — and there, two seats behind me, I dimly make out a gargoyle of a face intent on an open newspaper as if nothing has happened, though the belch was so loud that all the other passengers must have heard. If it happens again I'll have to look for an empty seat up front. Many people seem determined to tyrannise their fellow creatures in this way. This is a war of sound, yes, but where are the war correspondents? Unprovoked assaults like these should be reported and repulsed.

I look upon myself as I might regard a deaf-mute: not a sound to be heard, and even my gestures are unintelligible. Pushing thirty, and I'm still a smooth, blank wax disc when others have long since been engraved with countless grooves, when their discs already hiss or crackle because they've been played so often. No discernible past and no events worth mentioning, nothing in my memory that could help to constitute a story. Nothing there save a few isolated images or, rather, specks of colour. No, not even that: just a grey-and-black iridescence, a twilight zone, a brief moment sandwiched between night and day.

Once, when the whole class had turned out for compulsory physical training in the gloom of a winter's morning, we heard a strange sound coming from the gymnasium roof, and when the teacher turned on the lights we saw something black flitting around in the rafters. 'A bat,' said someone. It had probably strayed in not long before, desperately seeking a safe place in which to hibernate, and now it had been disturbed, first by a horde of noisy youngsters and then by the lights. While my classmates continued to horse around I stood stock-still, as though my solitary silence could drown the others' din and soothe the agitated creature. I even hoped that the class would be postponed and the bat left in peace until spring. But gym-shoes were already being hurled at it, and one boy, who had brought along a ball, handed it to the best marksman in the class. He flung it with all his might and only just missed. The thud of the impact was drowned by warlike yells. He took aim and threw the ball again and again, and someone kept running to retrieve it for him while the bat fled to and fro. All that brought this scene to an end was a loud call to order from the gym teacher, who wanted to get on with the lesson.

The bat's trembling body and helplessly fluttering wings lingered in my mind's eye all morning. The black creature's after-image persisted, and I failed to fade it out and replace its hysterical gyrations with the free-wheeling flight of flying foxes in the wild as illustrated in my album of cigarette cards. As soon as I got home I turned to the page I'd opened so often that it was dog-eared and grimy. I can still see it now, that African scene: a bare-branched tree starkly outlined against a red sunset with a cluster of black creatures hanging from it upside down, and, circling in the air overhead, a few flying foxes awakened by the approach of night, soon to fly off to their feeding-tree, guided there by the scent of night-flowering plants. Nocturnal creatures. Night: the unfolding of a world in which there are no warlike cries, no gymnastics. Come, dark night, enshroud me in shadows.

I'm soaked to the skin and thoroughly hoarse, even though I exchanged barely half a dozen words with my colleagues at the stadium. I'm back on inside duties for the next few days — stupid little chores, for the most part, though the man whose office I share prefers them to working in the field. I can't think why he's a sound engineer at all, when he could be compiling endless lists of statistics for any number of firms. Who cares whether the public address system we installed this morning generates its exact quota of decibels, or whether it displays some minor deviations from the norm? But that's just the kind of donkey-work that appeals to my office-mate: ascertaining whether the values recorded in laboratory experiments precisely correspond to those attained in field trials. He's quite uninterested in the sounds themselves, in fact it seems to me that paperwork is his way of avoiding the world of sound with which he would come into contact, willy-nilly, in the field or the laboratory. I'm not going back to the office today. The parade doesn't take place till after lunch, so the relevant figures won't, in any case, be available till late this evening.

The morning mist has dispersed, but my room is still filled with lingering shadows. Birdsong and cold, soupy air drift through the small window and the balcony door, which are wide open. My desk is littered with papers, writing materials and books — dusty appurtenances all, since I seldom touch them. A space has been cleared in the midst of the clutter. This is where the gramophone resides, permanently within reach, so that I can put on a record without having to get up. It occupies the only dust-free area on the desk-top, for dust is lethal: it kills every sound. Not that I can listen to any records at the moment. They've been lying untouched in their cardboard box and faded paper sleeves for quite a while. This is because the gramophone, dismantled into its separate components, has been consigned to the floor with its works spilling out. A fault in the drive mechanism. The driving band or the motor itself?

We all bear scars on our vocal cords. They take shape in the course of a lifetime, and every utterance, from the infant's first cry onwards, leaves its mark there. Every cough, every scream or hoarse croak disfigures the vocal cords with another nick, ridge, or seam. We're unaware of these scars because we never set eyes on them, unlike the furrows we notice in our tongues or the ominous areas of inflammation we see when peering deep into our throats. Yet everyone is familiar, if only from hearsay, with the symptoms of excessive vocal strain: the nodules, polyps and fistulas to which singers are prone. Our vocal cords deserve to be treated with extreme care. By rights, we should scarcely utter a word.

Very few voices are free from scars and simply coated with a soft, delicate network of veins. Small wonder that the impalpable something called the soul — the moulded breath of life that constitutes the human being — is thought to reside in the human voice. So the scars on our vocal cords form a record of drastic occurrences and acoustic outbursts, but also of silence. If only we could explore them with our fingers, if only we could trace their routes, cessations and ramifications. There, hidden away in the darkness of the larynx, is the autobiography that you yourself can never read.

You merely sense, without knowing why, how it manifests itself: when your mouth goes dry from one moment to the next, when your throat becomes constricted, when breathlessness assails you for no apparent reason and all that issues from your lungs is nothing. Why, for instance, while I'm waiting to purchase a spare part for my gramophone, do shivers run down my spine when the electrical-appliance shop is invaded by a young woman whom I can hear loudly talking to herself even before she comes in at the door? Her muddled monologue changes tack: she proceeds to harangue the dumbstruck customers in a hoarse voice, catches each eye in turn and complains of having to wait three weeks for her radio to be repaired. What do I detect in her voice that makes me recoil? Why do I even find my own voice repugnant — yes, mine above all? I've no idea. I stare at the demented woman, who, stung by our lack of response, speaks even louder: 'I want to hear my beloved Heinz Rühmann again. They ought to broadcast his songs all day long, not victory fanfares and rubbish like that.'

Then, to crown everything, she herself breaks into song, belts out a few bars from a popular hit. Her voice quavers and breaks. She starts again from the beginning, but no one protests. The other customers seem wholly unaware of how her dreadful voice is boring its way into every nerve cell. Am I the only one to perceive this blood-curdling sound — a sound that hammers on the temporal bone and sets up vibrations throughout my skull? It's as if I'm the only one who's wide awake at dead of night when an air raid is imminent, when bombs are already raining down and there's no safe cellar within reach. Next, the woman buttonholes an elderly man and thrusts her face into his: 'Guess what? I bumped into Santa Claus just now. We made a date for next Thursday. How often have
you
bumped into Santa Claus like that?'

The old man doesn't bat an eyelid. I couldn't do that. She's committing an assault, after all, like the man who belched in the tram this morning. Now her torrent of words hisses close past my ear: 'Got to go home soon, my teddy bear's all on his lonesome, he needs his oats and his straw.'

Quite suddenly, before you know it, you're in the aural front line. Just erase it. Erase it all.

The origin of my profound aversion to crude, overwrought vocal phenomena is quite unknown to me. So is the reason for my predilections. Why do I feel so infinitely serene when I sit down beside my gramophone of an evening — at dusk, the twilight hour when none of the lights in the apartment has yet been switched on — and hold one of those black shellac discs in my hands? On the central portion, just between the label and the innermost groove, each disc bears an inscription in an unknown hand: technical particulars such as a serial number and a note of which side is which, but also, in many cases, brief, anonymous messages secreted there by the recording engineer.

I put the first side on. The turntable begins to rotate, the gramophone is back in commission. The silence in the apartment would soon have become intolerable. I lower the tone arm, and at once I hear the hiss that precedes the recording itself. Then: a baritone voice. How it vibrates, how it ruffles the air! I shall always find it inexplicable that a recorded voice — just the fluttering of someone else's vocal cords — should have such power to stir the emotions. Coco sits down beside me and we listen together.

The needle leaves its trail across the shiny black shellac, painfully probing and imperceptibly eating away the grooves with every revolution, as if its purpose were to delve deeper and draw nearer to the origin of the sounds. Every playing of the record erodes a little of its substance, an amalgam of resin, soot, and the waxy deposits of the lac insect. Living creatures made their contribution to the disc. Their secretions were compressed so that sound could become matter, just as the sounds engraved on the disc are themselves secretions and vital signs of human origin.

Black is an essential additive. Only with the aid of black, the colour of night and burning, can sounds be captured. Unlike writing or painting, in which colour is applied to a white ground without injuring it, the capturing of sound requires one to damage the surface, to incise the recording agent with a cutting stylus. It is as if the most transient, fragile phenomena demand the harshest treatment and can only be captured by means of a deleterious process.

And then the singing dies away, the song is at an end. The tone arm, having reached the end of the recording, is firmly lodged in the escape groove. It emits a loud click every time the needle jumps back and re-embarks on the same circular journey.

I look through some new, still unheard recordings. Not on sale anywhere, they're rare items from our sound archive. That's one of the few perquisites of my job: access to our collection of special recordings. I often trawl the card index for interesting material after office hours. Almost anything can be heard, strange sounds of almost every conceivable kind have been engraved on wax: bird calls, wind of every type and strength, rushing water and avalanches, passing cars and machinery in operation — even the noise made by a large building as it collapses. Discs of this kind were not cut to be listened to for pleasure. They're used for experimental purposes when testing acoustic recording and playback equipment in the laboratory.