The Karnau Tapes (23 page)

Before that came the deaf, voiceless interlude. People went on taking photographs, of course, but they could no longer hear their own voices, the voices that had shouted themselves hoarse for twelve long years. Photographs can be staged and prettified to display smiles and embraces, banish medals and exchange uniforms for shabby post-war civvies. It's easy enough to shave off a moustache and alter one's appearance overnight, substituting weary amiability for martial hatred. But the human voice cannot be doctored in this way. The
Sieg Heils
and Yes My Führers continue to reverberate down the years.

Many pictures are still on display. Elderly men jostle in front of the newsagent's shelves, eager to refresh their memories of life at the front. They leaf through
Military Technology
and
Stalingrad Report,
elbow each other aside to get at the last remaining order form for the Obersalzberg video. And when tone of voice doesn't matter — when it's possible to read in silence — they also thirst for words from the lips of some old gargoyle of an SS man and stand there swiftly scanning every line rather than be seen in the street carrying a newspaper so littered with grammatical howlers that it doesn't contain a single correct German sentence.

No, nobody likes to hear the old voices any more. It seems that one can't say, 'Yes, that's how my voice sounded in the old days, but it soon changed.' How everyone envied the deaf-mutes! They would all have liked to have been deaf-mutes who miraculously regained their voices in the summer of 1945. If the loudspeaker vans that toured Berlin had broadcast, not the announcement of Germany's surrender, but the last recordings of Stumpfecker's patient, his furious outbursts and strangled cries, people would never have emerged from the cellars to welcome our victorious enemies. They would have torn out each other's throats with their teeth.

Voices from the past are ever-present, strenuously though we Germans tried to introduce a rapid vocal change with the victors' active assistance. It surprised us to discover that the occupying powers had worked hard, even during the war, to compile a basic vocabulary and devise pronunciation exercises and readily intelligible grammars that would enable the vanquished to discard their old tone of voice and enjoy a brief respite from their own language. Listening to foreign languages and lip-reading came as a relief to students chanting their lessons aloud in halls, gymnasiums and stadiums where parades and last-ditch rallies had been held not long before. In hopes of being able to eradicate their old tones of voice, they readily submitted to regular vocabulary assessments and checks on pronunciation. They even welcomed oral tests — in fact they positively hankered after anything that would help to rid their throats of aberrations from the norm, deviations from the group sound.

Or did they, after all, find it a trifle hard to bid their old voices farewell? Were they secretly in two minds? Did they wish, on the one hand, that the talkies had not been invented — that Party documentaries conveyed nothing but their mouth movements, their rigid stance, their regimented gestures and gesticulations? Even the sight of their contorted faces would have been easier to endure than the sound of their voices in the old days. On the other hand, each of those vocal outbursts had imprinted itself on their throats and engraved itself on their vocal cords in the form of fateful scars which no plastic surgeon, however skilled, could efface. Instead of completely replacing their old tones of voice, therefore, they resolved to overlay them with a different timbre. This has left the old voice available for use, and use it they sometimes do, even after half a century. It can unexpectedly burst forth from deep within them — as, for instance, when some old-timer catches children trespassing on his private property. Startled by his brusque, unfamiliar tone, they take to their heels as if in mortal danger.

This masterful, peremptory tone is still regarded as the embodiment of adulthood. Without being able to place it exactly, we all look back on some point in time and assume that this was the juncture at which we acquired a grown-up voice — that nothing comparable preceded it, just cute, naive responses to grown-ups' questions and clumsy attempts to find our way around in the grown-up world, the only one that counts. This presupposes, of course, that adults cannot detect the inner voice that underlies the outward, childish voice and is sometimes in stark contrast to its hesitant, childish tone — a discrepancy that never even occurs to them because they dismiss the possibility that children have an inner voice of any kind. They will never understand that a child's audible voice has an entirely dissimilar, inaudible counterpart; that a child lives in two worlds, has two voices, and speaks two languages that may differ as completely as those of the living and the dead. It is said that, although the latter employ the same words as the former, these mean the diametrical opposite of what they did during their lifetime.

It's still dark outside. I decide to look out my old collection of voices, the recordings too precious to me to be left behind in the archive at Dresden. When we discontinued our research, and again at the end of the war, I packed the most important discs and tapes in boxes. Since then I've taken them with me wherever I go, from one apartment to another, without ever listening to them. I even possess one of the old gramophones, the same model they used for that tea dance in the Bunker on the last day of the war. There's a rough patch on the lid where the death's-head emblem used to be. I erased it years ago with a kitchen knife.

I remove the perished ribbon from around a packet of wax matrices and extract one from its spotty, damp-stained paper sleeve. There's no label, but it must bear some form of identification in the centre: sure enough, I make out some words scratched on the matt black surface in my own handwriting. The wax resembles the high-grade material to which we in the Bunker alone had access at the end of the war. Are these the recordings Stumpfecker instructed me to spirit out of Berlin?

My ears tingle unpleasantly in expectation of the first sound. To my disappointment, I realise at once that the recording isn't one of mine. A wholly unprofessional job. All I can hear, very faintly, is a youthful voice saying 'clip-clap, clip-clap, clip-clap' and 'hick-hack, hick-hack, hick-hack'. A second wax disc, another child's voice. No, these recordings are nothing to do with me, so why do they bear my handwriting?

I've never recorded any children's voices. I don't have any children of my own and have never been around when a child is learning to speak. Those six children were the only ones I've ever been in close contact with, but I never recorded them, much as I always wanted to. I never got the chance, and besides, their father was dead against it: the thought of my possessing such recordings made him uneasy. Even at our very last meeting, shortly before his death, he was so adamantly opposed to it that I abandoned all hope. We had a heated altercation in the passage outside my Bunker cubicle. By then it was far too late: I was so busy assisting Stumpfecker in his desperate endeavours to preserve his last patient's voice for posterity that I didn't have the energy for anything else.

I try a third wax disc. Can that really be Helga? Yes, despite the hiss and although the voice sounds very far away, it's unmistakably hers. All at once, my mind's eye summons up the images that fit the sounds: the children's arrival in the Bunker on
22
April, the day on which they and their parents took refuge there. The very first evening, having renewed my acquaintance with them, I contrived while saying good-night to secrete a recording machine beneath Helga's bed and surreptitiously switched it on. Thereafter I made more such brief recordings every night, eavesdropping on the children before they went to sleep.

VIII

MAMA
IS
DOING
PAPA
'
S
HANDS
.
IT
'
S
FRIDAY
TODAY
,
AND
SHE
always gives him a manicure on Fridays now that his secretaries don't have the time. They're working day and night. All you can hear is the snip of the little scissors and the faint, scratchy sound of the nail-file. It always gives me goose-pimples, that sound, like chalk squeaking on a blackboard or a spoon scraping a saucepan. Mama finishes filing Papa's nails and starts massaging his fingers. Is he nervous? Are his hands trembling, or is his blood pumping harder than usual because Mama's fingers are squeezing his as they rub the cream in? Papa's skin is blotchy these days, it looks unhealthy. It's flaking off his face, even though he still uses the sun-lamp. He's run out of cologne, so he doesn't smell as nice either. Mama massages cream into Papa's fingers till the knuckles crack.

Papa will be leaving in a minute; that's why he wants his hands to look good. It's the Führer's birthday, and Papa is taking him our presents. We've all made presents for the Führer, but we can't give them to him ourselves, not this year, it's too dangerous. That's because of the shelling. There are more shells falling on Berlin than ever before. The bangs are the only thing that interrupts Papa's manicure, because they make him jump. He jerks his hands away each time, so the nail-file slips and Mama gets cream on her sleeve. Papa's hands are done at last. We've wrapped our presents. Soon it'll be Hedda's birthday too, she'll be seven on 5 May. We must be sure to make her something in good time, it's only two weeks till then. Another bang, a loud one, but Papa pretends it's nothing, he doesn't even jump this time. We all stay quite still for a second, but the shell wasn't all that close to our house. Papa looks out of the window. 'No,' he says, 'you can't even see the smoke.'

Mama packs up her manicure things, Papa straightens his tie. His hands are all red and shiny now. If shells are already landing near by, why did Papa have us brought here from Schwanenwerder two nights ago? It was much safer there. No shells or bombs, just a red glow in the sky every night, far away. The little ones thought there was a storm coming, except that you couldn't hear any thunder. They'd look across the lake and wait for the storm to break over our heads. They wanted it to rain at last, but all you could see were the beams of the searchlights and the glow in the sky.

Now we're in the city ourselves, right in the middle of the war. Mama didn't want to let on, not to any of us, but even the little ones must have taken in what she told us about the refugees: how they had to leave Berlin because it was too dangerous there. Mama once told us that the Russians would never get to Schwanenwerder, so why have we left there and gone closer to them? When Papa's ministry was bombed by Mosquitoes, why didn't anyone there say it would be too dangerous for us to move into the neighbourhood? Anyone would think the Mosquitoes had gone and the war was over, but it isn't: you can tell that from all the shells landing near by. Papa's ready to leave, he smiles and gives me a kiss, then he goes out. If it's dangerous for us to play in the garden, it must be dangerous for Papa to go to see the Führer, but he did his best to smile as if nothing could possibly happen to him.

What are Mama and Papa planning to do with us? Why did Papa insist on getting us up in the middle of the night, when we'd already gone to sleep, and make us join him here at our town house? A little while ago Mama and her secretary made a list of everything at Schwanenwerder, all the crockery, cutlery, bed-linen, tablecloths, and so on. We thought we'd take them with us if we ever left Schwanenwerder, but we didn't. We also thought we'd go to some other place, not Berlin, not where there's fighting. Mama said so herself. 'If things get dangerous,' she told us once, 'we'll leave the war behind us.'

Surely she must realise that the little ones are scared, and that we older ones know she's lying. 'Aren't you pleased, not having to do any more lessons?' she asks, and we all say yes, though the only one who's really happy is Helmut, who grins all over his face because he doesn't have to practise for three hours a day. Hilde and I aren't babies any more. Mama doesn't take us in with all this stuff about no more lessons, but we can't tell her so because the little ones would be even more scared. They mustn't find out what we're in for, all of us. They mustn't find out we'll soon be dead. Dead ... I can't say the word out loud because it makes my throat so tight and my mouth so dry that my tongue won't move. I can't even breathe, just thinking about it.

'Why are you looking so worried, Helga?'

'It's nothing, Mama. Will Papa be back soon?'

'Of course he will. You're afraid something may happen to him, is that it?'

Mama's face is twitching. She still gets those pains of hers; it's ages since they were as bad as they've been these last few days. When she came back from Dresden — that was the last time. The city was completely destroyed by then. Mama stayed at the Weisser Hirsch again, but not for a rest cure, just to say goodbye. She came home in a cigarette lorry. Her coat looked a mess and so did her hair, but she didn't notice, she was too sad and upset. Was it something she'd heard in Dresden that made her so sad? She didn't say, she didn't even look at us properly.

The bangs are getting louder and louder, they hurt my ears. The Russians will be shooting at our house before long. Mama says something to me, but I can't understand, there's too much noise. 'Helga,' she shouts, 'fetch the others. We'd better go down to the shelter.'

There are footprints all over the carpet in the hallway. Dirt everywhere. Nobody cleans the place any more, they're all too busy. You can hear typewriters clattering away behind every door, or meetings going on, or letters being dictated. There are people sitting working in every room now Papa's ministry has been destroyed. The whole house is full of them, not that you'd know it on the stairs or in the passages because nobody makes a noise there, they all talk in whispers. The rooms are getting more and more crowded. A lot of them can't be lived in because their windows have been blown out. Sheets of cardboard have been stuck in the window frames so it doesn't get too cold inside, but the wind comes whistling through the cracks and makes the candles flicker.