The Karnau Tapes Read online

  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.

  Most of these pressings are unique. I've brought home some recordings of speech, but also some unusual sounds of human origin. I'm even fonder of the voice alone than of singing with instrumental accompaniment. The quivering glottis and the operation of the tongue can be heard far more clearly when the organ lies naked and exposed to the ear. Purely on the strength of a voice, these records conjure up an entire person in the mind's eye. Like an archaeologist examining a potsherd, one can use a tiny fragment to form a picture of the whole. All one has to do is to listen closely, nothing more.

  It's also exciting when, having first heard a voice on the telephone and mentally provided it with a body, we meet the owner in person and are able to compare the fruits of our imagination with reality. The result tends to be a disappointment, however: people in the flesh are far less interesting than their voices lead one to suppose. I must study the subject more clos
ely. I must develop an even keener ear and listen to every nuance if my mental image is ever to match a person's actual appearance.

  I play a record of sneezing, throat-clearing and breathing. Meanwhile, Coco insists on being patted. He presses against me, rubs his soft, tremulous flank against my leg. Is it the sounds that prompt him to act this way? He jumps up on my lap, exuberantly licks my hands, refuses to be deterred by my feigned indifference. Finally I give in: I fondle him, tweak the fur between his ears. His moist nose thrusts itself into my palm. He can hear better than any human being with those furry ears of his. In daylight one can look deep inside them and follow their pink convolutions down into darkness. I tickle Coco's throat, and he instantly raises his head as far as possible to give my hand free rein. I palpate the hard canine larynx with my fingers. This is the spot from which sounds emanate; this is where the source of the voice resides, beneath that gristly protective shield.

  I run my hand over Coco's skull. Where is his sense of hearing located? Where is the capacity for generating sounds rooted in his canine brain? The shape of the skull and its bumps and indentations enable one to infer the site of certain regions of the brain, so Professor Joseph Gall discovered at the end of the eighteenth century. To Gall, every head was a cerebral map. If deaf-mutes had their heads shaved, for example, he could diagnose the nature of their disability by sight, without having been told anything about them beforehand. Professor Gall's observations filled whole phrenological atlases.

  Only by keeping a record could one guard against the intrusion of distorted sounds. The nature of the human voice is such, however, that this record would be no more than some cursory sketches of vocality comprising a few jagged lines scrawled on paper to define the hearers' location. It would merely be the rudiments, perhaps, of a map of which the bottom left corner, at most, displays a few faint lines devoid of an established scale, together with a few equally faint dots that do little to assist one's orientation. Where is one, in any case? In what area, since the map lacks a key?

  Coco has curled up on my lap and gone to sleep. The record comes to an end. Without getting up, I open the balcony door and continue to sit there for the time it takes to smoke a cigarette. A very clear, cold night. In air such as this, every external sound penetrates the innermost recesses of the ear: a horse-drawn cart, footsteps slowly receding. No, Coco isn't really asleep, or not profoundly so. His ears always twitch an instant before I myself hear something.

  I'm planning a map on which even the most insignificant human sounds must be recorded. For example, a practice common to many smokers: the violent expulsion of air between slack lips. A half-casual, half-voluptuous habit, it makes a disgusting sound that irritates me to death and provokes an involuntary urge to strangle the author of such repellently tuneless whistling. But I'd always be far too much of a coward to commit such an act, however justified. Too much of a coward even to rebuke the offender or to point out, very politely, that he's being a nuisance. I'm not equal to hand-to-hand combat — in fact I wouldn't even dare to clear my throat in an admonitory way. Those Hitler Youth boys this morning, perhaps they will be capable, when they grow up, of doing such things without turning a hair. Doubtless they will, if they can already bring themselves, as children, to get out of bed on a cold, dark morning for the sole purpose of sweating at their Scharführer's behest. It's lucky for someone like me that I grew up in the days before the Third Reich: no parades, no sojourns in camp, no physical training followed by the masculine stench and clamour of a steamy changing-room, no supervised wet dreams.

  The born coward fears everything on principle, even immersion in a group of equally bashful youngsters compelled to bare everything to the gaze of others, their half-aroused penises included. He dreads standing naked in the vaporous heat of the communal showers, dares not even peer between the others' legs for signs of pubescent fuzz. If only it weren't for the coarsely suggestive tone that seems so manifestly proper to those masculine voices. It can prompt a person to cut himself off from the rest because he simply can't bear to listen to it, and because it's inseparable from another tone of voice: the imperious, unambiguous, frontline organ from which all colour has been leached. It's so easy for someone who has mastered the first tone of voice to switch, quite instinctively, to the other. Are we all in danger, sooner or later, of adopting that barrack-square tone? It may be that none of us can rid himself of the temptation — none of us, of course, save deaf-mutes, who are immune to it because the said tone of voice is incapable of penetrating their consciousness. Professor Gall was a lonely child like me. It won him few friends when he noticed at the age of nine that the more pop-eyed of his schoolmates were exceptionally good at learning things by heart. Still, Gall was always surrounded by his skulls. He did at least have his family of death's-heads.

  Like Gall, anyone intending to compile a map of all the vocal nuances must not be put off by his fellow men. Nor, like that master of craniometry, can he afford to be thought a coward. He mustn't shrink from the most extreme human utterances; must be there on the spot when danger looms in order to record up any sounds that result; must not be deterred by the fact that many vocalisations sound far from pleasant, both to the hearer and to those who utter them. The listener must regard his subjects as sources of sound, nothing more; just sound sources and not, for example, pain-racked men in urgent need of assistance. I mustn't allow myself to be distracted from a collectable voice by such things as the brutal way in which the Scharführer abused his underlings, or the squalid conduct of the boor in the tram, or the behaviour of the demented woman who pestered the old man with questions about Santa Claus and allusions to her teddy bear's diet. I mustn't be so preoccupied with deaf-mutes' strange gestures, either, that I fail to notice when one of them gives vent to an inarticulate sound. Even if I fly at the throat of someone who noisily exhales tobacco smoke, the effort involved in throttling him with my bare hands must not divert my attention from the sound of his last, dying gasp.

  My vocal map will not be compiled in accordance with familiar rules or confined within predictable boundaries. It will not merely survey familiar terrain from a novel viewpoint, but display an area extraneous to every human cartographic domain. The implementation of such a plan will require infinite patience. To capture a specific type of whimper it may be necessary to make comparative recordings before my atlas covers all the nuances of that plaintive sound.

  It may be years before the last gap is filled by a related utterance from the lips of another sound source — indeed, a single human life-span may be far too short to accomplish this. An animal has to follow beaten tracks. We, being optical creatures convinced that all phenomena should be regarded in the same way for ever, as our lifelong habits dictate, must do no such thing. We must persevere until, quite suddenly, the heavens burst open and the world of sound breaks over us with elemental force, reducing all that is familiar to ruins in the same way as that belch startled me although my ears should have accepted it simply for what it was: an occasion for making another entry on my map, which is still almost blank.

  II

  NOW THERE ARE SIX OF US. MY DREAM ISN'T OVER YET, IT'S pitch dark, the middle of the night, let me go on sleeping, stop shaking me, leave go of me. So we've got a little sister, Heide, she's just been born, but that's no reason for us to get up now, in the middle of the night, we'll go and see her in the morning, as soon as it's light. Leave me alone, it isn't time for school yet, either, and there's no air raid on, there really isn't.

  All that shaking has woken me up. She's gone again, taken the others to the bathroom with her. What time is it? Do we have to go down to the shelter? I'm still dreaming. Who turned the light on? The bed's nice and warm, the pillow's all squashy. Someone whispered, 'Quick, get yourselves washed and dressed.' Who was it? The nursemaid. I can hear her in the bathroom, talking quietly to the others. 'You're going to be collected,' she said.

  Collected? Why? Who by? Where are we going? To visit Mama in the hospital and see Heide? Th
ey'll be asleep at this hour. Has something happened? Mama has been in the hospital a whole month, she wasn't well, she was waiting for the baby all that time, she was always so sad when we saw her. And now it's a girl after all, not another boy the way Papa wanted. "When Mama was allowed to visit us at home one afternoon, she and Papa talked about having another little son.

  I peep through the crack in the curtains: still pitch dark outside, not a light anywhere, everything blacked out. It's so quiet, too early for birds or people. Any wind? Don't know, can't see the trees. Yes, there, a branch waving around just outside the window, but it's bare. That's not leaves rustling, it's water running in the bathroom. I can't hear anything else. The nursemaid's calling me: 'Helga, pick out some toys, will you? Only one each, mind, that's all you can take with you.'

  I'd like to ask her what's up, but I'm too sleepy to talk. We never need to take any toys with us when we go to stay at our house at Schwanenwerder. And what are those two suitcases doing here, full of warm things? We've got plenty of clothes in all our houses. It's warm in the bathroom, the tiles are so steamed up you can hardly see across the room. The nursemaid's standing at the basin with Holde, but Holde won't open her mouth to have her teeth brushed. What's the point of the suitcases and all those clothes?