by Marcel Beyer
The tape is finally secured. Last of all: Operate microphone switch. The tape is running past the head, recording is in progress: 'Then I was thrown clear by the blast, found myself lying in the ditch with earth pattering down on me. A fiendish racket, intense pressure on my eardrums, a piercing whistle. Above me, comrades were running away with their hair on fire. One of them came rolling down on top of me, slammed me across the face with his limp arm. I shut his eyes, which were already caked with mud. Then silence, utter silence until I came to in the midst of another diabolical din from the men in bed around me, the bedclothes, the breathing. And the breathing turned out to be my own ...'
The man emits a low, throaty sound and breaks off. I've now recorded my first front-line voice, recorded it through this thin partition wall. My hands are still trembling. Only now does it strike me that the voice must have an owner: one of Hellbrandt's patients — an exceptionally serious case, no doubt. I sneak out into the passage, eager for at least a glimpse of my sound source. The door of Hellbrandt's office is ajar: I see a pathetic, grimy figure, bare feet in boots with the laces undone, knees trembling, trousers spattered with mud. An allegory of squalor with shirt buttoned askew, lips quivering and cheeks unshaven, the patient has red-rimmed eyes and his matted hair is singed in places. He doesn't notice me. The fingers of one hand are stiffly clutching a fold of filthy trouser-leg, the other hand is kneading his groin.
'What, still in your pyjamas? Did we wake you? I apologise.'
Hellbrandt stations himself behind me. 'The MPs picked him up quite near here last night,' he explains. 'A malingerer? A deserter? That's what they want me to find out and certify. He can't go back into the line in any case, the war has robbed him of his eyesight. It's immaterial for the moment whether his blindness is only hysterical. He certainly acquired a good dose of shell-shock at the front. He'll be going home with the next batch of wounded.'
Hellbrandt turns back to the patient. 'I'm sending you home,' he says. A sudden thought strikes me: What if my departmental chief notices that I've misappropriated a whole reel of precious magnetic tape? Does it still matter, though? They mean me to get myself killed out here, Berlin means to see me slaughtered, that's clear as daylight. The new generation, they said, but they didn't mean young soldiers, the youngsters with contorted, steel-helmeted faces who are quitting their short lives in the cut and thrust of trench warfare, or simply in the barrages laid down by their own side; they were referring to the new generation of portable tape-recorders. Premagnetisation, that's the magic word. The tape is premagnetised, so the hiss can be almost entirely eliminated while recording. A revolution in sound, that's what they call this machine. Its appreciably greater acoustic spectrum enables very faint and extremely loud sounds to be recorded for the first time in human history.
I know what happened. The children's father ran a test, as he does with every new technological development. He demanded a demonstration of this portable tape-recorder and was delighted with the result: 'A genuine breakthrough!' he is said to have exclaimed. And then: 'If we can put this new technology into widespread front-line use quickly enough' — or words to that effect — 'I foresee immense potentialities.' His idea was seized upon by some ingenious desk-warrior like my room-mate in the firm, who promptly devised a programme for testing the machine in action. Every last item of enemy radio traffic was to be recorded with crystal clarity — crystal clarity, no less — and sent back at once to the rear echelon for decoding. Why? Because it's obvious to any rational person that, unlike yours truly, cipher clerks are too valuable to be exposed to the perils of the front line.
'Harnessing science to the war effort,' my head of department told me, 'that's the prime requirement, Karnau, you know that yourself. Each of us must serve where he's needed most. Think of the vast, state-sponsored research projects we'll be given if we make a worthwhile contribution to final victory. We have to compile data based on practical experience, Karnau, I'm sure you agree. And that, Karnau, as I've no need to tell you, means getting closer to the enemy.'
What he omitted to say was that, by selecting me for frontline duties under the auspices of this programme, he was killing two birds with one stone and ridding himself of an unwanted subordinate. He's only waiting for me to wind up like everyone else out here: felled by a hail of bullets, blown to bits by a shell, or simply crushed to death by a tank. The whole firm still laughs at my blunder in Alsace. Someone only has to say the word 'Strasbourg' and my colleagues' faces light up. Then they're off: 'Poor old Karnau spends his nights keeping company with horses' heads and listening to records of people panting and groaning, and he's so dozy during the day, he goes and wipes important tape-recordings. Horses' heads are hot stuff — try swapping your old woman for a horse's head some night and you'll never look back.'
So now the die is cast. My first brush with the enemy is imminent and inescapable, and lying here in the wards are the wounded who have already seen everything that's in store for me. The front line: that's where inward experiences are abruptly externalised, for instance when a shell splinter or a bayonet severs your stomach muscles and your guts spill out over your genitals, thighs and feet.
Hellbrandt knocks on my door after his morning rounds: 'Karnau, come with me. There's something you should see — something that ought to interest you, being a sound engineer.'
He ushers me into a room off the main ward with only three beds in it. 'These are my favourite patients,' he says. 'They don't make as much noise as the others, don't keep calling for me or the nurses. These creatures in here are always quiet. It's a positive pleasure to treat them, especially after a spell of fierce fighting, when bloody shreds of humanity are brought in and groans and screams ring out on all sides, when the corridors are jam-packed with stretchers because there's nowhere else to put them. Then it's a case of operating, operating around the clock, digging out splinters, sewing up wounds, et cetera, so that at least the severest cases give you some peace. Men with badly shattered faces have very little hope of survival. The most you can do is remove the lower jaw and patch up a hole or two. Other than that, it's just a question of keeping them quiet until the end comes. Trouble is, as soon as you've dealt with one ward, the caterwauling starts up again in another. This is the only place where silence always reigns.'
The occupants of the three beds are staring at me. Slightly flustered, I say good morning. 'Save your breath,' Hellbrandt tells me, 'but if you do speak, make sure your mouth movements are clearly visible.'
He nods at the men in turn, and they all nod back. Then he produces some cigarettes from his pocket and inserts one between each patient's lips. The dry, loosely packed weeds burn down in no time, and no wonder, the way the deaf-mutes puff at them. Hellbrandt beckons me closer. 'The deaf-mutes' battalion was my own idea,' he says. 'A special unit capable of carrying out operations to the letter, even when the noise level is extreme.'
He perches on the edge of one of the beds and converses in sign language with its occupant, a man whose head is bandaged. 'Most of them are also in possession of highly classified information,' he tells me, without taking his eyes off the patient. 'There's no danger of their divulging secrets or military objectives that could be of assistance to the enemy, even if subjected to the most rigorous interrogation methods.'
The man in the next bed slowly raises his hands and begins to gesticulate in a similar fashion. Hellbrandt's eyes swivel from one man to the other. 'You'll have to excuse me for a moment, Karnau. It's all I can do to follow them when they get into an argument.'
He interprets their gestures in a low voice, producing a delayed translation of the visible into the audible. The picture and the sound-track are out of sync: 'It's days since we went into action, he says, but my stomach's still churning. It's almost like it's getting worse, becoming unendurable. You'd think the enemy had invented some ultra-special weapons designed to deal with deaf-mutes. Not shells but lethal soundwaves ...'
The man puffs at his cigarette, so his next sign
ed sentence is only fragmentary. The other patient waves to attract Hellbrandt's attention. 'No need for any ultra-special weapons, he says. Crouch in a trench when a tank goes roaring over the top of you, that's good enough. Our battalion is always first in line for unpleasant assignments up front. That's because none of us can afford to dodge them .. .'
Such are a deaf-mute's ordeals in the audible world, and such are the audible world's assaults on the deaf-mute. The rest of us are also subjected to these assaults, but we completely fail to perceive them because we're so inattentive, so busy listening that individual sounds escape us. The death cry of a comrade may go unnoticed amid the thunder of the guns, just as the sound of a barrage may be temporarily ignored by those awaiting the order to advance. Noises are merciless assailants of us all, but whereas eyes are always required for the perception of light, tongues for tastes and noses for smells, noises are not dependent on the ears alone. They eat into every part of the body, protected or unprotected: they can set up vibrations in a steel helmet and deliver a fatal shock to the entire skull.
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 sp
orts 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.