by Marcel Beyer
But the development of gooseflesh is a giveaway in itself. To the observer, even distended pores and erect papillae are overly revealing. The rigidity of the man's face is intended to disguise those uncontrollable changes in his epidermis. His vacant gaze and drooping lips are an attempt to distract me from the shivers running through the exposed parts of his anatomy. They're meant to divert my attention from his bare feet, bent back, hunched shoulders and incipient paunch, from the shape beneath the front of his cotton underpants, but they fail to do so.
They even fail to disguise that faint intimation hidden from the observer's gaze: the cold sweat of fear that is trickling down the back of the body on display and very slowly tracing the line of the man's backbone on the material of his vest.
And we both know this. We both know that the body under inspection can conceal nothing, even though the ears pretend to be deaf and the lips mute, because my subject's eyes are still looking out from deep within him. His gaze is eloquent of the dawning realisation that he has used his voice for years without paying it the slightest heed: all those countless mutilated sounds, all those crude, ill-modulated utterances have suddenly combined to create a diabolical din in his head.
That's how we stand facing each other. That's how the figure in front of me stands, like a conscript undergoing his physical — like a youngster who, for the first time in his life, sees his naked adult body exposed to thorough scrutiny by strangers. We stand there in silence for a short while only. Then it's time for me to put a stop to the man's impersonation of a deaf-mute. And, once he fills the cold room with sounds, being compelled to answer my questions, he's even more naked than before — really naked now, even though certain portions of him are concealed by the cotton that moulds itself to his scrotum and limp penis. Has he already reached the stage at which tears need restraining? Can I already detect, in the corners of his eyes, slight traces of moisture with morning sunlight reflected in them? Although he hasn't been informed that he's the subject of vocal research, he clearly senses, as we talk, that I'm inexorably recording every nuance of his voice, however faint. Is that a dark spot I see on the front of his underpants? Has my subject lost control of himself and passed a drop of urine?
But he realises that it doesn't matter whether he passes a drop that visibly moistens the material, or whether he manages to suppress this minimal efflux of urine throughout our session, because every fibre of him senses that even his muscular tension is being registered.
There it is: a twitch of the upper lip. Quite unconnected with word formation, this tic is quickly acquiring a life of its own and will persist with every sound the man utters, expressive of impending collapse and disintegration. My subject won't retain his composure for much longer, I can tell from his voice. It not only shakes but communicates its tremors to his entire body. The bare feet will soon have to move, the man in the vest will soon be seeking some means of support. He can't concentrate any more, gropes desperately for answers to the simplest questions, his own voice ringing so loudly in his ears that every attempt to formulate a word misfires. Not a single clearly audible consonant emerges from his writhing lips. His throat balks, contorted by uncontrollable muscular spasms, and all that can be heard is that hideous organ, just a croak bereft of all meaning, a strangled laryngeal gurgle that drowns one misshapen sound with its immediate successor. Meanwhile, quite unhurriedly, I continue to repeat my questions in a loud, clear voice as if patiently giving my subject a second chance. I do so although we're both well aware that he's long past saving — that every renewed attempt to speak is just another step on the road to speechlessness, that every movement of the mouth, every readjustment of the vocal cords, every flutter of the tongue, is bringing him closer to ultimate and ineluctable silence.
Now to conduct an intuitive assessment of my subject's swaying figure. Should I grant him a fleeting hope of recovery, or should I push him over the edge right away? His eyes transmit no entreaty, nor does his stance convey anything of the kind, but his voice implores me to exempt it from further interrogation. A momentary pause as I prepare to ask another question: calmly, I draw breath, assume a look of inquiry, begin to shape a word — and, almost imperceptibly, a plaintive sound issues from deep within that half-naked body. Not that my subject realises it, I've attained my objective: no need to say another word.
That last, faint sound was precisely what I had to coax from him for recording purposes. Now that silence has fallen and nothing more happens, he collapses. Is his uvula damaged? Are his gums sore? Have his vocal cords been seriously affected after only one session? I hand him over to Hellbrandt, who will check on his present condition. It's only afterwards that I become aware of an acrid smell in the room: the man spent half an eternity standing, barefoot and breathless, in a puddle of his own juices. I send for someone to mop it up.
*
Papa's going to give a speech. What a lot of people, and how close together they're standing. They can't move forwards or backwards, they can't move their arms and their tummies are rubbing together. This is the first time we've been allowed to come and listen, me and Hilde. There's a smell in the air from all these people. I hope they'll let us through to our seats, all the others have been taken long ago. If we have to stand we won't be able to see a thing — we'll be crushed to death by all these grown-ups. Mama pushes a man out of the way and points to our seats, one each for her and me and Hilde, Papa reserved them for us. People wave when we sit down, and we wave back. Now they're starting to cheer. Mama nudges me. 'Look,' she says, 'here comes Papa.'
'Where?'
'Not behind us, silly, straight ahead.'
Papa takes his place at the speaker's desk and looks out over the audience. He's looking in our direction. Has he seen us? Does he know exactly where we're sitting? His eyes are tired, but you can't see the shadows under them because the lights are so bright. He hardly eats a thing these days, just semolina with milk, and he smokes all the time, but now his eyes begin to shine. He's concentrating on what he's going to say. Everyone realises this, because they all go very quiet. Now he starts speaking.
He talks about the many millions of people who are listening to him at this moment. He says something about the airwaves and how they form a link between us and everyone else on earth. Perhaps even the dead are listening to him, he says, perhaps they include the last of the Stalingrad fighters, the ones who transmitted their farewell radio message weeks ago. The people shout, 'Bravo', they shout 'Heil', and when they clap it makes an incredible din. Papa says he intends to give us an unvarnished picture of the situation. 'The storming of the steppe!' he cries. Everyone is hanging on his words. 'Childish,' he says, 'that's a childish excuse.' Papa never smiles when he says childish, it's a sign that he isn't joking.
Papa takes great care to speak clearly, so that every word can be understood. He talks about peace feelers, robots, and — there it is again — 'The storming of the steppe!' How the loudspeakers rattle. Papa's really shouting now, to make himself heard above the din. The audience are so worked up, he has to keep breaking off. Now they're actually laughing, and someone in the audience calls out, 'Rotten swine!' Who was it? Where is he? The voice came from quite close by, but it's too late, we can't see anyone with his mouth open. 'Only the most total will be total enough!' cries Papa.
*
No use swabbing away the blood, it tints the gums like rouge, laps around every tooth in fine skeins. A complete set? A full house, dentally speaking? The jaws are clamped apart in the usual way to avoid damaging the enamel. Slight prognathism. Several microphones are needed to investigate this remote and hitherto unexplored area. Four are focused on the test subject from different directions. A fifth, secreted in the immediate vicinity of the sound source, serves to pick up special frequencies. It is continuously modulated while recording is in progress so that certain features of the voice can be brought out on tape with precision.
The larynx, subjected to a weak and far from dangerous electric shock, gives an involun
tary jerk. Will the voice go racing up the scale, into the very highest register? No, it subsides before it can do so. Murmurs uttered in a normal voice and repeated clicking sounds produce some very nice shadows. Then, slowly, barely perceptible at first, comes a dark, reddish glimmer, then pale violet, then a bright, sky-blue vocal shade. Is the light, the sound, already fading? As the larynx subsides and relaxes, so the voice becomes deeper and hoarser and displays a growing tendency to vibrate. The subject is still inclined to breathe from the thorax. Jaw movements are observable, and instinctive lingual contractions scour the gums. The more violent these movements, the more copious the flow of saliva. The subject tries to expectorate, but threads of spittle run down his chin, mingled — so far as one can tell in the gloom — with blood. Here and there the blood picks up a ray of light and carries it along. Thin, diffuse and flickering, it weaves a pattern on the darkness.
Sensors have been inserted in the convolutions of the ear. These provide an accurate record of how clearly the subject can hear his own voice while undergoing treatment. When it subsides from exhaustion after several tests and the contacts are removed from the throat, which is raw in places, I detect a shiny patch on the smooth floor: blood, or urine?
Expanses of shadow alternate with others bathed in the spotlights' glare. The smooth, fine-pored area stands out against its rough, uneven setting, where the musculature of the neck can be discerned when the chin is raised. Is that gooseflesh? No, just stubble on the edge of the ill-shaven jaw. The pink skin looks like a wound in the midst of that expanse of curly black hair, that stubborn canine fur which the razor has failed to slice off flush with the pores. The bare throat is motionless, exposed to a beam of light so dazzlingly bright that the illuminated area looks almost white. Rubber gloves squeak as the surgeon pulls them on. A final inspection of the clamps to ensure that the chin cannot suddenly sag, then the first incision. The open epidermis, the muscle texture, the blood that trickles over chin and shoulders, matting the fur. 'Are you through yet?' A clamp is inserted in the throat. 'More light, I can't see a thing.' Next, the windpipe: a faint, rhythmical breeze plays over the surgeon's fingers. Now to insert the scalpel in the narrow aperture and tackle the larynx itself.
Is it possible to take what one removes from another's voice and add it to one's own, adopting its timbre and volume, just as a cannibal believes that he can enhance his physical strength by devouring another's flesh? Can a child's clear, youthful voice be acquired by means of surgical expropriation? Nobody knows.
Stumpfecker discards his mask, gown and gloves and lights a cigarette. The smoke rises to the brick ceiling and forms illuminated curlicues there. I survey the yellowing charts on the walls, the straps hanging down on either side of the operating table, the gown on the floor with its reddish-brown incrustations. I glance at the open door through which the patient is now being wheeled out into the gloomy passage, feel the cool draught, and listen to the hum of the air-conditioning, which becomes noticeable only now that silence has fallen. Stumpfecker says nothing, just puffs at his cigarette from time to time, and the surgical instruments reflect its glowing tip.
*
Papa's eyes are shining, he's red in the face. It must be dark outside by now, he's been speaking for such a long time. 'Mama, can we have something to drink?'
She shakes her head, doesn't even look round. 'Mama, isn't there anything to drink here? Can we have something to drink when Papa has finished his speech?'
She looks round at last, angrily. 'Don't be so impatient,' she hisses.
Papa's talking about fashion houses. That interests Mama. She looks up at him, listening hard, but he says that all fashion houses are to be closed. Mama shakes her head as if to say, 'No, surely not,' but she's only brushing a wisp of hair out of her eyes. The people are laughing again. Papa has been talking about the pointless jobs that are done in wartime even though they've no connection with the war. It's ridiculous, Papa says. For instance, what about those experts in Berlin who've spent weeks debating whether the non-German word 'accumulator' should be replaced by plain 'storage cell'?
Mama laughs too. Her first husband owned a factory that made accumulators. Papa says that people who devote themselves to such absurdities in wartime aren't fully occupied and should be employed in a munitions factory or sent to the front.
There's a chapter in one of our school-books where foreign words have to be replaced by German ones, but that surely doesn't mean our governess will be sent to the front. She's teaching Helmut too, these days, he's learning to read and write. I used to be the only one that could read. The others had to come to me whenever they wanted something read aloud to them.
I can't hear a lot of what Papa's saying, the people are making so much noise and shouting, 'Sieg Heil!' He looks as if he can't decide whether their interruptions are a good thing or a nuisance. He talks about a woman with five children to look after, almost like Mama and us. Now he's going on about young men and women riding in the Tiergarten at nine o'clock in the morning. What was that word he said, graceful or disgraceful?
He gave us a pony once, Hilde and me. We were allowed to ride it, or sometimes we harnessed the pony to the trap that went with it and took the others for rides. Mama rides too, but on a horse. Papa can't ride, perhaps because of the iron strapped to his leg to help him walk straight. He never wears shorts, either. Papa doesn't know we know about his iron, but we saw it once when he pulled up his socks and his trouser-leg got hitched up too.
Now Papa's talking about rest cures and the people who go on them — idlers, he calls them. Everyone gets very worked up. 'People who take rest cures are rumour-mongers,' he says. 'Shame on them,' shouts the audience. Mama often has to take a rest cure. She fainted in front of us once, it scared us all to death. 'Let's have no more of this bureaucratic, time-wasting, form-filling nonsense,' Papa tells the audience. 'Let's not fritter away our energies on countless trivialities.'
A friend of Hilde, who doesn't have private lessons, told us about the nonsense she has to learn by heart in school. Like the size of an Aryan's head, so you can compare him with other races. Everything is measured down to the last detail, even the ears. Perhaps that's why Papa took us out of school. We'd sooner learn to speak English the way Mama does. She speaks a lot of languages, that's why she never needs an interpreter. Not like Papa, who can't talk to foreign visitors on his own.
*
The world that preceded our ability to study the recorded voice had yet to become a world worthy of the name. Until Edison invented the phonograph, the world of sound could manifest itself only in the transitory present. That apart, one was dependent solely on the fainter, vaguer recollection of sounds in the inward ear, or, less reliably, on a comparison of unreal sounds in the imagination. And then, in 1877, came the sudden breakthrough to an undreamed-of field of acoustics. Once the first words had been engraved on a wax cylinder, the speaker could hear them after the event without having to repeat them: he was the first person capable of listening to himself.
With quiet breathing and vocalisations from a single living body, that was how the process began. Since then it has been possible to recall every nuance for comparison with any other, however closely related and however almost imperceptibly different. It is impossible to conceal the fact that no two human voices are identical. Not a voice in the world can be excused by any other.
So voices set off on their journey inwards, into lightlessness, gloom, darkness: Black Maria, that was what Edison christened one of his first phonographs, and that is how the leathery skin of flying foxes appears, like a dark, shadowy negative threaded with pale, barely visible lines. Wide awake, they keep their vigil in the acoustic twilight. The interplay of tonal shades that emerges from this darkness is indistinct at first. Impossible to perceive in their entirety, they are so constituted that individual parts of them light up from time to time.
All shades and nuances of the human voice must be discerned in this darkness, and every articulatory characteristic,
no matter how seemingly unimportant, must be coaxed from a sound source before its tonal colour lapses into inaudibility, into a soundlessness pervaded by crackles, impurities and blemishes. The darkness spanned by the flying fox's wing-tips is profound, and the membrane from which its veins protrude has the dull sheen of leather. It clings to a branch upside down, doglike snout sniffing and licking a red patch in the midst of its black fur. Its bared teeth gleam in the darkness, its ears twitch nervously as they focus on sources of sound, its muscles tense. The animal emits a squeak so shrill that it sets the eardrums vibrating and almost bursts them. Flying foxes suspended from their perch across the street hear footsteps and warn each other of an approaching figure on the pavement beneath their sleeping quarters.
*
Papa wants everyone to dismiss their household staff. Does that include our housemaids and the cook and the nursemaid? Even Mama's secretary? Is she going to have to let them all go? The audience laugh, they think Papa's idea is funny. Mama is sitting beside me, quite still. Is her hand trembling, or is she just getting something out of her handbag? Papa is shouting again: 'It must flow through the German people like an electric current,' he says. The veins are standing out on his neck so much, he looks as if he's going to explode. Then he quietens down again and talks about Frederick the Great. A sad figure, actually. He'd lost all his teeth, suffered from gout, and was in constant pain. A great general, but feeble and dying of disease.
Papa mentions the Führer, and they all get up off their chairs, clapping and cheering. The noise goes on for ages, it doesn't die down till they can't clap or cheer any more. Even Papa is worn out and has to take a breather.