by Marcel Beyer
That's Holde, with her love of horror stories, but Hilde interrupts her: 'It's got to be snappy, we need really short sentences, like "All street signs to be painted over." '
'Radio Werewolf should broadcast marching songs and fanfares,' Hedda says in a loud whisper, 'with news bulletins in between.'
Helmut, who has been thinking hard, says, 'Papa also said you can stop American tanks by putting something in their petrol at night.'
The others rack their brains in vain. It would be nice if they really could think of something that would bring the war to an end. 'We must dream up some nastier things,' Hilde says. 'Acid, for instance. Acid's horrible stuff, it eats away your eyes and blinds you. All right, I'll put that down: "The Werewolves are blinding enemy soldiers." '
'Or hacking off their hands,' says Holde, but Hilde can't keep up. 'Or stripping them naked and chopping them up, in that order. Or spreading fire and destruction. Or shooting all traitors on the spot. Or drinking the enemy's blood.'
The others break off and look at each other as if surprised at their own thirst for blood, but they're sure they've been a great help to Papa. He'll feel much happier once they've given him their collection of news items.
*
But this darkness affords no protection, neither from the memory of those shrill, cracked, mutilated voices, nor from the noise of the bombardment. The crash of shells exploding above ground penetrates the Bunker walls, even at the very deepest level. It won't be long before the walls crack under the impact. They'll cave in and kill us — we'll be crushed to death by rubble just as Moreau's sleeping bats were crushed to death in the dark after being exposed to a momentary, blinding flash when the bomb ripped through the roof of the Chiroptera house and flooded their cage with daylight, the dazzling, agonising light that finally destroyed the defenceless creatures' nocturnal world.
So one form of darkness has absorbed the other: black is immersed in black, in a darkness unconnected with the night-and-morning world where safety resides. Such darkness fails to act as a shield against glaring light because it does not recognise light as its counterpart: in such darkness, light is inconceivable.
Stumpfecker stands facing me in uniform. It was he that ordered me to report to him forthwith, here in this sunless, subterranean world, in order to record the voice of his very last patient. He puts a finger to his lips. We have to be as quiet as possible in the Bunker, especially here on the lowest level, because one never knows, at any time of the day or night, whether the patient is asleep, presiding over a secret meeting, or simply sitting in his quarters, saying nothing but intolerant of any sound, however faint, in the passage outside his door.
The patient is far more sensitive to disturbances of human origin than to the thunder of the guns overhead. Stumpfecker believes that the patient's sensitivity extends to his own vocalisations: the voice that used to be so loud and clear is growing steadily fainter. 'You've yet to see this for yourself, Karnau, but what really dismays me is the fact that sometimes, in the last few days, the patient has been incapable of making any sound at all. It's happening more and more often, too. He'll bid a wordless farewell to subordinates who are leaving the Bunker for good, and his only response if they say something while shaking hands is a silent movement of the lips.'
There's a whole set of blank wax discs on the table in my cubicle, and a portable recording machine is permanently at the ready. Stumpfecker has gone off to see how his patient is. All that mitigates the oppressive silence is the hum of the overtaxed air-conditioning system. The telephone rings. It's Stumpfecker: 'Come quickly, Karnau, it's the patient, a very serious situation, he's been yelling at his subordinates in conference, hasn't strained his voice so badly for ages, it'll give out at any moment, so get your equipment down here fast.'
The stairs and the narrow passage are thronged with people listening with expressions of alarm. The patient is clearly audible now, even though all the doors are closed. It's possible to hear every word he bellows in that maltreated voice, which does indeed sound on the point of giving out. I can already detect rents in his vocal cords, laryngeal lesions, but the eavesdroppers seem unaware of this: their whole attention is focused on the wording of his furious accusations and invocations of doom.
Stumpfecker, crouching outside the door from which the noise is coming, nervously fidgets with his medical bag. We continue to wait, unable as yet to enter the room but poised to do so once the tantrum has run its course. 'He'll be slumped in his chair, utterly exhausted,' Stumpfecker murmurs. 'Stay in the background to begin with. Then, when I've checked his blood pressure and given him his medication, hold the microphone to his lips. You must start recording at once. It'll be my job to coax a few words out of him. You can't afford any slip-ups, Karnau. We don't know if he'll ever get his voice back. This could be our very last chance to record it.'
But the red, raw, worn-out throat fails to emit another sound. We sit in Stumpfecker's consulting room on the lower level and listen to the recorded silence. Stumpfecker tries hard to retain his composure. 'Let's hope this difficult phase will soon be over,' he says. 'There may be light at the end of the tunnel. After all, he's undergone several polypectomies, for instance in May 1935, on the advice of the doctors at the Charité Hospital. Having listened to one of his speeches on the radio, they inferred from his raucous voice that someone who could bellow so loudly for two solid hours must either have a larynx made of steel or be doomed to vocal paralysis. To the best of my knowledge, the last operation took place in October last year, shortly before my posting to East Prussia. It entailed the removal of another growth on the vocal cords.
'Many people regard the situation as hopeless,' Stumpfecker goes on. 'They think we're all condemned to look on idly at close quarters while the patient's physical condition deteriorates. There have been medical men who mistakenly believed that he was suffering from Parkinson's, but mark my words, Karnau: once the war is over — and it won't be long now — the patient's constitution will soon be restored by doses of fresh air, prolonged exposure to glorious summer sunlight, and rigorous detoxification.'
It's only two days since Stumpfecker was promoted to become the patient's personal physician in succession to the man who could neatly insert cannulas into any vein he chose. Dr Morell, renowned for his miracle pills, quit the Bunker in a hurry, and no one reckoned with the possibility that Stumpfecker, of all the numerous doctors present, would replace him — least of all Stumpfecker himself. The truth is that the end of our joint research had cast a shadow over his career. Although the authorities tolerated the failure of his transplant experiments at Hohenlychen, where he attempted to graft slivers of bone taken from inmates of Ravensbruck concentration camp on to patients in the SS hospital — a procedure that resulted in the growth of proud flesh, gangrene, and, ultimately, death — they did not feel able, in the light of military developments, to fund our research any longer. Having embarked on it with the aim of exploring the foundations of a radical form of speech therapy, we had ended up with a collection of mutes.
Instead of purposefully eradicating vocal defects, we had erased whole voices. This meant, in the end, that all our efforts were expended on reversing the process, on trying to adjust and repair damaged voices — on conducting futile breathing exercises and clearing asthmatic tubes, on directing the course of these only moderately successful experiments — when there was no real hope of repairing organs already given up for lost. This fact was, of course, concealed from our guinea-pigs, who would only have panicked and rent the air with countless aberrant sound waves.
Our work was finally terminated when a special SS unit herded the unresisting test subjects into a corner of their ward, doused them in surgical spirit, and set fire to them, destroying the entire building as well. Stumpfecker felt sure he would be demoted several ranks in consequence. He owed it to his teacher and patron, Professor Gebhardt, that the opposite happened. Not long afterwards, in October of last year, he was appointed surgeon at HQ Eastern Front, whe
re he often accompanied the patient on his daily walks.
And now, within the space of a few hours, he has had to familiarise himself with his patient's medical history by consulting the notes which Morell, in a very slapdash fashion, had kept over the years. Under present circumstances, however, the professional competence of his new personal physician matters less to the patient than his physical stature. Almost two metres tall, Stumpfecker is known here as 'the Giant'. Although he may not be able to administer injections as neatly and painlessly as Morell — Stumpfecker's own staff informed him of the patient's misgivings in this respect — his titanic physique would readily permit him, in the event of a dangerous bombardment, to carry the patient on his back to a place of safety. Laden with a rigid figure whose straining arms threatened to squeeze the air from his lungs, he could if need be hasten from room to room, dodging the chunks of concrete and steel girders that rained down on them both. His reserves of energy would enable him to scramble over rubble for a considerable period, upturned eyes forever focused on the crumbling Bunker ceiling and ears ignoring his human burden's stertorous breathing in favour of sounds indicative of where the concrete would be rent asunder or the next shell land.
At our session the next day Stumpfecker is once more filled with optimism. The patient has fully recovered from the exhaustion induced by yesterday's interminable tirade. He seems cheerful, relaxed, and in excellent voice. The needle quivers restlessly, leaving a silvery groove in the disc's matt wax surface. Every now and then the patient helps himself to a chocolate from a salver, a habit that struck me yesterday. It probably serves to lubricate his voice in a routine, unobtrusive manner.
I envy people who can fall asleep at the drop of a hat. There are some here who exemplify this ability, for instance a courier who simply nodded off in the canteen as soon as he had delivered his dispatches: he sat down at the table, slept for a mere quarter-hour in the glare of the overhead light, and then woke up in a trice, ready once more to brave the perils of a city under siege. The same phenomenon can be observed in many of the visitors who come and go in the Bunker: doctors, sentries, senior army officers, Party officials. They lean against a wall somewhere for ten or fifteen minutes — indeed, often for only five — and wake up seemingly refreshed. I can't do that. I take at least half an hour to go off to sleep, if not an hour, and even then it's a painful process: my head rings with past, present and future voices that refuse to be silenced. There are times when any voice is too much to bear.
This has to do with the absolute darkness that prevails in my Bunker cubicle. I find it a trial, the lighting here below ground. There's no dawn light in the morning, no twilight in the evening, none of the gradual blurring of outlines that precedes the nocturnal evanescence of objects and human figures. Colours don't gradate from purple to the red of coagulated blood, from pale to dark blue, until, little by little, they're all reduced to shades of grey that eventually turn a blackish blue and envelop the whole world. There's not a glimmer now, no faint glow from the night sky, just an abrupt transition when I turn the light in my cubicle on or off. There are no light switches at all in the passages and communal rooms. The lights out there burn twenty-four hours a day. They must consume a lot of power — the generators on the lower level can barely cope. Strange that precious electricity should be wasted in this way, but I suppose it's official policy that every space apart from our sleeping quarters should be illuminated. No shadowy figures must encounter each other in the gloom and no one can be allowed to withdraw into even temporary seclusion. That may be why the sleeping courier presented such a singular picture: people are not, as a rule, illuminated while asleep; they retire into the darkness, where no one can see them. What kind of life do we lead in our ever-illuminated surroundings?
The artificial light in which we have now been living for so many days is not particularly bright. It flickers or even goes out under the effect of gunfire, thereby seeming to imitate nature, but it burns and stings the skin as soon as you turn it on. In time you perceive it less as a condition than as a substance. It diffuses an oily yellow glow over everything and defies removal, however hard you scrub. It even clings to your face, which looks cheesy, as if its original colour had imperceptibly faded and been replaced by a film of artificial light. Is that skin on my milk, or is it just the light? None of us swallows his ration of boiled milk without a shudder of distaste.
Even our acoustics here are affected by the light. It suppresses natural sonic conditions: all voices sound a full tone lower, all noises muffled and indistinct. The brighter the light and the sharper the outlines, the more muffled the voices. This is an unreal acoustic environment, one in which everything loud and shrill stands out like a sore thumb. Does the wind still whistle? Do doves still coo? Do blackbirds still twitter as they hop from branch to branch? Is the air still alive with almost inaudible stirrings whose origin cannot be located? Down here, everything can be traced to its source with ease: a change of pressure simply denotes that someone has closed the heavy steel door at the end of the passage.
We no longer venture to cite the time of day or night with any certainty. When someone visits us from the outside world, he's promptly bombarded with questions about the time of day, the prevailing light:
'What are the clouds like, brilliant white against a grey background?'
'No, they're more on the hazy side.'
'So the sky's overcast, is it, as if all the light and colour had drained away?'
'No, not that either. It looks in places as if the sun may break through before long.'
'Did you hear that? Just imagine, he says the sun may come out soon. Lucky man, to have seen it with your own eyes.'
'Is there any warmth in the sun yet?'
'Are the nights getting milder?'
'What about that reddish glow the evening sky takes on in spring-time? Can you tell it from the reflection of the fires in the suburbs?'
'Whenever the smoke clears, sure, no problem.'
'And the gutted buildings overhead, do they reflect the light, or are they so black with soot they simply absorb it?'
It's hard on the constitution, a daily routine no longer governed by the sun: never to bed before three in the morning, up at noon, straight off to a recording session. Still tired out, I manipulate the controls in a kind of dream, observe my movements like a stranger: my hand, the rippling tendons, the curious way my forefinger bends when I extend it, and the half-moons I've never noticed before, the pronounced half-moons at the base of my fingernails.
The Bunker's entire ventilation system is on the verge of collapse. The stale air is no longer being fully extracted, so we filter the remaining oxygen from it by breathing faster than normal. Fainting fits are becoming more frequent. The ventilators themselves may be clogged with swarms of fruit-flies sucked in from the kitchen. The cook can no longer hold the little insects at bay, there's too much food lying around: ration packs of rusks and crispbread, honey by the bucketful, ketchup — comestibles for which no use can be found now that most of the staff are getting their meals from a big kitchen elsewhere in the Bunker.
'Look at this,' says the cook. 'Everything's going bad: fresh vegetables, cottage cheese, yoghurt, mushrooms. It hasn't occurred to anyone to cancel them — they're still being flown in daily from Bavaria, even though the Führer won't touch them any longer. I've never known a sadder day in all my time as his personal diet cook. For years I cooked him vegetarian meals on doctor's instructions, meals that took account of his weak stomach and his digestive problems, and now what? All my good work is undone in a matter of days because he abandons his diet and refuses to eat anything but pastries and chocolates.
'On getting up he has a bowl of chocolate-flavoured gruel or blancmange made from bars of bitter chocolate, but without milk. Vegetable matter only — that at least I can make sure of, being his diet cook. The Führer can't tolerate milk, unlike yoghurt or cream, so I use agar instead. Regular works of art in agar, I turn out. The main thing is to make th
em creamy and very chocolaty. He gorges himself on chocolates and chocolate-flavoured pastries all day long. The squares of nougat he mostly eats at night, during those tiring conferences of his: very sweet, good for the nerves. I'll see he goes on getting them to the last, provided our supplies hold out.
'We've just lost a whole roomful of milk chocolate — without nuts, of course. It was blown to bits, plus sentry, off a corridor on the top floor of the Chancellery — a risky location for a secret store-room, but ingenious. I mean, who would have dared to go looting on the top floor with all those shells falling?
'We're all fervently hoping that fresh supplies will continue to arrive from Switzerland every morning. Red Cross flights are still getting through, but the situation is critical. The members of the chocolate squad are scared of becoming embroiled in the fighting outside when they have to leave here and escort the daily chocolate consignment. As for the confectioner, who's working around the clock, he's afraid he'll be for the chop if the day ever comes when he can't produce a salverful of chocolates.’
*
The killer dogs have been trained to attack enemy soldiers lying asleep on the ground. They know their victims are defenceless because they can hear their quiet breathing from a long way off. They can hear every snore, every breath, and when they find a man asleep they sneak up on him and nuzzle his bare throat — very gently, so as not to tickle him and wake him up. It's his Adam's apple they're after, the killer dogs. They close their teeth on it very gently, and then, without warning, they bite it as hard as they can — so quickly that their victim can't scream with pain because they've already ripped his throat out. The killer dogs make sure that anyone they attack can't utter another sound. Their eyes glow in the dark, and they've got wolf's blood in their veins.