by Marcel Beyer
The room goes suddenly quiet, no one moves. Hilde is still sitting on Helmut's tummy, but he isn't trying to fight her off any longer. They both lower their arms and stare at Mama. The rest of us stare at her too. Not a sound. We were watching Hilde and Helmut fighting, but now all we look at is Mama. We see her eyes, which are red with weeping. We see the way she's clinging to the doorpost, the way she's trembling all over, the way she's breathing and her bosom is rising and falling. None of us says a word. We all go on staring at her for what seems like hours.
I don't know who broke the silence. Was it Mama who spoke first, or was it Helmut, because he couldn't stand Hilde's weight on his tummy any longer? And which of them made the first move? I can't remember, but they don't make it up till supper-time. Herr Karnau sees we're feeling low as soon as he comes in. He's being allowed to put us to bed tonight because Mama says she doesn't have the energy. He stands at the wash-basin and squeezes toothpaste on to our brushes. 'What's the matter with you all tonight?' he asks.
'Mama was acting strange just now, even though we'll soon be leaving here by plane.'
'Leaving, eh? What did I tell you? You won't have to stay down here in the dark much longer, you'll be seeing the sky again. It's sure to be nice and sunny outside. Maybe you'll fly south to the mountains. It'll soon be peace-time, too. Just imagine, the war will be over.'
'When we were in the mountains,' Hilde says, 'we heard people yodelling. Can you yodel?'
'No, Hilde, I'm afraid not.'
'We can, a bit. The people in the mountains showed us how.'
Holde makes a funny noise. Hilde laughs. 'That's not yodelling, Holde. Listen, this is how it goes.'
Hilde can yodel properly. Not for long, but she sounds just like those people in the Tyrol.
'You're really good, Hilde,' Herr Karnau says. 'Show us how you do it.'
We all watch Hilde's mouth in the mirror. Toothpaste froth runs down her chin.
'More, Hilde, more!'
'Slower, so we can really see.'
Hilde gives a little shriek. 'Ouch, that's cold!'
The froth has dripped on to her tummy. She can't concentrate on yodelling any more, we're laughing so much, but she does her best to keep a straight face. Herr Karnau backs her up. 'You'll never learn if you fool around,' he tells the rest of us. 'Watch her mouth closely. The tongue, that's the most important thing.'
We all try to imitate her. 'No, Helmut,' Herr Karnau says, 'you're opening your mouth too wide. You must form a hollow for your tongue to vibrate in.'
But it isn't so easy to do that with a brace like Helmut's. Hedda can't help laughing, she chokes on some spit. Herr Karnau thumps her on the back. We all yodel at once. Then it's time for bed. Heide has to sleep next door because she's still got a cold and Mama doesn't want us to catch it. She's sad at not being allowed to sleep with the rest of us. Mama comes in to say good-night. We beg her to let Herr Karnau tell us a story before lights-out, and she says yes. Then she goes off to play patience and Herr Karnau sits down on the edge of my bunk. Herr Karnau's good at telling stories. He has to keep stopping every two minutes so we can take it in turns to run and tell Heide what happens next.
*
The bar of chocolate is still there. Still in one piece, too, though it could easily get broken every night when Herr Karnau sits down on the edge of my bunk. It's the first of May today, only four days to go to Hedda's birthday. If we leave before then the bar of chocolate will stay here for ever, which would be a waste. Maybe it would be better to eat it up right away. Or some of it, at least — just a little bit. Except that the others would smell it. They haven't had any chocolate for so long, they'd be bound to notice the smell as soon as I opened my mouth to speak. Herr Karnau stole the bar, and my chocolaty breath would give him away.
Herr Karnau's eyebrows are all bunched together. 'Is something wrong?' I ask him.
'Yes, everything. The last few days have been a strain. Everyone's very tired.'
'Will you also be leaving the Bunker soon?'
'Yes. Once you're safely out of here, the rest of the grownups will go too.'
'Where to?'
'No idea. As far away as possible, I hope.'
'Abroad?'
'Perhaps.'
'Does that mean we'll never see each other again?'
'Of course not, Helga. We'll still be seeing each other long after you and the others are grown up. I'll be an old codger by then, and so deaf you'll all have to shout to make yourselves understood.'
He smiles at me. He must be just as happy as we are to be getting out of here at last. We both picture aloud how lovely it is outside. It's ages since we smelt a flower, or saw any animals apart from the dogs, or breathed fresh air, or felt rain on our faces.
'It's spring-time, Helga. Imagine standing in the rain without an umbrella. It could rain and rain till the clothes clung to your body, but you wouldn't feel cold. Think how good the air smells after a spring shower. Think of sea air and waves breaking, think of the sound of the sea.'
'We used to go to the Baltic for holidays sometimes. We made sand-castles and sunbathed and swam. We got ever so brown.'
Mama comes in with the others and Herr Karnau leaves us alone. Mama says we must all have a good wash before we catch the plane. Papa comes in too. He plays with Heide and her rag doll. As soon as we've finished washing, Papa is going to read to us. Mama has ironed our night things, and my blue nightie is nice and soft. Helmut puts on his white pyjamas, the ones with the little red and turquoise flowers. The younger ones lie on the bed and listen to Papa reading, but there are too many thoughts going round in my head for me to listen properly. Papa reads slowly, stroking Heide's hair all the time.
It's too early to go to bed, so we're allowed downstairs for a while. Herr Karnau isn't there, and we don't see Coco either. It doesn't smell the same as usual, people must have been smoking down there. We all go into Papa's office. He's sitting under the sun-lamp with his goggles on, which always looks dangerous, and he's actually smoking a cigarette, something he hasn't done since we arrived here. Mama combs our hair very thoroughly, one after the other.
'Will we really be taking off soon?'
'Yes, Hedda, really.'
'Tonight? Tomorrow morning?'
'We don't exactly know yet. The sky must be really clear of enemy planes first, so nothing happens to us. A few hours more or less don't matter, though, do they?'
The sun-lamp bell rings. Papa takes off his goggles. His face always looks a bit red at first, but later you can see how brown the skin has gone. He puts the sun-lamp back on the shelf with his books and goes out into the passage. The downstairs floor is sopping wet, which isn't a good sign. Something must be wrong. I wonder where the dogs are. Why aren't they in their kennel? We didn't pass them on the stairs. Have they been taken outside some other way? There's something wrong, something must have happened to Coco. Papa and Mama are looking terribly depressed. All of a sudden, I can't do anything but cry, just cry. Mama puts her arms around me, but I go on crying. It's all so sad and dreary here. Hilde starts crying too.
Mama takes us back upstairs and says we must go to bed. 'Why so early?' I ask. Mama can hardly stop herself from crying either, and her voice is trembling. 'You want to get plenty of sleep in, don't you, before we catch the plane?'
Mama lets Heide get into my bunk although she still hasn't got rid of her cold, not completely.
'Mama, will Herr Karnau come and say good-night to us?'
She promises to go and look for him. 'No need to settle down right away,' she says. 'A doctor will be coming to give you all an injection to stop you feeling sick in the plane.'
Then she switches off the light and goes out. To fetch Herr Karnau? We can hear her talking to someone outside. The door is opening.
'Is that you, Herr Karnau?’
IX
'IS THAT YOU, HERR KARNAU?'
Yes, that must be Helga, the eldest child. And just before that, on the same disc: 'Mama, will Herr Ka
rnau come and say good-night to us?'
That's little Heide, there's no mistaking her voice, even though she sounds rather hoarse. And that's their mother's voice, in the interval between the two children's questions: 'No need to settle down right away.'
I can distinguish all the voices if I listen closely enough. But on what night was this recording made? It should be possible to arrange the discs in chronological order by consulting the dates scratched on the wax. The inscription beside the innermost groove on the first disc I played reads: Monday, 30 April 1945. That's the one with 'clip-clap' on it. So it isn't a defective recording after all. The children are really saying that, but in heavily disguised voices, and the same is true of 'hick-hack, hick-hack'. But what do the words mean? Did the children speak a kind of secret language among themselves when no one could overhear them? They definitely used private code-words from time to time, I noticed that soon after we met, but why did they disguise their voices on this occasion?
I play the passage again, and suddenly I understand: they're not speaking some private language, they're repeating made-up words from a fairy-tale. It's true, they once asked me to tell them a bedtime story before they went to sleep. They're imitating my voice, my fairy-tale voice, and recalling incidents from the narrative. It must have made such an impression on them that a few key words sufficed to conjure it up in every detail. And to think they're imitating my voice as well... Although it sounds unfamiliar to me, they're reproducing certain features of my diction too accurately to leave me in any further doubt. It never occurred to me how closely they were listening to my voice and taking note of its peculiarities.
Once more from the beginning. Here's the very first disc: Sunday, 22 April. The children are talking about me. They're happy to have seen Coco again and are discussing the zoo. The poor little things didn't know how badly the animals were faring at this stage, or that many of them had long been dead. But their voices also convey a certain unease. Perhaps they were scared because this was their first night in the unfamiliar Bunker.
Here, on the second disc, they're imitating dogs barking and howling. Their yapping is punctuated by peals of laughter. How carefree their vocal experiments sound! The first shells began to land in the grounds of the Chancellery only a few hours later, but by then they were probably too sound asleep to notice.
The six voices have passed into my possession. They ring out in the darkness. Their sound fills the kitchen, unheard by anyone but me. The rest of the world is asleep. Unbeknown to the children, I am their only audience.
Wednesday, 25 April. A lively conversation about twitching faces, strawberries, sunken cheeks. I can't make head or tail of it, though all six voices are quite distinct. Helmut is the only one who sounds odd, as if his mouth is too full of saliva — as if his teeth aren't helping his tongue to form sounds in the normal way and the words are having to overcome some additional obstacle.
I listen to the voices on another disc. At the beginning of the recording the children are calling after me from their beds: 'Will you be sure to come back tomorrow?'
My reply is inaudible, I'm already too far away from the concealed microphone. Then the children's tone changes. They no longer sound as childish as they do in the presence of adults. They speak falteringly, earnestly, about the fear they feel whenever a bomb or a shell bursts overhead. About their fear of never being able to leave the Bunker again. About the sneaking fear of their parents that has overcome them in the last few days, because their father and mother, clearly unable to disguise their own alarm, have been acting more and more strangely under the pressure of events. The children's tone conveys a vague presentiment that they will never see daylight again.
At this point the nocturnal conversation is interrupted by a loud rustle, a disturbance emanating from somewhere near the microphone beneath the bed. What can it be? As soon as it ceases I hear the children talking normally. Then the inexplicable sound is repeated. I stop the turntable and decipher the inscription on the disc: Friday, 27 April. Not a date that affords any clue to the origin of the rustling sound.
I can't bring myself to listen to any more, not for the moment. It's still dark, but a light has now come on in a window across the way. Behind the glowing curtain I can make out the shape of a man slowly, sleepily getting dressed in time to leave before daybreak for the early shift. Silence still reigns, but my head is filled with the six children's voices.
A terrifying possession, these very last recordings of them, for all six died soon afterwards. Not in an air raid, not while escaping, not of debility or malnutrition in the aftermath of war. Before any such fate could befall them, they were killed in the Bunker itself. It must have happened at a time when their murderer could feel sure that I wouldn't catch him in the act. Someone must have timed their murder with care to guard against interruptions, because I hovered in the vicinity of the children's room on the upper level whenever I could spare a moment from my work. Quite instinctively, I felt it essential to keep an eye on them.
The children themselves could not have known about their impending murder, but why didn't I, an adult in regular contact with the other occupants of the Bunker and well placed to overhear them talking together, get wind of those lethal preparations? Although no one betrayed them to me, why didn't I, the sound expert, detect some sign in the voices around me, be it only a faint undertone, a brief hesitation, or a sudden silence — the curtailment of a remark uttered in passing? Hadn't Helga, in the course of a private conversation during those last days in the Bunker, extracted an assurance from me that all present would do their utmost to ensure her own and the others' survival? Who would deliberately have broken such an undertaking?
A certain Dr Kunz was interrogated on 7 May 1945. Kunz, who had a habit of opening his mouth with a jerk and exposing both rows of teeth as if biting the air, testified that the children's mother had asked him on 27 April to help her kill them, and that he had agreed to do so. Between four and five p.m. on Tuesday, 1 May, she called him on the internal phone — all links with the outside world had been cut for some time — and asked him to come to the Bunker. He took no medicines with him, he insisted, fixing his eyes on the interrogation-room's ceiling as if air raids still presented a danger: his medical case contained no pain-killers, not even a sticking plaster. The children's mother then informed him that the time had come. Their father, who appeared some twenty minutes later, said that he would be very grateful if Kunz would help to put the children to sleep. At that moment, said Kunz, whose tie did not hang inert on his chest but swung to and fro in time to the vehement gestures that accompanied his testimony, the Bunker lights began to flicker. For some unaccountable reason this reminded him of early mornings in his childhood, when he would sit at the kitchen table and run his hand over the oilcloth.
The children's father had then disappeared and their mother spent approximately an hour playing patience. Thereafter she took Kunz to her living-quarters, where she produced a hypodermic syringe filled with morphine from a cupboard in the outer room and handed it to him. The syringe and its contents had been given to her by Stumpfecker, said Kunz, keeping both feet flat on the floor as if afraid of losing contact with it. Together, they then entered the children's bedroom, where the six were already in bed but not yet asleep. Their mother addressed them in a low voice: 'Don't be frightened. The doctor here is going to give you a little jab, the kind that all other children and soldiers are getting.'
On that note she left the darkened room and Kunz proceeded to administer the injections in descending order of age. Helga, Hilde, Helmut, Holde, Hedda, Heide — all received a 0.5 cc shot in the lower arm to make them drowsy. Kunz particularly recalled the softness of their skin. After completing this task, which took him between eight and ten minutes, he rejoined the children's mother and waited with her for another ten minutes to allow them to go to sleep undisturbed. He looked at his watch: eight-forty p.m. They then re-entered the bedroom, where the mother took some five minutes to insert a crushed am
poule of cyanide in the mouth of each sleeping child. 'There,' Kunz recalled her saying, 'all over.'
Again the record makes that rustling sound. Of course! It's paper, wrapping paper — the bar of chocolate Helga was going to give Hedda for her birthday on 5 May. Helga had asked me to get her some chocolate, and I'd managed, behind the diet cook's back, to purloin a bar from her well-stocked store cupboard — a perilous undertaking, given that stealing food was an offence punishable by summary execution: no trial, just a bullet in the head. Would that have applied to a child, too, I wonder. Helga needed a hiding-place, so she must have concealed the present under her mattress and checked on it at night, when the lights were out and the others couldn't see. By feeling for the chocolate, she would unwittingly have put her hand near the microphone.
The switchboard operator, whose name was Mischa, testified that Dr Naumann had come to the telephone exchange and told him that Stumpfecker was going to give the children some 'bonbon water', in other words, that they were to be killed. He could not, however, be precise about the time he received this information. He only knew that all the outside lines were dead.
But what was 'bonbon water'? Now that the rustling sound has ceased, I'm able to follow the children's conversation without further interruption. They recall their visit to Moreau. Never having been told of Moreau's death, they refer to him as if he's still alive.
Hilde: 'Do you think Herr Karnau's friend is still angry with us for getting chocolate all over his furniture?'
Holde: 'If only we had some chocolate now ...'
Helga, in answer to Hilde's question: 'No, I'm sure Herr Moreau isn't angry any more, Herr Karnau calmed him down. Remember how we went outside with them that night?'