Authors: Marcel Beyer
*
It's sometimes far easier to detect the characteristic features of a voice from its most extreme utterances — shouts, hoarse cries, whimpers — than from the spoken word, even though those sounds leave exceptionally deep scars on the vocal cords. Even though, or for that very reason? That is when the voice attains a singular clarity unsuspected by speaker and listener alike: when the organ is coping with rough treatment or contending with difficulties and striving with all its might to overcome them, for instance during a fit of coughing that threatens to stifle it and extinguish every sound. Those are the times when a person's vocal image manifests itself with unbridled freedom.
Recordings of such vocalisations get to the very heart of the sound source in question. They penetrate far deeper than monitored and recorded heartbeats, which, although they vary in rhythm from person to person, do nothing more, in the last analysis, than confirm that the engine is ticking over steadily. The heartbeat is simply evidence of life, a vegetative function common to many living creatures. But the voice, being partly subject to the will, generates sounds that all reveal the special characteristics of its resonator: the human being.
*
The door suddenly opens, and Herr Karnau stands there looking down at me as if nothing had happened. His room is silent now. 'Can't you sleep, Helga?' he says. 'You haven't been crying, have you?'
I'm frightened. Herr Karnau takes my hand and leads me into his room. It's dark in there except for the light on his desk. Can I see something moving over there in the shadows, a visitor clutching his stomach and writhing in agony? No, it's only Coco. He comes trotting over. Herr Karnau sits me on his bed and wraps me in a blanket. Then he sits down at his desk beside the gramophone. Coco jumps up on the bed, snuffling. He wants to get under the nice warm blanket with me. Is there really nobody here but us?
*
Little Helga looked absolutely distraught when I found her standing outside my door. She must think I'm a monster. I can't play any more of my recordings while the children are here, it's far too risky. And I thought they'd all been asleep for ages. What could the poor girl have thought when she heard those screams of agony coming from my room? I hope she'll soon feel better and forget what she heard.
She's huddled up on the bed with her bare feet protruding from under the blanket. She's still frightened. Of me? Of this gloomy room? Of the voice that has long since died away? She looks around timidly, very much a child once more. As for the adult manner she adopts toward the younger ones in imitation of her mother and the nursemaid, it seems to belong to another person altogether, not to the tongue-tied little girl who's sitting here in front of me.
I must quickly reinvolve her in our interplay of this afternoon, keep up a flow of words so as to steer her thoughts in another direction. The music, too, is gradually calming her down. So is the sight of the black disc on the turntable, gleaming in the semi-darkness as it rotates with soothing regularity.
*
Coco rests his head on my lap. Herr Karnau asks me if I like Coco. 'Yes,' I tell him, 'but what breed is he?'
'I don't know, I've never given it any thought. I suspect it would be very hard to identify.'
'You mean he isn't pure-blooded?'
Herr Karnau laughs. 'I'm afraid not.'
'So he's a bastard?'
'Let's call him a mongrel, shall we? It sounds nicer.'
Herr Karnau plays the record for me again. 'I like sitting in a darkened room at night,' he says, 'listening to records. A lot of people find the black-out depressing on really dark nights, but I think it's lovely when the sky above the city looks dark blue, not pale the way it does in normal times — you can see the stars so much more clearly. Were you scared in the dark just now?'
'Yes, a bit, but I'm all right now. It was only out there in the passage . ..'
'I know what you mean. As a child I was also scared of the dark, especially in enclosed spaces, but it didn't really bother me outdoors. I'm just the same today, come to think of it: I can only stand being inside the apartment with the lights off for a certain length of time, but I enjoy walking at night for hours on end — as long as I don't meet any shady characters.'
The desk lamp is shining on Herr Karnau's hair. He's letting me stay up much later than the others. They must have been asleep for ages, but the two of us are still talking together, all by ourselves. What are shady characters, though? Not just people with shadows, because we've all got those. People who only move around in the shadows? People
made
of shadows, not flesh and blood? Herr Karnau is speaking very softly, his voice gets quieter and quieter. Are shady characters spirits that roam around at night? Or are they like the Kohlenklau, that creature on the posters Papa designed to stop people wasting fuel in war-time? Not a human being, but not an animal either, slinking around in the dark with claws instead of hands and a sack of stolen coal on its back. I'm not frightened any longer, not of the Kohlenklau's lopsided face peering out from under its cap, and not of the fact that I can't hear Herr Karnau any more and it's gone all dark.
'Are you still awake, Helga?'
I don't say anything. Herr Karnau picks me up and carries me, blanket and all, into the room next door. Very gently, he puts me down on the sofa bed beside Hedda, who has warmed the mattress while I've been away. He tucks me in. Now he's gone.
*
What's the matter with the dog? Why is Coco lying on my arm at this hour? Is he trying to wake me? Another weight lands on my legs. Coco isn't as heavy as that, nothing like. I open my eyes a fraction: daylight already. I make out a child's smiling face. And another.
'His eyes are open!'
A chorus of giggles, a fivefold good morning. The children have crept in and are sitting on my bed. Already wide awake, they shake their little heads like dogs emerging from sleep. Their hair is thoroughly dishevelled after only two nights here. The housekeeper and I have both proved incapable of plaiting it neatly. I let Holde crawl under the covers and she promptly sets to work on my hair with her doll's comb: 'That's so you don't look so shaggy.'
The children laugh. The rag doll dances in front of my face as Hedda sings me an
aubade
in a squeaky doll's voice. But after only a few bars she gets muddled, or the doll does, so she sings the first two lines again and again. Helmut is doing gymnastics at the foot of the bed. Coco, who approves of all this activity, jumps up and joins us.
Helmut collapses: he slowly buckles at the knees and lies there for a while without moving. Then he gets up again, extends one arm, takes aim at Helga with his forefinger, and loudly clicks his tongue. Helga collapses too, but much more slowly, and lies so inert that her body would be motionless but for the bedsprings' undulations. Holde watches expectantly as Hilde follows suit after Helga has aimed a forefinger at her and made the same gunshot noise. Helmut has another idea: 'We won't use our fingers as pistols, we'll pretend our pillows are grenades and have a pillow-fight.'
Hedda and Holde emerge from under the covers and run after the others, who are fetching their pillows from across the way. Only Helga stays behind with me. 'You have to be careful to do it right,' she says. 'It isn't so easy to fall the right way when you've been shot.'
Soon they've had enough of dying and want to play something else. Helga whispers something to the others and tells me, 'You've got to guess what we are.'
The children line up beside my bed. Holde gives an involuntary giggle, but Hilde shushes her and tugs at her nightie, looking cross. Holde shuts up at once. The children stand there in silence. Then they wave their arms about and look at me as if to convey something, but they don't say a word. After a while they lose patience. 'Well,' says Helga, 'haven't you guessed yet?'
'No. Swimmers? Birds?'
'Wrong.'
'Windmills, maybe? Characters in a silent film?'
'No, silly, we're deaf-mutes on parade.'
They turn about, all five of them, and march silently out into the passage.
III
IT
'
S
VERY
QUIET
IN
THE
APARTMENT
NOW
THE
CHILDREN
HAVE
gone. Too quiet, for my taste, as if the floors are close-carpeted and the walls padded with cotton wool. They reflect no echoes of childish laughter, no childish comments or questions. The dog's snuffles, too, sound strangely unreal, like a vague reminder of louder and livelier days. My recordings are no substitute. No matter how I turn up the volume, they produce no sounds capable of soothing me. I wander restlessly from room to room as if visible traces of the children's voices may be lingering on the wallpaper or furniture. But no, nothing.
Their voices made so distinct an impression on me during the few hours we spent together that my inward ear can recall them all. Each has its own, unmistakable acoustic image. Even the piping voices of the youngest can be clearly differentiated, although they still sound ill-defined and will only develop fully as the years go by. Not that vocal development is dependent solely on physical growth. Physical mobility, too, plays its part. Children's voices develop as they romp around with their brothers and sisters, as they pit their strength against that of their peers, as they scuffle and pant and cry. They develop as the individual limbs become adjusted to each other while their owners walk, jump, and co-ordinate the movements of their hands. They also develop during those self-absorbed games on the floor, when the child, almost without knowing it and wholly undistracted by the extraneous noises in its vicinity, mutters a running commentary on the state of play.
At present, while their vocal cords are still supple, the children speak quite uninhibitedly. They're altogether unaware, I imagine, of the freedom with which they form words and sounds. They may even yearn to be able to speak like adults. Later on, however, their voices will inevitably lose that natural quality. It will vanish if only because they learn how to cough, to emit polite little coughs and clear their throats behind an upraised hand, grown-up fashion, instead of relieving a troublesome tickle as promptly and forcefully as possible. It will vanish if only because their voices will seldom be heard again at full strength, and because the uninhibited shouts, screams and jubilant cries of childhood will be replaced by restrained utterances delivered at room volume. Their voices will soon be subject to limitations. They will be taught to speak clearly at all times, taught not to pick up any old accent they hear, if only in passing, and temporarily substitute it for their usual mode of speech, albeit unconsciously, perhaps, when they themselves pass a remark or engage in conversation. The continual repetition of words and sentences, the persistent crying and whimpering, will disappear for ever, because every voice is monitored by the human ear.
The children may already have a secret inkling of this. Why else were they so shy when they first arrived, why else were they so reticent at first? Not a word more than necessary, and only when they couldn't avoid answering a question of mine. Slowly, one by one, they gained confidence and ventured to address me of their own accord. But they chattered with real abandon only when playing alone in their room with the door shut so the stranger couldn't hear — or so they hoped. A diffident, inhibited manner of speaking will one day come naturally to them, and they'll be wholly unaware that their voices ever sounded any different.
Their original lack of constraint will never be satisfactorily replaced by anything they learn in the way of new vocalisations, for instance the polite, affected, swiftly subsiding laughter that greets an unfunny or unseemly joke, or the vocal sweet nothings, the reallys and you-don't-says that dissuade people from tearing each other limb from limb at the slightest conversational tiff. The erstwhile vocal range narrows and the voice is steadily abraded by prescribed patterns of speech until death supervenes, by which time it has become a strangled sound located at the base of the tongue. Clipped utterances are all it can produce, and any outbursts are quickly retracted.
It will dawn on the children, sooner or later, that they no longer enjoy free use of their voices. Helmut will attain this painful realisation as soon as his voice starts to break. The larynx suddenly refuses to obey and becomes a sore point, an ever open wound in the throat. The vocal cords are strained and distorted, and the tongue, too, weakens because all it can articulate are fragmentary sounds that fluctuate in pitch. And Helmut will be alarmed to find that his voice is slipping from his grasp. Like everything else.
Growth alone is held responsible for all the unpleasantnesses associated with this phase: the adolescent's headaches, growing pains, and uncoordinated movements. But isn't it far more likely that changes in the voice are to blame for this feeling of disorientation, and that its gross failure has repercussions on the entire body? We know, after all, that phonation or vocalisation brings many more muscles into play than are directly connected with the apparatus of speech itself. May not the voice be far more important than is generally assumed, therefore, since it is echoed by dull aches throughout the body at the very stage when it sounds most discordant? If a breaking voice betokens adolescence, or incipient sexual maturity, must a man have slept with a woman before his voice attains its final form?
My own voice never broke, as far as I can recall, and my memory cannot be at fault or my voice would now be deeper, like those of other men. I have the impression that its pitch has never really changed, never slipped down the scale. Characterised by inflexibility, it produces a sound quite inappropriate to my age. Its melody is also false, as high-pitched as a child's and at odds with the body and movements of an adult, but devoid of a child's sincerity.
A medley of cries and hesitations, the speech of a child is coloured by its upbringing.