The Karnau Tapes (21 page)

*

Tuesday, 24 April. An absolute disaster: the patient is refusing chocolate-flavoured dishes of any kind. He won't touch chocolate in adulterated form, even in pastries or gateaus; he now insists on straight chocolate — milk chocolate, to be precise, and nothing else will do. The kind of very fine chocolate that melts in your mouth without having to be chewed or sucked or rolled around your tongue: it dissolves of its own accord, diffuses itself throughout the oral cavity, and coats the teeth and gums with a thin film of creamy cocoa butter. Nougat, too, is out from now on. Stumpfecker, who has closely examined the patient's gums and tongue, diagnoses nervous irritation of the taste buds. There's no hope now, everyone can sense it: this is the beginning of the end.

Today, after all the recordings I've made that picked up virtually nothing, all the wellnigh wasted discs on which the grooves incised by the cutting stylus are almost devoid of oscillations, we're treated to another session at full volume. His nerves at breaking-point, a state of affairs that may be attributable partly to the precarious chocolate situation, the patient flies into one of the notorious tantrums that can easily fill a whole set of discs. Every stirring of emotion vents itself in bellows of rage and wild, inarticulate sounds. We have just arrived for our routine recording session, and Stumpfecker signs to me to switch on the machine without the patient's noticing.

Afterwards, Stumpfecker follows me into his consulting-room for a trial playback: a perfect, crystal-clear recording, its only drawback being that the patient's voice periodically swells and fades as his restless perambulations take him nearer or further from the microphone: 'Betrayed, I've been betrayed . .. surrounded by nothing but traitors .. .' Similar snatches recur on several of the discs I've cut in the last few days.

Apart from carefully eking out his stock of morphine, Stumpfecker has for some days been responsible less for his patient's health and well-being than for devising a suitable way for him to die. It was at first taken for granted — not that the patient himself was privy to such conjectures — that his bodyguard would solve this problem by assassinating him. Although the possibility of apoplexy cannot be discounted, a natural death due to chronic malnutrition and nervous exhaustion must, in view of the patient's exceptionally robust constitution, be ruled out.

Consequently, on the night of 29 April, Stumpfecker successfully tries out one possible way of causing death by external means on the patient's Alsatian bitch: he doctors her food with cyanide trickled into her bowl from an ampoule and stirred into the mush. For some unknown reason the animal spurns this offering and backs away from the bowl. She then has to be lured into the guards' washroom, where her jaws are prised apart and the contents of another ampoule, which has been crushed with a pair of pliers, emptied on to her tongue. Death supervenes within seconds.

Death by poisoning would necessitate the patient's consent, however, because he no longer partakes of any food whose consistency would enable it to be mixed with cyanide, and one could hardly lever his jaws open and force him to swallow the ampoule.

Mouth liberally smeared with chocolate, the patient dictates his last will and testament, leafing through dictionaries and thesauruses in search of apt words and telling phrases. If one reference book fails to yield at first glance what he seeks, he hurls the heavy volume across the room and reaches for another. He dictates while lying on the sofa, cramming square after square of chocolate into his mouth. Much to the secretary's annoyance, he indicates any passages to be altered with fingers that anoint her shorthand pad with chocolate and leave greasy brown blotches in the midst of his momentous last words, which are then fair-copied on a typewriter with characters three times normal size and submitted to him for signature. The characters are uneven because the typewriter has a mechanical defect that obstructs the carriage as it glides from right to left, and the ribbon's inferior quality is such that it disfigures the paper with smudges and black fluff. The nib of the fountain pen splutters across the foot of the final sheet. The patient's signature is less neat than usual, not only because of his agitated state but also, quite possibly, because the pen is so bedaubed with chocolate that it slips through his fingers.

Meanwhile, the patient's chauffeur has been instructed to retrieve and replace the dictionaries littering the carpet. Before putting them back on the shelf, he smooths out the innumerable dog-ears that mark the places where his lord and master has discovered words and definitions of interest. Another of his allotted tasks is to stem the water trickling down the stairs into the rooms on the lower level, so much of which has already been absorbed by the carpets that every footstep is accompanied by a sound like someone smacking his lips. In this the chauffeur fails because the Bunker lacks sufficient caulking material to seal the cracks in the water-pipes and concrete walls occasioned by incessant detonations in the immediate vicinity.

We've been recording the patient every hour, on the hour, since the night before last. The phone rings: Stumpfecker. Surely it can't be a whole hour since the last session? One loses all sense of time down here. What's the date today? Monday, 30 April. A gramophone starts blaring in the passage. Most of the staff have gathered in the open space outside my door, which usually serves as a canteen, and are holding an impromptu dance. SS men, bodyguards and domestic staff are sitting around on the benches tapping their feet. A Security Service officer unbuttons his tunic, loosens his tie, and, with a bow, invites the cook to dance. She gives him her arm, and the two of them thread their way through the tables and chairs that have been pushed aside for the occasion. Once on the dance floor they traverse it with
elan
from end to end.

Down below, Stumpfecker stops me at the entrance to the patient's quarters: 'No, Karnau, no more recordings, the patient's voice has given out. He can't speak any more, not that it matters now. Fetch your things from the consulting-room and get those wax discs out of here. They're the only means anyone will ever have of hearing his voice in the future, so take the utmost care of them. To be on the safe side, better make some copies right away.'

I hear a familiar cough in the background just as Stumpfecker closes the door behind him and locks it from the inside. So this is the end. The water in the stairwell is now ankle-deep, and there are hand-grenades, medals and peaked caps strewn everywhere. I climb the spiral stairs to the emergency exit and step out into the garden. A bright, sunny afternoon. I haven't seen the sky since my arrival. If it weren't for the infernal din, the incessant explosions, I could almost believe the war was over.

It isn't, though, so I have to take cover. Here in the lee of a ruined wall my bronchial tubes relax for the first time in ages and my lungs, having expelled the stale, subterranean air of recent days and nights, replace it with the balmy air of spring-time. A sudden flicker of flame elsewhere in the garden. Are they burning the last, tell-tale documents? There's Stumpfecker, but he isn't carrying any folders under his arm, just holding a single sheet of paper. He bends over a body lying on the ground. More men are standing near the flames with shadows dancing across their faces. A sudden, ear-splitting crash, and the figures jump back: a shell has landed near by. They're out of sight when the petrol-soaked uniform on the ground finally catches fire, ignited by a blazing page from a dictionary. Looking more closely, I make out the burning cadaver's gaping, blood-smeared mouth and the hole in the back of its head. A moment later it's enveloped in dense, dark smoke. Now a second corpse lands beside it and promptly catches fire too. The flames fan out from the centre, upwards to the swelling bosom and downwards to the black suede shoes.

It's all settled: we're taking everyone along. Our intention is to break out of the Bunker piecemeal and make our way out of the city in small, inconspicuous groups. The Bunker's occupants are packing the last of their possessions, and the prevailing commotion is incredible: boots clumping along the passages, pots and pans clattering, a crash of broken china followed not by silence but by loud laughter. Not as loud as all that, though: it's the sheer contrast with the whispering and tiptoeing of the last few days that makes every noise seem so violent and protracted. None of us feels exultant, however. We're all too drained and exhausted for that.

While awaiting the breakout I sit in my cubicle and work. There are two copies to be made of our most recent recordings. One set of discs will be sent on ahead, the other Stumpfecker will take with him when he heads south. I, who intend to go west, have been entrusted with the originals.

Everyone is smoking. The whole Bunker is suddenly thick with smoke after such a non-smoking eternity. We all fish out the cigarettes we've been hiding for weeks in expectation of this moment, when we can at last light up again because the master of the house is no longer in a position to maintain his ban on smoking. We make up for lost time with a vengeance. Clouds of tobacco smoke fill the air, day and night. It won't be long before the walls and furniture are blotted out — indeed, I can barely see my own hand, which itself is holding a cigarette.

Just before ten p.m. on 1 May. It must be getting dark outside, and that's how we propose to make our final exit, under cover of darkness. Where's Stumpfecker? It's time he came to collect his box of discs. Maybe he's down below in the SS guard-room. No, not here, the place is deserted. The concrete walls are covered with crudely executed pornographic murals: grinning women with massive breasts and sporrans of hair between their legs. One of the SS troopers comes hurrying along the passage with an empty jerrycan. He has just set fire to the conference-room, so we'd better get out before the smoke asphyxiates us. The members of our group have already assembled in the entrance upstairs, complete with their belongings. Stumpfecker is standing guard over the two boxes of records.

He turns to me before we set off. 'As long as there's any risk of our being picked up by the invaders,' he says, 'get this straight: your first priority is to learn to speak like a victim. Summon up a precise recollection of the words, sentence structure and intonation of your own test subjects. Recall them, imitate them, repeat them slowly, at first in your head, then in a low voice. Speak with downcast eyes, keep breaking off in midstream to convey that you've undergone some atrocious experiences but can't bring yourself to describe them. Say nothing of those alleged atrocities. Gloss over your doings in recent years by inserting judicious pauses. Draw a veil over your activities by stopping short just in time. Contort your face, develop a stutter, learn to make your eyes grow moist by an effort of the will, seem helpful and communicative, affect a willingness to describe the terrible things that have happened to you, coupled with heartfelt regret at your inability to do so. Break down and they'll exempt you from further questioning — in fact they'll end by commiserating with you. You'll be taken for a victim, the victim of some nameless and indescribable atrocity. In other words, you'll have changed sides. As your interrogation proceeds, you'll imperceptibly turn into one of those whose treatment at your hands formed the basis of the interrogators' original accusations. You must learn to do precisely what always revolted you in others and inspired the disgust that motivated your activities in the first place: you must stammer, dry up, pretend to be at a loss for words. For a while, alas, we're destined to play the inarticulate.’

VII

IN
JULY
1992,
DURING
A
ROUTINE
INSPECTION
OF
DRESDEN
'
S
municipal orphanage, workmen removed some boards nailed over a hole in the cellar wall. Beyond it lay a secret sound archive. Despite its age and provenance, which the nature of the material stored there proved beyond doubt, no one had previously known of its existence.

The sound archive was found to be connected with the nearby Museum of Hygiene by a series of underground passages. From this it could be inferred that members of the museum staff had once had access to the premises, and that exchanges of information and personnel may even have taken place. None of the museum's current employees knew about the archive, however, so only privileged personnel could have been aware of the connecting passages, whose existence was kept strictly confidential. Very few details of the sound archive's staff had survived. The only name definitely listed in the card index, the bulk of which had been destroyed, was that of a retired security man: Hermann Karnau.

While attending a preliminary, on-the-spot inspection by a committee of inquiry, Karnau made the following statement:

'Here, gentlemen, if you can spare the time to confirm this for yourselves, you will find every conceivable aid to research into the relevant field, including, of course, a whole library of recordings representative of every leading figure in politics and public life since the invention of the phonograph. It even includes that supposedly long-lost series of recordings entitled
The
Führer
Coughs,
shellac, seventy-eight r.p.m.'

Karnau was then asked what purpose the establishment had served. His explanation:

'Weekly recordings on wax were made of the Führer's pulse-rate while he was subjected to stress, in motion, or delivering a speech, so that regular comparisons could be made by playing back different weekly results in parallel. Were his blood vessels dilated? Had his blood pressure gone down? Did his heart take an appropriate time to regain its normal rhythm after a speech delivered
con brio
? Those were some of the aspects from which these cylinders, shellac discs and tapes were evaluated.

'The approaches were doubly secured by grilles and massive steel doors. Anyone working in the brick-lined vault beyond them had to crouch a little. The recording studio was more luxuriously appointed: a comfortable armchair behind the microphone, wall-to-wall carpet, and cloth-lined walls, not only for soundproofing purposes but because the important persons who frequented the studio were accustomed to a certain degree of comfort. Nothing could be heard of the children running around two floors above.'