The Karnau Tapes Read Free Page A

lethal: it kills every sound. Not that I can listen to any records at the moment. They've been lying untouched in their cardboard box and faded paper sleeves for quite a while. This is because the gramophone, dismantled into its separate components, has been consigned to the floor with its works spilling out. A fault in the drive mechanism. The driving band or the motor itself?
    We all bear scars on our vocal cords. They take shape in the course of a lifetime, and every utterance, from the infant's first cry onwards, leaves its mark there. Every cough, every scream or hoarse croak disfigures the vocal cords with another nick, ridge, or seam. We're unaware of these scars because we never set eyes on them, unlike the furrows we notice in our tongues or the ominous areas of inflammation we see when peering deep into our throats. Yet everyone is familiar, if only from hearsay, with the symptoms of excessive vocal strain: the nodules, polyps and fistulas to which singers are prone. Our vocal cords deserve to be treated with extreme care. By rights, we should scarcely utter a word.
    Very few voices are free from scars and simply coated with a soft, delicate network of veins. Small wonder that the impalpable something called the soul — the moulded breath of life that constitutes the human being — is thought to reside in the human voice. So the scars on our vocal cords form a record of drastic occurrences and acoustic outbursts, but also of silence. If only we could explore them with our fingers, if only we could trace their routes, cessations and ramifications. There, hidden away in the darkness of the larynx, is the autobiography that you yourself can never read.
    You merely sense, without knowing why, how it manifests itself: when your mouth goes dry from one moment to the next, when your throat becomes constricted, when breathlessness assails you for no apparent reason and all that issues from your lungs is nothing. Why, for instance, while I'm waiting to purchase a spare part for my gramophone, do shivers run down my spine when the electrical-appliance shop is invaded by a young woman whom I can hear loudly talking to herself even before she comes in at the door? Her muddled monologue changes tack: she proceeds to harangue the dumbstruck customers in a hoarse voice, catches each eye in turn and complains of having to wait three weeks for her radio to be repaired. What do I detect in her voice that makes me recoil? Why do I even find my own voice repugnant — yes, mine above all? I've no idea. I stare at the demented woman, who, stung by our lack of response, speaks even louder: 'I want to hear my beloved Heinz Rühmann again. They ought to broadcast his songs all day long, not victory fanfares and rubbish like that.'
    Then, to crown everything, she herself breaks into song, belts out a few bars from a popular hit. Her voice quavers and breaks. She starts again from the beginning, but no one protests. The other customers seem wholly unaware of how her dreadful voice is boring its way into every nerve cell. Am I the only one to perceive this blood-curdling sound — a sound that hammers on the temporal bone and sets up vibrations throughout my skull? It's as if I'm the only one who's wide awake at dead of night when an air raid is imminent, when bombs are already raining down and there's no safe cellar within reach. Next, the woman buttonholes an elderly man and thrusts her face into his: 'Guess what? I bumped into Santa Claus just now. We made a date for next Thursday. How often have you bumped into Santa Claus like that?'
    The old man doesn't bat an eyelid. I couldn't do that. She's committing an assault, after all, like the man who belched in the tram this morning. Now her torrent of words hisses close past my ear: 'Got to go home soon, my teddy bear's all on his lonesome, he needs his oats and his straw.'
    Quite suddenly, before you know it, you're in the aural front line. Just erase it. Erase it all.
    The origin of my