It’s too bad you don’t have ears like mine. It’s not that they’re particularly shapely. It’s what they’ve heard. Hear. I recall the wistful voice of my grandmother, remember how she played the piano in our living room, especially Chopin’s dreamy Étude op. 10, no. 3 in E major, which was overlaid on occasion with the hissing of gases being released from tall thin cylinders across the street at the Liquid Air factory. Next door to the factory Mr. Gibson kept a flock of flapping pigeons—clap-clap-clap—that circled the neighbourhood three times a day.

I grew up on Valour Road in Winnipeg—the West End—where most people on the street spoke English. But the neighbourhood was also peppered with snippets of French, Ukrainian, German and Chinese. Next door was a patch of Holland where the VanVliets lived, and just down the street was a pocket of Iceland inhabited by the Einarssons. And, like us, there were other Mennonite families with names like Loepp, Riediger, Suderman and Toews.

When I was a boy we spoke German at home—High German—because Oma only knew a handful of English words. She spoke Plautdietsch to confuse us—Low German—and sometimes threw in a delectable word like morozhenoye—which means ice cream in Russian—referring specifically to Blue Boy vanilla ice cream that we bought from Max the Jewish grocer on the corner of Sargent and Valour.

I was conceived on Ingersoll Street, in a standard two-and-a-half storey house on a twenty-five-foot lot between Wellington Avenue and Notre Dame. A quiet, leafy street. My parents shared the house with my aunt and uncle, two cousins and grandmother. I wonder about the acoustic signature of the house, narrow wooden staircase and small plaster-walled rooms, the echo of voices and my father tapping away on his typewriter—clickety-clack—writing letters and poems that rhymed. 

Mere weeks after conception, when I was only the size of a lentil, my ears began to develop, beginning as tiny folds of skin. At eighteen weeks they started to stick out. I could hear my mother’s heartbeat, breath, swirling digestive juices, the odd burp. By the twenty-third week, in the summer of 1954, when I was about the size of a large mango, I started to hear sounds from outside the womb. Most of all I heard my mother’s voice. What did she whisper to me in those early days?

I heard these first sounds—muffled and warbled—as though through a kind of primitive sonar, and imagine my mother humming to herself in church on Sunday morning, her hands resting on her pregnant belly, the droning words of the minister, her soft singing voice off-key and melding with the congregation. Of course I don’t remember these sounds but, immersed as I was in my mother’s belly, surely they were soaked up by my little ears and stored away somewhere in proto-memory.

Although research shows that the earliest childhood memories date to somewhere between the ages of two and four, I feel they go back farther. Why else would certain sounds reverberate so? Why else would splashing in puddles and skipping stones be so pleasurable? We hear far earlier than we speak and what we hear from the outset must be in us somewhere, even if we can’t measure or retrieve it.

Between the twenty-fifth week of pregnancy and six months old is a crucial time for hearing development, requiring speech, music and meaningful noise from the surrounding world. Sound apprentice, I listened intently, imbibed mother tongue, German lullabies. Everything was muted. Then suddenly it was all clear. Thunderstorms. Rain pelting down on the roof. I don’t remember gurgling but I’m sure I gurgled with the best of them. In German and Plautdietsch. Then came babbling, early vocalizations, a little spilled milk: “Uh-oh.”

When I was three months old we moved to the house on Valour Road, an L-shaped, stucco-clad bungalow, where I absorbed new sounds: empty rooms with hardwood floors, jingling bottles of milk, roaring furnace. By six months I could turn my head toward the source of a sound, zwitschernde Vögel—chirping birds—for instance, or to the drone of a plane, a story my grandmother told me. She watched me in the baby carriage as I searched and searched the sky until I found the tiny dot of an airplane.

When I was two my younger brother came along, adding a fresh voice to the family chorus. He laughed at words like Heinzelmänn-
chen, from a nursery rhyme in which little men come at night and swarm and clap and make a big racket. In the midst of a story my father would blurt out, “Chargez charbon pierre!”—a French phrase remembered from his years after the war working in a coal mine in Belgium. Uncle Arthur cut in with a booming “Zhulik” and Tante Valli offered a hearty “Chasnyok.” It was a regular Kaffeeklatsch in my head.

When I was old enough to play out on the street with the other kids in the neighbourhood I learned English. Foreign fricatives and backwards sentence structure, new plosives, glottal stops and word order, words that tripped over my tongue. And the confusing words—funny when you’re a kid—that sound the same in both languages, like fahrt and groß, which in German mean ride and big. Soon after we got a TV and then came “Yabba-Dabba-Doo” and “What’s up, Doc?”

One day my grade 5 teacher, Miss McMurchy, asked about my name. “Kroeger,” she said, rolling each r before asking whether the oe had once been an o with two dots above it; an “omelette” she pronounced it, trying to use the German word “umlaut.” Umlaut and omelette clashed in my head. I stood in front of the class—stumm—ears red with embarrassment, and couldn’t manage a word. It was as if all sound had been sucked out of the room. I returned to my desk, the dissonance of Miss McMurchy’s mispronunciation still clattering in my ears. I couldn’t wait to sing God Save the Queen, which signalled the end of the school day. 

A word, a sound, begins with a breath or a breeze, jangle or rap. Vibrations rush at the speed of sound, hitting each eardrum one millisecond apart—ba-boom—left tympanum first, then right, or vice versa—allegro, dolce, presto—rattling the auditory ossicles and speeding through the cochlea’s spiral to the inner sanctum—a secret part of the brain—for deciphering. Room 40. Signals intelligence.

Why do certain sounds resonate so? Do we remember watery words heard in the womb? Is that why I love the sound of water and fountains? A stone dropped into a pond, its slippery—schluddrijch. Perhaps that is at the heart of resonance: me bobbing gently inside my mother as she walked. The swish of her footsteps. I was already learning the measures and syntax of language through her movements.

Resonance is a kind of punctuated harmonizing over time. The word comes from Latin and means “to resound,” like an echo. As if the whole body’s an ear, it is something felt as well as heard, tremors just at the threshold between stillness and movement. Deep-down shiver. Shake, shimmy, sashay.

Words linger too, never dissipating entirely, coming back to ring like the sympathetic vibrations between tuning forks. I absorbed the sound of certain German words so deeply that when I hear them I’m taken away. Radieschen, such a lyrical word for radishes. A lover whispers in my ear, “Tell me a story in German.” Memories sneak up, tiptoe quiet as a cat. Boom like a slapshot. Rustle like Populus tremuloides.

I remember sitting in the living room with my grandmother listening to a record of Arthur Rubenstein playing Chopin. A nocturne. Her eyes were closed. We were waiting for dinner. Overtop the exquisite melody came the irritating sound of the cuckoo clock. On top of this the Polo Park bus rumbled by, rattling the dishes. Gloms Vareniki—cottage cheese pierogis—burbled in a pot in the kitchen and farmer sausage sizzled in the pan. Next door the neighbours were arguing, their dachshund barking away.

There’s something about the way such sounds are recalled, like the pop and crackle of a spark leaping out of a fire, floating silently through the air and then disappearing. Vibrations flowing through the ear’s canals halt now and then. Reminiscence occurs in intermittent aural waves, sounds quietly gathered inside my inner ear, in a kind of resonant refrain.

I recall and recall. In the morning the kitchen radio crackled with static and funeral announcements on CFAM. In the back lane the junk collector’s wagon crept along pulled by an old nag, horseshoes clanging, clippety-clop. I practised imitating the horse’s clip-clop, pulling my tongue from the roof of my mouth. It’s called a click consonant. One day Dad fell down the basement stairs, bump-bump-bump-bump-bump! But he was okay and then he wrote a poem about it, in Plautdietsch, thanking the Lord for protecting him. One time a sparrow fell down the chimney, its panicked flailing sounding all the worse for being buffered by the bricks.

I drift through time on an aural dérive, sometimes humming to myself, beyond all words. Inadvertently, church hymns surface and I sing to myself: “So nimm denn meine Hände und führe mich.” I wonder where such musical memories come from. It’s as if I could hum the old church interior back into being. So take my ears and listen, just one more time.

“Now I know where your accent is from,” my cousin’s mother-in-law told me one morning: “aus Westpreußen”—from West Prussia—she having traced it through her memories to an old friend in Danzig, now Gdańsk. That’s where, in the flatlands of the Vistula Delta, Dutch and German mixed and fermented for hundreds of years. I was astounded to have my accent so accurately geolocated. Later, I traced it farther back along the serpentine shoreline of the Baltic and the overlapping waves of the North Sea to the dikes and polders of Holland and sh-inflected words by the Zuiderzee, waves gemischt with Frisian and Flemish, a mix of saltwater and schmaltz.

Inside our house was a mix of German, Low German, English, plus Surzhyk—a blend of Russian and Ukrainian—a lively, flowing multi-grain mix of sound and language. Languages. Loan words and mingle words mixed with light voices and heavy accents, a new and sweet, mellow hybrid enhanced by cross-talk, overlap, signal distortion and echoes.

Today my sonorous memory is disrupted by tinnitus, a slurry of sound overlaid on the auditory landscape of present and past, a watery soup with a still acceptable signal-to-noise ratio of less than 1:1. My internal soundtrack is made of multiple tracks and interweaving melodies, the steady beat of time interspersed with unexpected riffs and voice-overs. Lärm und Geräusch. The odd discordant beat. Sibilant whispers.

At times it sets me off balance, as if my ears have been turned inside-out. But still, under the buzz, there’s a pleasurable sensation, remembered sounds that take me back to a time when I couldn’t understand anything and everything flowed together, was garbled, and I didn’t mind. It’s as if such memories offer some heretofore unheard-of sustenance. Remembered voices that connect me to loved ones long gone. To another world.

 On top of the ringing, the theme song of Bonanza drifts in from a Sunday night long ago—medium tempo—galloping horses and a 4/4 beat. Then “schlope gohne”—time to go to sleep—kneeling by the bed and saying my prayer. “Unser Vater, der du bist im Himmel…” Then lights out, voices fade. Night sounds linger and lull me to sleep. In the distance the train, its E-flat minor refrain. Dreams of tomatoes growing at night. Lilacs, thunder, crickets and fright. Sounds that come and echo through time. The song of the nightingale. Good night. Amen.

‍

‍

Image: Catherine Mellinger, Shards, 2016, mixed media collage.