I stood staring into the flames, and as I stared, the fire became a deeper red and I saw beyond it not a tangled mass of smoking wreckage, but the flames of a hotter and intenser
fire which now burned and smouldered in the hearts of the people of Greece.
Still I stared, and as I stared I saw in the centre of the fire, whence the red flames sprang, a bright, white heat, shining bright and without any colour.
As I stared, the brightness diffused and became soft and yellow like sunlight, and through it, beyond it, I saw a young child standing in the middle of a field with the sunlight shining in her hair. For a moment she stood looking up into the sky, which was clear and blue and without any clouds; then she turned and looked towards me, and as she turned I saw that the front of her white print dress was stained deep red, the colour of blood.
Then there was no longer any fire or any flames and I saw before me only the glowing twisted wreckage of a burned-out plane. I must have been standing there for quite a long time.
The Sound Machine
First published in The New Yorker (17 September 1949)
It was a warm summer evening and Klausner walked quickly through the front gate and around the side of the house and into the garden at the back. He went on down the garden until he came to a wooden shed and he unlocked the door, went inside and closed the door behind him.
The interior of the shed was an unpainted room. Against one wall, on the left, there was a long wooden workbench, and on it, among a littering of wires and batteries and small sharp tools, there stood a black box about three feet long, the shape of a child’s coffin.
Klausner moved across the room to the box. The top of the box was open, and he bent down and began to poke and peer inside it among a mass of different-coloured wires and silver tubes. He picked up a piece of paper that lay beside the box, studied it carefully, put it down, peered inside the box and started running his fingers along the wires, tugging gently at them to test the connections, glancing back at the paper, then into the box, then at the paper again, checking each wire. He did this for perhaps an hour.
Then he put a hand around to the front of the box where there were three dials, and he began to twiddle them, watching at the same time the movement of the mechanism inside the box. All the while he kept speaking softly to himself, nodding his head, smiling sometimes, his hands always moving, the fingers moving swiftly, deftly, inside the box, his mouth twisting into curious shapes when a thing was delicate or difficult to do, saying, ‘Yes … Yes … And now this one … Yes … Yes … But is this right? Is it – where’s my diagram? … Ah, yes … Of course … Yes, yes … That’s right … And now … Good … Good … Yes … Yes, yes, yes.’ His concentration was intense; his movements were quick; there was an air of urgency about the way he worked, of breathlessness, of strong suppressed excitement.
Suddenly he heard footsteps on the gravel path outside and he straightened and turned swiftly as the door opened and a tall man came in. It was Scott. It was only Scott, the doctor.
‘Well, well, well,’ the doctor said. ‘So this is where you hide yourself in the evenings.’
‘Hullo, Scott,’ Klausner said.
‘I happened to be passing,’ the doctor told him, ‘so I dropped in to see how you were. There was no one in the house, so I came on down here. How’s that throat of yours been behaving?’
‘It’s all right. It’s fine.’
‘Now I’m here I might as well have a look at it.’
‘Please don’t trouble. I’m quite cured. I’m fine.’
The doctor began to feel the tension in the room. He looked at the black box on the bench; then he looked at the man. ‘You’ve got your hat on,’ he said.
‘Oh, have I?’ Klausner reached up, removed the hat and put it on the bench.
The doctor came up closer and bent down to look into the box. ‘What’s this?’ he said. ‘Making a radio?’
‘No. Just fooling around.’
‘It’s got rather complicated-looking innards.’
‘Yes.’ Klausner seemed tense and distracted.
‘What is it?’ the doctor asked. ‘It’s rather a frightening-looking thing, isn’t it?’
‘It’s just an idea.’
‘Yes?’
‘It has to do with sound, that’s all.’
‘Good heavens, man! Don’t you get enough of that sort of thing all day in your work?’
‘I like sound.’