The Dumb House

by John Burnside

  For a long time, they lived together entirely, hardly losing sight of one another. They were only physically parted when I took one twin out of the pen to feed or bathe it. From the beginning, this was a distressing experience for them both. A, in particular, cried and struggled desperately whenever I took him away from his sister. After a while, they became slightly more able to cope with separation, but I never kept them apart for longer than was absolutely necessary. Looking back, I see this was probably a mistake, but it did not occur to me that there would be any profit in parting them, and it made life a good deal easier to keep them together. As they grew, they vocalised constantly when they were alone, chanting to one another in their odd singsong and, despite my confusion as to the nature of the song, I was excited. I thought this a good signal for their future development towards language. It didn’t strike me as odd that, whenever I entered the room, they fell silent. Perhaps I felt this was nothing more than an obvious animal caution. I suppose I was still thinking of Poto and Cabenga. The possibility of their developing a private language out of this song beguiled me: if it happened, I could stay clear of them for about ninety per cent of the time, and observe their progress without their knowing, using the video camera and the tape recorders. They could not be aware that their attempts to exclude me were useless.

  One afternoon, however, I decided, as an experiment, to remove one child from the pen and take it outside into the garden. By this time they were around fourteen months old, and I felt it ought to be possible to part them, if only for an hour. I chose B, because she seemed the more independent of the two. After the months of confinement, I wanted to see how she would react to the space and the light of the outside world.

  As usual, the child’s body stiffened when I picked her up, but she did not cry out, she simply struggled against my hands like a small animal. She kept her face turned away, looking back at the pen, where A sat, flailing his arms in silence. It was no different from all the times I had taken her from the pen to bathe or feed her, until I opened the door. As soon as she could no longer see her twin brother, her body slumped and, for one terrible moment, I thought she had literally died in my arms. It was a moment before I realised she was only playing possum. For the first time, I felt a twinge of resentment at the implication that I was a danger to her.

  She remained limp and silent till we reached the stairs. Then her body tensed again and, flexing her arms and legs, she tried to break free, to lever herself out of my grasp. I was surprised at how strong she was. I held her tightly and made my way to the back door. It was a struggle to get it open and hold her still at the same time; I ended up tipping her head forward and holding her with one arm around my waist, while I turned the doorknob with my free hand. B screamed once, at the top of her voice, then the fresh air and the light hit us, and she jerked her head up to see what was going on. From where we were standing, we could see the garden: the dark green of the holly trees on either side of the path, the iris beds in full flower, the paler green of the pleached apple trees against the back wall. The sudden riot of colour must have startled her, or perhaps it was the sudden light; nevertheless, I turned her body around and, gripping her tightly with both hands, I lifted her up so she could see clearly. I had wanted to show her the garden, to let her experience a new stimulus, but she only screamed again then, as I held her still, slumped into the same state of apathy as before, like a baby monkey that has been parted from its mother. I cradled her in my arms and looked into her face. Her eyes were half-open, but she wasn’t seeing anything. By an effort of will, she had closed down her mind. It was uncanny. In a matter of moments, as we stood there in the afternoon sunlight, she became inert, quite lifeless, utterly withdrawn. For the first time, I began to be aware that keeping them together and allowing them to develop so closely might have been a mistake. They were too intertwined. It was as if they were one person. What if it were true that twins could share their thoughts, with no need for ordered communication at all? Their singing might be nothing more than play, or an attempt to mask the real exchanges that were going on under the surface, exchanges so subtle I would never be able to penetrate them.

  In retrospect, I realise that I lost track of the experiment at this point. I had intervened unnecessarily, caught up in a fantasy that, by showing one twin a world wider than that inhabited by her brother, I might induce a change of some kind – perhaps a development of their language, or a break of some kind that might allow me a way into their experience. I was unscientific in my approach, I was looking for something that wasn’t there, and missing what was. I had lost sight of the larger picture. The behaviour of the twins confused me: their development was too rapid, the singing was too intricate, too complex, their attachment to one another a red herring that I allowed to distract me. At the time, I wanted to see an order, a structure in their song that was not present. I believe, now, that there was structure, there was even meaning, but not in a form that I could understand. Meanwhile, I was bound by the grammar I understood. I was like a man who sits at a window and looks out at the world: he cannot move, he cannot even turn his head to the side, and all he can see is a brick wall, or a patch of sea, or a corn field, and he thinks the entire world is one undifferentiated brick wall, or sea, or corn field. He cannot imagine diversity, because the only basis he has for imagining a world is the evidence of his eyes. If, as he stares at the brick wall, he notices how the light changes, how sometimes it is redder, or more yellow, or turns black, he might understand that something else exists to cause this transformation, or he might decide that one of the properties of this wall is that of changing its colour on a more or less regular basis, and the rest of the world, the rest of that infinite brick wall, possesses that same property. If, as he sits there, head fixed, eyes trained on the wall, he hears a train, or the cry of a gull, or a child singing, he imagines these sounds are also properties of the wall. If he could turn and look at himself, or at the room behind him, or the chair in which he sits, he might come to understand more of the nature of things – but he cannot. He is so fixed upon the wall, that he sees nothing else.

  In one respect, at least, I was this man. I had my eyes fixed upon a structure, an idea of order, which I believed must, of necessity, be universal. I was like the child who draws a tree, who shows a trunk and a leafy crown, a scrawl of brown and green, an asymmetrical lollipop shape, cut off at the bottom, where the trunk of the tree meets the earth. If I had focused on the whole picture, I would have resembled the botanical artist who observes the tree when it has fallen, or who plucks a blade of grass from the earth and draws the roots, and the creeping stems that emerge from each individual plant. I would have seen a symmetry, a deeper order, a more complex and subtle world.

  Yet, in another way, I believe my error lay in a kind of passivity. Separating the twins was nothing more than an act of frustration: until that moment I had made no connections, I had never looked closely enough, I had failed to discover the whole picture. I believed that the scientist is the one who observes, who does not interfere, but simply records the data and waits to find the pattern that emerges. If nothing becomes apparent, the assumption is that nothing is there, or nothing that can be described. It was a failure of imagination of the kind that the great scientists would not have tolerated in themselves. Yet, given that it was so impulsive, my intervention was equally unacceptable. As the weeks passed, as the children had developed their song, I had sat patiently and waited, like someone working on a simple puzzle, who believes that everything can be investigated by his normal methods, everything can be described in the accustomed terms.

  The twins developed alarmingly. Physically, they were progressing in advance of any expectations I might have had, given their age, and the restrictions of their environment. But it was in their singing that I noticed the most obvious development. Sometimes they vocalised for hours on end, but there was always a freshness about it, an air of improvisation, a freedom that seemed to delight them. I have no clear idea whether
the pleasure arose from listening to what the other was saying, or in the making of their own sounds. Maybe it was a mixture of the two. I kept making and analysing the recordings, but I had more or less given up hope of ever breaking the code and, after a while, the singing began to haunt me. I could hear it throughout the house; I even heard it in the evenings, long after I had shut them away in their pen and gone out into the garden. Even when I played music to drown it out, it persisted, like tinnitus. I wanted to know what it meant. I wanted to play the tapes to some complete stranger, to see if I was missing something. Sometimes I told myself that it was no more than an animal form of communication, like the language of dolphins, a rich vocabulary of musical tones and dynamics that were too alien for me to interpret, as arcane as the bee’s dance, that appeared so noisy and erratic, yet conveyed the precise positions of flower beds and clover leys. Yet what could they be telling one another about the world outside, about the position of the sun, or distant meadows, or schools of herring?

  I listened to the tapes over and over again. I looked for patterns, but there was nothing I could detect. As far as I could tell, there were sounds that never came up twice in all the recordings I had; others were repeated all the time. The code, if there was a code, was impossible to crack, unless you knew the basic rules, the parts of speech, the syntax. There was no evidence of a vocabulary.

  For a long time, I looked for myself in their exchanges: if the singing meant anything at all, I thought, it would surely contain one sound, a special tone or sequence to denote my presence, some constant that would indicate whatever it was they felt for the masked creature who brought them food and drink, who bathed and changed them, the large, inexplicable presence who possessed such power in their small world. I thought this must be the starting point: if I could find myself in their discourse, I would find the key to unlock their secret. Yet, when I analysed the tapes, isolating those occasions when I came in to the room, from the exchanges before I entered to the exchanges that occurred after I left, I could find nothing consistent. They were always silent while I was there. They might have been singing to one another for hours before I appeared, but as soon as they heard the key turn in the lock, they broke off. Then, as soon as I had left, they resumed their singing, but there was nothing to show that they were making any reference to me.

  I was discouraged by this fact. I felt as if I had lost something, as if I had become invisible. I really began to feel that I had stopped existing a little. Now I understood why parents taught their children those words first: Mamma, Daddy, Mum, Mummy, Dad, John, Mary – whatever they asked to be called, however they saw themselves in their children’s eyes, it was one proof of their being, an ontological victory, when the child looked up and spoke the appropriate word for the first time – recognising, making certain, becoming complicit. Parents vied for that moment. I had made real efforts to maintain objectivity, to keep my distance; yet, in the end, I have to confess that I succumbed to the most maudlin of emotions. It troubled me, to be excluded from their world. They wouldn’t even sing while I was in the room, even though they knew – and I was certain they knew – that I could not understand.

  I worked hopelessly on the doomed experiment for several months more. I would not allow myself to discard the idea that some form of communication was taking place, which meant it was susceptible to analysis, but in the end, it was stalemate. I considered teaching them a single word, to see what would happen. I thought of playing them tapes of people speaking, in a number of different languages, those sample tapes you can send away for, with a few basic sentences of French, German, Italian, Spanish, Greek. Or I might just turn on the radio and let them listen for a while. From a few words, they might still construct a whole language, as Poto and Cabenga had done. It was the last option: the twins had never heard human speech other than their own. I decided I would expose them to language somehow, obliquely, without comment, then observe the results. To begin with, I played vocal works during their daily music sessions: German lieder, Breton folk songs, Tibetan chants, sung masses. I made a conscious decision to avoid English, though there was no logical reason for doing so.

  It made no difference. They listened to the voices – and it appeared they were registering something new – but they continued to sing as before, whenever they were alone. I played spoken word tapes, extracts from plays, readings of poetry, recipes, instructions, conversations. They ignored these. While they would often stop singing to listen to what I played, they seemed not to notice the speaking voices, or, if they did, they felt no interest in them.

  One afternoon I stopped the tape abruptly and waited to see if I had their attention. Then I began playing one of the first tapes I had made of them singing together, several months before. They sat entranced, enraptured, listening closely. I had no idea if they knew what it was they were hearing, if they knew it was their own voices coming from the speakers. Yet, from their expressions, I guessed that this was the first time they had truly understood that the world is an inhabited place. I think, now, that they were always looking for others of their kind, but all they could see was a wall, a set of speakers, the bars of a pen, a door. Suddenly, after a few minutes of listening, they began to sing back to the tape, back to themselves, in a pure ecstasy of recognition. It was unbearable. I allowed them to converse with themselves for a while, then I couldn’t take it any longer. Hoping they would not notice me, I opened the door quietly and stepped into the room.

  They stopped singing as suddenly as they had begun, and looked at me. The recorded voices continued to echo around the walls of the basement room, like the voices of ghosts. Using the remote, I stopped the tape. The expression on their faces was identical: it was the shame of having been discovered, of having, by some weakness, betrayed themselves to me. For the first time, I was real to them. They could see me, they could not help but see me and I felt a surge of triumph, as if I had slipped through the one crack in their defences. I wanted them to know I had been listening all along, that they had made a mistake, they had no secrets from me, but the only way I could do it was to repeat back to them what they had just sung. I rewound the tape and replayed a short section, then, with my head tilted slightly to one side, I tried to reproduce the sound, singing softly, as they did, watching their faces all the while. They stared at me. They seemed surprised and I thought, for a moment, that I had beaten them. Then, as I played back another section, and sang again, more sure of myself this time, more accurate, they glanced at one another and began to laugh, the way children do when somebody makes a mistake or says something foolish. And yet it was a kind laughter. It wasn’t resentful or mocking. Something had collapsed, in that moment of surprise, and I suspect they were seeing me for the first time. For the first time, I think, they understood that I was like them; but at the same time, utterly strange, someone to pity a little, in the same way as we pity a fool, or a madman with delusions of grandeur. From that day on, they did not bother to stop singing when I entered the room. They sensed my coming, but now they knew there was no need for secrecy. Now, as I had so ably demonstrated, there was no risk of my eavesdropping on their conversations. Now they knew, once and for all, that I couldn’t speak their language. Now they had decided, once and for all, that I did not exist.

  Looking back at my notes, I see now that I was becoming delirious. The solitude was wearing me down – that and the constant singing, and the suspicion I had, from time to time, that I was being observed. I had no good reason for this feeling, yet I felt it, and even recorded it in my observations, as if it had some relevance to the course of the experiment. It was around this time, in fact, that my notes ran wild: they were highly personal in places, sometimes absurdly metaphysical, occasionally maudlin. One entry, made towards the end, runs as follows.

  I know now that what matters is what we choose to consider. All of life is a process of selection: we filter out the irrelevant details in order to come at a truth of sorts, which is no more valid than another possible truth, ex
cept in the fact that we selected it, as opposed to something else – and language is the instrument of that process. What matters is not just the story that is told, to ourselves and others, but the way the story is told, the words we select to convey, and to solidify, our vision. Standing in the kitchen tonight, as darkness fell, I saw that I could think of Mother, dying in her white bed, or I could have thought of Lillian’s small, bewildered cries of pain and fear, as I guided her away into death. I could think of the twins in their unassailable world. I could ask myself what choices they are making, what world it is they are constructing. Or I could Fill a glass with water and he amazed by the very fact of surface tension, amazed by the very existence of things in liquid form. I could walk outside into the garden and look up at the sky. It doesn’t matter who I am, or what I have done. I am nothing other than a mind in space, noticing each detail then moving on, noticing then forgetting, looking then moving on. This is all there is: a vast, endless stream of random events – stars, thoughts, spiders, rain, buildings, children, money, lava, blood, sex, pain. Each mind makes what it can of the data but no one can say what sense is. No one can say, with conviction, that one thing is entirely true, while another is false. It doesn’t work that way. When I stop like this, when I stand still and see it all streaming towards me, my own mind empties. The order is coming from somewhere else, and I don’t know what it is. At times like this, language is meaningless. People talk about God, or time, or the great unified field theory, but these are nonsense words. If I allow myself to experience the world fully, I can see that there are no descriptions. Is this what the twins know? Is this why they see, and forgive, me?

  It was the hottest summer in years. I barely slept; when I did, I had strange or violent dreams that woke me suddenly in the dark and left me uneasy. I felt close to fever. The twins seemed not to notice the heat: now that they were old enough, I would risk taking them outside with me on some evenings, carrying them one at a time into the garden and letting them play around at my feet while I watered the beds. As long as they were together, being outside seemed to encourage their physical development. In the basement room, they had never got past crawling, in the narrow confines of their pen. Occasionally, B had managed to stand, tottering on her feet a moment before she collapsed into a sitting position again, with a small thud. Out in the garden, they developed by leaps and bounds. I suppose, given the right environment, they were only too ready to make up for lost time. I made no effort to help them: I didn’t teach them to walk, they simply helped one another. It was as if they had both had a bright idea, at exactly the same moment, and had worked out the mechanics of the thing for themselves. I was always amazed at how well they did, as soon as they put their minds to something. It was as if their wills were united, as if they had become one. In the end, that was the cause of their downfall. They got a sense of their own power, and I had to cut them down.