Voicing Two Monsters: Narrating the Unspeakable

In a few months, probably in the fall of this year, a student working to overcome his or her dyslexia or wanting to listen to a book due to a visual impairment or blindness, will select from a special audiobook catalogue Stephen King’s four-novella work, Different Seasons. The student will sit down and begin listening to me narrating King’s four short stories: Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (Hope Springs Eternal); Apt Pupil (Summer of Corruption); The Body (Fall From Innocence); and The Breathing Method (A Winter’s Tale). The dyslexic student who chooses the audiobook will also have a hard copy of the book to match what he or she sees with the narrated audio. The non-profit organization for which I am one of many volunteer readers, is organized specifically to produce audiobooks for just this purpose. You will not find this version of Different Seasons in my Audible collection. In a way, I’m glad. But that’s to be explained momentarily.  

It will take several days, maybe a week or more, for the student to get through the entire audiobook, which comes in at around 20 hours of narration. They may know that three of the novellas were made into movies: The Shawshank Redemption (1994); Apt Pupil (1998); and Stand by Me (from The Body, 1986). The student may even have seen one or more of the films on Netflix—I’m betting it’s The Shawshank Redemption, with Morgan Freeman as the story’s narrator. If so, he or she will be disappointed to find that my voice is hardly that of Freeman’s, but that’s not for a lack of my trying; it’s only that the character in the book is not a Morgan Freeman type.

Having completed Shawshank, the student will cue up the next story, Apt Pupil. I have had discussions with the non-profit’s leadership about this moment, and how the audiobook should come with some warning and, perhaps, an age-restriction. It would be disingenuous of me to suggest that just this one Stephen King story merit’s such caution when most of what King is known for virtually shrieks, moans, cries, sobs, and growls some sort of horror or depravity of the human condition. Though his stories’ endings usually resolve themselves with rehabilitated characters, or acts of redemption, Apt Pupil gets there all-too-horribly, painfully, darkly, and, of course, gruesomely. And it does so through the conversations of two monsters—Kurt Dussander, an aging Nazi concentration camp commandant, and Todd Bowden, a California-handsome teenage boy (aging from 13 to 17 across the arc of the story) who cannot breathe deeply enough of the fetid fumes of the gas chambers and killing fields of the death camps.

When I accepted the assignment to narrate the novellas, I was familiar with two of the four—Rita Hayworth and Shawshank and the The Body—and I’d grabbed enough snatches of The Winter’s Tale to know its plotline. But, I’d not read, or seen, Apt Pupil, and I had no idea how much it would affect me, and take me back to a place in my own very young life where inhumanity reared up before me and left an indelible impression that would stain the memories of my childhood for the next sixty years.

Let me share with you a passage from a memoir I’ve been struggling with for more than 20 years. This particular narrative happened when I was nine, an Air Force brat living in Wiesbaden, Germany, not long after WW II, during the 1950s occupation by the American military. 

Next to our on-base family quarters was a tall stone wall bordering a narrow country road on the German side. There was a black-ribbed iron gate in the wall that closed off the road in front of my house from access to the country road on the other side. The gate was secured by heavy hinges to two flat-topped stone pillars that my friends and I would sometimes scramble up on in order to watch the farmers in the neighboring fields. The country road below us was used by the local German populace to walk from a small community to a bus stop about a quarter-mile down from the gate.  I will let the memoir, through my family nickname, Chris, take over from here.

“Steve Dunnan sat on the gate pillar looking down on the subject of his taunts: a young German school boy who was trying hard to ignore the epithets hurled his way.  I can picture the boy even today, more than a half-a-century later. In this, my memory is clear.  He was thin and frail, in the way small trees in deep winter are delicate and vulnerable. A few books were pressed, protected, tight against his right side by his upper arm. His red lips were pursed, damming up his anger and fear; his sunken eyes – made darker under yellow-white eyebrows – would not meet ours, but I could see a fire in them that I did not interpret until many years later as rage against his father’s shame.  His straw-textured blond hair was harshly cut and did little to soften the effect of the featureless, malnourished skin pulled taut across his forehead and cheeks.  The young German’s spindly legs seemed embarrassingly exposed by too-large lederhosen that had probably been passed down from father to son to brother. He wore leather sandals and dark green knee socks. His hands were jammed into his pants pockets.

“Don’t you know you’re a loser, Kraut kid?  My daddy probably dropped bombs all over your stupid little town. Whad’ya think ‘a that, huh?”  Steve leaned forward in preparation to launch a hawked-up wad of sputum in the German’s direction.

“Steve, don’t you dare!”  I shouted.  “Your dad will whip you if he finds out you did that, and you know it.”

“Yeah? And who’s gonna tell him, huh?” Steve spun around to me, his face reddening, his eyes flashing.  “Neither one of us is supposed to be up here, so you’re not gonna tell.” Dunnan held my gaze for a moment, then he turned back toward the target of his fury, but the German had moved quickly down the sidewalk out of spitting range of the boy on the pillar.

“Damn you, Chris!  I had him in my sights and I’d ‘a got him good, too.”

Steve jumped down from the wall into my yard and turned to look up at me, disgust undisguised on his face. “These Heini Krauts ought’a watch where they’re walkin’, is all I gotta say. One day I’m gonna catch one of ‘em alone and then we’ll see. Yeah.”

I watched Steve walk away, his swagger of false bravado looking silly on a nine-year-old, but, at the same time, it was a swagger he got from his dad and from countless other men in uniform who populated Wiesbaden and hundreds of other American bases. It was a disconcerting gait of unquestioned moral authority, treading carelessly across a country laced with raw nerves, a country that had barely ten years earlier countenanced the dispatch of more than six million men, women, and children into kilns, gas-spewing showers, and self-dug graves of inhumanity.

As a painfully shy kid, I was unable to square my feeling of fear of boys like Steve with my desire to remain in their company. Only time and distance taught me that I needed their approval because I was terrified of their scorn. And of what value is that in this account? If the nine-year-old me could not face the mirror of my conscience, letting courage slip out of my control, I was as good as ceding my whole moral being to others to abuse. That abuse would continue to dog me until I learned to take back that which others sought to squander. But, that is another story.

This narrative from the nine-year-old me bubbled up totally unbidden as I began to read Stephen King’s story of Kurt Dussander—“the Blood-Fiend of Patin,” as he was called—and Todd Bowden, the Southern California junior high school student. Because I spent four very formative years in Germany, learning and speaking German as only military kids do, the accent was always hovering around in my brain, waiting for some excuse to come out. Children in peripatetic families—particularly military families—adapt quickly, like chameleons, to their surroundings. I’m a Virginian now (born in DC, but a native Virginian for nearly 50 years), but I’ve lived in Louisiana, Nebraska, Ohio, California, and Germany. Kids like me can drawl or smear or crisp-up their accents to fit in as quickly as possible. During my first read-through of King’s book, I could feel the accent, could hear Dussander’s German delivery, sometimes old and soft and Americanized, sometimes harsh, strident, precise and demanding as it would have been as Unterkommandant Dussander, relentlessly drawing death into Patin’s Final Solution machinery.

But how was I going to give him his voice…not his accent, but his voice? Could I say with the right emotion what he said in his long conversations with Todd, the young suburban all-American kid who wanted to hear everything about the death camps…everything! There is dialogue between the two of them…and dream sequences…I won’t write down here that caused me to stand up from the microphone and take deep breaths—you can read it, or listen to in other audiobooks. Typical King scenes that in any other story of his would have been less gut-punching (not any less powerful, but less viscerally impactful, if that makes any sense). There is a scene with Todd and a bluejay…no. Not for here. But I read it, and read it with King’s sure authority; and then I left the Dungeon and took a walk.

Dussander, though. He was a toughie to voice from start to finish because I needed to be him without becoming him and losing my way in the dialogue changes.

Here is 78-year-old Dussander telling 15-year-old Todd about a new death gas, PEGASUS, that Dussander was encouraged by his superiors to use in the death chamber at Patin.

“They began to twitch all over and to make high, strange sounds in their throats. My men . . . they called PEGASUS the Yodeling Gas. At last they all collapsed and just lay there on the floor in their own filth, they lay there, yes, they lay there on the concrete, screaming and yodeling, with bloody noses. But I lied, boy. The gas didn’t kill them, either because it wasn’t strong enough or because we couldn’t bring ourselves to wait long enough. I suppose it was that. Men and women like that could not have lived long. Finally I sent in five men with rifles to end their agonies. It would have looked bad on my record if it had shown up, I’ve no doubt of that— it would have looked like a waste of cartridges at a time when the Fuehrer had declared every cartridge a national resource. But those five men I trusted. There were times, boy, when I thought I would never forget the sound they made. The yodeling sound. The laughing.”

I did not read this as Colonel Klink of Hogan’s Heroes. I read it as the aged Unterkommandant Dussander, now just a chain-smoking, cheap-bourbon-drinking, fading old man in a faded Los Angeles suburb, hiding from the Nazi hunters as German-American Arthur Denker until he was discovered by the relentlessly curious Todd Bowden. When I narrated such a scene—and there were several—I leaned into the mic with a sort of tenderness that I would use to get you to lean into me as I told a fascinating story. It was creepy.

The actual diction, the pronunciations, varied with the Dussander’s emotions and with the plot itself. Not all German is clipped, just as not all Southern accents are drawly and imprecise. Dussander’s “the” might end up being “zuh,” or his “would” morphed from a hard W to a softer, almost V-ish “vuhd,” as in “I vuhd nefer fohrget zuh zound zehy made,” in the above sample.

However, there has to be greater clarity when narrating a book for a dyslexic who is listening and following along on a printed page. The goal in such cases is to be true to the emotion and the likelihood of a character’s delivery being imprecise at certain times in the story.

There was a particular moment in the book when King has two characters speaking German, but the text itself is American-English. King tells the reader that German is being spoken, so I read the English with enough of a German accent to give the dyslexic reader the flavor of the dialogue. One of the characters is new to the plot, and is an Israeli Nazi hunter, but King only says he speaks German to Dussander. With no further guidance from the author—and without trying to apply any sort of German-Jewish-Yiddish accent to the character—I just went with a generic German. Improvisation even with accents is permissible in narration.

Sometimes I would give Dussander a tired, smoothed-over accent, particularly when he had just woken up and was in his robe, shuffling around his kitchen, and had not yet put in his dentures. Sometimes I would clip and punch-up his German, when he was irritated at Todd (often) or when he was stressing a point to be made quite clear to the boy. 

On one occasion, Dussander is drunk, and his German slurs and takes on a more heavily pronounced tone. From time to time, as when Dussander meets Todd’s parents, or when, in a key sequence, he meets with Todd’s guidance counselor, I refined his accent, hid it away a bit more behind his careful English enunciation. But always he was German, and whether he was drunk and slurring his speech, or shouting and livid, or caressingly smooth, or proudly defiant, I imagined myself inside his skin, inside his head, and went there for whatever accent was waiting for me.

And then there was Todd Bowden. How to narrate a kid who is a monster, a 13-year-old who revels in inhumane stories of gore and depravity—who blackmails Dussander into describing the camps in exquisite detail?

Here is Todd, early in the story, pressing Dussander for…well…read for yourself:

Todd leaned forward, tanned elbows on bluejeaned knees. “Sure. The firing squads. The gas chambers. The ovens. The guys who had to dig their own graves and then stand on the ends so they’d fall into them. The . . .” His tongue came out and wetted his lips. “The examinations. The experiments. Everything. All the gooshy stuff.” Dussander stared at him with a certain amazed detachment, the way a veterinarian might stare at a cat who was giving birth to a succession of two-headed kittens. “You are a monster,” he said softly. Todd sniffed. “According to the books I read for my report, you’re the monster, Mr. Dussander. Not me. You sent them to the ovens, not me. Two thousand a day at Patin before you came, three thousand after, thirty-five hundred before the Russians came and made you stop. Himmler called you an efficiency expert and gave you a medal. So you call me a monster. Oh boy.”

Again, how does a 67-year-old narrator with memories of what being 13 was like in suburban America at about the same time as the book, give this monstrous kid a voice? Todd called on me to be the bullies that once beat me up on a regular basis, while still maintaining the appearance of being just one more carefree middle-class kid in Southern California.

But King’s cue is that Todd is a junior high schooler, and who among us hasn’t thought-at least at some point, be honest now—of junior high school as a hellish place we never want to visit again? I worked to get inside Todd’s head and relive that time in my life when the demons and dragons of uncertainty, shyness, sexual imprecision, clumsiness, vocal pitch rearrangements, and all the other awkward traits nestled in my hormone-drenched, gangly, unquiet body.  Yes, I had a pretty good childhood…if you put all that stuff aside. For Todd, I put all that stuff front and center, and gave his demons and dragons their voices.

As I said earlier, Stephen King’s evil characters often meet their comeuppance, and so it was with Todd. Dussander’s stories, and Todd’s increasingly ghoulish deeds, begin to invade the boy’s dreams, and I took pleasure as a narrator in torturing Todd in this nightmare sequence:

In another dream he [Todd] wore an SS uniform. His jackboots were shined to a mirrorlike reflecting surface. The death’s-head insignia and the lightning-bolts glittered. But he was standing in the middle of Santo Donato Boulevard and everyone was looking at him. They began to point. Some of them began to laugh. Others looked shocked, angry, or revolted. In this dream an old car came to a squalling, creaky halt and Dussander peered out at him, a Dussander who looked two hundred years old and nearly mummified, his skin a yellowed scroll. “I know you!” the dream-Dussander proclaimed shrilly. He looked around at the spectators and then back to Todd. “You were in charge at Patin! Look, everybody! This is The Blood-Fiend of Patin! Himmler’s ‘Efficiency Expert’! I denounce you, murderer! I denounce you, butcher! I denounce you, killer of infants! I denounce you!”

In this example, I gave Dussander full command of his German accent…an accent of concentration camp nightmares.

Not until close to the end of the story was I able to rid myself of Kurt Dussander and to wash him off and let his remnants gurgle down the Dungeon drain. 

Todd took just a bit longer. 

But they are both gone now, and it’s on to the third of the quartet—The Body, the coming-of-age story of a band of teenage boys in search of something outside themselves.