I remember that as teenagers we used to play Chinese Whispers. We'd stand in a circle. Someone would “send off” a word, say, garden. They'd say it quickly into the ear of the person next to them, that person would pass it on to the next one, and the last one would say out loud to everyone what they'd heard, and the first one what they'd sent off, and we'd all laugh. What got heard could be pardon, carton, Martin and goodness knows what else.
We, the slightly hard of hearing, play this game all our lives. Our “hearing brethren” talk quietly to us too, just as they do to everyone else. If we raise a questioning look at them, they either don't repeat what they said, or repeat only part of it, of their own choosing, often with irritation. That's why we hard of hearing develop an acute sense of not wanting to become a nuisance. If someone talks to us, we usually just nod like a horse at an empty manger. When we “sense” that it's “our turn”, we tell them something noncommittal: “Yeah, yeah, right,” or “Yeah, right, the idiots!” if the speaker is a bit cross or it's about politics. We're most at ease simply keeping quiet, smiling mysteriously like the Mona Lisa.
In this connection it once dawned on me that maybe she too, while posing for the genius Leonardo, couldn't quite hear what he was prattling on about while he painted her. True, I'm drawing a conclusion from the point of view of a person with some sort of defect, but I'm also proceeding from the maxim that when God takes something away from someone, He gives them something else in return, sometimes many times more. It would come as no surprise if, in time, it turned out that I was the first to solve this mystery of the world. Sadly, recognition doesn't come in one's lifetime. People are inclined to acknowledge the merits of a deceased (and by then harmless) person, but of a living one, very rarely, in case he gets too big for his boots too soon.
As an engineer, I'll add that a person is something like a computer, and when his “inputs”, the eyes and ears, feed him distorted information, he struggles to reconstruct it. That's why in people like us the central processor always runs at Gigahertz, not at Megahertz as in normal people, even though to them we seem slow on the uptake. It looks that way, but in fact our computers are running at “100% CPU usage” to decipher what they've received.
My wife and I often went to the theatre. I always bought tickets for the front rows, but even from that close I could barely stop myself asking the actors to repeat their last line. In plays like Antigone I heard clearly: they had a Chorus repeating the most important bits. In the others, only when the characters were shouting at each other, and I started to like that solely for the good audibility, and not otherwise.
I'd got used to not hearing properly, but it was starting to take on alarming proportions.
Once I was travelling in a taxi. I'd been drinking and smoking more than usual. I could feel some sort of wheezing coming out of my chest, with an irregular rhythm at that, which thoroughly worried me. When we stopped, I started fishing around for money. The taxi driver turned up the radio in the car and it filled with something exactly like my wheezing of a moment ago. It turned out he'd been listening to some music very quietly; it wasn't my poor alveoli after all. This time I wasn't stingy and gave him a big tip.
I'd agreed with a company that they'd install an access control system for us. They promised me, as the boss, that as soon as I transferred a 30% advance and emailed them our Ego_,_ they'd get everything done the next day. I transferred the advance straight away, but for days on end that Ego kept scratching at me, and at the thought of it I'd sigh and put the problem off. A week later their secretary rang and said in her ringing little voice that they were still waiting for an email with our Logo, to print it on our access cards. I made some excuse to her, but I felt ashamed that this time I hadn't managed to decipher what I'd heard, and that apparently I wasn't much good at that any more either.
My wife decided to celebrate a milestone birthday in a restaurant. In her view, at the end I, as her husband, ought to pay the bill, and she gave me more than enough money in advance. Right at the start of the party I let the waitress serving our table know that I was the man who'd be paying, and she started looking at me the way violinists look at the conductor. If I didn't hear something properly, I wasn't shy about asking her to repeat it. Everything was served on time and after the cake the guests started leaving. My hands were itching to pay the bill; I hadn't paid big in a long time. I made her a regal gesture to bring it to me. She nodded and a little later brought me some sort of wooden vessel in folk style, resembling a small mortar with a lid, and whispered to me:
“A treat!”
It struck me as a very sweet gesture from the establishment. At that moment I was just pondering how on earth we'd carry away all the gift bags, lined up like soldiers by me personally on two chairs next to our table, and I tucked the little mortar with the “treat” into one of them.
I sat down with the rest, by now only the closest relatives and friends. Our conversation flowed along, but soon I began to notice that the others had started glancing at their smartphones. My wife told me to ask for the bill, people were waiting for me. I snapped at her that I'd done that ages ago. The waitress kept asking us more and more often whether we wanted anything else, and we kept saying no. That got on my nerves a bit and I made her an even clearer sign that I wanted the bill, at which she shrugged, which annoyed me.
Some people started asking me whether we had enough money, so they could help us out if we couldn't manage. This time, when the waitress looked my way, I traced a big signature in the air for her. She, however, performed a little pantomime in which she first pointed at me and then raised her hands to the ceiling. As in: what do I want from her, she's snowed under with work!
By now only our party was left in the restaurant, and our table had been cleared. I set off towards her, ready even for a row. She headed crossly for the bar, and I followed her.
To my great astonishment, she stopped in front of the chairs with the gift bags and started rummaging in one of them. Before I could react, she took out that little wooden mortar, opened its lid and pulled out a long till receipt. She handed it to me and said loudly, “Receipt!”, after which she shot off to the bar with the vessel. The computer in my head started smoking, and soon it dawned on me that an hour earlier she had apparently said not “A treat!” but “Receipt!” I confessed to the guests what had happened and they left in fits of laughter, promising to buy me a little mortar just like it. If I'd heard normally, the evening would hardly have ended quite so merrily.
After that incident my patience ran out, and the very next day I booked an appointment with the ear doctor at our local clinic. I don't like splashing money on assorted leading lights of their field. When I walked into his surgery, I was startled by a sign on the wall: “Norm for human hearing: Whisper – 6 metres. /W. – 6 m./” My hearing ranged from a whisper right in the ear to a shout at three metres. He immediately took me to the treatment room so the nurse could remove my earwax. The effect, as I'd expected, was nil; I could hear even worse.
The compressor, or whatever it was in there, was still droning in my head. Then the doctor did an audiogram on me. Looking at the results, he decided to crack the standard joke that it was all down to my date of birth. I always answered that joke in standard fashion too:
“Nonsense! My date of birth has been the same ever since they gave it to me!”
He carried on questioning me and writing something. Judging by the movement of his thin, spiteful lips, it seemed to be about personal details. Since he was talking to me from only 1 m away (on his form he wrote “W – 1 m”), I ought to have been able to hear his whisper. He wrote out one more and said, louder, that it was for the disability panel, so they could certify me as an “individual” and I could buy the hearing aid cheaper. I set off for home. By some strange logic I could hear better outside. That wouldn't have been the case if the surgery had had loudspeakers in it, as it should have, instead of assorted little signs with captions that depressed hard-of-hearing patients.
As I left the surgery, I noticed that outside it said: “A person receives 60% of their information about the world through their hearing”.
And outside the neighbouring surgery, the eye doctor's: “A person receives 90% of their information about the world through their eyes”.
Who on earth, according to the clinic, was this person receiving 150% information? Or maybe a percentage was no longer calculated as “so many out of 100”, but out of at least 237, yet another wacky English unit of measurement along the lines of the inch, the yard, the foot and so on.
At home I found out in writing that I was supposed to go before the disability panel so they could certify me as an invalid, which I'd heard as “individual”. Invalid sounded rather insulting to me, and queuing for a document like that, downright absurd.
I bought a hearing aid without the panel and without a discount. It fitted me straight away and I started hearing everything. I'd become so “all ears” that, besides films with subtitles, I started watching dubbed ones too. But tell me, would you like it if Richard Burton said something at the sublime moment of the film in the voice of a soft-spoken dubbing actor? You start thinking Burton was born in Stara Zagora, and Liz Taylor answers him in the voice of a pop-folk singer.
Right, back to watching only films with subtitles! My wife and I started going to the theatre again. Now it was fashionable for actors to shout more, until the audience burst out giggling. I could hear them even without the hearing aid, even from the back row. I called it “Brute-force humour”, which I never did try to like; clearly I'd become a very fossilised dinosaur.
Soon I was getting almost 90% of my information about the world through my ears, and I knew that was above the norm of 60%. Even without medical help I came to the conclusion that this was because of my deteriorating eyesight, and I bought myself glasses as well. They fitted me too, but that didn't seem to be entirely for my own good either. Before, quite a few ladies had looked perfect to me, but with the glasses, not quite so much. I was disappointed both in them and in the glasses.
Before my “improvements” life was more fun. Heaps of funny things had happened to me while I was hard of hearing or short-sighted. Back then my brain had been running at Gigahertz to patch up the information it received, and now it got it ready-made and correct, and soon the poor thing really did start being slow on the uptake. As if it had turned into a vestigial organ, just as God willed: when you're given something, something else is taken away. That's also how it is according to the law of conservation of energy.
I remembered Dino Buzzati's novel The Tartar Steppe. It tells of a young officer sent far from civilisation to a fortress at the very edge of the country, beyond which the desert began. In vain he begged his superiors to transfer him to some town inside the country. Then he started watching through binoculars to see whether an enemy was approaching from the desert, as his bosses claimed, and even started fantasising that it was so, and stopped his requests for a transfer. For years he diligently prepared his soldiers to defend the fortress. In the end, when enemy troops really did appear from the desert, he received notice that he was being retired. He watched with sadness the arriving reinforcements, to whom he was nobody. With a strange smile he climbed into the carriage sent for him to take him back to his home town, which he had once dreamt of so much, but not any more.
Or maybe the Mona Lisa herself, with her mysterious smile, was also hiding some disappointment. Could it be that she'd expected, after posing so long for a genius painter, to end up looking better in the picture? No, my hypothesis that she was hard of hearing is still the better one.
