Longing for the Screams

Longing for the Screams describes how the cries of psychiatric patients became, for the narrator, not simply a disturbance but the sound of home. Heard from his bed in Schleswig, they formed a nightly chorus whose rhythms he knew by heart and whose absence, even far away, made him homesick. Years later, as his father’s terminal illness brought pain and screaming into the family house, that childhood soundscape returned in a radically altered form: familiar in its setting, but no longer comforting in what it carried.

A Childhood Home Inside the Sound

The narrator grows up in a house within the grounds of a psychiatric institution, where patients’ voices reach him after dark. From his bedroom he can see the large balconies, enclosed with wire mesh for safety, that the family calls the “aviaries for the mad.” Their position near the crematorium tower makes the institutional buildings part of his ordinary view, just as the cries become part of the ordinary sound of night. The voices are not an occasional interruption: the evening chorus recurs throughout the year, and the narrator says he has known some voices from before he could speak.

The cries resist simple interpretation. A sound might express pain or happiness; the narrator hears howling, groaning, wailing, and calls that seem to span the whole range of human utterance. The voices mingle with clattering and rattling, while their sources remain indistinct. A voice that seems feminine may suddenly drop into a bass, and one that sounds unmistakably masculine may rise into a soprano. The boy does not have access to the patients’ stories, but he attends closely to the sound they make and to the ways it travels across the institution.

Learning the Nightly Chorus

The narrator listens as if the cries have a score. He distinguishes five recurring vowel sounds, each associated with a different quality of vocal expression: prolonged pain and uproar, stubborn resistance, a short, sharp cry, sorrow or an eruption of joy, and a low, patient resignation. Calls answer one another from bed to bed and ward to ward. A single voice begins; another replies; then a duet gathers further voices until the sound becomes a group or a crowd. The narrator knows who will answer whom, and hears the exchanges as precisely timed, though their conductor remains unseen.

The performances impress him for their duration and power. He observes that the patients’ voices do not seem to fail, unlike his mother’s voice after she returns hoarse from choir practice. He also notices the contrast between the rare, still summer evenings and the nights when the voices intensify into overwhelming uproar. These scenes do not make the institution’s suffering disappear; rather, they show how the child incorporates its sounds into an intimate knowledge of the place, learning their varieties, intervals, and repetitions.

Ritual, Safety, and Homesickness

The narrator actively wants the window left open so that he can hear the cries. His bedroom has other nighttime conditions as well: the door must remain partly open, the hall light must stay on, and a narrow strip of light must fall across the end of his bed. He places one bare foot in that strip, leaving part of himself in the light as if it can keep watch and protect him. The light, the open door, the familiar voices, and the mother moving in the hallway belong to a single arrangement of domestic security.

That attachment becomes clearest when he sleeps elsewhere. At his grandparents’ home in Munich, silence does not soothe him. Instead, it makes him acutely aware of the sound of his own blood in his head and leaves him feeling confined in darkness. He longs for the cries of the patients, which he experiences as reassuring. His homesickness is therefore acoustic as well as familial: what he misses is not only a house or a family routine, but the institution’s nightly chorus, the very sound that might seem frightening from outside.

The Screams Return with His Father’s Illness

Years later, the narrator no longer lives at home when his father becomes seriously ill. After an initial operation, the disease returns and spreads; his father eventually moves back into the family house, sick and alone within the psychiatric grounds. As the illness advances, pain migrates through his body, intensifies, and demands more of his attention and strength. Morphine begins late, after the pain has become difficult to control, and his father injects increasingly large doses into his swollen abdomen. The account makes the pain more than a diagnosis: it becomes an advancing presence that shapes what his father can do and what the family can bear.

At the worst point, the disease reaches his father’s spine and spinal cord. On a warm night, the father screams, while patients in the institution scream as well. The narrator lies in his old room and hears both sources of sound: the patients’ cries filling the night and his father’s cries ringing through the house. He repeatedly goes to sit with him, but the sight of his suffering overwhelms him, and after about ten minutes he retreats to his own room. The scene brings the childhood chorus into direct proximity with a particular person’s agony. The cries are still part of the night’s familiar acoustics, but now the narrator cannot listen from the protected position of a child who finds the sound comforting.

From Familiar Sound to Unresolved Loss

After his father’s lower body becomes paralyzed, the pain disappears below the point of paralysis. For the first time in nearly two years, his father is without pain, and the narrator describes a strange period in which his mother cares for him and the parents become, in the son’s experience, two attentive lovers. That respite is temporary. The father develops worsening breathing problems, remains dependent on morphine, and eventually goes to hospital after a life-threatening attack of breathlessness. The mother moves in with him, and the parents endure the final weeks together through the practical work of dying.

After his father’s death, the narrator sees him looking relieved, as if pain and fear have finally released him. Yet the disappearance of the pain remains difficult to comprehend. He wonders whether it ended with his father or moved elsewhere, and the question gives the earlier longing for screams a darker afterlife: sound had once marked a familiar world, but the father’s cries reveal how suffering can become intimate, exhausting, and impossible to keep at a distance. The motif’s force lies in that reversal. The narrator can long for the patients’ cries when silence separates him from home, yet when the same night holds his father’s cries, listening becomes an act of painful witness rather than comfort.