The Other Side of Silence

by Andre Brink

  Invariably, however, some of the women would remain unclaimed. And these, the ultimately rejected, found unworthy by even the most disreputable of men, were candidates for Frauenstein. In their latter-day tumbrels they were driven through streets of jeering males forming a guard of dishonour baring their backsides or shaking their veined pricks at their rejected quarry; and carted off into the interminable silence of the desert.

  And so to Frauenstein, colossal against the shimmering black sky (arrival always seemed to occur at night). Prison, convent, madhouse, poorhouse, brothel, ossuary, a promontory of hell; but also asylum, retreat and final haven. Into which, at long intervals, bedraggled individuals or bands of marauding soldiers, hunters, smouse or remittance men from distant mines would stumble in search of shelter or refreshment. And under cover of darkness the most intrepid, or drunk, or desperate of these would find among the inmates some not too utterly irredeemable with whom to disport themselves; and if even then a face would appear too repulsive the act could be performed from behind, as must be the wont of men more used to quadrupeds anyway.

  Not all the women were flotsam from the fatherland washed up in search of employment or matrimony. But they had in common the fact that they were all rejects of society, whether through widowhood, indigence, moral turpitude or disability of one kind or another, and that no one else could or would be burdened with the care of them.

  The place was overseen by a small flock of females resembling nothing so much as an aviary, birds of all shapes and sizes and dispositions, but all of a feather. Some of them had drifted there to escape from various fates all worse than death, or had been attracted by misplaced missionary zeal; others had presumably been recruited – but by whom? Various churches, it would seem, were involved in one capacity or another, in a rage of righteousness to prove through good works and divers acts of dour charity their Christian worthiness as a step towards everlasting reward and grace. The colonial authorities also had a hand in maintaining the institution: the women incarcerated there had after all been shipped out under a governmental scheme, and the turning of a blind eye might be frowned upon from distant Berlin.

  Not that anyone compelled the inmates to remain within those forbidding walls. They were never locked up, not even at night. It was as much by their own choice as by a decision of the provincial authorities that they remained there. But of course, there was also the consideration that even if someone might wish to escape, the surrounding desert was more effective than any lock or barrel-bolt. Twice in the early days of Hanna X’s sojourn a woman did abscond. On both occasions the skeleton was later found, half-buried in the ever drifting sand.

  There were also, barely a year ago, the girls Gertrud and Katja: two young sisters from Windhoek, fifteen or sixteen years old, orphaned by the war in the north, their parents slaughtered by Hereros on the run from the terror perpetrated by the colonial armed forces of Generalleutnant Lothar von Trotha. Placed in the care of a series of foster-parents, the girls had been detained several times for running away and loitering in the streets; held in prison cells or army barracks for a while, reprimanded and punished, all without effect; and then, as a measure of desperation until a decision about repatriation could be taken in Berlin, transported to Frauenstein. There they seemed meek and obedient enough, but only until the doughty woman in charge, Frau Knesebeck, believing all was well, began to relax her vigil; and then they ran away. After a week the older girl, Katja, returned, a dishevelled and emaciated rag doll with half its stuffing torn out; Gertrud had died in the desert. What remained of her after the vultures, the jackals and hyenas had done their bit, was brought back to Frauenstein in a hessian bag and buried with little ceremony in the quietly expanding cemetery beyond the pumpkin patch. After that Katja was like a dispirited puppy broken by too many beatings, whimpering as she wandered through the halls and passages and empty spaces like one of the many ghosts that haunted the place.

  The only person to whom she appeared to relate was Hanna X; at night the girl slipped into the woman’s room to find comfort in the dark they both feared. No one could fathom the reason for this attempted closeness; no one cared. And as time went by they became almost inseparable.

  Katja could be silent for days on end, a silence interrupted suddenly and unpredictably by bouts of uncontrollable chattering. It was not necessary for Hanna to respond much, which was just as well, as without a tongue she could of course not speak. But from dark recesses in her memory she began to retrieve snatches of the sign language she’d had to learn at a time when she’d looked after an angry deaf old man and his angry deaf young daughter; this she taught to Katja, in fits and starts, and the girl was a ready learner. Where she couldn’t recall the original signs she made up new ones. They even had fun – in that grim place – devising these together: a clenched fist for man, an open hand for woman, thumb and forefinger opened and closed for bird, a hand cupped in a crescent shape for moon, a hand with fingers spread wide for sun, a rippling motion for water, easy and obvious gestures to indicate walking, running, sleeping, while body parts were simply pointed out.

  Soon Katja was the only person in Frauenstein with whom Hanna could, in a way, communicate; and Hanna the only one to whom Katja cared to talk. This sealed the unusual bond between them. As it was frowned upon by Frau Knesebeck and her staff, they tried as best they could to keep it secret. But most nights Katja would come tiptoeing from her room to Hanna’s and creep into her bed with her. Which sometimes stirred painful memories of another girl, another woman, in her mind: but these she resolutely repressed. That was a territory sealed within her, where no one would readily be allowed to obtrude. And if there was, in the occasional unguarded moment, a fleeting memory of the arcane yearnings and urges a body was capable of, it would be denied almost before it could be acknowledged. If anything, Hanna’s reaction to Katja was maternal, not carnal. And this made it possible, for both, to survive between the barren walls of the great building surrounded by the desert, swept by the wind.

  Frauenstein was too vast for its inhabitants. Rooms on some floors had not been opened or entered in years. By the time Hanna X was dumped there parts of the ground floor had already been invaded by desert sand, blown in through broken shutters and shattered windows and gaping holes where doors had been hacked up for firewood; sand accumulating in corners and against walls, as very slowly the desert began to reclaim the space that once was part of it. Even the inhabited rooms were subjected to the long inexorable process of decay: erstwhile ballrooms and refectories, kitchens with gaping furnaces, cavernous halls and lobbies with ornate ceilings; or the smaller rooms and cells and cubicles where the inmates slept or spent their days staring and mumbling, shuffling, masturbating, moving restlessly to and fro, doing useless embroidery, making patchwork quilts or curtains or tablecloths or shifts for imaginary trousseaux, or just sitting, or preening in front of real or non-existent mirrors, or slicing patterns into their skin, using knives and forks and shards of glass or scraps of rusty tin.

  The more enterprising ventured outside into the garden, wearing outsized kappies they had made with the same studious care and lack of skill that marked their other endeavours; and with grim Teutonic determination persuaded the earth to bring forth thirty-, sixty- or hundred-fold. Pumpkins and carrots and leeks, potatoes and gnarled sweet potatoes, even tomatoes, cabbages, beans, peas, gooseberries. This is the secret of Frauenstein: that high up against the rocky promontory, behind the statue of the Woman sculpted by the wind, there is a magic fountain. Invisible unless you accidentally stumble across it, it bursts white and rapid from a fissure in the rocks, courses briefly among the boulders and then disappears underground again as if it has never been there at all, except in a febrile dream.

  ∨ The Other Side of Silence ∧

  Four

  The whole shipwrecked house is straining against the cables that creak and tense to keep it anchored in the shifting sands. Suppose at a given moment they can hold it no longer. Suppose it takes off
, and sails into the pitch-dark sky, sailing through space, moonless starless space, back to beginnings. Like a stream returning to its fountainhead.

  ∨ The Other Side of Silence ∧

  Five

  The fountain is where Hanna X buried the dead man. The event will still be with her as she scrutinises her naked face in the mirror, all of its history folded into itself as if it were a single moment. Because this is where her whole life converges: what has happened until now, what is waiting yet to happen. A death, a birth.

  The sound of the man’s head as she descends the staircase, dragging the body down, the two heavy boots tucked under her armpits. Thud thud thud. With a curious jerk of the head at every thud, as if he is still alive, nodding in approval, or perhaps convulsed in silent laughter. A muted sound, for she has swathed the head in a sheet to stanch the blood. Thud thud thud. The girl Katja is not with her. She must still be crouching in her room, on the stripped bed, against the wall, naked as a small plucked chicken, the pillow crumpled against her insignificant breasts, stricken eyes staring. It is a long way down, two storeys, but Hanna is not aware of it. All thought is suspended. Attending to the matter at hand as she would otherwise concentrate on washing flagstones, emptying a bucket of nightsoil, working her way through a pile of dishes, washing a bundle of dirty laundry, slitting a chicken’s throat. For now, this is the only necessary action, descending step by step, as if all her life she has been waiting for this moment. Thud thud thud.

  She stops only at the bends to check for leaking blood. The man is as messy as a slaughtered pig. But a trickle or a smear here or there need not be a cause for concern. It is that time of the month in Frauenstein. Her own sheet had been stained even before she tore it from the bed to wind around the man’s pulped head. All the inmates have tuned in to the same rhythm. Which made it a less than propitious time for the visiting garrison earlier in the day – no doubt the reason why the encounters between officers and women were so much more violent than usual. Little Katja must have been the only one not in flow; her bleeding had been very irregular since she came stumbling from the desert that day under the spiralling vultures. Poor thing. Now this. Thud thud thud.

  It used to be the same in the girls’ orphanage when Hanna was a child. All of them in unison with the dark rhythms of the moon, under the forbidding eyes of the women in charge: That time again. Now the bread won’t rise, the milk will turn, the meat will go off in the cool-room, the knives will become blunt, the mirrors will tarnish. The curse, the curse. Except that tonight she has turned it against a man, this pink bloated pig. He is outlandishly heavy. It is hard work. But she is strong. It has always been her one commendable virtue. Hanna is as strong as an ox. They would add: And as thick-skinned. Or: As stupid. Anything heavy to be lugged from one room to another, the groceries to be carried from the market or the joint of meat from the butcher’s or the shit bucket to the pit at the bottom of the garden, call Hanna. She’s strong, and she doesn’t mind. Thud thud thud.

  Tonight the mirrors won’t tarnish, the bread will rise, the knives will remain sharp, exhilaratingly and exquisitely sharp. It is the celebration of the blood. For once she has not flinched. (There was that other time, on the train. But that was different. God, how different that was.) Thud.

  She opens the front door. Behind her the great house groans and murmurs in its sleep. Outside there is wind. It has been blowing all day, in long sweeps and waves interspersed with shorter, angrier gusts, drowning out the possibility of other sounds, confirming the fearsome solitude of the house below the outcrop on the plains. She drags the body after her, returns to shut the door, closing off behind her a dimension of existence, something that can never return to her or be returned to. Like a mule yoked to a plough, bent double into the wind, every muscle of her awkward body strained, she moves on, hearing now only the hiss of the thing behind her as it is dragged over bare earth and patches of scrub and scales of stone. She knows that what marks there may be will be obliterated by the wind in no time.

  In a wide curve past the vegetable garden and the graveyard. Up the incline towards the rocks from which the spring erupts. In the silence of the wind she can already hear its subterranean liquid libidinal sound. A smoothness embroidered with a delicate sibilant tracery. She moans in response, a deep low sound from her guts, up through her heaving chest, into the wet darkness of her throat, past the miserable brief stump of a missing tongue, through parched lips. Without waiting, except for a brief moment to stretch her back, she proceeds to strip the clothes from the body. There is no moon, though the stars are strewn recklessly through the sky, almost within reach. By their disinterested light the bare body seems faintly luminescent, a pale anonymous lump which she drags across the boulders and through the icy water to heave it into the black hole from which the stream comes gushing. Infinitely patient, tireless, she labours to lug and carry stones from lower down back to the source where she rolls them into the hole. She works with admirable economy. This, too, seems to have been prepared and rehearsed for a long time, a lifetime; not in the mind but in the very body, the body that is right now ridding itself of another fruitless waiting and an accumulation of unnecessary blood as it prepares for a new beginning.

  The clothes and boots, wrapped in the stained sheet, she carries back with her to the outside baking oven behind the kitchen wall. There she meticulously tears all the brass studs and buttons from the uniform before she opens the half-round metal door of the oven. Using twigs and dried grass from the firewood boxes beside the woodpiles she soon coaxes new flames from embers still smouldering inside from the afternoon’s baking. She adds one piece of wood after another until the fire is burning with impressive vigour. Giving it time to settle, she picks up the brassware stripped from the now anonymous uniform and goes down the footpath to the latrine pit where she can dispose of it. By the time she returns to the back of the house the blaze in the oven is so fierce that it singes her hair and eyebrows. But she adds even more wood, stands back for a few minutes, contemplating the flames with the intensity of a meerkat waiting for a snake to move; at last, with a small grunt of satisfaction, she hurls into the fire the uniform jacket, the trousers, the jackboots, the helmet, the soiled sheet in which she’d wrapped the officer’s head. A brief glance reassures her that there is no sign of human or animal life around. She tears the long stained shift, which is all she is wearing, from her body and adds it to the raging fire in the oven.

  From a safe distance, bent over to peer into the flames, she surveys for another few minutes the burning clothes, and men, swiftly now, she flits like a shadow around the house and pushes open the heavy front door. Back inside, she listens warily in the great dark entrance hall, then steals, naked, upstairs to Katja’s room. The girl is sleeping now. Fitfully, and whimpering, but bludgeoned into oblivion by exhaustion. So let her be. With a nod of satisfaction, perhaps relief, Hanna returns downstairs. In the kitchen she fills a large basin with water from the tub beside the stove which is gleaming at her with the eye of a wicked cat in a robber’s house; and although the water sends a shock of cold through all her limbs she begins to wash and scrub and scrub herself, from head to toe, with a controlled rage that is at odds with her seeming placidity. Then dries herself with clean kitchen towels from the bottom drawer of the sternly formal dresser. Still naked, but mostly invisible, gleaming only briefly, palely, as she passes the windows on the landings, every movement of her ungainly long limbs soundless, she returns to her room.

  It is when she comes past the large mottled mirror on the second landing that she catches sight of herself. And goes to fetch a candle from her room, and returns to stare, for the first time in three years, seven months and thirteen days. At her face. Then at the rest of her body, all the way down. Everything they have seen and she must now dare to look at. What has happened has finally set her free to look.

  ∨ The Other Side of Silence ∧

  Six

  This is what has happened before the burial. It is lat
e that night when she hears the scream from Katja’s room, across the landing from her own. She sits up in her bed. No one will come. Many inmates scream or cry in the night. And Katja, everyone knows, has nightmares since she came stumbling back from the desert on bleeding feet. But this scream, Hanna recognises immediately, is not provoked by any dream. She knows the child; she knows nightmares. She knows screaming. One does not need a tongue for that.

  Clothed only in her shift, and not bothering to cover her face, as she has the habit of doing, with her voluminous kappie, Hanna moves across the floor on bare feet to open her door. One leg drags after her, but she has long become used to it and moves swiftly. Tense, pressing her forehead against the jamb, she waits. There is a second scream, followed by what may be a blow, or a body falling, and then more muffled sounds, a man’s voice raised in anger. She reaches Katja’s door and pushes against it. It is not bolted.

  As she bursts across the threshold she has a heavy brass candlestick in her hand. How it came there she doesn’t know. It happens. Once before, soon after her arrival at Frauenstein, she was walking in the veld far from the house, when she put her foot down right beside a bloated beautiful brown-and-yellow puff-adder. As the snake struck she jumped up to get away and when she came down she had a rock in her hand. Only after she had killed the puff-adder did it occur to her to wonder about the rock. The earth was bare and sandy there, no stones lying about. But she didn’t stop to tease the thought for long. Such things happen. And this time she has the candlestick. The man is standing beside the narrow bed with its striped grey blanket. It is the officer from this afternoon. She recognises the uniform even though he is wearing only the khaki jacket with the fancy golden braid. The helmet lies discarded on the bed. His trousers are crumpled on the floor. His buttocks show up very white through coarse black hair. The girl is lying naked, huddled like a foetus at his feet, whimpering. His right arm is raised above his head, a heavy-buckled belt hanging down from it like a snake. Hanna has seen the posture before. In the orphanage. On the train.