The Other Side of Silence

by Andre Brink

  Her favourite story is about the musicians who run away, the donkey and the dog and the cat and the rooster, all of them old and poor and no longer wanted by their cruel masters, and who then take over the robbers’ house in the dark wood where they, too, at last, can live happily ever after. This is why she covets the small porcelain figurine which a girl called Ute brings to school one day. It is a sin to covet, God knows how severely she will be punished for it if they find out; but there is a worse sin, and that is to steal. Thou shalt not – thou shalt not – thou shalt not. Everywhere she goes she is surrounded by the dense hedge of Thou-shalt-nots. This small exquisite porcelain ornament showing the minute donkey and dog and cat and rooster is the one thing in the world she covets and which she decides to steal. There is no other way for her to hold it in her hands, to cherish it, to caress its delicate outline. During the interval she slips into the classroom and takes it from Ute’s satchel, then hurries outside to hide it behind the girls’ lavatory. After the break, when the disappearance of the figurine is discovered, they all have to open their satchels and sit with folded arms while the teacher moves along the rows to ransack their belongings. The little ornament is, of course, not found. Hanna leaves it in its hiding place for a week – furtively checking every day – before she carries it back to her bed in the Little Children of Jesus. It lives in her drawer inside her single spare pair of drab knickers; at night it sleeps under her pillow. But one of the smaller girls finds her with it and when Hanna tries to conceal it she drops it and now it is chipped. This is how she discovers that nothing one loves one is allowed to keep. Because now she has to get rid of it, but how?

  God himself provides a solution. It is time for the Easter Messe, after the weeks of starvation when the meagre rations of the orphans are cut down to just under subsistence level (one has to suffer for the Lord). The girls are expected to produce small objects to be sold at the Messe, contributing a few pfennig to the church coffers and the greater glory of God. Most of them knit shapeless socks or crochet doilies. Hanna fabricates a small, rather wobbly chest of drawers from matchboxes smudgily glued together and a skewed cardboard mirror covered with silver paper. And on it, neatly centred, she places the Musicians of Bremen in all their fragile glory. This, she calculates, should appease God and perhaps cancel out the sins of coveting and stealing. She has already taken her leave of it. Now God may have it. He has so many useless things already. She has lately begun to have serious doubts about God. He’d better be careful, or she will stop believing in him altogether.

  When Frau Agathe calls her in after the Messe to question her about the figurine, she can say with a very straight face that she ‘found’ it and thought God might like it. Even Pastor Ulrich’s probing hand cannot elicit any further confession, and she is let off with a mere warning. With a profound feeling of relief she lies in her small bed that night, listening to the rain pouring down outside, her sole possession of any importance, her shell, pressed against her ear as she listens to the distant hiss of the sea and imagines going off very far away, hand in hand with a small girl from a strange land, a girl with very black hair and very blue eyes, across all the seas of the world to the palm trees of an oasis beloved of the breezes and the sun.

  ∨ The Other Side of Silence ∧

  Ten

  In the desert through which they are travelling now there are no palm trees. Nor any breezes, just a terrible February heat beating down day after day, gathering inside the canvas hood of the ox-wagon, suffocating, sweltering. But Hanna X is only distantly aware of it. She has no interest in finding out how, or why, or when she landed on the wagon which is taking her towards a place which is only a name as yet. Frauenstein. Below her aching back – there is no part of her body that is not aching; this must be the undying fire of hell itself – the motion of the wagon, jolting and rolling and swaying, is so much like that of the sea that on the verge of consciousness she believes that she is indeed, still, or again, on the ship on its indolent but relentless voyage from midwinter to midsummer.

  The train journey is over; somehow, through a perverse and unwanted miracle, she must have survived that too. But she will not think about it. It is a black hole in her mind which she doesn’t care to visit. In her thoughts it has not happened, it will never happen. (Even now, standing in front of the ancient mirror on the landing outside her room in Frauenstein, studying her reflection, she will not think of that journey. Not now. Soon it will have to be faced; before she eventually turns away she will have to face everything; but for now, please God, not yet.)

  Adversity, Pastor Ulrich would say, is an ordeal of the Almighty. Catastrophe even more so. What would this journey on the wagon qualify as? But the question makes no sense. She and the Almighty parted company long ago. Who abandoned whom is a moot point. But surely it cannot just go on: there must be an end to suffering. At the moment just going on is all that happens, and all she can endure. She doesn’t even know where they are taking her. She doesn’t know who ‘they’ are.

  The driver of the wagon and his two companions make no attempt to talk to their passengers, their load. They are black, and she is scared of them. She has never seen black people before; terrifying tales were told about them in Hamburg, before she left, when people found out where she was going. If one were a missionary, there might be some redeeming grace in the enterprise; but simply to go, like that, into a wilderness inhabited by godforsaken naked savages…? It is a German colony, she would reply. There are good, ordinary German people living there. They need housekeepers and helpers. And wives, her interlocutors would insist, knowingly. That remains to be seen, she said. It still remains to be seen.

  A military escort accompanies the wagon, four surly outriders. Good, ordinary German people. After what has happened on the train she is more scared of them than of the blacks; but at least, like the driver and his companions, they make no attempt at conversation. Sometimes two of them will ride off and return after some hours with an antelope draped over one of the horses. Kudu, gemsbok. The names are strange to her.

  There are four other women on the transport wagon, rejects like her. They, too, will not talk, or only rarely. From time to time one of them may come over to the thin palliasse where she lies, to wipe her face or chase away flies or moisten her lips (or what remains of them) with a dirty rag. One of them, the youngest by the looks of her, tries initially to talk to her. “What have they done to you?” she asks. Hanna shakes her head; they do not know about the painful throbbing stub in her mouth. “Why did they do it?” the girl asks again. “What on earth did you do to provoke them so? Why didn’t you just let them be? We are not meant to resist the men. They always have their way. A woman must know her place.” Presumably this one knew her place: yet what good has it done her? Here she is with them on the same wagon, going towards the same end, whether destiny or destination. The girl is silent for a while. But in the end she starts again, now with a whining tone of voice: “One never knows, of course. I tried so hard to please them, but they just didn’t want me. What do you think I did wrong?” Hanna makes no reply. “You despise me,” says the girl, “I know you do. But what right do you have? Just look at you. I mean, what kind of man would want you anyway?” Hanna turns away her head. Then she is left alone again. When her dizziness, or the pain, permits, she lies looking at them. They do not bear the kind of wounds and scars that disfigure her; but they have been marked too. Their bodies carry the imprint of their histories as hers does. It shows in the way they sit or stand or he, the hunched shoulders, the knees drawn up, the faces turned away, the silent crying which they make no attempt to suppress, the snot they allow to congeal on their faces, the odour of armpits and groins they no longer try to hide. Rejects all. Yet these things hardly matter, they are no more than signs. There are other scars, invisible, which are incomparably worse and will not heal.

  Not for a moment does the pain abate. It is like a body of liquid in which she has been immersed. Pain, God, pain. Why didn’t she die
? Surely no sin can be so terrible as to deserve this. Can they not simply leave her behind here to die? It should be so easy. But no death so far has been strong enough to take her. On and on, the pain goes on. On and on, they go on.

  With every jolt of the wagon she feels diminished, eroded, dismantled, bone by bone. She is no longer who she is, nor who she ever was, only what she may be, a mere possibility of herself, circumscribed by pain.

  There might have been some comfort to be drawn from her shell; but that has been lost somewhere along the way, possibly during the ordeal on the train. Such a small thing, but not having it marks the difference between memory and blankness, a possibility of hope and the certainty of despair.

  Almost imperceptibly the wagon creeps through the vast landscape under the malignant sun. Occasionally they espy a tortoise, a blue-headed lizard on a flat brown rock, a gemsbok in the distance with heraldic horns; or birds. Quail fluttering up, screeching, when the oxen come too close; small freckled partridges; sometimes the specks of vultures drifting with wide wings on invisible currents of air. Once, miraculously, a flight of storks with black-tipped wings and beaks dipped in blood. She recognises them. At the end of summer she used to see them gathering on trees and rooftops in Bremen before they took off. ‘To the south’. That was what people said. No one could be more specific. To the south. And now here they are. This must be the summer south. For a moment a strange elation fills her. She, too, has migrated like a bird. Perhaps she too will learn to fly. But the mere thought makes her dizzy. The white sun blinds her. Perhaps she has imagined it. This is a country of the imagination. There are mirages on the horizon, great lakes which shimmer in the heat and disappear as suddenly as they have appeared. A beach with palm trees waving in the breeze, upside down. Children playing on the sand, she can see the colourful patches of their clothes against the glare. She has another blackout. But the visions persist. A small black-haired blue-eyed elfin girl. A sudden donkey, a dog, a cat, a rooster with outrageous plumage. She can hear them bray and bark and meow and crow. And then she blacks out again.

  When she wakes up there is no change in the landscape. It is as empty as before – emptier, because the brief creatures have disappeared – as empty as the world must have been just after God had said, Let there be light, and before there was anything else. Or perhaps this is the ultimate fulfilment of creation, this desert. The solid earth liquefying at the edges, melting into the sky. Its nothingness is complete. It requires nothing else, it is what it is, no more, no less, this sky, this earth, this glorious emptiness full of itself. God has withdrawn from it before his supreme failure, man, could leave an imprint here. The only redundancy is this wagon with its labouring trundling beasts, its accompaniment of men, its huddling women, she, Hanna X. Without them, without her, the landscape would be perfect.

  To all sides it stretches out to meet the smouldering hollow of the sky. It undulates very gently. Like the sea on the equator. It is endless as the sea. Again she abandons herself to the motion. She is on the open deck. There is no one else. And suddenly she knows what she has to do. At last she will have peace, world without end. So easy. Why hasn’t she thought of it before? Just move to the railing, lean over, one small heave, and over she goes, a falling, and a falling, a falling into nothingness, she will not even try to swim or come up for air, sinking, sinking, through all the layers of pain, into a deep oblivion, a susurration, fading, fading, as she dies at last.

  ∨ The Other Side of Silence ∧

  Eleven

  There is a kind of punishment in the orphanage which Hanna actually comes to enjoy, although she takes great care never to let on, otherwise they will devise something else. It consists of being ordered to spend hours, sometimes a whole afternoon, sitting on a hard bench at one of the long bare dining tables, reading the Bible. Afterwards she has to give an account of what she has read to Frau Agathe. For a long time she hates it, because the Bible is the book of the people who most terrorise her, stalking her even in her dreams. But then she discovers the good stories. And gradually she finds ones she likes more than the others. Mostly, they concern women who in one way or another cheat or charm or fight or wangle their way out of adversity. There is Ruth, poor and miserable, gleaning the field – whatever that might mean – of the rich man Boaz; until one night she crawls under his blanket with him and makes him notice her, so that he decides to marry her. (A rather silly story, she finds, as a matter of fact, but at least it got Ruth out of her misery.) And the shrewd Esther who marries King Ahasuerus after he has callously rejected his wife Vasthi, and then uses her power to promote her friends and punish her enemies. And of course the fabulous Salome who dances her way into the heart of King Herod and persuades him to give her the head of John the Baptist on a plate; a rather nasty one that, but how else could the girl have had her way?

  There are others that bring a glow of deep and dark satisfaction. The sister of Moses who deceives the daughter of Pharaoh to save the life of her little brother. Tamar, who tricks her father-in-law into sleeping with her so that she can unmask him as the hypocritical lord-and-master he really is. Hagar, rejected by the man who used her upon the wicked advice of his old wife Sarah, and then saved by an angel in the desert. The daughters of Lot who make their father drunk and lie with him so that their tribe won’t die out. (Hanna is not quite sure about how lying with a man can lead to the survival of a tribe, but somehow it seems a shrewd way of getting what they want.) Deborah who becomes a judge over the whole of her nation and leads the armies of Barak against the enemy Sisera. And Jael who cajoles that same fearsome man, Sisera, into accepting some milk to quench his thirst, after which she covers him with a blanket and puts him to sleep in her tent, and hammers a long nail through his temples, pinning him to the ground. Good for her. And Delilah who betrays the savage, swaggering Samson to her people and makes him pay for the many men he has battered to death with the jawbone of an ass. And on and on, through all those gold-rimmed pages, to the triumphant vision of the woman arrayed in purple and scarlet colour and sitting on a scarlet coloured beast, with seven heads and ten horns: now that, Hanna thinks, is how she would like to ride through the streets of Bremen one day, accompanied by all the great bells of the cathedral.

  ∨ The Other Side of Silence ∧

  Twelve

  I have never been able to understand why the wagon did not stop, or turn back. Even if Hanna X’s absence was discovered only later, surely the most obvious reaction would have been to retrace the route as far as was necessary. Or can it be that they did indeed turn around but finding her motionless gave her up for dead and moved on again? But wouldn’t they at least have made an attempt to bury her, even if it consisted merely of covering the body with stones or dry branches? Then again, there may have been so little communication between the women on the wagon and their drivers and escorts that the loss wasn’t discovered before they arrived at Frauenstein – and by the time they returned the body would have disappeared; nothing unusual about that, given the prevalence of scavengers. But what about her female companions then? Or were they so deeply sunk in their own abjection that they didn’t notice, or didn’t care? Even so, we know that at least one of them, the young one, used to be concerned enough to look after Hanna from time to time – unless she preferred not to attract undue attention after the fact. A most irritating mystery, and not the only one in this story. Hanna X, forever hiding behind the trite symbol of the unknown.

  She doesn’t die, of course, even if to her it seems so at the time. When she comes to – hours later? days? she doesn’t know, it doesn’t matter – she is with a group of Nama people at their place in the desert. Her first thought as she struggles from darkness back to light, through many tiers of pain and dizziness, is that it must be an orphanage concert and that everyone is in fancy dress. Though ‘fancy’ makes a mockery of the weird blend of clothing and ornaments they are wearing: roughly sewn caps of lynx or musk-cat skin, but also wide hats with ostrich or pheasant feathers stuc
k to the brim; some shirts and skirts, but also strings of shell-beads or the bunched tails of jackals or zebras; a few jackets, but also ample karosses made of the pelts of dassies or gazelles; moleskin trousers, but also skimpy skin aprons to cover their shameful parts. A few of the men have guns, others bows and arrows. The women are naked to the waist, exhibiting breasts ranging from pubescent buds to the dugs of old crones, empty folds of skin sagging down to their wrinkled bellies, nipples like the scaly heads of lizards.

  They are all chattering in what sounds like the twittering of birds, with strange clicks and sibilants and gutturals; but when they discover that she has opened her eyes some of them approach excitedly and start addressing her in broken German, which they must have learned from the occupiers of their land. Hanna can only shake her head. When they persist, she reluctantly opens her mouth and points inside at the absence of a tongue. Exclamations of shock and surprise and what may be sympathy. But even this small effort has so exhausted her that she sinks back into oblivion, though she is aware of hands lifting her head and a calabash pressed against her aching mouth and some sour, smelly, curdled liquid forced down her throat. Pain, pain.