The Other Side of Silence

by Andre Brink

  Frau Kathe is speaking: “Poor thing. So very plain. Not very appetising to look at, is she?”

  “We did not hire her for her looks, Kathe,” Frau Hildegard says pointedly.

  “No, quite. That much is clear. But I always say looks are important for a girl. That’s all a man will notice.”

  “Just as well then,” comments Frau Hildegard with a harsh little laugh. “Then we know our menfolk will be safe. A pretty woman is an invention of Satan.”

  “How can you say that when you have such striking looks yourself, Hildegard?”

  “I was talking about servant girls,” Frau Hildegard puts the matter beyond dispute.

  “Well, of course, I’ve heard it said that for some men a plain woman is a better proposition, because the plain ones are more grateful for some attention.”

  “There is plain and plain,” Frau Hildegard trumps her. “This one, as you have no doubt noticed, is severely plain. So we can both rest easy.”

  Their laughter drowns out the tinkling of the coffee cups.

  And so there is of course more than a touch of irony in the fact that it should be Herr Dieter’s dalliance which leads to the abrupt termination of Hanna’s service.

  Not that they are ever discovered together, nothing as melodramatic as that. (If only it was, Hanna may, perversely, think after it is all over and the dust has settled and she is back in the orphanage.) What happens is that Frau Hildegard, driven by her concern for propriety and diligence, ventures up to Hanna’s little box of a room in the attic on a tour of inspection, one day while the girl is off to market. There is nothing untoward to be discovered among Hanna’s pitiful possessions. Except, perhaps, the shell from the girl on the beach; but it holds no interest for the lady of the house. What does attract her attention, however, is a tear in the old stained mattress in the corner. Is it suspicion, or sheer nastiness, that makes the woman stoop to put a hand through the tear and pull out a soiled linen bag half filled with coins? She has no wish to count the money, it is dirty; but at a guess she would say that it may well be a few hundred marks. The equivalent of a whole year’s wages. Before the share of the Little Children of Jesus has been deducted. Stolen. All stolen from the household over these many months. That is the only logical conclusion.

  Frau Hildegard chooses the hour of dinner, that evening, when the whole family is assembled at table – Hanna hovering in the background serving, almost too tired to stand on her feet – to produce, with a show of disgust, the dirty bag which she places on the corner of the long table next to Herr Dieter’s plate.

  Everybody stares. Hanna takes a step back. Her only comfort is that she is in the half-dark; hopefully no one can see her face.

  “And what might this be?” asks Herr Dieter, fingering the bag with mild distaste.

  “You ask that person,” says Frau Hildegard, half turning to point at Hanna. “I found it in her mattress. Perhaps she will care to explain.”

  Everybody waits, Herr Dieter too.

  “It is my money,” says Hanna. She reaches for the bag, but Frau Hildegard sweeps it out of her reach.

  “As far as I know you have nothing but debt. And this is a substantial sum.”

  “I’m saving it to pay off my debt.”

  “I couldn’t care less what you want to do with it, my girl. What I wish to know is where you got it.”

  “I earned it,” says Hanna, barely moving her lips.

  “Earned it?”

  Another long silence. Hanna looks at Herr Dieter, but he is more interested in reaching for the beer bottle to fill his mug, his head turned right away from her.

  “At the market,” says Hanna. “Doing things for people when I go there. Carrying and stuff.”

  “I keep a close watch on your coming and going,” says Frau Hildegard. “You have never been away for long enough to do such things. Anyway, this is not the kind of money people pay for small errands.”

  “It took months. Ever since I came here.”

  “You are lying to me, Hanna.” A pause. “Is that so?”

  This time the pause becomes almost unbearable.

  “Yes, it is,” Hanna admits at last.

  “Then what is the truth?”

  “I earned the money with my body.”

  Herr Dieter chokes on his beer.

  “You did what?”

  Hanna retreats until her back is against the wall.

  “Hanna, talk to me.”

  Hanna looks imploringly at Herr Dieter, but he avoids her eyes.

  After another silence Hanna says, so softly it is barely audible, “You pay me so little, I have no choice.”

  Frau Hildegard gets up. Her chair scrapes the polished wooden floor.

  “A thief and a whore,” she says, spitting each word out separately. “I shall not have that in my house. We are decent people. Tomorrow Herr Dieter will take you back to the orphanage. With some luck you will end up in prison. It is a pity they no longer send criminals to me pillory.”

  ∨ The Other Side of Silence ∧

  Twenty-Five

  The day after Hanna returns to Frauenstein from the desert she calmly and deliberately hacks off her long hair. When she enters the dining room for lunch, Frau Knesebeck looks at her with stern disapproval, but soon composes herself. All she says is, “Did you have to do that? Were you not ugly enough as it is?”

  ∨ The Other Side of Silence ∧

  Twenty-Six

  Life in the orphanage runs on as if she has never been absent. Hanna receives the routine punishment for working girls who have been dismissed – rations reduced to bread and water for a week, concluded with the public exposure of the culprit to the collective, rehearsed jeering of the assembled children and their overseers. Afterwards, through the considerable skills of Frau Agathe who has a reputation for inventing impressive references (signed by herself, by Pastor Ulrich, and imaginary employers), she is dispatched to a new placement. It is somewhat more distant than the first, but it is still possible, with half an hour of additional travelling each way, to continue seeing Fraulein Braunschweig; so Hanna can resign herself to it.

  The problem, as she soon finds out, is that her debts from the Klatt household have not been written off but are carried over to her new employment. Frau Agathe having paid the full account produced by Frau Hildegard, without soliciting any comment or verification from Hanna, the new employers, the Hartmanns, are now required to reimburse the Little Children of Jesus.

  They are a tight little family, but not a very happy one, as if they occupy the same space without really touching each other. The only child, Peter, who is twelve, has such a frail constitution that he cannot go to school and has to be taught at home by his mother, Frau Liesel, who was a teacher before her marriage. Herr Ludwig works for a firm handling imports and exports in a large brick building at the Europahafen. Hanna has been hired to do the housekeeping so that Frau Liesel can devote all her time to Peter.

  Which does not prevent her from going out almost immediately after her husband has left for work in the mornings and seldom returning home before mid-afternoon, leaving Hanna to take care of Peter’s lessons, an arrangement that suits everyone. It is likely that were he to know, Herr Ludwig would not approve, but he is studiously kept in the dark by his energetic wife, who draws Hanna into the conspiracy with a wink, some dark threats, and sporadic small rewards.

  What Peter suffers from appears to be asthma, but Hanna is tempted to believe that the parents are really over-protective, following the loss of no fewer than three other babies before his birth – two of them stillborn, one dead just before his first birthday, as Frau Liesel never fails to remind her young housekeeper in tones of hushed and dire drama. To Herr Ludwig the survival of a son and heir is of primary importance, he himself being the last in a long line of almost-notable men, most of them in military service. (The only reason why he turned to commerce was that his own health had never been robust; also, he already had two older brothers in the army. No one could for
esee that both would die within months of each other, one on duty in East Africa, the other in a duel not much spoken about in the family.)

  Supervising Peter’s homework is for Hanna a way of resuming her own lessons and her own reading. Her eagerness also brings a faint glow to the boy’s pale face, though he remains weighed down by the suspicion that he will never really be as brilliant as his parents expect him to become. At least she can share with him her enthusiasm for the sufferings of the young Werther, the exploits of Jeanne, the far places of the earth.

  When Frau Liesel comes home in the afternoon – often flushed and with shiny green eyes – Hanna is called to run her a bath, where she reclines for an hour or so, stepping out just in time to hear the boy’s lessons. Sometimes, when Herr Ludwig comes home a bit early, he joins the little gathering, invariably lavish in his praise for the merest flickering of brightness demonstrated by his son. Sometimes, when the boy falters, Hanna cannot restrain herself from eagerly prompting him the dates of the Seven Years War, the capital of Peru, the river that forms the northern border of the new German colony of South-West Africa – and this attracts Herr Ludwig’s interest. One late afternoon, the revision done, when mother and son retire to Peter’s bedroom to pack away his books and have their customary cuddle, he turns to Hanna and looks at her so intently that she begins to fidget and drops the coffee cup she is about to place on the tray.

  “You are a bright girl, Hanna,” he says as she squats to pick up the pieces. “Why didn’t you finish school?”

  She puts the shards on the tray, causing a teaspoon to fall.

  “I had to go into service, Herr, Ludwig,” she says, feeling her cheeks bum as she kneels down again.

  “You must try to keep it up.”

  How? she wonders with a brief rush of anger. But she just nods and mumbles, and gets up. In the process she nearly knocks the tray off the sideboard, but fortunately manages to salvage it at the last moment.

  “Why don’t you come to my study tonight when your work is done?” he says. “There’s something I’d like to show you.”

  Please, she thinks, not again.

  “Hanna?”

  “Herr Ludwig?” she croaks, not daring to look at him.

  “I asked you a question.”

  “I – I can’t, Herr Ludwig. Please. If you don’t mind.”

  This time she drops the tray.

  When she has finished collecting all the pieces and cleaning up, he says quietly, “I’ll be waiting for you.”

  After supper, having taken twice as long as usual over the dishes, she sits down at the kitchen table and stares at her hands, red from the hot water. In her mind she repeats all the questions and answers she can remember from the afternoon’s lessons. Then she looks up at the clock on the wall. It is almost nine. Now, surely, he will have gone to bed.

  Dragging her feet, she goes to the study. There is a sliver of light under the door. Perhaps he has left the lamp burning.

  But he is still working, comfortably seated in a large armchair, a clutch of papers on his lap.

  He looks up and smiles indulgently. “It took you a long time,” he says.

  “I’m sorry, I…” Her voice trails off.

  “I must have a word with Liesel,” he says. “We cannot burden you with too much.”

  “No, no, please, it’s all right, really.”

  Without any warning he asks, “How did you know about the Kunene River?”

  She stares at him blankly.

  “The northern border of the colony of South-West Africa,” he prompts her.

  “I try to listen when Peter does his lessons,” she mumbles, dreading that she will give anything away that might reflect on Frau Liesel. She adds precipitately, “I like the names of faraway places, Herr Ludwig.”

  “My company’s ships go to harbours all over the world. China, Africa, America, everywhere.” He takes off his reading glasses and looks at her. “Perhaps, if you continue with your studies, you can come and work for me one day and travel to some of those places.”

  “Please don’t mock me, Herr Ludwig!” she suddenly explodes. “How can I continue with my studies?”

  “To begin with, you can tell me if there are books I can get for you.”

  “I have no money apart from what I earn here, and most of that goes to pay my debt.”

  “We will have to see about that,” he says. Then he puts his papers on a low table beside the chair and gets up. “But that is not why I asked you to come to the study.”

  This is it, she thinks. He comes towards her. She edges away, trying to shrink out of reach. But he moves past her to a small table with immaculately inlaid squares in pale and dark wood. Two rows of intricately carved pieces, ivory and ebony, have been set up at either end.

  “Do you know what this is?” Herr Ludwig asks.

  “Some kind of game?” she guesses. At the church Messe the children were sometimes allowed to play draughts, but these pieces are different, more various and more exquisitely turned.

  “It is a chess set,” he explains. “If you wish, I can teach you to play.”

  “What for?” she asks suspiciously.

  He smiles. She looks at his face in the amber light of the lamp: its finely chiselled features as if it, too, has been carved from wood – keen eyebrows, high cheekbones, a firmly set chin, a nose like the beak of the eagle preferred by Chancellor von Bismarck who recently resigned in sullen deference to the new young emperor, Wilhelm II. His hair is wavy, combed up high in front, then stroked severely back.

  “Just to see how good you are,” he says. “I’ve tried to play with Frau Liesel, but she gets bored too easily. And Peter, I’m afraid, has shown no aptitude yet.”

  “And if I don’t play well I get punished.” It is a statement, not a question.

  “If you don’t play well, you lose. That is all. And then you try again, until you get better.” He gives an almost boyish smile. “We can make a deal: every time you beat me, you can ask for any book you wish to have.”

  “And I don’t pay for it? Not even afterwards?”

  “Of course not. You earn it by winning.”

  “And what will you ask of me if you win?”

  “I want no more than the pleasure of playing. My evenings are very boring.”

  “Is your wife not waiting for you?”

  He hesitates for a moment. “She reads, and then she goes to sleep,” he says with just the slightest tightening of his jaws.

  “What can be the pleasure of playing with someone like me?” she insists.

  “There is no one else. Liesel doesn’t like my friends to come over.”

  “You can go out.”

  “I cannot leave her here alone.” Almost apologetically he adds, “You see, after the children we lost…and with Peter so sickly…”

  “Now I understand.” There is a slow, bitter twitching of her mouth. “You want someone you can beat. You will only teach me because you know I can never beat you.”

  “Why don’t you give it a try? If at any time – tomorrow, a week from now, a month, no matter when – you decide you don’t like the game, we can stop.”

  There is a prolonged silence. Even the light seems to defer to it.

  Then Hanna says, “Show me.”

  It is midnight before he insists that she go to bed.

  During the next day she finds time – makes time – between bouts of other work, even when she is supposed to be with Peter, to slip into the study and rehearse the moves of the pieces on the chessboard. “Think of it as a military campaign,” Herr Ludwig has told her. “Think of it as a battle plan. If your enemy makes certain moves, there are others you can make to counter him: stop him, waylay him, forestall him, lure him in a different direction, pounce on him from behind. And for every move you make, you can be sure he will think up something else in turn; so keep him guessing, don’t let him see what you really have in mind before it is too late. Always try to stay one step ahead, try to read what is happening
inside his head.”

  Her first thoughts, last night, were, I shall never learn this, I’m just not clever enough. But all through the night new thoughts, possibilities, manoeuvres, strategies, moves, shifts have been careering through her mind. Now she is exhausted, but she cannot rest before she has tried them out. When Peter complains she tries to draw him into her game, but he soon loses interest and she has no choice but to give it up too.

  That evening, after the dishes have been done, she cannot wait to go to the study. To her chagrin she turns out to be so tired that she plays worse than the night before, and Herr Ludwig insists that she retire early. Those are frustrating weeks. Hanna is not very good; but she will not give up, and she has endless patience. One evening there is an unexpected crisis, when Herr Ludwig, in an attempt to bolster her confidence, makes a silly move at a crucial point, loses his queen and finds his king mated.

  But instead of seeing her jubilant as he expected, Hanna erupts in a rage that catches him completely by surprise. He never thought this compliant, placid girl could be so angry. She pushes her chair back and jumps up so furiously that it falls over; in a single sweep she rakes all the pieces from the board, scattering them across the floor.

  “Why did you do that?” she shouts at him, her face red and contorted. “You have no right to humiliate me like that. Just because I’m a servant girl!”

  “I’m sorry, Hanna,” he stammers, genuinely upset. “I lost my concentration for a moment, I made the wrong move…”

  “You did not!” she screams. “You’re not so stupid, you did it on purpose. You let me win. Because you despise me, because you think I can never win on my own. I won’t play with you again, not ever!” And she runs to her room, sobbing.

  In the night her rage makes way for shame. What on earth has possessed her? She never knew she had this in her. But at the end of it all there is only one simple and terrible fact to face: he is the master, he can do anything he wants, she has no right, no right at all, to question him, whatever he may wish to do. And to storm at him like that! Calling him du. It is the end. She will be sent away in disgrace again. And she deserves it. She has wrecked everything. Any chance of beating him, of winning books from him, of studying, of one day working for his company and travelling the world, everything, everything.