The Other Side of Silence

by Andre Brink

  Hanna motions in their direction with a brief movement of her head. Her young companion nods.

  She is still not sure she should have brought the girl with her. But what else could she have done? When she heard that voice softly calling her name in the dark as she prepared to leave Frauenstein she froze in her tracks, one foot already poised on the top step. Katja. She’d counted on the girl being still trapped in her death-like sleep. Now something would have to be done, and quickly. It cannot be long to daybreak. Leaving her bundle at the top of the stairs she hurries back and takes the girl by the arm, motioning urgently that she must return to her room. But Katja stands her ground.

  “Where are you going?” she asks again.

  Hanna gestures impatiently: outside, away, now.

  “You’re not going without me. You can’t leave me here.”

  You don’t understand, Hanna tries to convey to her in me sign language they’ve begun to devise. I cannot stay in this place.

  “After what has happened…” says Katja, her voice choking. “Please. I need you. I won’t let you go.”

  Without a tongue, how can she possibly persuade Katja to stay? And time is running out. Also, even if she has no wish to admit it, she has become, in a way, responsible for the girl. Ever since Katja began to cling to her, following the death of her sister in the desert; and much more so, now, after the events of me night. For a long time Hanna cannot make up her mind. What finally resolves the question is the strange feeling she has, looking at the terrified young girl, that she is again looking in a mirror and seeing, this time, a younger version of herself. Katja is prettier than she has ever been, yes; but there is the hair, the long blonde hair cascading over her shoulders, the hair that used to cause people seeing her from behind to assume that she was beautiful; the hair that once captivated Pastor Ulrich, the hair that men urged her to wind around their privates as she caressed them with closed eyes; the hair she cut off soon after she’d come to Frauenstein, to help rid her of the nightmare on the train. And here is Katja now, thin and vulnerable in the pauper’s dress she put on after the murder, Katja with the selfsame wealth of hair. Taking the girl with her into the wilderness will be like giving herself a second chance, rescuing her not only from this forbidding fortress, but from everything that can restrict and immure and menace her, all the rules and regulations and prescriptions of the world – Katja the orphan, lonely, threatened from all sides.

  So in the end she resigns herself to what has come to seem inevitable. She accompanies Katja back to her own room and helps her pack another bundle. The first feeble daylight comes leaking through the small windows as they pick their way downstairs and then outside, across the bare yard, past the outbuildings and the vegetable garden and the graveyard, past the rocky outcrop that marks the spring, past the rock formation in the shape of a woman turning back to whatever she has left behind, and out on to the open plain that stretches ahead of them to meet the sky where the first streaks of dawn are beginning to show.

  Below the rock she stops to glance back one more time, almost as if expecting to see something, someone, following. But who? The ghosts, perhaps. In a way it might have been reassuring to see them following in her wake, that grey, immaterial host. But they must have their own reasons for staying. They must remain behind as once, lost in the distance, she left behind her imaginary friends when she was transported from her first and unremembered life to the unforgiving walls of the orphanage. And now another life is beginning. What it may be, she does not know yet. But she has chosen it, and must go on.

  No need to hurry. After her previous experience, and Katja’s, they know there is little danger of being followed: Frauenstein will rely on the efficacy of the desert either to destroy them or to send them staggering back. Unless the corpse is found, and there is little chance of that, no one is likely to care about them any more. She takes her time to initiate the girl, as they go on, into the skills she can remember from the Namas: how to find tsammas, roots and tubers, thick-leaved succulents, and to distinguish between the edible and the lethal; how to recognise the markers of buried ostrich eggs filled with water by nomadic Namas and Bushmen; how to be alert to the flutterings and the brief twitterings of the small grey birds that can lead them to the nests of bees in hollow tree-trunks or anthills ripe with the sweetness of golden honeycombs.

  They communicate as they have done in the past: Katja talking and asking, Hanna replying with spare but eloquent gestures or with a scribble of key words, no longer on paper as once in Frauenstein, but scratched on a patch of sand or hard bare earth. They should try to find a Nama settlement or a group of nomads, she has suggested. For the moment she is not yet ready to offer any further explanation. Apart from the time she spent with the Kreutzers, and with Lotte on the boat, her stay with the Namas has been the only interlude in her life in which she has approached a state of near-contentment, containment, perhaps of happiness. That tribe is now annihilated, but they may find others. And for what she has in mind she will need the strength of numbers. As many as she can find. An army. But she has no hurry. This clear, limpid hate that drives her is as patient as the desert sun; as inexorable too. A fire in the guts.

  What strikes Hanna as almost uncanny is the way in which Katja seems to need fewer and fewer written words or phrases from her: their communication is becoming almost telepathic; as if the girl is turning indeed into a version of herself. She is tough too, much tougher than one would expect from her frail body. It was, perhaps, not a mistake after all to have brought her along. Even if two weeks is hardly enough thoroughly to put her to the test.

  From time to time they come across the remains of some Nama settlement – burnt-out huts, kraals of branches torn apart, the carcasses of goats, a few cattle, dogs; bones of people scattered by scavengers. These must be signs of the war that has been ravaging the land and of which they have heard so much; but except for the single recent occasion when the army detachment and its prisoners arrived at Frauenstein it has never been more than rumours or reports. This is more real, more stark, yet there is a curious sense of absence about it, a denial of life. Ultimately the signs point nowhere.

  But now there is something happening ahead, announced by the slowly wheeling vultures. It is unnecessary for Hanna to gesture or for Katja to say a word; they do not even exchange glances. Yet both have quickened their step. The discoveries of their desert trek, so far, have been unremarkable, although to the two women they are momentous in their way: a secretary bird caught in what seems like an extravagant and faintly ludicrous dance with a snake; a family of meerkats surveying the plains; tufts of dry grass swept up in an otherwise invisible whirlwind; small clouds sailing across the sky and disappearing again; a trail of ants crossing their path. Insignificant in themselves, yet each a portent of life and death pursuing its course without a moment’s respite. But this – those vultures and their still unseen target – is more overtly dramatic in the total stillness of the desert.

  “A sick animal perhaps?” Katja suggests as they draw nearer. “Perhaps a buck wounded in a fight or mauled by a lion? Or a little one abandoned by its mother.”

  Hanna shrugs.

  They come still closer.

  Hanna touches the girl’s arm to hold her back. She clenches her fist to indicate a man.

  Yes, it is a man. Or was once. Before he was tied down, on his back, over an anthill, outstretched arms and legs fastened to stakes driven into the ground. The front of his body, from neck to knees, is black with dried blood through which a criss-cross pattern of stripes can be discerned. His sex has been mutilated, the testicles cut off. A cloud of flies rises in an angry buzz as they approach. Hanna tries to turn Katja’s head away, but the girl resists as she kneels beside the spreadeagled body, her eyes staring.

  “Is he dead?” she asks after a while, her lips dry and barely moving.

  As if in reply the man utters a low groan; his body twitches, the only movement of which he seems capable.

  Hanna
kneels beside him, unties her bundle, takes out her long knife, proceeds to hack and saw through the thongs that tie his wrists and ankles.

  Water, she signals to Katja.

  The girl approaches with an earthenware jar she has brought with her. There is little liquid left, but what there is she sprinkles on the man’s dark, swollen, cracked and bleeding lips.

  Careful, motions Hanna. Take your time. Otherwise it will all be wasted.

  They try to move him into a more comfortable position, but he seems unable to comply, even to understand. His back, they discover as they cautiously and clumsily drag him from the anthill, is inexplicably unscathed. It is a giant of a man, built like a bull, but now in such a sorry state that they may well have come too late. He appears delirious.

  Who could have done this to him? Hanna tries to convey to the girl. And why? Do you think he was punished for doing something terrible? Murder, or… She drops her arms, unwilling to proceed.

  “He is black,” says Katja. “In this land, I have found out, that can be enough of a crime. I sometimes saw them when they came crawling on all fours to my father’s trading post. He always tried to shoo us away; it was not for our eyes, he would say. But we would look anyway.”

  But how can they beat a man like this…? Hanna tries to ask. On his chest and stomach and the front of his legs…and there – she points – and not on his back?

  Katja shrugs. “This is how they do it here,” she says in a small, strained voice. “The Hereros call it the German way.”

  We must find some shade for him, gestures Hanna.

  “There is no shade.”

  He will die here. Involuntarily Hanna glances up. The vultures have descended much lower than before. At times they come so close that one can make out the obscenely naked necks, the fierce stare in the unblinking yellow eyes. She looks around, gestures. We’ll have to make shade to protect him.

  “How?”

  Gire me a hand.

  From a stunted thorn tree they spread open the sheet that held Hanna’s few possessions and into its inadequate shade they half carry, half drag the body of the man who moans weakly in agony. Hanna drapes a shirt from her bundle over the blackened, bloody stump that remains of his genitals. Overhead, the vultures utter screeches of protest, flutter their wings in anger, then take off; after a while a few of them return again, dive down as if to hurl themselves into the ground, only to swoop up at the last moment and resume their spiralling, but now upward, higher and higher, dwindling into mere pinpricks.

  There is little more the women can do. The man’s wounds should be cleaned, he is racked with fever, but they have no water. And in this shimmering heat which blinds the eyes every motion is exhausting. They can only wait. When at last the sun begins to liquefy, Hanna leaves Katja in charge and goes off to look for medicine. It is so long ago that she was tended by the Namas; she has forgotten much. But she does find a few small dry shrubs which look vaguely familiar; if they are what she hopes they are, they might help for fever. And a gli root for a concoction to make him drunk and numb the pain.

  The dark comes very suddenly, but there is an abundance of firewood about and using one of the tinderboxes they have brought with them they can get a fire going. Just beyond the reach of the flames there are green eyes shining in the night, appearing now here, now there; and the eerie cackling of jackals, the calls of a hyena. Katja is terrified. Hanna holds her close, making soothing, humming sounds; and from exhaustion the girl drifts off into uneasy sleep. But Hanna stays awake to feed the fire, and from time to time to force some more of the bitter juice from her shrubs through the swollen lips of her delirious patient. He responds with low, rumbling groans like an ox in pain. If he makes it through the night, Hanna thinks, he may survive. If not, the vultures will be back in the morning.

  ∨ The Other Side of Silence ∧

  Thirty-Seven

  In the morning the vultures have not returned. The dark giant will survive. They feed him small morsels from the hard stale bread they still have left, and moisture from a tsamma. Katja keeps at a safe distance: she has too many nightmare memories from the time the Hereros attacked her father’s trading post and killed all the men. But she watches intently while Hanna feeds him from the tsamma. What an amazing melon it is, Hanna thinks as she cautiously makes a hole at the top as she once saw the Namas do, and inserts a sturdy twig which she twirls until the flesh inside is pulped into a liquid which she feeds to the debilitated man. Once it is all finished, she will shake and scratch out the seeds to roast, or to grind into flour. And the shell, carefully preserved, will be kept to serve as a container or even a cooking pot.

  Slowly, as the days creep by, the man’s condition improves. In the beginning, when he is awake, he just lies staring at them with suspicion in his eyes narrowed into slits. But after a day or two he utters something in a voice like a subterranean rumble. It is in a language they do not understand.

  Hanna nudges Katja, who asks, “Do you speak German?”

  “They make me learn,” he replies, his mouth struggling to shape the words. “Otherwise I get no work.” Then he adds with what seems to be a statement of superiority, “I am a Herero.”

  “The land of the Hereros is up north,” Katja quickly reminds him. “The other side of Windhoek. Not down here.”

  “They kill my cattle,” he says in a rush of anger. “They kill all our cattle. They kill the fire of our ancestors. So what must I do? I come here to find work. Otherwise my people will die. My wife, my family. That way, far away.” He motions to the north. He tries to push himself up on his arms. In what sounds like a tone of accusation he demands, “Who are you?”

  Katja first glances at Hanna, then says, “I am Katja. She is Hanna.”

  “Why are you in this place?”

  “We found you here. We couldn’t just leave you.”

  “We cannot stay here. He will come back to see if I am dead.”

  “Who will come back?”

  “The one who put me here. The baas.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “His farm is that way.” He gestures. “Not far. One day.”

  For the first time Katja ventures a question on her own: “Why did he do it to you?”

  He mumbles something unintelligible.

  He must tell us, Hanna conveys to Katja. We must know if he is a thief or a murderer. The girl puts it into words.

  For a long time the stranger stares at them; his attitude is defiant, hostile, even menacing.

  “Why you ask?”

  “We must know who you are,” explains Katja, at Hanna’s prompting.

  “And I must know who you are.” His gruff voice sounds almost taunting.

  “We come from the farm Frauenstein.”

  “People go to that place. Nobody come from there. That is what I hear. If you go there you stay there.”

  “We were not safe there.”

  “Why does she not speak?” he asks, pointing his chin at Hanna.

  “She has no tongue.”

  “Who do that to her?” He moves his hand across his face.

  “Soldiers,” says Katja. “An officer in the German army.” Hanna communicates something to her in sign language, and she asks, “Why did your baas do this to you?”

  A long silence. Then a smothered growl. And he says, precipitously, and in a fury too urgent for his broken German, “The baas want to take my wife. I stop him.”

  “Who is your baas?”

  “His name is Albert Gruber. He is a farmer.”

  Doesn’t he have a wife of his own then? Hanna wants to know, through Katja.

  “He bring a wife from Germany, yes.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “She make music. He beat her. She drink poison stuff.” A pause. “Now he want my wife, he take her.”

  “What is your name?” asks Katja.

  “Kahapa.”

  For the moment that is the end of their conversation. But over the next few days, as he gradu
ally grows stronger, he becomes less obdurately reticent. And once they have given in to his increasingly insistent demands to be moved away from that place, his suspicion about them seems to be allayed. Between the two of them they help him to hobble along, stopping to rest every fifty or hundred metres, until they can no longer see the spot where he was exposed. In the shelter provided by a small koppie they make a new halt, shifting around it as the sun moves the deep shadow.

  On Hanna’s firm instructions, Kahapa has torn a broad strip off the sheet from her bundle to wind it round his waist. His attitude makes it clear that he resents the outfit; perhaps it makes him feel like a woman. But he keeps his protests down. He owes them too much.

  Hanna draws a peculiar satisfaction from the care she bestows on the still almost helpless giant. For perhaps the first time in her life someone depends utterly on her. Even the woman with the cataracts she once read to, the deaf man and his daughter to whom she spoke in signs, were not truly dependent on her: she was a hired help, she was paid to do her work (however paltry the wage), she could be – and was in the end – fired. Here is a life for which she alone is responsible. And it has been her choice. Katja is in it with her, yes. But it is no simple role the girl fulfils: Hanna has come to rely on her – as an interpreter, a helper, a support – but she also needs Hanna in the intricate processes of survival; and she has her own needs, fears, hopes, demands.

  Sometimes, when the injured man dozes, they talk with their hands, a language that becomes more nuanced by the day. If they need to talk at all: for long periods they simply sit together, looking at each other or not, allowing their thoughts to come and go in a silent osmosis.

  “What are we going to do with the man?”

  We must wait until he is healed. Then we’ll see.

  “Is it for him to decide then?”

  No, but he is with us now. We shall decide together.

  “And after that?”

  We’ll go on into the desert. (She will not yet talk to the girl about the hate. The hate that burns like a sun and gives light like a sun.)