The Other Side of Silence

by Andre Brink

  Hanna notices Katja staring at the naked dead men in a troubled fascination she evidently finds it hard to conceal; and only when they are covered with earth does the girl turn away. The mound is covered with stones, and the huge fire is moved, log by log, to resume on top of the grave. The whole camp is swept with branches. Afterwards, when the fire is flaring up again, the uniforms are thrown into the flames. They give off an awful, suffocating, smoky smell; but after some time it dissipates in the stirring of the wind.

  When it is all over they return to the fire, their faces blackened by smoke and streaked with sweat.

  Kahapa takes off his hat with the leopard-skin band and violently dusts it with his free hand. “You are a good fighter,” he says to Hanna, replacing the hat on his head. The others murmur in approval.

  This is only the beginning, Hanna replies through Katja. It will get harder as we go on. She looks slowly from one to the other in the crazy light of the fire. Is there anyone who would like to back out now? You will not have another chance.

  No one comes forward.

  Old Tookwi glances up at the sky, half-obscured by the haphazard movement of the smoke. “I still don’t like that star,” he mumbles, more to himself than to them.

  ∨ The Other Side of Silence ∧

  Fifty-Four

  In the night, as usual, Hanna and Katja lie together, close to the fire. Hanna cannot sleep. She lies watching Kahapa’s broad back as he sits keeping watch. She feels an urge to go and sit with him. But she senses that she cannot leave Katja. The girl is not sleeping either. Rigid, tense in every limb, she lies pressed against Hanna, her breath shallow and uneven. And later she starts shivering. It turns into an uncontrollable trembling; Hanna can hear her teeth chattering. She isn’t crying, only shaking. Hanna holds her as tightly as she can. Once Katja utters a muffled moan. Hanna responds with an unarticulated sound in her throat, perhaps a question, perhaps a sound of soothing.

  “They were all so young,” whispers Katja suddenly. “They looked so innocent.”

  Young, yes, answers Hanna with her fingers on the girl’s body. But not innocent. They brought the war here. You have seen the Nama villages they destroyed. You have seen those girls.

  Katja shivers. Hanna presses her open hand against the girl’s mouth. For a moment Katja struggles against it, biting into the palm; but gradually she begins to relax. And now she is crying, but soundlessly. Then she drifts into sleep.

  ∨ The Other Side of Silence ∧

  Fifty-Five

  They have travelled for a day and a half, on horseback and on the oxcart, and now they are approaching the fort from which the military patrol set out. The landscape is more uneven here and the fort remains obscured behind a series of high koppies. The two batmen, Lukas and David, have shown them the way. A few of the others in the group were reluctant, initially, about considering such a move. There used to be thirty men in the fort, according to the batmen, which means there will be twenty-four left. It sounds redoubtable, if not foolhardy. But Hanna is adamant. If the six soldiers do not return within a reasonable time their fellows are bound to go looking for them; and there may be a greater risk in encountering several patrols, probably coming from different directions, and unexpectedly, than having the whole garrison herded together, she argues. Besides, it is a challenge she cannot resist.

  She spends many hours along the way, with Katja as her interpreter, interrogating Lukas and David on every detail that may in one way or another be relevant: the size and layout of the fort and its fortifications, the roster by which the guard is changed, by day, by night, the nature of its provisions and equipment, the extent of the arms and ammunition at its disposal, its supplies of fresh food and water (there is a well inside, she learns, and a vegetable garden; information which more or less rules out the possibility of a siege), its contacts with Windhoek (dispatches to and fro once a fortnight, the last having occurred just a day before the ill-fated patrol set out). She insists on hearing anything at all they can report – facts, anecdotes, gripes, suspicions, whatever – on the command structure, even on individual members of the garrison, their morale, their interaction in the barracks, their response to discipline, and the nature of that discipline, the length of their postings, their experience or inexperience in the army, their ages, the towns they come from, what they think about their enemies and how they treat prisoners. Sometimes David and Lukas can only shake their heads. Why, one can almost see them thinking, would this woman want to know whether the commander – Captain Weiss, a feared and respected man in his fifties – is reasonable or unreasonable in his demands and expectations of his men, whether he is married, and if so whether his wife lives in Windhoek or in Germany, and whether they think he misses her, whether he is a religious man, whether he reads before he goes to bed at night, whether he rises before his men in the morning or prefers to take it easy, whether he has a passion for his job or merely does his duty, whether he really cares for his soldiers or simply commands them…? And then the second in command, Sergeant Vogel. And the third. For sure, she cannot be in her right mind.

  After this inquisition, when they make their final halt among the koppies, Hanna beckons to Katja and Kahapa to follow her away from the others who are relieved to rest awhile in the shade of the thorn trees. She goes down on her haunches and starts drawing on a patch of sand with a long white thorn. Here is the fort with its garrison of twenty-four soldiers and three grooms for the horses. Here is their little company of ten, plus the two batmen whom she brackets separately, with a question mark beside them.

  Right. Now look carefully. This is what we shall do…she indicates to Katja.

  “You can’t be serious,” objects the girl. “Hanna, this is not a stray patrol in the desert. It is an army garrison in a fortified place. They outnumber us almost three to one. They have months of warfare behind them. Some of them years.”

  So much the better. I promise you I won’t take unnecessary chances. But victory now will give our people all the confidence they need to face the tests that still lie ahead.

  “We cannot just charge in!” Katja persists.

  Absolutely not. That is why we’re planning it all in advance. We have most of the information we need. Of course there are decisions we can only take once we’re there. We have to leave room for improvisation, but we are not unprepared. And we have all the advantage of surprise on our side.

  Kahapa observes in silence. Against her own better judgement, Katja is drawn into the passion of Hanna’s convictions. With nothing less than awe she watches the woman elaborating her sketches and her scribblings on the sand. Hanna herself is conscious of an inexplicable deep contentment which has been dormant in her for years: that quiet, assured joy she used to feel on those distant evenings when she was huddled over the chessboard with Herr Ludwig in the dark amber light of the lamp in his study. This feels like an extension of the same game, although she is very deeply aware that it is infinitely more dangerous, and the stakes are higher. It is, in a very real way, a matter of life and death.

  “How you are sure it will happen like this?” is all Kahapa asks when she has outlined her whole campaign to them. It requires old Tookwi and the six women to move ahead to the fort – Hanna and Katja and Gisela, the strong woman Nerina, the brooding Koo, the medicine crone Kamma – while Kahapa, Himba and T’Kamkhab will remain behind here among the koppies with the two batmen to prepare an ambush.

  “But if they catch you in the fort?” he asks angrily. “How can we help you then? You are six women, they are twenty-four men.”

  The numbers are not everything, she insists. We’ll arrange for a dozen or more of them to go out on an expedition, perhaps two expeditions. With the others we can deal in ones and twos and threes. It is more important for you to he here, to set up your ambush, to wipe out the soldiers we send here.

  “And if you need me there? How I know you call me?”

  There will be signals they can use, she assures him, and launches into a me
ticulous cataloguing of what she has in mind.

  “You think of everything!” he exclaims, and this time there is a hint of real admiration in his voice.

  First tell me where you think I’m wrong, she cautions. Tell me how we can improve on it. We cannot go ahead before we’ve discussed all the possibilities.

  A new round of discussions begins. Kahapa and Katja go through every detail with her, come up with a few refinements, but finally approve of the whole campaign.

  Katja is the one who, even after all the discussion, remains the most apprehensive. “It looks fine here in your pictures on the sand,” she says. “But what happens when there are real people involved? We simply cannot afford to risk too much too soon, Hanna!” she pleads.

  We’ll never know what we can do unless we try.

  “But people may die. We can die.”

  Trust me.

  After a last brief hesitation, with the flicker of a wan smile, Katja concedes, “All right. I trust you.”

  Hanna leans over cautiously to obliterate her scrawls from the sand with the flat of her hand before they get up to return to the others. Once again the whole plan is presented, once again there is lengthy discussion. But at last they can move into action.

  In final preparation for the approach to the fort they fire a large number of shots into the air, in irregular volleys, to create the impression of a skirmish. Now they are ready.

  Lukas and David are left behind, still unarmed, among the koppies with Kahapa and his two men; they keep the horses with them.

  Very slowly the oxcart begins to pick its way across the difficult terrain, accompanied by the women and the rainmaker. Once again Gisela has to bed down on the cart, this time under protest: she has undergone a quite startling transformation, as if in the violence of the encounter two nights ago she has found a passion and an energy of which there was little sign in her former lethargy. All the guns and ammunition won from the German commando are hidden under her bedclothes, because to avoid suspicion only four guns, three Mausers and a straight-pull Mannlicher, are openly in evidence on the cart.

  It takes a good two hours to get through the hills. From there, at a distance of another few hours, they can make out the squat brown fort perched on a steep hilltop.

  “They’ll see us coming all the way,” warns Nerina.

  That is the idea, Hanna makes Katja answer. We don’t want them to be surprised; that will make them feel threatened.

  There are sentries posted on the high front wall, watching them like falcons through binoculars as they approach. At a slow steady pace the two oxen trundle along, led by Tookwi. The women walk in two small groups, on either side.

  When they are about a hundred metres from the gate it swings open and two soldiers on horseback come out, guns at the ready on the pommels in front of them. Hanna and Katja move to the front of their small company. The horsemen stop, scrutinising them, suspicious, apprehensive, challenging.

  Katja tells them about Hanna’s predicament and recounts the same story as before: the wife of the visiting dignitary stricken down by what seems to be a serious illness, their need to get her to a doctor. But this time she adds more elaborate explanation: on their way here, about half an hour beyond the hills over there, she says, they were overtaken by a band of armed Namas and lost two members of their escort before the attackers fled into the desert.

  “A patrol from our fort was sent out in that direction several days ago,” says one of the horsemen. “Did you not meet them on the way?”

  Katja shakes her head. “No. But we did hear a lot of shooting more to the west, two days ago. Perhaps they also ran into Namas.”

  “Those vermin are everywhere,” says the soldier.

  “The group that attacked us cannot have gone very far away,” Katja tells him. “There were quite a few wounded with them and they moved very slowly.”

  “You’d better talk to the captain,” the young man says, new eagerness lighting up his eyes. “Bring your cart into the courtyard.”

  Several other soldiers await them inside the gate. Despite the information provided by the batmen, the women find the courtyard less spacious than they expected; but the large stone well and the vegetable garden match their description in every detail. Apart from the barracks there are rows of stables and sheds, all according to their expectations. While the oxen are outspanned and the women are still taking stock of their surroundings, the commanding officer makes his appearance, summoned by two of the young men in the garrison. Captain Leopold Weiss is lean and middle-aged, exactly as the two batmen described him, with a bald head and penetrating eyes the colour of bayonet steel. With a stiff bow he introduces himself, then stands to attention to hear what they have to say. Katja repeats her story, trying to sound as urgent and agitated as she can. “There is another group of women following us,” she says, inventing as she goes along. “Seven of them, some already old. Relatives of the pastor at the mission station. They are worn out, and quite unarmed, because the natives escorting them ran away one night and took all their food and guns. We trekked on ahead to look for help. Thank God we found you.”

  “How far behind you are they?”

  “Probably a full day by now,” says Katja. “They were quite exhausted and we tried to move on as fast as we could.” Her voice becomes tearful. “Please, Captain, for God’s sake, they need your help, you must track down those robbers. It is just by the grace of the Lord that we escaped death.” A dramatic pause; she drops her voice. “Or worse.” She clasps her hands in front of her breasts, a movement that elicits a pale glow from the captain’s eyes. This, too, is what they have been led to expect, and it suits their scheme.

  Captain Weiss glances up at the sky and makes a quick decision. “We’ll send out a commando immediately. With some luck they can find the marauders before dark, and then move on to rescue the women.” A few quick barks bring soldiers running from all sides. Hanna calculates that the whole remaining garrison in the small fort (including three grooms from the stables) must be assembled.

  Six soldiers are dispatched. Hanna hoped that the captain could be persuaded to send as many as eight, but he will not be swayed. However, she does succeed in convincing him to send Koo with the detachment, on horseback and armed with one of the guns, to show them the way to where the skirmish with the fictitious band of hostile Namas took place. Her presence will make things much easier for Kahapa among the koppies.

  The little commando canters off and in her mind Hanna crosses them out. That leaves eighteen soldiers and the grooms.

  As if the old woman has read her thoughts, Kamma whispers to Hanna, “There are too many soldiers for my medicine. I do not have enough for them all.”

  “We do not need to poison all of them,” Katja reminds her on Hanna’s behalf. “We only need to knock out a few to bring down the numbers.”

  Once the heavy gate has been barricaded behind the departing commando, the rest of the men turn to their evening chores; the captain insists that his soldiers will entertain the ladies and make it a memorable night for them. A sumptuous meal is prepared – a goat is slaughtered, there is a thick broth, and fresh cabbage from the garden, and beetroot, and a great flow of beer. The atmosphere is heavy with festivity. Several toasts are drunk. The evening may yet turn into an uproarious event. But they have hardly finished the broth when there is a shout from the sentry outside on the wall, accompanied by a distant crackling of gunfire. In a turmoil of shouts and moving bodies soldiers from all sides start kicking out their chairs, grabbing their guns and running outside to the two heavy stone staircases that give access to the outside wall. The women follow. But there is nothing to be seen. The gunfire continues for a while, far away among the hills, falters, picks up again; then there are two brief final salvoes of four shots each, followed by a silence as absolute as the night.

  Hanna nudges Katja with an elbow to acknowledge Kahapa’s message: their small group has wiped out the enemy commando. They will have to wait for a full
account later; but Hanna knows that if the encounter took place according to plan, Koo would have led the commando at a very slow pace through the narrow fold among the koppies where Kahapa and the others were lying in wait to pick off the one or two soldiers bringing up the rear; at the first shots Koo would have swung round to bring down the soldier closest to her, and then the rest of their band would close in. Their task completed, it is understood that they will remain among the koppies for a further decision to be taken in the morning.

  Captain Weiss attaches a different interpretation to the shots. “Got them,” he says, but his manner is rather less self-assured than his words. “It was a long way off. They’ll probably camp there and go in search of the women in the morning.” He turns to a subaltern. “Hans, just for safety’s sake, double the guard.”

  In more orderly fashion everybody returns to the barracks, where the table has been set up on trestles. The room is long and low and rather gloomy in the light of torches mounted in brackets along the walls. No one seems quite as hungry as before.

  “Another toast,” proposes the captain, raising his large mug. “To His Imperial Majesty’s victorious army.”

  There is general, if somewhat forced, acclaim. In the hubbub no one notices that the two women do not drink.

  The mugs are thumped down again on the heavy wooden table. The food is served by officious young men. One of them, a smooth-faced youth who seems barely seventeen, keeps on bustling about Katja, plying her with the choicest morsels, smiling and bowing and spilling until the captain curtly orders him over to the far side of the table. But not before the young man has slipped a clumsily scribbled note under the girl’s serviette. She removes it, surreptitiously shares it with Hanna.

  I must see you. You are so pretty. Werner.

  Hanna grimaces. Don’t pay attention, she advises. But she finds it slightly disturbing to see Katja blush. To direct the girl’s attention to more pressing business she communicates an instruction which they have discussed earlier.