The Other Side of Silence

by Andre Brink

  The snake strikes down. The girl screams and rears up, her face streaked with tears through her long tousled hair. On the half-formed mounds of her breasts the tiny nipples seem to stare like horrified dark eyes.

  The man is bellowing with rage, “You’re not bleeding! Why did you tell me you were? You’re not bleeding! You’re not bleeding, you lying little slut!”

  Clearly beside himself, he brings the heavy belt down again with so much violence that he almost loses his balance. This time Katja sees it coming and half evades the blow. She also sees something behind him. For a moment she freezes in disbelief.

  She exclaims, “Hanna!”

  The man, in the motion of raising his arm again, swings round to look. As a result the heavy candlestick comes down on his nose instead of the back of his head. He is momentarily stunned. As he goes down on his knees to cup his face in his hands the second blow breaks his knuckles. The third cracks his skull. He is blinded by blood. A bellowing sound turns into a gurgle in his throat. And still she goes on striking, beating, smashing, as if breaking the bars of a cage. From her throat come grunting, growling sounds. They may be smothered sobs, or not. She has never heard sounds like this coming from herself.

  It is only when she gets too tired to raise the heavy brass thing any more that she is forced to pause, panting and gasping, her whole body heaving.

  “You must stop now,” pleads Katja in a low moan. “You have killed him.”

  Hanna nods, dazed. She sits down heavily on the bed. The girl flops down beside her, reaches out to touch her, then withdraws her hand.

  “What are you going to do now?” she asks.

  Hanna shakes her head. She gestures towards the girl’s skinny body and makes a movement with her elbows to say, Put on something.

  Mortified, Katja briefly covers her chest with her hands, turns away, starts fumbling with the pile of day-clothes on the small table near the window (the shreds of her night-shift are scattered across bed and floor). As she stretches her hands above her head to put on the pauper’s dress donated by well-meaning ladies of the church, she unexpectedly breaks into a giggle. It turns into uncontrollable, hysterical laughter which goes on and on until she collapses on the bed. Only when Hanna reaches over to press the girl’s body against her own does the laughter change into wailing.

  “He looked so funny,” she sobs. “In that smart uniform. And with his bare arse.”

  Uttering low comforting sounds Hanna rocks the thin body; she can feel the girl’s ribs.

  Slowly the sobbing subsides. Katja begins to talk. It is confused and random, an uncontrollable flood interrupted only by deep convulsions which rack her body.

  “This afternoon. There were so many of them. You remember? And then you hid me. But I could still hear them. Everywhere. And the women. It was like when we were on the farm where my father had his trading store. They killed him. With an axe they found in the shop. He was repairing the gate to the cattle kraal. My brothers were helping him. Gerhardt and Rolf. But those Ovambos didn’t just kill them, first they…You know? And Mother and Gertrud and me just stood there. But they never touched us. They even left some food for us when they went away. The next day we went to the mission station that’s six hours away. We first dragged the bodies into the house. To keep the vultures and stuff away, you know. Mother didn’t want to go, but we made her. And then on the way she fell and broke her leg. Oh Jesus. We went to the station and brought the people back with us but the hyenas had got to her before we could. And there were vultures all over her. And flies, just everywhere. All over Father and Gerhardt and Rolf when we got back. The missionary tried to shield them from us, but we saw them. And smelt them. Later the soldiers came to take us away. The same ones as this afternoon. I don’t mean the same men, but the same uniforms. The German army. We were so happy when they came. Gertrud was smelling too, when she died in the desert. For a whole day I tried to scare the vultures off. And the jackals. But I was frightened of the hyenas. So I had to leave her there, you know. And anyway I couldn’t stop the flies. All over the bodies. Over hers. I don’t know where they came from. They were just there. But it was better when the soldiers came. No one came when Gertrud died. Only when my parents were killed. After two days, I think. Perhaps three. And the solders were really so kind to us. They gave us food and water and everything. Only when they found black people in the veld they were not so kind. On the way to Windhoek…” She shudders. “You know what they did?”

  Hanna presses the girl’s face against her chest to smother the talk. But Katja struggles free from her fierce embrace.

  “So when they came this afternoon I wasn’t scared. Not in the beginning. Only when they…When he…” She tries to turn so that she can look again at the heavy half-naked body crumpled on the floor, but Hanna forces her head back.

  That is enough now, her face says.

  “What are we going to do with him?” the girl asks again.

  Hanna looks at her, staring hard into her eyes. Will you help me?

  They kneel down and begin to put the uniform trousers back on the dead man, turning their heads away, which makes the task more difficult. The girl starts giggling again.

  Hanna utters an angry sound of reprimand.

  “When they found black people in the veld they caught them and beat them and gouged their eyes out and tied them to anthills and left them there and some they hanged from thorn trees, you know, those big ones, the camel-thorns, and some they took and cut off everything, their ears and noses, their hands, their feet, their things, everything. And they put their things in their mouths and stood round them and laughed and smoked and drank schnapps. But they really were so kind to us, as if they were our fathers or our brothers, only some were still quite young.”

  Hanna grabs her by the shoulders and shakes her. Now stop this! For God’s sake, shut up!

  “You don’t believe me? I tell you, I saw everything.”

  You think I don’t believe you? You think I haven’t seen or lived it?

  “And when they came this afternoon, I was happy to see the uniforms. This one too, he looked like the leader. When he put his arms round me and kissed me it was like my father, and I felt like crying, I was so happy, I remembered so many things, you know, from long ago, when we all, when Gerhardt and Rolf and Gertrud and I, but of course Gertrud died. And then all of a sudden he wasn’t like my father any more.”

  ∨ The Other Side of Silence ∧

  Seven

  This, as Hanna recalls it, is what happened in the afternoon. The detachment arrives just after noon, from the south. A group of officers on horseback, followed by a crowd of haggard soldiers on foot, fifty or sixty or eighty, then a wretched line of naked prisoners, hands tied behind their backs, strung like dusty beads on a rosary with thongs running from one neck to the next. Namas, by the look of them: short, slight people, yellowish in colour, their faces pinched and furrowed. Most of them are men, but there are women as well, and even a number of children. The rear is brought up by another band of soldiers with guns and whips and sjamboks.

  They must be followers of Hendrik Witbooi, fighting on out of sheer habit or stubbornness even after their captain’s death five months ago. In the early days of this war that has been ebbing and flowing through the vast land for years now there used to be a kind of gentlemanly code of conduct determining relations between the German army of occupation and the indigenous people; it is known that on one occasion, after Witbooi had been beleaguered on a koppie for weeks, he sent a letter to the German commander on the plain below (‘My dear German imperial Herr Franz’) detailing his needs: food, water, two boxes of Martini Henry ammunition, ‘as is only fit and proper between large, decent and civilised nations’. But soon there was little evidence of honour remaining; and as time dragged on, particularly after Generalleutnant von Trotha took command, the war became as beastly as any other, engulfing large tracts of the colony as the general implemented his Tabula Rasa strategy. Sometimes it was reduced to
a mere dribble of incidents, isolated guerrilla attacks on farms and outposts and military camps, but two years ago, in 1904, there was a sudden and total conflagration. The Hereros, finally uprooted from their ancestral lands by German expropriation and by the cattle disease that ravaged their herds and having nothing more to lose, unfurled wave upon wave of desperate attacks to drive the Germans – Schütztruppen, settlers, merchants, all – into the white-crested waters of the Atlantic. This time they were joined by most of the other native peoples, from the Kunene all the way down to the Orange. And after the violence had burnt itself out in the north it raged on in the south. Now, even after von Trotha has been recalled, his military successor, Oberbefehlshaber Dame, is continuing the campaign against the Namas. Which is where this detachment comes from.

  Someone looking from a high rear window in Frauenstein gives the alarm. Within moments there are women clustered in every window like bats in a cave while the staff, with the diminutive but formidable Frau Knesebeck in front, form a protective phalanx in the backyard, between the kitchen and the barns and stables. The whole edifice is trembling with excitement. Strangers: visitors! And such a multitude of them. There is a sense of real occasion, something almost unheard of. And at the same time there is apprehension, fear, terror. All these military men – they cannot be up to any good. Such visits in the past have been restricted to small patrols of two or three or half a dozen soldiers at a time; and God knows what havoc they left behind. What lies ahead today cannot be imagined. Such an incursion from beyond the desert has all the impact of an event greater than history, it is the stuff of legends and of myth. This is the closest the war has yet come to Frauenstein; suddenly it is no longer a murmur of rumour and conjecture and possibility but something overwhelmingly real. It is here, it is now. They are aquiver with anticipation.

  The commander is the first to alight from his horse. Clicking his heels, he bows stiffly to Frau Knesebeck.

  “Gn’adige Frau!”

  “Whom do I have the honour to meet?” she enquires, tentatively extending a stiffly formal hand.

  On a level with him, she finds his figure less impressive than when he was on horseback. Stockier, more fleshy, his legs somewhat too short for the heavy torso; and sweating copiously. Even so the khaki uniform with its many braids and brass accessories makes him seem a splendid specimen of imperial manhood.

  “Colonel von Blixen,” he says, pressing sun-blistered lips to her knuckles.

  His company is on its way back from Namaland, he informs her. He is happy to say that behind them lies an appeased land. There should be nothing more to fear from that direction. But his men are exhausted. Some refreshment would be in order. He glances up at the windows thronged with female bodies. Some entertainment too. If what they have heard about this admirable establishment is true.

  “We keep a decent German house,” says Frau Knesebeck, pursing her lips. But it may well be accompanied, to the keen and possibly wishful observer, by the hint of a wink.

  “We shall abide by all the rules of gentlemanly behaviour,” he assures her. His wink is less ambiguous.

  “We lead frugal lives here,” she informs him. “We do not have an abundance of victuals at the ready.” Noticing a narrowing of his eyes she hastens to add, “But what we have is at Your Excellency’s disposal.”

  “Once back in Windhoek,” he says with a gesture of magnanimity, “we shall arrange to make good to you whatever my men consume today. Tenfold.”

  Frau Knesebeck makes a few quick calculations before she turns to her staff to give her own instructions. Six goats will be slaughtered, and any number of chickens. From the garden an abundance of vegetables will be brought in.

  A foreign fever spreads through the corridors and recesses of the building as the women begin to make preparations for the feast while the men take charge of roasting the meat over large bonfires from the woodpiles outside the kitchen. From a distance, covered in ochre dust which leaves only eyes and mouths exposed, the prisoners stare in abject apathy. Two guards with sjamboks keep moving slowly along the rows to deal with anyone tempted to topple over from fatigue, hunger or pain. Before the afternoon is out, two bodies will be dragged off some distance from the house and left exposed to the predators that have been following them at a judicious distance over the last few days.

  The soldiers eat outside. The officers are served at the long refectory table set in the middle of one of the seldom-used reception rooms on the first floor of the residence. Because very little light intrudes through the tall narrow windows – the whole place appears to have been designed from the need to shut out as much as possible of the outside world – there are chandeliers on the table and erratically flaming torches in brackets on the bare walls, lending a medieval, unreal aspect to the place. Frau Knesebeck is seated at one narrow end of the table, Colonel von Blixen at the other. Huddled against the surrounding walls, visibly torn between fascination and terror, are the thirty or forty female inmates, peremptorily summoned by the mistress of the house, ogling the excesses of the meal and the men partaking of it. They range from what seems like toothless crones (although it is doubtful that there is anyone above fifty) down to the barely nubile Katja. The girl is squeezed in between Hanna X and a squint-eyed youngish woman, Gerda Kayser, a comparatively recent arrival, whose face has been ravaged by smallpox. There is a constant flow of movement up and down along the broad stone staircase (where much later, in the night, Hanna X will drag her victim downstairs, thud thud thud) as the women on the staff carry off used plates to the kitchen and return with new laden dishes. Frau Knesebeck has had brandy brought up from the cellar. Very few of the inhabitants of Frauenstein have even been aware that such a supply is hoarded there. It must date back to the early, half-forgotten years of the place, presumably transported from Windhoek or perhaps Luderitz on one of the wagons which still, a few times a year, traverse the desert with provisions Frauenstein cannot produce on its own – salt and sugar, oil and vinegar, coffee, paraffin and lanterns, small quantities of chewing tobacco, medicaments, shoes and clothing, needles and wool and reels of cotton, cutlery and crockery, occasionally paper and ink and pens for records and registers which are supposed to be kept although it is hardly ever done, bales and bolts of chintz or cheesecloth or sheeting, some basic farming implements. (From time to time there is some official error which results in large quantities of unexpected and unnecessary items being dumped in the yard: once a whole wagon-load of porcelain pisspots, once a pile of army uniforms, once a mountain of left shoes, a consignment of sheep-shears, a supply of pickaxe handles intended for a mine in Otavi or Otjiwarongo. So, too, presumably, once, the superfluity of brandy.)

  As the meal progresses and the spirits flow more and more copiously, the officers grow steadily more rowdy. Some resort to eating with their hands, tearing meat from bones with their teeth; glasses and plates are broken; brandy is gulped directly from the bottles which continue to be brought up from the dark bowels of the building. And judging by their ever more irresponsible comportment several of the serving women must also be partaking of the liquid fire as they shuttle along an increasingly unpredictable route between cellar and dining hall. Frau Knesebeck’s mouth resembles more and more the rear end of a fowl as Colonel von Blixen’s gestures, accompanying his account of exploits on and off the field of battle, become more recklessly expansive and more precarious.

  Here and there on the long sides of the table the general carousing erupts in raucous song; among members of conflicting groups of singers scuffles break out. More crockery is smashed, no longer in exuberance but in anger. Colonel von Blixen rises to his feet, steadies himself on his long arms, and thunders a long command ending in a string of verbs. Escorted by four more senior officers, the gang leaders in the brawl are ordered out. Stripped of the insignia of their ranks, they will accompany the footsoldiers outside on the resumption of their march. For a short while, under the scorching stare of their commander, the men remaining at the long table fal
l silent as they attempt, with varying degrees of success, to pour the next round of brandy in the abandoned glasses. The escorting officers return up the broad staircase, two of them on all fours.

  “It is time to drink our toasts,” announces the colonel, who appears to have forgotten that they have already done so.

  The officers rise with studied dignity. Three toasts are proposed and drunk. To their gracious hostesses. To the high command in Windhoek. To His Imperial Majesty, Kaiser Wilhelm II in Berlin.

  “We shall now proceed with the enjoyment of the other delicacies so graciously put at our disposal,” announces Colonel von Blixen.

  He pushes out his chair, takes a moment to steady himself with his hands on the high back, and begins to move in slow measured strides towards the nearest cluster of women against the wall. He stops to wipe his perspiring forehead with a large kerchief drawn, not without effort, from his pocket. Beaming the goodwill of the conqueror, he raises the chin of the first woman, briefly studies her face, moves on to the next.

  “Herr Oberst,” says Frau Knesebeck, rising hesitantly at the far end of the table.