The Other Side of Silence

by Andre Brink

  He pays no attention. By the time he reaches the fifth or sixth woman his comportment has become more brazen. He no longer merely lifts a head or a hand or pinches an earlobe but palpates a breast, tweaks a nipple, forces a knuckle between the lips of the woman in front of him. The tweaks become fiercer as he moves on. One woman moans lightly in pain. He raises his other hand to pinch both nipples. This time she makes no sound, but her face grows very white. When he comes to the twelfth woman he orders her to turn round and fondles her buttocks, grunts, moves on. At the next he grips with both hands the high collar of her dark dress and rips it open, exposing her breasts. In a reflex movement the woman tries to cover them with her hands. Von Blixen slaps her very hard across the face.

  “Herr Oberst,” says Frau Knesebeck.

  The woman drops her hands, looking down at the floor.

  The commander moves on and on. Soon he no longer bothers to tear open the shirts or dresses in front of him, but barks brief commands at the women to do it themselves. It becomes boring. He returns to the table, refills the empty glass at his place, drains it in a single gulp, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, resumes his inspection. They are now ordered to raise their skirts and remove their underwear, some with their backs turned to him, others facing him. He glances at their lower bellies, tugs at pubic hair, inserts a finger in a vulva, withdraws it in disgust when he discovers that the woman is menstruating. As is the next, and the next.

  “Herr Oberst,” pleads Frau Knesebeck.

  “Gottverdammt!” snarls von Blixen. He turns back to the table, instructs his officers to complete the inspection on his behalf. They draw blood every time. The colonel contents himself by finishing his round at some distance from the inmates lining the walls, merely glancing in passing at the odd face that appears briefly to interest him and gesturing to the nearest officer to sample her more intimately. More blood.

  It is only when he reaches the girl Katja that the colonel comes to a standstill.

  “You,” he says. “Come here.”

  Katja tries to slide behind Hanna X.

  “Come here!” he shouts, so loudly that some of the women exclaim in fright.

  The trembling girl approaches a pace or two. He beckons her with a finger. She stands in front of him.

  “Now, girl,” he says. “No need to be afraid.” With surprising gentleness, almost fatherly, he takes her face between his hands and leans over to kiss her on the forehead. “Was this so bad?” he asks.

  “No.” She manages to force a little smile.

  “And this?” Von Blixen takes her by the shoulders – such thin shoulders, the blades behind protruding like incipient wings. He presses her slight body against him, still with a show of tender care.

  She seems briefly to overcome her fear, even leans her head against his shoulder.

  “Show me your tits,” he says.

  “I don’t have any,” she whispers. Coyly, archly, ashamed, terrified? It is hard to tell.

  “Herr Oberst,” says Frau Knesebeck.

  “I’ll take this one,” he says, grasping the girl by the hand.

  Hanna X makes a deep sound of protest in her throat.

  There is a general low-key commotion among the women, inmates and staff alike.

  “Silence!” shouts the colonel. His face is once again shiny with perspiration. It even glistens among the bristles between the joints on his fingers. He is still grasping Katja’s narrow hand in his free hand. For another moment he glowers at the assembled women, then turns towards the nearest door, pulling the girl after him.

  “I’m sorry, Herr Oberst,” says Frau Knesebeck. Suddenly resolute, she leaves the table and hurries past the colonel to block his way to the door. “You cannot take this girl. She is in our special care.”

  “Stand aside!” he bellows.

  The small woman hesitates for a moment, then shakes her head. “I’m afraid she is here under a special dispensation.”

  “From whom?” he asks. “What difference does it make?”

  She stands her ground. “We have instructions from the chief commanding officer of the German army in the colony, Oberbefehlshaber Dame himself,” she informs him without batting an eyelid.

  He stares at her in silence, then looks down at the girl. “Is that true?” In sudden rage he shakes her the way a dog tussles with a rag.

  Katja merely whimpers.

  Von Blixen faces his hostess again. “I don’t believe you,” he says, but his voice has lost some of its assurance.

  “I have instructions to report directly to Governor von Lindequist,” says Frau Knesebeck calmly. “If anything happens to this girl, who is Oberbefehlshaber Dame’s niece, you will have to answer to him.”

  ∨ The Other Side of Silence ∧

  Eight

  For what must be a full minute Colonel von Blixen stares piercingly into the eyes of his small hostess before he abruptly turns away from the girl, heads for the nearest woman, grabs her by the elbow and snarls, “Come!” On his way out he snatches a full bottle of brandy from the long table in his free hand.

  Katja blunders back to Hanna X, who puts her arms around the shaking girl and presses her against her own body. The other officers give them a wide berth, eddying past them like a stream past a boulder, each claiming a woman – prey or trophy – whom he drags off through the nearest doorway into the vast and various spaces beyond. Without deigning to cast another look at the girl, Frau Knesebeck turns to the members of her staff who are thronging in the doorway to the staircase. “What are you waiting for?” she asks. “There is all this mess to clear away.”

  Throughout the interminable hours of the afternoon the place rings and shudders with the sounds of the men on their rampage as they go about their business. The walls reverberate with cursing and shouting, the screams of women, the crashing and thundering of furniture and utensils being smashed – beds and chairs, pitchers and ewers, pisspots, mirrors and window panes, doors, chests. In her own sparsely furnished room Hanna sits on her narrow bed, straight-backed and quiet, stroking the thin shoulders of the girl who is lying beside her, half asleep, whimpering occasionally like a dreaming puppy. From time to time the din appears to the down, then suddenly flares up again, moving from one part of the building to the next, up and down the stairs, spilling outside through doors or windows, then sweeping back. But at last the worst of the rage seems to have spent itself. From the yard come the first sounds of horses being saddled and readied to resume the journey.

  That is when the door is violently thrown open and a man comes staggering across the threshold of Hanna’s room. It is Colonel von Blixen.

  “Ah!” he exclaims, steadying himself against the doorpost. “I have been looking for you all over the place. You juicy little bitch!”

  The girl struggles up through the confused remains of dreams. Hanna puts a hand on her hip. She appears calm, but her body is very tense.

  “Come here,” says the colonel. In his red face the grin appears like a gash. There are smudges of blood on his uniform, and on his hands.

  Katja shakes her head.

  “Come here!” he thunders.

  Hanna X draws the girl closer to her side.

  The officer is clearly blind drunk, and now apoplectic with fury. He stumbles as he tries to approach, manages to get hold of one of the bedposts, stands swaying for a moment, then lunges towards the women.

  Hanna X tries to move in between him and the girl but in the power of his rage he simply sweeps her out of the way, sending her sprawling on the floor.

  “You heard what Frau Knesebeck said,” whispers Katja.

  “To hell with her. To hell with Oberbefehlshaber Dame.”

  Hanna comes to her feet, stroking into place the kappie with which she habitually covers her face. She makes a sound, but he doesn’t even turn his head.

  “Come here,” he tells the girl again. They can both smell him now. The drunk, the soldier who has marched through the desert for days, maybe weeks, and w
ho has been fucking and vomiting his way through the labyrinthine afternoon.

  This time, as if mesmerised, Katja does obey.

  “That’s a good girl,” approves von Blixen. He stretches both arms out, stiffly, with fierce concentration, and places them on her breasts. The girl goes red in me face, but she appears too scared to move.

  “Blood,” he says, and spits on the floor. “All these miserable women, bleeding, it’s like a bloody slaughterhouse. But you are too young for that, I’m sure. It’s you I want.”

  He slides one hand down the front of her body and cups it over her pubis, grunting with satisfaction.

  Several things happen at the same time. The girl jerks away from his grasp, loses her balance against the edge of the bed and falls on her back, her legs kicking briefly. “I am bleeding,” she screams at him. “I’m bleeding like all the others.”

  Hanna X removes the kappie from her head to expose her face.

  And right then Frau Knesebeck speaks from the doorway, “Herr Oberst.”

  Colonel von Blixen reacts as if he has been struck by a snake. What ultimately shatters him – the girl’s taunt, Hanna X’s face, or Frau Knesebeck’s appearance – they will never know. But without a word the military man draws himself up, squares his shoulders, and marches out. They hear him all the way down the great staircase. The front door slams. Outside there are sounds of men and horses. Hooves trotting off, growing ever fainter in the distance. The interminable silence of the desert reimposes itself.

  “Make yourself proper,” Frau Knesebeck curtly tells the girl.

  Katja gets up and straightens the dress which has rucked up in her fall. Hanna X puts on her kappie again. The mistress of Frauenstein leaves, closing the door behind her with a firm, quiet click.

  It is only several hours later, after night has fallen and the girl has gone back to her own room, that the colonel returns, unaccompanied, shaking in a silent inner rage that will not subside before he has vented everything that has been building up for so long.

  Frauenstein is quiet. The dark has restored, a curious bitter innocence to the place. The sad innocence of an orphanage when all the ordinary diurnal sounds have drained from it.

  ∨ The Other Side of Silence ∧

  Nine

  Sounds do not disappear, not ever, not really. Hanna knows this even when she is very small. What happens when they appear to fade away, like the sounds of the bell from the square, particularly at night, is that they grow very small in order to fit into a hiding place where they cannot readily be found by those who do not know how to listen. A small round place like a shell. This is what she discovers on the narrow grey beach of the Weser opposite the Europahafen one day when the girls of the Little Children of Jesus are taken on an outing by Frau Agathe. The day is gloomy and cold, but the river entrances her. Not for itself but because she knows it runs to the sea, which she has never seen, except in her dreams. And perhaps in her lost life before she was left at the orphanage, a life of which she remembers only brief unconnected flashes – one of which is of the sea, its sounds and smells, its white waves breaking. The sea is a place of miracles and magic. It goes all the way from Bremerhaven to the other side of the world, where the wind comes from, and where the palm trees of the Children’s Bible grow and camels come by and the sun always shines. It is not cold and grey like here beside the Weser in Bremen, but an endless warmth. One can be naked in it and feel the sun on one’s body, it turns you golden brown all over. Here in the orphanage, to be naked is very bad. There is the little girl, Helga, who is new and stays in bed all day crying, so Hanna crawls in beside her and they take off their shifts to be closer together, and Helga’s sadness disappears and her own as well, but then Frau Agathe finds them together and it turns out that their badness is so bad that it is not enough for Frau Agathe to punish them, they have to be taken all the way up the street, both still bare as small skinned fruit, to the parsonage to be dealt with. That is where Pastor Ulrich awaits them, enormously round and fat, his moon-shaped red face beaded with sweat, the front of his black waistcoat stained by the past week’s meals – egg yolk and cabbage and beetroot and meat and gravy – his large soft hands resting on his stomach. In his high-pitched voice he tells them that their nakedness is evil, a sin never-ever to be forgiven. In future he will summon Hanna every Sunday after church for an account of her sins during the week, and every week he will insist on finding out for himself – he can feel with his fat hand – if she has sinned again. And he will pinch her there, viciously squeezing the little lips together until they’re bruised and sometimes blood-blistered. The sound of his voice, like the sounds of the great bell and of the oxen bellowing at the abattoir to which they’re driven right past the orphanage in the Hutfilterstrasse, all those sounds shrink and grow very small in order to hide away. The same happens with good sounds. Like the sounds on midwinter day when everyone goes out in their brightest clothes, except for the orphan girls who wear grey, to skate on the frozen Weser. Everyone, even the very old who can no longer walk by themselves, but who can somehow still skate if they’re put down on the ice upright, every single person in the town is there; there is such a crowd, Hanna is convinced that even those who have been dead for years must have come out to join them; and the noise they make mingles into one huge sound like the blast of the trombone in the brass band that plays on the Rathausplatz on holidays, and then it grows smaller and smaller until it can fit into that secret space of the shell she brings home from the grey pebbly beach of the Weser that day.

  It is given to her by a small stranger she meets in the bright shallow water. Her name, she says without being asked, is Susan. She comes all the way from an island called Ireland and does not speak German very well (she has come here with her father, she explains, who is employed at the harbour with a lot of other foreign Catholic people from Thuringia and Bohemia and other places where there is no work for the men). Hanna asks to see the shell, and the little girl hands it to her with an endearing mixture of shyness and eagerness. It is beautiful, whispers Hanna, almost too beautiful to believe. Hold it to your ear, Susan tells her, you will hear the sea. Hanna has never heard of a thing like that, but the little girl nods solemnly and insists, Just listen. And she does and indeed, she hears the distant sea which hisses very softly in her ear, and brings to her all the lost sounds of the world, even from the far side of the earth where the palm trees are and the wind is born, and the singing of the sun, for oh the sun does sing. They play together for the rest of the day, Hanna and the little girl Susan with her very blue eyes and her very black hair, and it is as if the day itself, all of it, can now fit into a shell which will never stop its faint, small, perfect sound.

  When she needs to pee and wants to run off, Susan says, Don’t be silly, just squat down here, I’ll keep watch so no one comes, and afterwards I shall too. So they first make a small round hollow in the sand and she squats carefully over it, her feet wide apart and her dress hitched up high so that it won’t get wet, and when she stands up again to correct her clothes, Susan peers at her stomach with large surprised eyes, and asks, What is this? And puts a cautious finger on Hanna’s protruding navel. It’s my belly-button of course, says Hanna, don’t you have one then? And Susan pulls up her little red dress to take her turn to pee, displaying a sweet and perfectly indented navel. (There is a small mole a little way below it, and somewhat to the right.) You see? says Susan, yours is quite different. I suppose it’s because you’re not Catholic. Just then, from far away, where the other children are, Hanna hears Frau Agathe calling her name. Oh dear Jesus, I’ll be in trouble, she says, breathless with fear. And they run back together, the small shell-gift still clutched tightly in her sweaty hand. You are not, says Frau Agathe, do you hear me? you are not, not ever again, to talk to strange children on the beach. They are Catholics, and that is worse than heathens. And on Sunday she has to report it to Pastor Ulrich who as always tells her to approach so he can feel with his fat finger if she has sinned, only
it is not her non-Catholic navel he insists on probing. She is instructed again to pray, to be vigilant, and to repent of her evil nine-year-old ways, and he reads to her from the Bible, terrible things about hell and sulphur and damnation, but the sounds of the words are beautiful, whatever they may mean, words stored in her small magic shell with all the other sounds. This side of the shell there is only silence; if you look at it at arm’s length, you will never guess what is enclosed in it, a sea, a whole world of sound, past and present and who knows future, and if you listen very carefully, holding it close to your ear, you can hear it all. Not just from the other side of the world, but the other side of everything, the other side of silence itself.

  It is a silence which she carries deep within her, from the lost time before she ever arrived at the orphanage, a time before the real time of hours and bells and loud voices began, the time of the invisible sea, a time when the silence surrounded her and her three friends, the friends no one but she could see but who were as real as her feet or her belly-button or her narrow face in a mirror, their names were Trixie, Spixie and Finny, but when she was brought to the Little Children of Jesus they got lost along the way and she has never found them again. She cried for days, until Frau Agathe put an end to it with her strap, maintaining that such creatures could only be manifestations of the Devil. Even so Hanna continued to run away, albeit at increasingly long intervals, in search of them, only to be found and brought back and beaten every time by Frau Agathe and probed by Pastor Ulrich.

  Beatings happen all the time in the Little Children of Jesus because it is a Christian place where evil will not be tolerated. You get beaten if you’re late at prayers or for school, or for not being able to recite the names of the books from the Old Testament in the proper order, or for forgetting to bring in the washing, or for soiling your clothes or scuffing your shoes, or for talking in the dark after the candles have been put out, or for wetting your bed, or for having lice in your hair, and most certainly if you run away to the big cathedral on the Domplatz and hide behind a pillar to listen to the organist practising Bach. Sometimes a beating is not enough and has to be accompanied by other forms of punishment like being sent to bed without supper, or locked up in the linen cupboard for an afternoon or overnight or for a night and a day, or being forced to sit for a given time in a cold bath, or to stand on two bricks in the corner until you faint, or to learn long passages from the Bible by heart (never the easy or interesting ones, but the genealogies) and if you don’t get it right you get a stroke for every mistake, on your hands or your legs or the soles of your feet or on your bare buttocks with everybody assembled to watch. But this hasn’t happened for quite some time now, for she no longer needs to run off in search of her lost friends, she now has this new friend Susan from her distant Ireland, and one day they will run away together and live happily ever after, the way it happens in stories.