The Other Side of Silence

by Andre Brink

  Still, she must be getting better. The dark intervals become shorter. The returns to painful lucidity last longer, her thoughts grow more coherent, memory filters back. She would still prefer to be dead, and helplessly resents these people for not allowing her to die in peace. But the pain, she notices almost against her will, the pain is slowly dulling, ebbing, fading, no longer – or not always – as overwhelming as it was.

  When she feels a warm wetness between her thighs and tests it with a finger she discovers that her bleeding has begun – the old bleeding from inside, not the bleeding of the wounds. Some of the women, the oldest ones, draw her legs apart to stanch it with tufts of grass; she can hear them clicking their tongues, tsk-tsk, as they stare at the mutilation of her sex. Only now does the nightmare on the train come back to her, and she retches at the memory. First there was her face. Then her mouth forced open, a piece of wood wedged between her teeth to give access to her tongue. Choking in blood. And then her nipples cut off. The viscous chicken-livers of her labia excised. Oh God, oh God. Give me a knife, she thinks, let me kill myself, how can you let me live like this? I am no longer a woman, a human being, I am a thing.

  What would Pastor Ulrich say if he could see her now? She groans and grimaces. The Devil’s hiding place, he used to call it. After what has happened to her on the train, how innocent his probings and pinchings and furtive fondlings seem now. But then the bitter bile rises up in her. The women have to keep her down with force. She tries to shout, No! but no recognisable sound gurgles from her throat. There was nothing innocent about that, she thinks in rage as the futile tears of her anger run down her burning cheeks. There may be a difference in degree, but not in kind. What happened to the woman on the train was just a variation and an extension of what had been done to the girl. It is all the same, there has been no let-up, not ever.

  She sobs and groans in helplessness, which brings the pain back, and it goes on and on, until at last there is the respite of a blackout again. And this time, when she comes round, she has no energy for anger left. She can only moan and lie with drawn-up knees. There is no hope, no hope, there is no resistance left; this is her life, it has to be lived, that is all.

  Through days and nights the old Nama women attend to her, bringing foul-smelling herbs and ground powders to apply to the wounds, feeding her unspeakably vile potions, forcing her to suck on a long-stemmed pipe and inhale the sickeningly rancid-sweet smoke which eases the tension and the pain, and brings oblivion in the end. They coax her into drinking curdled milk, sucking on strange-tasting roots and bulbs and tubers from the veld, slurping the yolk of an ostrich egg ladled from a shell positioned in the remains of a fire, until she can cautiously, painfully chew very small chunks of meat. Birds, probably. Later the strips cut from small buck, sometimes raw and succulent, sometimes boiled or roasted, sometimes dried.

  More vividly than food or medicine or the comforting clicks with which both are administered, Hanna will remember the way they feed her with stories, of which the oldest of the women seems to have an inexhaustible store. It begins soon after she wakes up for the first time and lies staring dully, in a kind of uncomprehending stupor, at the landscape throbbing with sunlight and timelessness, under a sky from which all colour has been scorched. After watching her for a while, the oldest of the women – her name is Taras, which she says means ‘Woman’ – makes a sweeping gesture towards the surrounding desert. “You wonder how it can be so dry?” she asks in her rudimentary German. “It comes from a woman. The woman Xurisib, who was very beautiful, but very vain, the vainest woman in Namaland. And all the young men lusted after her, their purple wattles drawing lines in the dust. Even the old men would wake in the night with a branch planted in their loins, the way they dreamed of her.”

  Hanna lies with closed eyes and lets the words of the old woman wash over her like bright cool water. Xurisib, says Taras, was so vain that she even scorned the flowers that covered the earth after the good god Tsui-Goab had sent his rains. “They don’t last,” she said. “Tomorrow they shrivel up and die, but my beauty will never wither.” All the people warned her, warned her, but Xurisib wouldn’t listen. Then Tsui-Goab himself came to her in the shape of a mantis in a small bush that burned and burned and burned without burning itself out. “You give me great pain, Xurisib,” he said to the girl. “It is I who make those flowers come out after the rains, I am the giver of all good things.”

  But Xurisib laughed proudly and shook her head and her breasts quivered and her bangles sang. “I don’t need your flowers,” she said, “and I don’t need you. My beauty is all I’ll ever want.” Then Tsui-Goab grew very sad and he went away, and Namaland became the dry place it is now. The rivers dried up and the trees died and the reeds withered and the voice of the birds grew silent, and all that was left was white sand and red sand and long thorns that scraped her legs. When Xurisib went back to her village, she found her people packing up their possessions to trek away, taking all the young men with them too. The girl wanted to go with them, but the headman wouldn’t let her because he said there was a curse on her head. From that day on the Nama people have never stayed in one place. Always, always, always they are on the move. Xurisib stayed behind, and her skin became as dry as the husk shaken off by a snake, and her black hair turned grey, and in no time at all she was an old hag of a woman. She lay down on the ground to die. That was when the mantis came back to her and said from the burning bush, “Xurisib, your life is over. But if you say my name I shall take away my curse.” And softly, softly, softly, Xurisib whispered the name of the god. And where the sounds of her voice fell, flowers sprouted from the parched earth. Again and again she said his name, “Tsui-Goab, Tsui-Goab, Tsui-Goab,” until with her last breath she was shouting so loudly that the koppies in the distance reverberated with the sound. And the rains came, and the veld was covered in flowers from horizon to horizon, and Xurisib became a young girl again, with a shining face and firm breasts and strong legs and beautiful hands, and she danced the dance of the rain.

  The voice of the wizened old woman turns into a chant, and some of the other women join in:

  “Oh the dance of our Sister!

  First she peeps over the hilltop, slyly,

  and her eyes are shy;

  and she laughs softly.

  Then, from afar, she beckons with one hand;

  her bangles glitter and her beads shimmer;

  softly she calls.

  She tells the winds about the dance

  and invites them too, for the yard is wide and the wedding great.

  ♦

  The big game come surging from the plains,

  they gather on the hilltop,

  their nostrils are spread wide

  and they swallow the wind;

  and they bend down to see her delicate tracks in the sand.

  The small creatures deep below can hear the rustle of her feet,

  and they draw closer, singing softly:

  “Our Sister, our Sister! You have come! You have come!”

  ♦

  And her beads dangle,

  and her copper rings glimmer in the dying of the sun.

  Her forehead bears the fire-plume of the mountain eagle;

  she steps down from up high;

  she spreads the grey kaross in both her arms;

  the breath of the wind dies down.

  Oh the dance of our Sister!”

  There is a long pause. Then the old woman resumes, “A few days later the flowers began to fade and shrivel up and die, and Xurisib quietly died with them. And from that day,” she says, “if the rains come in Namaland and you listen very carefully, you will hear in the far-off thunder the voice of Xurisib calling out, ‘Tsui-Goab! Tsui-Goab! Tsui-Goab!’ And then we know the land will live again.”

  Story upon story, through days and nights, to while away the time, to make Hanna forget, to ease memory. For everything she sees or hears, everything silent or moving around the tentative settlement – casually sha
ped huts of rush and straw mats or skins laid on a latticework of bent branches – there is a story; sometimes various stories about the same object or event, stone or thorn tree, birth or death. No koppie or rock or aloe or quiver-tree or dried-up river bed or dust devil or erosion ditch or limestone ridge is without its divinity, benevolent or evil; all of it gathered in an eternal battle between the good god Tsui-Goab who lives in the red sky, and the devilish Gaunab who lives in the black sky.

  When Hanna raises her hands to question what it all means, old Taras smiles and answers with a question of her own, “How is your pain?” And Hanna nods, to indicate that she is feeling better. And Taras says, “That is what stories are for.”

  Sometimes she forgets to listen to the words and submits herself only to the flow of the language, the rhythms and repetitions and cadences, even in the old woman’s halting and garbled German – Dann liefen sie, dann liefen sie. Sie treckten, treckten, treckten: Then they walked and they walked, then they trekked, trekked, trekked…– the pure and intricate music of the stories.

  Or she listens to the Namas talking among themselves in their own tongue. All those complicated clicks. Sometimes she opens her silent mouth to imitate the movements of theirs, but gives it up. How can she ever converse with them? It is not just the loss of her tongue which forces her into silence, but knowing that there is nothing in the language she has brought with her which could conceivably say what she would so urgently wish to articulate. The things of this place, this space, in words not yet contaminated by others, or by other places. But that is impossible. Words bring their own past and their own dark geography with them, she thinks. Theirs are different. She listens intently when Taras patiently repeats them, as to a dull-witted child. Khanous, the evening star; sobo khoin, people of the shadows, ghosts; sam-sam, peace; torob, war. The names of animals: t’kanna, kbmob, t’kaoop, nawas, t’kwu. Words that shut her out and turn their backs on her.

  When at last Hanna is persuaded to take a few hesitant steps outside – first supported on the arms of women, later by herself – she is almost scared to set down her feet, for fear that it will not be the earth she feels under her soles but stories, live and hidden beings, natural and supernatural in turn, or at the same time.

  ∨ The Other Side of Silence ∧

  Thirteen

  The whole Nama tribe – fifty or sixty of them, men, women and children – accompany Hanna X when at last she is ready to be taken to Frauenstein. And they walk, walk, walk, they trek and trek through a landscape of stories, until the strange unworldly edifice rises up from the horizon.

  On their approach they pass sprawling vegetable gardens, surprising in this desert; and what appears like a desiccated patch of the garden, some distance apart, but which must be a graveyard. It is surrounded by a low wall, irregularly stacked. However, there are no headstones. Each of the graves, of which there may be a good fifty or so, in straight rows, has a crude wooden cross at one end, but these bear no inscription. There are no flowers either, no sign that anyone has bothered to tend the place and keep it in some order. The last row is not completed, but the remaining three or four graves in it have already been dug and are loosely covered with old weathered planks, with mounds of earth heaped up beside them, patiently waiting to receive whoever may be coming their way.

  The small band of Namas hesitate for a while to inspect the site which seems so much less permanent than the burial cairns their people have raised across the barren land to commemorate their own dead and the many deaths of their hunter-god Heiseb – on the way here they have passed no fewer than three. After some time they press on towards the towering structure of stone.

  A woman in a drab dress opens the huge front door to their knocking. She takes a step back when she sees the black people massed outside, but as she prepares to shut it in their faces she notices the white woman among them – blistered from the sun, haggard, her face mutilated – and hesitates.

  “What do you want?” she asks.

  “We brought a woman we found in the desert,” says the leader of the tribe, whose name is Xareb.

  “Why did you come here? Why didn’t you take her to Windhoek?” asks the woman.

  “They tell us this is a place for women,” says the man.

  The woman turns to Hanna X in horror. “What have they done to you?”

  Hanna merely shrugs, a hopeless gesture.

  It is Xareb who turns to her and motions her to open her mouth. When she hesitates he does it for her, his sharp fingers pressing into her hollow cheeks. She moans with pain; the wound through which her teeth are visible has not quite healed yet. An angry altercation between Xareb and old Taras erupts in their Nama tongue.

  “Wait,” the woman at the door says quickly and hurries into the dark interior, then comes back to close the door.

  It takes a long time before Frau Knesebeck makes her appearance, flanked by several members of her staff. Two of them have guns, although from the way they are holding them it seems doubtful whether they know how to use them. There follows a near-endless discussion between Xareb and Frau Knesebeck, during which Hanna is once again required to open her mouth.

  Then another wait in front of the closed front door. Some of the children are getting restless. There are many flies about them. Cicadas are shrilling ear-splittingly. The sun is right overhead.

  When Frau Knesebeck returns she is accompanied by the four women who were on the wagon with Hanna X.

  “My God!” exclaims one of them. It is Dora, the young one who tended her in her delirium. “We thought you were dead.”

  “So you know her?” Frau Knesebeck asks unnecessarily.

  All four vociferously confirm it; then appear to be ashamed by the admission and try to retreat out of reach.

  “You never said anything about another woman,” Frau Knesebeck challenges them.

  “We lost her in the desert,” says Dora. “She was already more dead than alive. There was nothing we could do for her. And the soldiers who came with us…”

  “What about them?”

  A pause. “They said they didn’t want trouble.”

  Frau Knesebeck snorts with contempt. She comes a step towards Hanna. “Come inside. You are in need of care. One shudders to think what happened to you among these savages.”

  Hanna makes a sound, raises an arm in futile protest, then meekly comes forward.

  “We looked after her,” Xareb argues in anger.

  “You?!” Frau Knesebeck waves dismissively at them. “A white woman, a German woman, in your hands!” Annoyed, businesslike, she takes Hanna by the shoulder and pulls her across the threshold. “Now get away from here, or there will be big trouble. All of you.”

  Xareb stands his ground. “We need food.”

  “You are a no-good filthy lot!” says Frau Knesebeck in an icy rage.

  The heavy door is flung shut. The sound reverberates through the dark building which feels dank even in midsummer. Outside there are voices raised in anger, the crying of children. Then silence.

  “We shall have to bath you first,” says Frau Knesebeck. “God knows what vermin you are infected with.” Orders are given; women hurry off to draw and boil water. They wait for a long time, to make sure that the Namas have vanished into the dull drabness of the desert, a mirage among mirages, the trickery of memory. Then Hanna is taken out through the front door again and round the house to the back: they cannot risk having the whole place infected before she has been thoroughly scrubbed and washed and cleaned.

  It must be at least an hour before Hanna has been painfully ridden of all possible contamination, given a shift to cover the shame of her broken, scarred body, and taken upstairs to a room. It must have been standing closed for a long time, because it smells overpoweringly of dry rot and decay.

  “We shall pray for your soul,” announces Frau Knesebeck. “Only God could have brought you alive through the ordeal with those savage scavengers.” Hanna raises, again, a hand in protest, but is stopped by the fo
rmidable small woman in front of her. She takes a deep breath. “Unless it was the Devil.” But grimly she resolves, “When we are through with you, Fraulein, you will be cleansed like a newborn babe. In the meantime we shall communicate with Windhoek.”

  How the communication is effected, Hanna will never learn. Possibly through a smous who happens to turn up at Frauenstein three days later.

  What she does get to know, about a month later, is the outcome of the enterprise. A small detachment of soldiers arrives at Frauenstein (Hanna, scared out of her wits, hides in an attic when she first sees them) to report that they have undertaken a punitive expedition to track down the malefactors. Deep in the desert they surrounded the tribe who had abducted and terrorised the woman taken from the transport wagon, and killed the lot of them – men, women and children all. “We cannot allow this to be done to our women,” concludes the victorious commander; and his words are faithfully transmitted by Frau Knesebeck herself, to Hanna; who reacts by vomiting.

  For ever after this news will be impregnated with the smell of the kitchen where she learns about it after she has been dislodged from the attic. The smell of cabbage soup. The smell of the orphanage.

  ∨ The Other Side of Silence ∧

  Fourteen

  The orphanage is pervaded with smells. Urine, carbolic acid, old leather, mould, despair. And food: sauerkraut, leeks, potatoes, fish heads steaming in a pot. But good smells too. Newly baked bread, milk straight from the udder frothing in the pail, freshly ironed laundry, shoe polish, a candle that has just been blown out. The parsonage smells of rat droppings and mould. But for her religion will always reek of Pastor Ulrich. A staleness, the smell of an old sofa on which dogs have slept. “Closer, my girl, come closer. What sins have you brought us today?” He is so eager to hear. She will recite her little litany, knowing beforehand that he will answer, “I’m not sure that is everything. But we’ll soon find out, won’t we?” First there will be his sermonising, the words spilling from his mouth and staining her: that must be, she sometimes thinks, why he wears his silly little bib, to catch the flow of words he spills as messily as the bits and pieces of the meals that smudge his waistcoat. And after the talking it is time to bruise what to him has always been the site of evil. She knows he is expecting her to wince, to mewl, to cry out, but she never does. That makes it worse, but she will not give him that satisfaction.