The Other Side of Silence

by Andre Brink

  There is a long silence, before Lotte says, “I was. I planned it. I bribed his brother to do it.”

  “How did you do it?”

  “I promised him – it doesn’t matter. It worked. That is all.”

  “It will work again.”

  “They will find a way to stop us.”

  With all the heedlessness of her newly discovered state Hanna says, “Nothing can stop us.”

  “My Hanna, my Hanna.” And in love and anguish she begins the stroking movement which she knows will drive Hanna to hopeless pleasure.

  But she is, of course, right. It cannot last. The irruption into their joined privacy comes unexpectedly. As the journey continues the sailors take to visiting the women at night, particularly the most vulnerable among them, in third class. And the fact that they are welcomed by some of the women – for all kinds of reasons that proliferate in the dark – makes them bolder in imposing on others. There are small profits to be made from such encounters: favours in various forms, food, inconsequential gifts, promises of one kind or another. And these alleviate the tedium of the weeks at sea, instilling flickerings of hope in some who have already given up or resigned themselves to deception and disappointment.

  For some time this does not affect Hanna and Lotte. They inhabit a small island which seems inviolable. Until one night a few very drunk men blunder their way into the cabin at the end of the passage. They do not bother to pick or choose, but grope at random at the female flesh barely concealed under shapeless cotton or linen shifts. One of them drags Lotte away. She fights with all the viciousness of a trapped rodent, but it only makes him randier. When Hanna joins in and attacks him from behind he is nearly overpowered. But then she is set upon by one of the other sailors and sent sprawling in a corner by a blow to the head. By the time she is on her feet again they are gone.

  One of the other women takes her by the hand. “Just leave them, dearie. They’re in such a state they’ll kill you if you try to interfere.”

  “But you don’t understand,” sobs Hanna. “They can’t take Lotte. They have no right.”

  “They have every right, my girl,” says the other woman. “We should just be thankful that we’ve been spared. For tonight. There are still six nights to go.”

  There is a sickness in her which is not of the body. She remains hunched up in a corner of the bunk, waiting for Lotte to come back, praying open-eyed, praying to the God she doesn’t believe in, to make sure Lotte isn’t hurt too much. What this may do to them, she is too scared, too numb, to figure out.

  But Lotte doesn’t return. Has the man killed her?

  No, she discovers later the next day, it is much worse. The man has claimed her. Lotte will spend the rest of the voyage on his bunk with him. Even during the daytime he keeps a hawk’s eye on her as he goes about his tasks, never far away. The two of them are not allowed a minute together to talk.

  It is soon over though. Two days later, in the afternoon, the news spreads from deck to deck: a young woman has committed suicide. She has slit her wrists in the bathroom. Hanna does not need anyone to tell her who it is.

  It is only the next day when, after a cursory service presided over by the captain, Lotte is buried at sea – her body, that small beloved body, sewn into a canvas bag, laid out on a wooden stretcher and summarily tipped overboard, followed by some makeshift wreaths – that Hanna discovers the horrible mistake. The name of the dead woman is announced to have been hers, Hanna X’s.

  She hurries to the captain afterwards to have the mistake corrected, but the officers surrounding him deny her access. When she finally grabs one of them by the lapels to shout, half dementedly, that she, Hanna X, is still alive, that the dead woman is Lotte Mehring, he disengages himself with visible irritation and promises to look into it. But when she corners him again a day later, he tells her she is mistaken. Enquiries have been made, they have checked the cabin number and the bunk, and the deceased woman is indeed Hanna X.

  “But I am Hanna X!” she exclaims. “Here I’m standing before you. Do you think I don’t know who I am?”

  “Listen, woman,” he brushes her off gruffly, “I don’t know what is up with you. We have gone through all the records, you have given us a lot of trouble, so why don’t you just accept the facts?”

  “The facts are wrong,” she says. “Look at me.”

  He gives an indulgent, superior smile. “Suppose,” he says, “just suppose you are right, which you are not. Even then, do you really think we can change the documents now? Do you realise how many forms we have had to fill in?”

  “Then who am I?” she asks him. “If you are so sure, tell me.”

  “I really could not care less,” the officer says brusquely. “Now please just leave me in peace and accept that Hanna X is dead and buried.”

  ∨ The Other Side of Silence ∧

  Nineteen

  The wind. The wind always comes from somewhere else. At night in the orphanage, slowly retreating from the edge of death, she lies listening to the comforting sound of her friend, the wind. She must have been very small when she first became aware of it. She was suffering from a bad cold and couldn’t sleep; and all the time the wind was there to keep her company. In the morning she told Frau Agathe, “The wind has a cold too, I could hear her sniffing all night.”

  And Frau Agathe replied, “If you can think up such nonsense you’re not sick any more. So get up, make your bed and go and weed the garden.”

  Ever since then she has been thinking about going on a journey to find out where the wind comes from. The far side of the wind would also be the other side of silence.

  ∨ The Other Side of Silence ∧

  Twenty

  In the early days after her arrival at Frauenstein with the band of Namas Hanna keeps mostly to the small grey room assigned to her, exposed to all her memories. The in-between time with the Nama tribe – between an old life and the beginning of a new, between the sea and the desert, between the train and Frauenstein, between life and death, consciousness and oblivion – remains a fluid and confused assortment of images, watercolours running together on a sheet of paper, a space of stories and possibilities and impossibilities. Her thoughts keep wandering. The train journey – no, not that; that must be excluded from memory. The voyage on the Hans Woermann, then. Lotte. For the first time she is free to mourn, and she does. A mourning as much for herself as for the young woman who briefly shared her bunk, her life. A woman undone by the vagaries of officialdom when the name of Hanna X was entered on the records. She is dead, she will think. And that is true, for nothing remains of the person she once was or may have been. So she must be dead. And in a way this links them even more fatally and more wonderfully together.

  She need not fear the outside world any more. The worst that could ever have happened to her has happened. Lotte’s death, the train, her own death in the desert. There is nothing more they can take from her. She has arrived at an inviolate stillness. That careless action by the scribe on the Hans Woermann, sealed by what then happened on the train, has put her at a remove from the ordinary lives of ordinary people.

  It is confirmed, if confirmation is needed, by what occurs when the commando bring the news about their triumphant expedition against the Namas to avenge the wrong they believe has been done to her.

  To celebrate the victory they are invited in, and as is the wont of Frauenstein, they are treated to dinner and granted the freedom of the house. As has happened in the past and will be repeated in the future. Hanna, who at first hid in the attic, is now cowering in her room, still petrified by the news, and even more so by the memories of the train they rekindle. But there is no need to fear. When three, four, five of the soldiers burst into her room she looks up at them from the small rough table where she is seated; and when they see her face they gape, and stop in their tracks, and retreat, and close the door very solemnly after them. Which brings the reassurance that, indeed, she has nothing more to fear. But also the painful confirmation of f
inal and utter rejection. Even these scavengers have turned her down. She has sunk lower than any woman, lower even than the animals or wild melons with which these men will copulate if there is nothing else at hand.

  From that day on she will never go about with her features exposed. The large pointed kappie will cover her head and obscure her face, day and night. Not even the remonstrations of Frau Knesebeck will make her reconsider. But why does she really wear it? To spare others, or herself? To confirm, finally, her indignity, or to safeguard an ultimate shred of pathetic dignity?

  Not that anyone would bother to ask. They know, now, that she is incapable of answering. But it goes beyond that. Because she cannot speak they seem to assume that she is mentally deficient. When they address her, they choose simple words, which they articulate very slowly, and very emphatically. For God’s sake, she would like to tell them, I am not deaf; I am not an idiot; I understand perfectly. In the first days, even weeks, it will make her cry in helpless rage when she is alone; she will tear curtains from the windows, or break things, or beat her hands or her head against the walls until her knuckles bleed or her forehead is swollen with unsightly bruises. (Their only reaction is to shake their heads and commiserate: the poor thing, the mad woman whose mind is quite unhinged; one has to be very patient with her, treat her even more circumspectly, she is like a small child.) But very slowly she comes to resign herself. There is no sense in trying to resist. This is her life, now. It has to be lived somehow. And perhaps it is not without consolation that she is allowed to retreat ever more deeply into herself.

  In the Little Children of Jesus she used to go to the most extreme lengths to please Frau Agathe and the others, to invite their approval if not their love. True, in their eyes she never went quite far enough: she could not prostrate herself utterly, or ingratiate herself, or be obsequious – which is why they continued to think of her as stubborn and intractable, and punish her the more for it. And of course she had her long, flowing cascade of hair, which convinced them that she must be suffering from the sin of pride. But what she craved, because she was so clumsy and always spilled things, or broke things, or did the wrong things, was to make them realise – please, God! – that she was trying; that she, too, needed to be acknowledged, however grudgingly. But now not even that effort is necessary. She can withdraw entirely and they will shrug it off: that is the way she is; after what those savage Nama people have done to her, how can one not grant her the right to be ‘otherwise’? Poor thing, poor ugly wretch.

  In the beginning, particularly after the visit from the avenging commando, Hanna has an unbearable urge to speak. She has to tell Frau Knesebeck about her stay with the Namas. The ghastly mistake made by the soldiers cannot go uncorrected. But there is no way she can communicate in grunts and moans and wails: when she reacts in this way to the soldiers’ tale, the staff believe that she has lost her wits by the reminder of her ordeal among the savages, and she is forcibly if sympathetically taken to her room. That is when she decides to write down her story. Communicating in frantic signs to Frau Knesebeck – who somehow has assumed that she is illiterate – she is finally pacified with a stack of paper, a pen, spare nibs, an inkwell. It has become the only way open to her to grope through the wall of silence surrounding her, reaching out to someone out there who may respond. There must be someone, something, at the other side.

  Throughout the night, by the dull light of her single candle, she writes, in the large looped childish calligraphy they taught her in the orphanage. It is irregular and spoiled by blots and splashes and smudges, because the emotions are still not under control. Two nibs are broken. Her hands are stained black, and some of it has come off on her face.

  From time to time she has to step altogether to calm down, walking around the room, or wandering up and down the stairs through the huge gloomy building. But always she returns to the task, driven by the need to tell her story. It may be too late to do something about the fate of her Namas – ‘her’ Namas is how she always thinks of them – but at least someone must know; it may change the future for others.

  Laboriously, painstakingly, she writes down everything she can remember about her stay with the tribe – her confused memories of the early days, faces, words; the way the women cared for her, the herbs and concoctions they made her swallow, the ointments and unguents they applied to her wounds. The singing she listened to, the dancing when the moon was full, the curious instruments they used to make their music, the monotonous but mesmerising rhythms of the t’koi-t’koi and the ghura. And then the stories in their pidgin German, the endless inventions of the old women. The care they took of her, the generous attention to ensure she wouldn’t get too tired on the long trek to Frauenstein.

  In the early dawn she takes the wad of papers covered in her messy scribbling down to Frau Knesebeck’s office.

  “You’re up early,” the spruce woman says.

  Hanna merely shrugs impatiently, thrusting the papers into her hands.

  “Very nice,” says Frau Knesebeck in the tone one adopts for a small child. “Not very tidy, but I’m sure you have done your best.” She opens a drawer and puts the papers into it.

  Agitated, Hanna comes round the desk, opens the drawer again, points excitedly at the papers.

  “Don’t worry,” Frau Knesebeck assures her. “I promise you I shall read it with great attention.”

  But Hanna tugs at the woman’s elbow, points at her eyes, pats on the papers, pulls them out of the drawer again. Read, read now! she tries to say.

  “Now calm down,” Frau Knesebeck reprimands her firmly, with a hint of annoyance in her voice. “I’m very impressed with the effort you have made. Now you must give me some time to peruse it.”

  Breathing heavily, Hanna remains standing for some time. Only when Frau Knesebeck makes it very clear that she has other business to attend to does she turn to go out, her shoulders sagging. In the late afternoon, hearing Frau Knesebeck in the laundry, Hanna returns to the office, removes the papers from the drawer and replaces them on the middle of the desk.

  Exhausted as she is, she finds it impossible to sleep that night. Once again she spends hours at her table writing, writing. This time she doesn’t dwell on the Nama tribe but writes randomly whatever comes to her mind about the more distant past – her life in the orphanage, Frau Agathe, the long-ago day beside the river when she met the little Irish girl (the shell is gone now, she writes, lost in the course of that nightmare on the train, lost for ever, and the sound of the sea with it), about Trixie and Spixie and Finny. In the morning she takes the new clutch of papers down to the office.

  Frau Knesebeck motions to a corner of the desk where Hanna can put down her latest offering.

  But Hanna remains standing.

  “What are you waiting for?” After a moment, Frau Knesebeck forces one of her thin-lipped smiles that look like wincing. “Oh I see.” She pulls open the drawer and removes the previous stack of papers, pushes them across the desk towards Hanna. “Yes. Well…” She presses her fingertips together. “I have read your outpouring with great attention. It must have been unbearable, subjected to the whims and the cruelties those natives inflicted on you. Even worse than I’d imagined before. You are a very brave person indeed. I commend you for it. Now” – she rises briskly – “hopefully you have written it all out of your system. You will soon feel a new woman.” She looks at the new pile on her desk. “I shall look at this as soon as possible. But I do think you should now put this behind you. We do not want to perpetuate such a bad memory, do we? The crime has been punished, your suffering has been avenged. We can now move on.”

  The third night Hanna does not even try to make sense in what she writes on the many pages she covers with her rambling notes – increasingly tired, disconnected, leaden. Quotations she recalls from old books, snatches from the lives of Werther or Jeanne d’Arc, random rhymes, nursery songs, slogans from the streets of Bremen, long words from school dictations, deliberately misspelt; and then, drive
n by a rage she cannot explain herself, all the curses and swear words she has ever heard, the ones for which her mouth used to be rinsed out with the foul-smelling black soap. Even the unforgettable sentence the man on the train spoke that night.

  Almost gleefully she takes the new stack down to Frau Knesebeck in the morning and exchanges it for the previous instalment.

  “Another effort?” the woman asks, irritation now on the surface of her voice. “I’ve looked at yesterday’s of course. Well done, indeed. But I really believe we have now exhausted the experience.” She places the latest pile of papers in her drawer. “I shall naturally look at this too. But you realise I have other work to attend to as well. I shall let you know when I am ready.”

  Three days later Hanna returns to Frau Knesebeck’s office and patiently waits at the door until the woman sharply raises her head to ask, “Well, what is it this time?”

  Hanna points towards the drawer.

  “Yes, yes, of course.” She opens the drawer and takes out the manuscript. “It is quite remarkable that you should have made the effort. You can be proud of yourself. We certainly are.”

  Shaking with barely controllable rage Hanna rushes to the desk. In a long raking movement she sweeps up her papers and goes to the door. Tears are streaming down her face, but she makes no sound.

  “I do think you should take more care with your writing, though,” says Frau Knesebeck behind her. “It gives the impression of being rather hastily written. The letters are not always shaped properly, the lines are uneven, and there are far too many blots.”

  In the oven at the back door, where a fire is flaring in preparation for the day’s baking, Hanna spends half an hour burning everything she has written, each sheet separately. At first she is shaking with rage. Burn, burn! As if it is her own pyre. But as she grows more weary and her movements slow down, a deeper, inexplicable satisfaction spreads through her. Yes, this is a necessary act. How could it be otherwise? What she has written did not deserve to be told. It was not the truth, couldn’t ever have been the truth, the whole, and nothing but. How could she have presumed so much? The truth cannot be told, that is why it is the truth.