The Other Side of Silence

by Andre Brink

  When she takes his breakfast in to him (Frau Liesel and little Peter are still in bed) she starts to apologise but breaks into tears and cannot go on. He gets up from the table, takes her by the shoulders and says gently, “I am sorry, Hanna. I am very, very sorry. I never meant to hurt or insult you. Will you please forgive me?”

  It makes her cry more hopelessly. But that evening, very quietly, and without talking about it again, they return to the small chess table against the wall.

  And a month later, perhaps a bit more, the unimaginable happens. After an intense and drawn-out game spread over two long evenings, which Hanna tries to approach like the siege of Orleans, it dawns on her that she has him at her mercy. One move of a bishop and his king will be cornered. There is no way out. She has done it. Never in her life has she felt such a sense of power. That is when she sits back, the shadow of a smile on her lips, savouring it, only for a moment, before she leans forward again and moves her bishop out of the way, letting Herr Ludwig’s smooth white ivory king off the hook. Which will make it possible for him to capture hers.

  Herr Ludwig looks up in dismay. He studies her face as if it were a military map and cannot believe what he sees.

  “What have you done?” he asks in a smothered voice. “Hanna…?”

  “What do you mean?” she says, unperturbed. “You win.” In the caress of the light her face looks timeless, much older than her tender years – how old is she? fifteen? sixteen? – but at the same time much younger, with all the intricate innocence of a child building castles on the sand.

  After that they continue with their evening games; more often than not he wins, occasionally they play to a draw, but from time to time she beats him fairly, squarely, and wins a book. Especially when she imagines Jeanne hovering behind her to repeat her early triumphs – Jargeau, Beaugency, Patay – or to attempt new strategies which will convert previous defeats into victory, even below the walls of Paris and Compiegne.

  Not that it has any hope of lasting. And afterwards, predictably, she will come to think of it as having been inevitable from the beginning: the very fact that happiness exists, means that it will end. As simple as that.

  What happens can be directly blamed on the chess. Frau Liesel is not unaware of their games in the evenings, but this causes no more than a fleeting whiff of annoyance, certainly no serious suspicion; if anything, the discovery allows Frau Liesel more scope for her own diurnal fugues. It only turns problematic when Hanna begins to take more time off from her lessons with Peter in order to practise her chess strategies.

  One afternoon while she is in the study working out a new move Peter, bored stiff with being alone, is tempted outside by some boys kicking a ball in the small park across the road. Hanna does not become aware of it until the front bell is rung and she finds Peter on the doorstep, writhing in agony and gasping for breath, his new-found friends having dissolved into the crisp wintry air.

  By the time Frau Liesel returns from wherever she has spent her day the boy has been revived, thank God, but he is still shaking and deathly pale. Before the distraught mother has administered her own medicaments and concluded her hysterical inquisition of Hanna, the father arrives. Even much later, thinking back, the girl will remember it as a scene of total confusion, everybody speaking at the same time and the boy, finding himself the centre of attention, acting up in high melodrama. Inevitably, Hanna is designated the culprit for having abandoned her precious charge; but what Herr Ludwig demands to know is where his wife has been. There is a hailstorm of accusations and counter-accusations, but the more Hanna tries to cover for Frau Liesel the less the latter’s absence can be explained. Only one outcome is possible, since it just wouldn’t do for the mistress of the house to bear the brunt of all the accusations.

  “I hate you, I hate you!” Frau Liesel shouts after them as Herr Ludwig and Hanna finally drive off in their cab, back to the Little Children of Jesus; but whether it is directed at her husband or the girl, or perhaps even at Peter or herself, is impossible to say for certain.

  “I am so very sorry,” Herr Ludwig apologises along the way through the glistening cobbled streets. “Please believe me, this is not what I wanted at all.”

  Before they reach their destination in the Hutfilterstrasse he slips her some money, and he assures her that her box of books will be dispatched the following day. (Although these will be promptly confiscated by Frau Agathe.) A few days later a small chess set will also be deposited for her at the orphanage, but Hanna will refuse to accept it. All that matters, as far as she is concerned, is that she is, once again, back where she first came from.

  ∨ The Other Side of Silence ∧

  Twenty-Seven

  This will happen so many times over the ensuing years that Hanna loses count. All she knows is that with every return and every new beginning there is a diminution of hope, like light draining from a winter’s day.

  There is only one advantage, if it can conceivably be called that, which is that in the process she is exposed to an amazing variety of skills – though it should be said that she remains as clumsy at all of them as ever she was. She brings the same anxiousness to please to each new placement, accompanied by the same inability to do anything quite right. She still breaks crockery and loses cutlery or shrinks or stains items in the wash, still forgets exactly what has to be done exactly when, still catches her fingers in drawers or cupboards or bumps against furniture or door jambs. But oh God, she tries so very hard.

  Over the years Hanna will look after infants, poultry and even larger livestock; change the nappies of the very young or the incontinent old; milk cows and goats and once a sickly young mother; read to a woman with cataracts on her eyes, to somebody’s illiterate uncle and any number of boisterous children; look after the irascible deaf man and his even more irascible daughter mentioned before (which involves the need for proficiency – at the cost of many a frenzied beating – in sign language); keep senile old women of both sexes occupied; prepare food and wash dishes, sheets, clothes of any description and feet of various sizes; make beds, butter and cheese; do hair and odd bits of carpentry; unblock drains, sewage pits and ears; cut down trees and the amorous attentions of sons, fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers, uncles or nephews in the household; kill chickens, lice, newborn kittens, rats and expectations; wax floors and moustaches; prepare poultices, plasters and concoctions to cure or calm headaches, inflammations, congested lungs, stomach cramps, gallstones, bladder infections, female complaints, male complaints, rheumatism, bunions or cancer.

  Some of her placements are better – less appalling – than others. She may be allowed a full day off every week (the luxury of spending unhurried hours from dawn to dusk with Fraulein Braunschweig); she may be granted access to an employer’s library; she may be given the same food as the rest of the family (though never sitting down at table with them); she may have light in her room, or a bed; she may be allowed to sleep until six in the morning, seven on Sundays; she may be fitted out in a new uniform for Christmas; she may be given permission to lie down when she is sick or has menstrual cramps; she may go to church of a Sunday morning to listen to the organ even if she pays scant attention to the preacher. Some placements, of course, are worse than whatever passes for the ‘rule’: there may be stiffer penalties for transgressions than even Frau Hildegard could dream up, or savage beatings administered by the master of the house (usually on Friday evenings when she has to line up with the children, and sometimes the wife, to review the week’s infractions), or black bread infested with weevils, or rats running riot in her bedroom, or icy draughts cutting right through her in winter, or a criminal insufficiency of food or clothes.

  Often there is some form of sexual harassment to contend with. In a few homes it does not progress beyond predictable gropings in passing. Others are more serious. Some nights, when the lord of the house slides into her narrow bed at hours when she least expects it, she has to make an escape – pleading sickness, or the curse, or an infec
tious disease; excusing herself to go to the outhouse and not coming back (on one occasion spending the whole night shivering outside after he has locked her out)…More often than not she is required to offer variations of her administrations to Herr Dieter; but she soon learns to absent herself: it is not she who performs these slightly silly obscenities, but someone else, while she migrates for the while to a different space where she may observe from a distance the man observing her. And she never agrees to go beyond the limits once imposed on Herr Dieter. On a few occasions her refusal provokes assault, but she perceives very soon that the masters cannot always let themselves go completely. Because at the other end there is always a wife to account to.

  Even in the better positions she cannot always rely on payment, whether in money or in kind, for these unscheduled services. In fact, the first time she dares to request, in a very subdued manner, some kind of reward she gets her face severely smacked. But in the end there is a weird pliability in them: as if not she, but they, are in a position of supplication. A man remains a mystery to her – that someone so big, so strong, so imperious, so peremptory, can be at the mercy of such a very small squiggle of his anatomy. (Once the seed has been spilled, of course, his manner tends to change abruptly, as if there is now in him a need to avenge the humiliation he invited in the first place; and she rapidly learns when to make her getaway.) And so she can continue, like a squirrel or a crow, to hoard away her ‘little gifts’, in the hope, always in the hope against hope, that one day she will be able to buy herself out of her debts and be free to go where the wind or her wildest dreams take her.

  ∨ The Other Side of Silence ∧

  Twenty-Eight

  Then always back to the Little Children of Jesus, in disgrace; humiliated, cast away, waiting for the punishment to come and the new confirmation of her utter worthlessness as she lies on the hard narrow bed temporarily assigned to her, or sits huddled in the branches of a tree laden with luminous fruit like dull red lights glowing in the dark, apples heavy as sin.

  And always out again, after Frau Agathe has forged new references and testimonials in order to rid the orphanage of her. For better or for worse. No, after the Hartmanns it is always worse. Except once; and that will be the last of her placements, a good twelve years after the first. It is an old couple who come for her in a coughing, smoking, straight-backed car, black as a coffin, a Daimler-Benz. It is Hanna’s first ride in a car and she is terrified, but under the collective envious gaze of the entire orphanage assembled in the Hutfilterstrasse, she tries to strike a regal pose and can barely refrain from waving her nail-bitten hand like a queen.

  The Kreutzers live on a small farm some distance out of town, on the road to Hamburg. Herr Wolfgang, who insists on being called Opa, used to be a violinist with an orchestra in Bremen until his hands turned useless with arthritis; and Frau Renate – Oma – designed costumes for the opera. Now they are happy to spend their old age on the farm, driving into town for the occasional concert; when they learn about Fraulein Braunschweig, they even drive Hanna to her ageing teacher’s apartment once a month, otherwise she would no longer be able to visit. They have several grown-up children but haven’t seen them in years. The life they lead is very quiet. There are a few farmhands to take care of the animals and the fields, so Hanna has only the house to look after. The old people grow very fond of her; soon she is like a child of their own. Having generously taken charge of her debt to the Little Children of Jesus they will pay her the full 50 marks she nowadays earns every month. And when they die, Opa says, she will inherit the farm.

  Her main task is to read to Oma in the afternoons, as the old woman’s eyes are very bad. Opa spends most of his time in his music room, reading old scores and chuckling from time to time, as he constantly finds secret jokes in them, particularly in Haydn and Mozart. For the rest he works on his ‘instrument’, which no one but Oma has ever been allowed to see as it is reputed to be something exceptional. He does like to talk to Hanna about it, mainly because she is such a good listener: she can sit for hours without moving, drinking in every word, never allowing her eyes or her attention to stray.

  “It is the ultimate instrument,” he often tells her. “The whole of the history of music has been a movement towards this. Not a piano, not a cello, not a violin, not a harp or a flute or a French horn, although each of these has its small share of the sublime. No, this is different. I think of it as the summum of music, the absolute, the ne plus ultra.” (Half of the words Hanna cannot understand; but she memorises them and will later look them up in Fraulein Braunschweig’s dictionaries or encyclopaedias.) “You know what happens when pure white light strikes a prism?”

  “It becomes a rainbow,” says Hanna, faithfully recalling Fraulein Braunschweig’s teachings.

  “Just so.” He beams his satisfaction over the half-moons of his gold-rimmed reading spectacles. “You’re a clever girl. Now you can think of all the colours of the rainbow as different musical instruments. Do you see what I mean?”

  She frowns and shakes her head. “I’m not sure, Opa.”

  “You wait.” He smiles. “It will soon be finished. It has taken me years to think it through, but actually it is very, very simple. You shall see. You and Oma will be the first to hear it.” He raises a gnarled finger: “And the beauty of it is of course that I shall be able to play it. Even with these old hands. Anybody will be able to play it.”

  “I don’t think so, Opa. I’ll try, but I’m sure I’ll be too clumsy. At the Little Children of Jesus they tried to teach us so many things, but I’ve never been good at anything. Running or the high jump or embroidering or making rag dolls for charity or playing the recorder. I’m just not good enough.”

  “You will play my instrument like an angel,” Opa assures her. “Just be patient.”

  It takes two years of patience, but there is a special satisfaction in the waiting: the old man has so much confidence in her, he is so sure of the outcome, so truly delighted at the prospect, that Hanna gradually dares to believe that perhaps, who knows, this once…And while Opa is locked up in his soundless music room for afternoons on end, she hums or whistles out of tune while she cleans the house or washes the dishes or reads book after glorious book to Oma in the living room where they even have electricity.

  When she isn’t busy and the weather is good – not very often, but it happens – she goes up the stairs to the large balcony that juts out from the top floor. Sometimes she reads. Mostly she just lies on her back, staring up at the sky, watching the drifting clouds, the shapes they form, their endless changing, dissipating and reforming, their slow swirling, their near-motionless dreaming like white swans on water. She loses herself in their fantasies of ships and birds and dromedaries and waving palms and unicorns and magic castles on faraway beaches of Ireland and Africa. Shapes that come and go and are lost for ever and remain in the memory for ever. It is as if she herself becomes a cloud and drifts and sails and swims, it is like flying, it is bliss, the only true bliss she has ever known – except for that forever day with Susan on the beach.

  Sometimes a fleeting, never-quite-catchable memory filters into her mind and she seems to remember lying just like this, in green grass, as a very small child, in a time before the Little Children of Jesus. And her three imaginary friends are with her. But the image is too vague, and too brief, to hold on to. Still there is reassurance in it, as her life before memory began is now strangely reconciled with the hereness of her lying on the balcony and the possible shapes of the future. Even God becomes slightly, if only slightly, more comprehensible – not the dirty old man of wrath and vengeance who presides over the Little Children of Jesus, but someone altogether more smiling and musical, who resembles Opa in many ways.

  Then at last, out of the blue, one day, Oma comes upstairs to the balcony to call her: “Hanna, Opa has something to show you.”

  She sits up quickly. “Not the…?”

  “The instrument,” says the old woman, her fading eyes bright w
ith light. “It is finished.” She pauses and adds, “I hope you won’t be disappointed.”

  “How can I be disappointed? We’ve all waited for so long.”

  “Well,” says Oma soberly, “it is perhaps not quite what one expected.”

  “But it is special?” she asks breathlessly.

  “Oh it is special enough. And if you think of it, exactly what he promised.”

  She hurries down the stairs, misses the last step, falls, gets up again, dusts her torn dress and dashes to the music room where Opa sits at the window. Light falls through the small panes, making delicate brush strokes across his bald head and the shiny object he is holding on his lap. She stops and stares. For a moment she is disappointed. It looks so ordinary. Like a violin, somewhat rounder, the wood beautifully polished, and with a single string. It isn’t taut at all, but hangs limply over the surface where the sound hole of an ordinary violin would be.

  “Try it,” he says, handing her the instrument, and the bow to go with it.

  “How does one hold it?” Hanna asks.

  “Any way you like.”

  She glances at him, holds the instrument some distance from her body, and lightly touches the single string with the bow.

  “It makes no sound,” she whispers, embarrassed.

  Opa laughs with deep contentment. “That is it,” he says. “Do you understand now? That is it.”

  Two days later, without warning, Opa dies quietly in his sleep.

  “I want you stay here with me,” Oma tells Hanna at the funeral.