by Andre Brink
“Four days,” the official confirms. He gets up behind the desk, now visibly in a hurry to put the formalities behind him before they are bedevilled by further complications. “Well, my best wishes to you both.”
But a few hours later, as the train pulls out of the station under a sky bleeding like a slaughtered carcass, there is an early hitch. The man to whom she has been assigned pulls Hanna into their compartment and slides the door shut. Unceremoniously he begins to unbutton his corduroy trousers. On the bunk opposite another couple is already fucking.
Hanna remains standing with her back pressed against the door. “Do you have palm trees?” she asks in a strained voice.
He gawks at her. “What the hell’s me matter with you? Where do the palm trees come in?”
“Do you have palm trees where you live?” she repeats.
“Woman,” he says, “don’t waste my time. Take off your bloody clothes.”
“I shall let you do this thing to me,” she says, “but only if you can give me palm trees in the sun. Otherwise no.”
That is when he slaps her in the face.
And Hanna slaps him back.
This he has not expected. With his hand to his stinging cheek he retreats out of her way.
The naked man on the bunk opposite pushes himself up on his arms. “Will you two shut up and get on with it?” he asks before he plunges down on his woman again.
“But did you hear that?” whines Herr Grossvogel. “She doesn’t want to let me.” In a sudden new surge of fury he lurches towards Hanna.
It is a very confused scene that follows. Hanna is fighting with everything she can muster, scratching and biting and kicking, butting him with her head, all of this in silence, except for the violent rasping of her breath. When she fiercely raises a knee into his groin he folds double, begins to retch. She turns round to escape. But then the man opposite joins the fray. Grabbing Hanna from behind he hurls her to the floor. And suddenly the other woman also jumps up and jerks at Hanna’s long hair. Between the three of them they manage to force Hanna down. It is in fact the woman who tears off her clothes and grabs hold of her feet while Herr Grossvogel kicks off his trousers to take the plunge. As soon as he has her pinned down on the soiled floor the two naked lovers resume their own coupling.
But Hanna is not giving up. Once the other couple are again engrossed in their own actions and while the man on top of her is still fumbling to find his way, she manages to gain a grip on him where it hurts, and rolls from under him. Clutching her torn clothes to her breast she pulls the door open.
“Fuck off!” her would-be husband shouts after her. “I don’t want you anyway.”
She runs down the narrow corridor to the next coach. There she steps back into what is left of her clothes and remains standing at a window, her forehead pressed against the cool hard pane, seeing nothing of the darkening bare landscape streaming past.
How she aches to be back on the sea.
∨ The Other Side of Silence ∧
Thirty-Two
At midnight, as you cross the equator, the sea sighs and turns in its sleep; and then there is a stillness unmatched by any other silence you have ever known. It would not surprise you if, as in ancient legends, you suddenly found yourself going right over the edge of the world into a void too vast to understand; and what lies at the other side of it is entirely unknown, unknowable. The sea is a magical darkness, shot through with lines and flashes of phosphor. And there are flying fish. Nothing is improbable any more.
∨ The Other Side of Silence ∧
Thirty-Three
In the narrow train corridor, as the night wears on, Hanna is joined by two or three other women, later by more; after some time there are ten or twelve of them standing close together, not talking, but seeking comfort in the closeness of other female bodies. At least they are out of it, she thinks. They have survived.
But it is still only the beginning. And the evening and the morning are the first day.
In the deep of the night, while the train is stationary at some unnamed siding and the sheer weight of a yellow bulbous moon seems to drag it down to the horizon, men make their appearance from elsewhere on the long train and converge on the string of women. Some are asked, even obsequiously; others are simply dragged off by the arms. It is the second round. What Hanna will remember, afterwards, is how one man after the other approaches her from behind, saying things like, ‘Hello, beautiful’ or combing fingers through her hair; and how they withdraw in disappointment or disdain when she turns round and they see her face. How many times in the past has it happened to her? Yet this must be the first time their derision comes as a relief, a bitter pleasure. But it does not last. The men are too drunk, and too desperate. Hanna will be unable to recall details later; she will not want to. And by the time the disgrunded lovers grow too unsteady on their feet, too inebriated, too frustrated to persevere in their hunt and are replaced by soldiers who initially kept to their own coach at the front, the macabre version of musical chairs becomes increasingly hectic, with ominous undertones no one can mistake any longer for pleasure or play.
It must be on the second day, or perhaps the third, that Hanna – the worse for wear and weariness, yet still in a manner of speaking unscathed – is forced into a compartment by what, from his braids and insignia, must be a particularly high-ranking officer. There are two others looking on, too drunk to join in but not too drunk to contribute crude interjections of encouragement or jest. When she tries once again, only more tired and dejected than before, to evade what seems at last to be inevitable – by turns arguing, pleading, shouting abuse, appealing to his sense of honour as a military man representing the Kaiser – he merely laughs.
“Why pretend to be what you’re not?” he asks. “You’re a whore. That’s why you’re here.”
“I am not a whore,” she says in quiet rage. “I came here to find work. I have never slept with a man.”
“You’ve never slept with a man?”
She raises her head, stares him defiantly in the eyes. “No, I haven’t. And I will not do it now.”
For a long time he studies her with the keenness of a botanist looking at a new species of plant, or perhaps a boy inspecting a beetle he has shorn of its legs. “Do you know who I am?” he asks at last.
“It makes no difference.”
“I am a captain in the imperial army.”
Hanna shrugs.
“I am Hauptmann Heinrich Bohlke.”
“It is a name,” she says.
“You can count it an honour that I have selected you. You do not look like a woman who has much choice.”
“My body is my own,” she says.
“Not on this train. You are here at our pleasure. More precisely, at mine.”
“I would have expected you to show some respect.”
“I am a man, you are a woman. That’s all. And I think we have wasted enough time.”
She shakes her head. But she cannot control the trembling of her body.
“After this,” he says, “you can return to whatever way of life you choose.” A brief but humourless smile. “In fact, after this you will not want another man.”
She does not know – and afterwards will not understand – where she finds the temerity to say, “That is not for you to decide.”
“Look, Lotte,” he says. There is now a low, more dangerous edge to his voice. “That is your name, isn’t it?”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Then what is it?”
She shrugs.
He narrows his eyes. “It makes no difference,” he says. “There is only one thing you have to understand. Are you listening to me?”
She shakes her head.
There is a very small, very unpleasant grin on his face. “When I fuck a woman,” says Hauptmann Bohlke of the imperial army in a voice as still and keen as a blade of very fine steel, “she stays fucked.”
And then he fucks her.
∨ The Other Side of Silenc
e ∧
Thirty-Four
It is still not the end. It is actually a long way from the end. She will refuse to remember what happens, but it will come back to her regardless. At some stage she is alone in the corridor again, her whole body aching, a feeling of blood and singeing fire between her legs. At another stage there are, as before, women with her. Some of them cannot stand and are crawling on hands and knees. And then the men return. Different ones, or the same ones. No one seems to care any more. Hanna doesn’t.
But this, whether she wants to or not, this she will remember. That Hauptmann Bohlke comes back to find her. It is night. Some time in the night, one of the nights. Has he not had enough? Or is he furious that when he first took her, when she realised there was nothing more to be done about it, she neither resisted nor showed any sign of life at all? He might have had his way with a corpse. And now, who knows, his pride may be at stake. Otherwise the woman may not stay fucked.
Of this time she will remember that she is stripped naked. (There are not many tatters of clothing remaining anyway.) And that she is forced on her knees in front of him. And that something is pushed against her mouth. It is very hard, yet it has the softness of human flesh. And that he is shouting at her in a kind of frenzy, “I’ll make you remember this! Take it! Slut! Whore!”
She thinks of what so many others have tried to make her do; but they never succeeded. Only this time she cannot avoid it. She gags, but he will not let her go. His hands are clamped to her head, on either side, his fingers entangled in her long hair. She hates her hair. He goes on shouting obscenities.
And she will remember – but this will never be a clear, precise memory – that after a long time, when she cannot resist any longer, she breaks down and accepts in her mouth what is thrust into it. And that, then, blindly, when there is no other way out, she bites. And that she doesn’t stop, not even when the blood comes streaming from her mouth, more blood than she would ever have believed possible, a red fountain pulsing into her mouth, choking her, gushing all over the place and the braying men. Screaming, his body collapses over her.
Whether the end comes soon after, or only much later, she does not know. All she knows, and this quite clearly, is that it is now indeed the end because it can go no further.
She is thrust into a compartment. It is crowded with men in khaki uniforms. In a far corner huddles the captain. He is wrapped in a blanket and looks very pale, but it seems he insists on being there.
“Now I’ll show you what I meant,” he says through clenched teeth, but whether in rage or pain is hard to tell.
She wants to clutch her shell in the palm of her hand but there is only emptiness.
They are all around her. They are taking off their belts with the heavy pointed metal studs. Some of them have army knives. One of them produces a piece of wood which he wedges between her teeth.
That is how Hanna X dies, this time.
∨ The Other Side of Silence ∧
Thirty-Five
I must return to the scene in front of the mirror, where the life of Hanna X first assumed, for me, the shape of a story to be patched together, piece by piece, from the threadbare facts of history. Here, in front of this mirror, it is time for her at last to look. Nothing can be avoided any longer. Her face. Her body. The whole of her physical truth, everything that has been inscribed on her to tell her where she has been, who she is. Obscurely in the background, barely visible in the light of the candle on the blemished surface of the mirror, looms the host of dull grey ghosts – not threathening, but as it were in solidarity, to show that they are here too.
Holding up the long candle close to her, she gazes at the image of herself she has eschewed for so long. With her free hand she lightly touches the surface of her face and of her body. Almost the touch of a lover – if she closes her eyes she may imagine Lotte’s fingers, Lotte’s lips; but this is not a time for closing the eyes. It is a time to see, to see, in order never to forget again.
This is what has been done to her. Not because of anything she has done, but purely because she is a woman. And because they could.
This is who she is now. Almost in wonder she moves her fingers along her skin. How curious, this urge they have, all of them, to leave their mark on a woman’s body. As if despair lies behind it, and fear, a deep but very ordinary fear, a fear perhaps of death, their own. In each the need, the terrifying urge, to scar and leave his mark. And only her body available for their inscription. Ever since Pastor Ulrich first took her lips between his fingers to hurt them, to try and make her wince and cry (which she didn’t). Until that last man on the train, Hauptmann Heinrich Bohlke.
She touches with a single fingertip the scars where her nipples used to be. Her belly, her protruding navel (for she is not Catholic). Then slightly parts her legs and leans forward, reluctant to look; but for once she knows it cannot be disowned or avoided. The site of the ultimate humiliation. The secret tenderness, the small extremity of pure and infernal joy, once offered to Lotte and assumed by her, now gaping and absent. When I juck a woman she stays fucked.
Wax drips on her naked belly. The pain is almost pleasurable. I am still alive, she thinks. It comes like relief, like rain to this parched land. I can still feel pain; I can still feel. It is not all gone. I have returned from the dead.
She is ready to take her leave. This is not another escape. She will not be running away from something again, but towards something. What has happened in this place today, what they tried to do to little Katja, has awakened her from her sleep of death. Because it was to her that it was done. Like all the humiliations of her life, inflicted by all those involved in her slow dismemberment. Now she must begin to remember herself. There is something in her which has never been there before and which gives shape to all that has happened to her, and inside her. It is hate. Tongueless, she tastes the word in her mouth. Hate. It has the bitterness of a medicine that restores life.
On the face of it, she has always borne whatever they chose to visit on her, but she has never yielded, she has always withheld consent. However meek she may have seemed, this deep stern resistance has always been there. When they went too far, sometimes the only way to express her protest was to run away; at other times it made her stand up to Frau Agathe and Pastor Ulrich and Frau Hildegard, or draw the line with Herr Dieter and his successors; always, deep down, she has lived a restrained and muted No to them and their world. Now she will no longer do it quietly. She has at last acknowledged hate. It gives a purpose to all the turmoil inside her. It has made her kill the man who tried to rape Katja. The knowledge brings with it a strange, almost exhilarating, freedom. They no longer have any power over her. Because now it is up to her to decide what she will do with her hate.
Breathing very calmly, holding the tall candle in her steady hands, she returns to her room. She puts on a long dress and her sturdy boots, then packs a few necessities on a sheet from her bed. On top of the clothing she puts the dead man’s Mauser and its bandolier of cartridges, and the Luger pistol she removed from his belt before she dragged his body to the fountain, thud thud thud. Then she goes down to the kitchen to find a good strong knife and a few indispensable utensils. The journey may be long. Once she is satisfied that nothing important has been left behind, she returns to her room, ties the sheet into a bundle which she slings over her shoulder.
She blows out the candle. On the dark landing she stops in front of the mirror for a last look. She gazes past her own image to the rustling throng of grey shadows behind her. The sisterhood of silence. There is almost a smile on her disfigured face. She will not be fucked for life.
As she turns to descend into the deep stairwell that reaches down, in the faint light, towards the darkness below, a voice says behind her, “Where are you going?”
∨ The Other Side of Silence ∧
Part Two
∨ The Other Side of Silence ∧
Thirty-Six
Even in well-documented accounts of the men who dominate
d the turn of the twentieth century in South-West Africa – the early governors who took charge after nearly a century of pioneering by missionaries and traders and miners: Curt von François (1891–1894), Theodor Leutwein (1894–1904), the infamous Lothar von Trotha (November 1904–November 1905), his less bloody-minded successor Friedrich von Lindequist (1905–1907) – the individuals tend to remain shadowy figures in the background of their own story, obscured by historical facts. This is also true of indigenous leaders like Samuel Maharero or the redoubtable Nama captain Hendrik Witbooi (whose extensive diary, for all its vividness, relies more on the consideration of external facts than on the internal motions and impulses and calculations that made him the man he was). Which means that in all these cases documented history still has to be reconstructed, reimagined for a grasp of the identities caught up in it. How much more so the life of someone like Hanna X. And yet she was there, that much I know. And having reached this turning point in her story I have no choice but to continue. I believe more and more that as a man I owe it to her at least to try to understand what makes her a person, an individual, what defines her as a woman.
Like Hanna herself I must go on. And the first image I have of her after she left Frauenstein is of her moving through the desert landscape, one of two very small figures in a vast expanse, under a sky speckled with distant vultures. It is the first sign of life she sees in two weeks, as they spiral very slowly, effortlessly, wide wings motionless, gliding on their high thermals. They are in no hurry to come down; whatever they have noticed below cannot yet be dead. But there must be something, otherwise they would have moved on already.
