The Other Side of Silence

by Andre Brink

  So many things have shifted in the short time since they set foot on the farm. What Kahapa said on that first day, standing over the dead body of the man who had made his life hell and murdered his wife, has given a shape to her own thoughts: This is my man. Now we go find your man. Because this is what her hate is focused on, she now knows very clearly. It is not just an escape from Frauenstein, from living an immured existence, having the details of her life regulated and determined by others, being at the disposal of those who have assumed power over her. Nor is it just an attempt to forge a new kind of life for herself and Katja. It is, above all other things, a journey towards a confrontation with the man – the men – who turned her into what she is now. You look like something out of hell. Only when that has happened can her freedom have meaning and substance. And Kahapa is in it with her. There has been no need even to discuss it. She has helped him – not simply to take his revenge, for that notion, revenge, is too simple and too shallow; but to do what has to be done in order to be what he can be – and now he will help her. They are together.

  Others have come with them. The labourers on the farm of Albert Gruber, thirteen men and women altogether (and any number of naked, snot-nosed children), ran amok after the death of their baas. Katja, shocked by the excesses of their rampage, wanted Hanna to intervene, but the woman shook her head. Anyone who tries to interfere will be hacked to pieces. And Kahapa agreed, though probably more from exhaustion and pain than conviction. There was no whole furniture left in the house when they were done. Not that there had been much to begin with: a carved wooden bedstead, presumably of German origin, some chests, a long table and eight chairs, all very roughly hammered together, a number of rickety shelves. The only object of value – fantastically out of place – was a dark rosewood piano, which collapsed under the blows of the frenzied labourers in an unbelievable cacophony of breaking strings. It must have belonged to the dead man’s wife. Hanna remembered Kahapa’s laconic account: She make music. He beat her. She drink poison stuff. A life in ten words.

  Hanna intervened only after everything had been smashed, including doors and window frames, and the labourers prepared to set fire to the place. Pushing the still dazed Kahapa forward, she made him stop the plunder to salvage at least a number of utensils, some provisions (oil, sugar, salt, coffee, flour), a kaross and an old sheet from the broken bed, and all the guns and ammunition she could collect (seven guns in all, of various sizes and calibres, and ranging from an old-fashioned frontloader to Mausers and a Lee-Enfield). Then they stood back to watch the wretched place go up in flames until only a few blackened walls remained. After that the people quietened down. A strange calm beset them, almost a sense of melancholy, a tristitia post coïtum. Perhaps they were even, suddenly, inexplicably, too late, feeling ashamed of what they had done.

  Without talking among themselves they went to a shed behind the house and emerged with picks and shovels to dig a shallow grave for the dead farmer, not to show him any consideration, merely to be rid of the carcass. Then some of the women took Kahapa away to wash him; water was drawn from a deep well a hundred yards downhill. (How many weeks, months had it taken how many men to dig it?) At long, long last, as dusk was already falling, they came to rest.

  Kahapa engaged in conversation with them. To Hanna, he interpreted: “They say who will be their baas now?”

  Through Katja she responded: For God’s sake, they’ve just got rid of one, why should they want another?

  “They say who will look after them?”

  Why can’t they look after themselves? They are free now.

  “They need food, they must work, they have families to look after.”

  What did they do before they worked for Albert Gruber?

  “They work for other white people.”

  Hanna made a series of signs to Katja. And the girl interpreted, “She stayed with a tribe of Namas once. They did not work for anyone.”

  The people snorted and laughed dismissively. How could she presume to tell them what to do? A woman? One looking like that?

  Then what will you do? asked Hanna through Katja.

  That was when a man said, “We must go the mission station. They will help us there.”

  The following day, before they could begin to round up people and animals (twelve head of cattle apart from the two drawing oxen, a flock of bedraggled, foul-smelling goats, a few makeshift coops of chickens and muscovy ducks) two of the labourers announced that they had decided to set out on their own, with their families, to return to wherever they had once come from. All the others elected to accompany the oxcart, the men on foot, the women and children to take turns on the back of the jolting, swaying, creaking cart.

  The entire small crowd is assembled on the werf at the back of the house watching the two families leave. Kahapa stands in the forefront, scowling into the sun. He is wearing Albert Gruber’s clothes. The shirt is too short and too wide and Kahapa hasn’t bothered to do up the buttons; the trousers, too, are ill-fitting. He doesn’t care for shoes. But he is proud of the hat with the band of leopard skin around it, which he wears with a swagger. Like the others he follows with his brooding eyes the two men and their families as they move off with their paltry possessions balanced on the women’s heads, and driving before them two of the cows and some goats. It seems an ordinary enough leavetaking. But it is interrupted in a completely unexpected way when, moving slightly to one side, Kahapa stretches out a hand to pick up one of the guns, the Lee-Enfield, from the back of the cart. He must have prepared everything beforehand, because without needing to load, he raises the rifle to his shoulder and pulls the trigger. The sudden explosion is greeted with shouts and screams of dismay; some of the children start hollering. Fifty yards away one of the two departing men falls down in a small cloud of dust, convulsing; the rest of the group appears to be in disarray. But before they can start scrambling out of the way, Kahapa ejects the spent shell, slips in a new cartridge, and lowers the hammer to repeat the action. This time Hanna comes running to him and grabs him by the arm, but it is too late: already the second man drops in his tracks.

  “What are you doing?” screams Katja.

  Hanna is shaking Kahapa this way and that in inarticulate rage.

  He calmly frees himself from her grasp. “That two men,” he says. “They are the ones that hold my woman down for him to fuck. They are the ones that beat her dead.”

  The children in the distance are scattering in all directions, screaming and howling with fear, as the women kneel down in the dust beside the killed men. There is much shouting and wailing on the werf too.

  Hanna prepares to run after the others, but Kahapa holds her back.

  “Leave them now,” he says. “We go.”

  She signals furiously to Katja; the girl says, “But what about the women and children?”

  “They bury their men. Their place is not with us.”

  Katja hides her face in her hands.

  In an uncharacteristic gesture of compassion Kahapa puts a hand on her shoulder. “This is the way it must be,” he says.

  In numbed silence they move away, without looking back again. The mission station will be only the first stop on the long road that lies ahead.

  ∨ The Other Side of Silence ∧

  Forty-One

  Along the way, as Hanna walks on her own some distance from the oxcart, she finds the slough of a snake, long and thin and quite perfect, silvery against the reddish brown of the earth. When she squats down to pick it up it disintegrates into dust more insubstantial than ash at the touch of her finger. It leaves her unsettled. Once this skin was inhabited by something alive and quick, a feared shiver of lightning rippling through the scrub and stones. Now that life has moved on, leaving only this trace behind; and even the trace dissolves. There will be nothing left, nothing at all.

  ∨ The Other Side of Silence ∧

  Forty-Two

  The Rhenish mission station is a modest cluster of buildings set among low win
dblown makalani palms, held in the tight embrace of a high wall; from the entrance it juts out into the desert like a jetty into the sea, a resolutely straight line into the distance, a riddle which the eye cannot solve. In the middle of the tiny settlement is a small whitewashed church with a squat steeple and a freestanding bell-tower; there is a single long low house, also whitewashed, and a scattering of round huts. Someone must have sounded the alarm because in the deepening dusk quite a gathering awaits the travellers who all look the worse for wear. The group is led by a very tall, very thin, white man, his face burnt a fiery red by the sun, his long wiry arms covered in ginger hair. A step or two behind him is a woman who must be his wife, also very thin, with lanky blonde hair, a prominent beak-like nose, a long chintz dress. She is flanked by children, who at first sight seem like an innumerable brood, later distinguishable as eleven; all of them shockingly thin, and all of them girls – the youngest a baby in the mother’s arms, the oldest trying to conceal, with self-consciously hunched shoulders, the first signs of budding breasts. They are all barefoot. So are the members of their congregation massed some distance behind the whites, a motley crowd that appears to represent a variety of types and tribes, from wiry ochre-coloured Namas to pitch-black Damaras and a number of Hereros and Ovambos in various shades of brown.

  “Welcome to our vale of grace,” says the missionary in a booming voice much too large for his frame. “God must have brought you here. To which purpose, we shall soon find out, I trust.”

  Hanna pushes Katja forward with a series of quick hand-signs.

  “These people are refugees from a farm,” explains Katja. “The farmer died and they have nowhere to go. I am Katja Holtzhausen. My parents were traders, far from here, near Gobabis. Hanna here, and I, stayed at Frauenstein in the desert. This is Kahapa, our friend and guide who has brought us here.”

  “You are most welcome, little sister,” says the man, extending a skeletal hand in a gesture of blessing. Yet there is something very severe in his attitude. He turns to Hanna, glances under the kappie, winces involuntarily in the reaction to which she has become accustomed. Then he continues in his studied, bookish way, as if he has memorised every phrase and trusts his audience to find it memorable too. “God seems to have visited a terrible retribution on you, sister, for what vile sin I shall not presume to ask. But if ever you wish to discuss it, remember his mercy is infinite and as his servant I am at your disposal.” He looks round at his congregation and, in an unexpectedly stentorian tone, shouts a number of commands about preparing food, shelter and water for the white visitors. Only then does he summon the thin woman to his side. “This is Gisela, whom God has appointed to care for me and support me in the performance of his work.” A mirthless and possessive smile: “And these are the olive branches at our table. As you can see, we have been fulfilling his great command to be fruitful, and multiply and fill the earth. Amid the mass of dark heathens on this continent we try to form a small but growing source of light.” The line of girls blush and fumble and giggle until a withering look from their father imposes the fear of God on them. “Now let us go forth to praise the Lord for his many blessings.”

  Only after the many blessings have been duly – and individually – acknowledged in the swiftly darkening little church, does the Reverend Gottlieb Maier lead the way to the house for more earthly, and more needed, refreshment. Black women come in with large basins of warm water in which the feet of the visitors are washed. And then, at last, by the light of several crude home-made candles, they are seated at the very long, narrow dining table: the parents at the head, Hanna and Katja at the bottom, the girls on low benches at either side. They are served from a large dish of goat-meat with pumpkin and sweet potatoes, and bowls of milk. As the missionary seems temporarily to have forgotten about Kahapa, Katja – nudged by Hanna – has to remind the man of God that their guide, too, is in need of sustenance. To this end a Nama servant is summoned and ordered to serve the man some bread in the kitchen. The other visitors are, hopefully, looked after by members of the congregation in their huts.

  A safari of kitchen-women has appeared to clear the table and wash the dishes (Hanna and Katja, who both rise to give a hand, are curtly instructed to resume their seats). It is followed by a session of reading from a huge Bible. The children sit staring at the visitors in silent, breathless awe. After the reading each child except the youngest two or three is required to recite a verse from the passage read by the father. After a near-interminable prayer in which the visitors and their destinies are amply included, four of the children, who have botched their recitation, are summoned to be given cracking blows on their hands with a strap. One, who dares to succumb to tears, is punished with a second stroke. And then, at last, everybody may bed down. Ten of the children, as well as Hanna and Katja, will sleep on reed mats on thedung floor of the main room, while the parents and their baby retire to the small bedroom at the far end. Within a few minutes, while the house is still reeking of candle smoke, muffled rhythmic moaning sounds from next door signal the missionary’s enthusiastic performance, undoubtedly to the greater glory of God, of his marital duties.

  Hanna begins to feel nauseous; with a dozen breathing bodies gathered in the less than generous space of the front room and all doors and windows shut against the night, the interior is close and stifling. Rising from her mat which fortunately has been spread out right beside the front door, and moving cautiously so as not to wake the sleeping Katja, she unbars the door, pulls it open and slips outside into a night riddled with uncannily large stars. Even her fear of the dark subsides before this pale shimmering. It is as if a large, very dark blue moth-eaten cloth has been stretched across the earth, through the holes of which shines some distant cosmic fire.

  Alone in the innocent night she stares up at the stars, trying to find the ones the Namas have named for her: the seven sisters of Khuseti, the bright eye of Khanous, the mighty hunter Heiseb striding towards the dark horizon. They seem like old friends. And yet, as a small shiver moves down her spine, she wonders whether it can all be really as innocent as it seems. What violence, what danger may lie behind it, lurking, looming, waiting?

  The ground feels reassuring and cool under her bare feet. Nothing moves; there is no sound. She looks at the low steeple of the little church, pointing upward like a stubby finger. She thinks of the service, of the prayers that followed the supper, the pastor’s laborious piety, the heavy hand with which he rules his family and his congregation. The words he spoke to her when he first looked at her. God’s retribution for some vile sin she has committed. It is as if in her mind she is looking right through the shadow of his drawn, ascetic features at the fleshy face of Pastor Ulrich. How concerned they all are about her immortal soul. How enthusiastically they conspire to hasten it on its way to perdition.

  But perhaps she is being unfair. The missionary has welcomed them generously enough. It must be her old suspicion of the subplots of religion which has prejudiced her. She should be grateful for this station on their violent road which has only just begun. Again she sees the half-clad body of the officer subsiding under the blow of her heavy candlestick. The two naked bodies, one black, one white, locked together outside the dilapidated farmhouse. Kahapa shooting the two labourers on their way into the desert. Blood, blood. Is there no other way at all? There are other worlds, she knows. She has entered them, however briefly, in the stories from Fraulein Braunschweig’s books. Simplicity, so powerful and so perfect. If only one’s life could be like that. But that seems out of reach, a wholeness beyond her grasp except in dreams. And the only way, now, to move towards that is along this bright road of hate on which she has set out. At least, she tries to reassure herself, there is the brief respite in this place with its paltry palm trees.

  A crunching sound makes her swing round with a small gasp of fright. A large dark figure is approaching. She tries to efface herself, but he must have seen her for he is coming directly towards her. The night is indeed no longer innocent
.

  Then she recognises Kahapa and breathes deeply in relief.

  He stops. “You must not walk alone,” he says, his voice a deep rumble in the silence. “This is not a good place.”

  But it’s a mission station! she would like to counter. Then thinks: Perhaps he knows more than I do, more than he will let on.

  “I cannot sleep,” he says, as if he has guessed her thoughts. “I wonder if you are all right.”

  She puts her hand on his shoulder and nods, not knowing whether he can even see it.

  For a moment he hesitates as if he would like to say more, but then he grunts, and turns, and walks away again. She remains for a while, reassured by his appearance from the night, the knowledge that he is there, awake and wandering, keeping watch; but also perturbed by what he has said. This is not a good place. Has he, too, seen through the missionary’s ostentatious piety?

  She goes back to the low house, its stark whiteness a pale smudge against the night sky. As she opens the door she discovers a dark shape right in front of her, huddled over Katja’s sleeping form. It is the Reverend Gottlieb Maier, dressed only in a nightshirt. As Hanna opens the door he recoils.

  “Oh!” he exclaims, then drops his voice to a whisper. “It is you.” He pauses. “I was just hoping to find out from our little sister what had happened to you. I was worried. It is such an ungodly world and with all these heathens about…”

  Katja wakes up. “What is going on?” she mumbles, pushing herself up on her elbows.

  “Nothing, nothing,” he whispers. “I just came through to see if everybody was safely asleep. Good-night. God bless you.” To Hanna his explanation sounds more like a threat than a reassurance.