The Other Side of Silence

by Andre Brink

  “I already tell him.” Kahapa nods approvingly. “But he will not believe me.”

  Several of the others are also turned down – among them a young woman whose main purpose is to find a husband in Windhoek; two pleasant and jocular Ovambos who have simply had enough of hard work; a middle-aged woman anxious to visit relatives in the north; a chronically smiling, very black Damara who can remember his father and grandfadier meekly slaving for any master who came along, whether Ovambo, Herero, Nama or white, and who is willing to accept any new employment as long as he does not have to reason why; a beautiful muscular specimen of a man (though not quite as massive as Kahapa) who is eager to avenge a great number of atrocities in his past on the German occupiers. This sounds promising indeed, Hanna thinks. But then it turns out that while he will be happy to take orders from Kahapa, he will not defer to a woman. And that rules out his candidacy. In the end, after consulting with both Katja and Kahapa, Hanna accepts only three of the applicants.

  The first is a Nama woman of uncertain age, wizened and emaciated, her breasts mere flaps of crumpled skin, flimsily covered with a tattered cloth imposed on her by the rigid religiosity of the place. Her name is Kamma, which, she says, means ‘Water’. She is introduced by Kahapa as a medicine woman. Her tribe, Hanna learns, lives in a place called by the impossible and beautiful name of Otjihaenemaparero, where she built a reputation, like her mother and grandmodier before her, as a healer. No one knows the herbs and secrets of the veld like she does. People used to come to her from as far as two or three full moons away. She healed them all. A few times, she assures them, and it is difficult to doubt her, she even brought back to life people who had already died. Then one day, about a year ago now, she – literally – got wind of a sick German smous stranded in the desert with his ox-wagon loaded with goods. He had been bitten by a snake and his whole body had swollen up so badly that he was close to death. But Kamma cut open the wound, sucked out the venom, and set to her task with potions and unguents and chanted incantations. And within a day the man could sit up and take his first food. He took her with him to Otjihaenemaparero on his wagon and distributed most of his merchandise among the tribe members.

  Everybody was elated. Until he made it clear that he intended to take Kamma back to Windhoek with him. In the course of long deliberations that lasted through days and nights (the tribe’s customary politeness practically prohibiting anyone to say no to a stranger) it transpired that he expected to become rich through Kamma’s professional skills. Whereupon his offer was turned down. On learning this, the foreigner lost his temper and in an attempt to cut the Gordian knot he grabbed his guns and started firing at the tribe. They retaliated in their own way. Bristling with arrows like a porcupine the German fell down.

  Kamma set about repairing as much of the damage as she could. But there was a sad end to it all. However much her services were needed by her people, the tribe could no longer afford to keep her. This kind of incident had a way of propagating itself, no doubt with the help of the wind; some time, sooner or later, they believed implicitly, a commando would be sent out from Windhoek to retaliate. Kamma had to be banished before that could happen. Amid loud lamenting from all sides she was expelled from the place with the magical name of Otjihaenemaparero. And after moons and moons of travelling, here she is. Safe, but burning with anger. All she wants now is revenge.

  She will come with us, Hanna decides; and Katja and Kahapa concur without protest.

  Then there is the Ovambo warrior, Himba. He, too, has a chequered career behind him. No longer a young man, he has, however, a formidable physique; his whole body bears the scars of innumerable battles and he walks with a slight limp, which Kahapa swears does not prevent him from travelling faster than most men can run, for days on end, without food or water. After the death of his father in a skirmish with a German patrol when he was still a youngster, he collected around him a band of hand-picked warriors and took an oath not to rest before the last foreigner had been driven from the land. But as the years went by he just saw more and more foreigners making their appearance – from the sea in the west, from the land of the Bechuana in the east, Boers from the south, occasionally even from Angola in the north. One by one his men disappeared from his side: most killed by the enemy, others falling prey to illness or predators, a few deserting to find an easier life elsewhere. Only when Himba was left behind on his own did he grudgingly consent to retire. He took two young wives, fathered several children, and seemed at last to succumb to the easy pleasures of domesticity. But barely a year ago, soon after the outbreak of the new war which is still raging in the land, the remote settlement to which he had retired was overrun by the occupying army. They had no specific quarrel to pick with this village. But inspired by the merciless Lodiar von Trodia the soldiers, heading towards the restive Nama armies in the south, sacked the small place of peace, killing everything that lived and breathed – dogs, chickens, pigs, cattle, goats and people – including Himba’s wives and all his children. With only two companions he managed to get away on a moonless night. For weeks they wandered about, intent only on avoiding all enemies along the way. One of his companions was killed by a scorpion, the other was trampled by a solitary elephant bull at a water-hole. In the end Himba reached the mission station on his own. But this will be no more man a temporary halt, he assures them, an ancient fire smouldering in his throat. He is just waiting for the chance to go to war again. And this time only a knife, a bullet, or a bayonet will stop him.

  He, too, is hired without more ado.

  The third recruit elicits more discussion. He is a Nama. His name is Tookwi, which he explains means a thunderstorm. It seems he was born in a heavy downpour; and perhaps as a result he became the rainmaker of his tribe. A curious phenomenon, he tells them with evident pride, is that it often rained only on the spot where his people happened to find themselves at the time, nowhere else. So there would be drought and scorched earth for as far as the eye could see, and one small green patch in the middle of it all. There are many different ways of calling the rain, he explains to them. Small white pebbles can be buried in the veld with the chanting of special songs to the god of the Red Dawn, Tsui-Goab. Or the whole tribe can join in a rain dance under the full moon, singing the song of the girl Xurisib who defied Tsui-Goab. (The memory of the story she first heard in Xareb’s tribe awakens a small pang of nostalgia in Hanna.) There are other remedies too, Tookwi says, but most of them are very secret.

  For years he performed his rites for his tribe, and they prospered. But times grew worse. More and more of the young men moved away to work for white farmers – Boers who approached from the Cape Colony, or Germans on the Khomas Highland near Windhoek. They would still return to the tribe from time to time, but they were not the same people who had left. They brought new customs with them, new clothes, some got involved in gun-running. The young ones started jeering at Tookwi and persuaded others to abandon him too, calling his rites tomfoolery or superstition. And Tookwi found that, faced with their taunts, his magic would no longer work as potently as before. Browbeaten by a powerful faction of young men, the tribe expelled him. He started wandering through the desert on his own like an animal driven out by the herd. After years of loneliness he came to this place, in need of human company, even though he felt aggrieved by the customs and superstitions of the Christians. All this time his sadness has been nourished by anger: anger at the Germans who have changed the old way of life and driven him away from the only people with whom he belonged. That is why he now wants to join Hanna’s little band.

  Feeling genuine pity for the wiry little man, she is eager to accept him, but Katja is sceptical, Kahapa openly hostile. “He will just be a nuisance,” he says. “There’s nothing he can really do to help us.”

  Hanna puts her hand on Katja’s arm in the old gesture of familiarity and resolution. Tell him we feel pity for him. But we ate not sure he can really be useful to us. Ask him what he can do to persuade us.

 
“I can make rain for you,” Tookwi offers without hesitation.

  “When?” asks Katja, unprompted.

  “Tonight, if you wish,” says Tookwi.

  Involuntarily they all look up. Above them, even at this hour of the afternoon, the sky is still white with rage, the sun like a bhster in the shimmering expanse.

  “The only thing is,” says Tookwi in a tone of warning, “Tsui-Goab will not be mocked. He will send rain but he will also demand a sacrifice.”

  “What will that be?” asks Kahapa.

  “It is for him to decide.”

  Hanna glances at the others, then nods.

  “Then the rain will come tonight,” says Tookwi calmly, picking up the collection of little bags, tortoise shells and skins he has brought with him.

  ∨ The Other Side of Silence ∧

  Forty-Nine

  It begins as another stifling night in the long narrow front room of the parsonage. The interminable wailing of the sick baby in the bedroom next door, behind the curtain, pierces the deepest darkest corners of mind and memory. The children are all awake, lying tense and straight on their thin reed mats, no one daring to utter a sound as they breathe and sweat in silence. There is no way of telling the time. At a given moment, quite unexpectedly, there is an angry outburst in the missionary’s deep booming voice in the bedroom, followed by the unmistakable sound of a slap. The child starts screaming blue murder. Hanna can bear it no longer. She sits up on her mat and puts out a hand to open the door. She can feel all the children stiffening in the dark but pays no attention. There is no need to alert Katja: by the time Hanna steps barefoot on to the hard naked ground outside the girl is already with her.

  The others are gathered behind the stern little church. Kahapa is there, and Tookwi of course, and their two new followers; but also the rest of the congregation, man, woman and child, it would seem. Whether they have been summoned, or whether the news has reached them by some occult nocturnal osmosis, is impossible to tell. There is a sense of subdued excitement: no distinct individual sound, even the children are quiet – only something like a bundled-up hush, as if the night itself has tensed its secret muscles as it contracts and waits.

  Everybody seems to have been waiting for Hanna and Katja to appear. They make way for the woman and the girl to find a place in the front row. Tookwi nods in their direction, and kneels in the small clearing left in the middle of the crowd, where he starts scraping away soil with what may be a flat shard of flint or a piece of tortoise shell. It takes a long time as the ground is as hard as stone. They all look on patiently. At last Tookwi appears to be satisfied with the long narrow hollow he has scooped out. Into it he drops a thin, limp object.

  “Snake,” he explains briefly, as he catches Hanna’s quizzical look. “Geelslang. A yellow cobra. I was lucky, I found it this afternoon.”

  “Is it dead?” asks Katja cautiously, having glimpsed a tremor in the snake’s long body.

  “No, not quite. There must be some life left so it can call the rain.”

  “Can you use any snake for it?” asks Katja.

  “No, no, just the cobra. Because it is yellow like fire, like the lightning which is its sister. It must call the rain from up there down to the earth below.”

  The cobra is stretched out full length on its back in the shallow trench. As he begins to cover it with the soil he has dug out, Tookwi intones in a low voice a long chant composed, it seems, exclusively of gutturals, sibilants and clicks. When he is done he looks up again and translates briefly:

  “O Heiseb, our forefather!

  Send good luck to me.

  Give into my hand the rain of your sky.

  Let us soon enjoy honeycomb and sweet roots

  And I will sing your praise.

  Are you not our father’s father,

  You who are Heiseb?”

  It is, he explains, a hunting song adapted to the purposes of calling the rain. Then, falling silent again, all concentration, he takes from his bundle a long bow-shaped instrument which Hanna recognises from her stay with the Nama tribe: a ghuia, a primitive wind-harp on which he blows as he plucks the single string to coax from it an endlessly repetitive hint of melody. In principle, if not in shape, she thinks with a touch of wry amusement, it is not far removed from the soundless instrument devised so many years ago by her gentle employer Opa.

  Round and round the flattened mound where the cobra lies buried, Tookwi moves, swaying gently on his reed-stalks of legs to the rhythm of his soporific melody.

  “I hope he doesn’t go on until the rain comes,” Katja whispers to Hanna, “for then we’ll be here for weeks.”

  The rest of the crowd still waits in a hush, spellbound.

  After some time Tookwi comes to a standstill astride the flattened mound. He looks at his audience.

  “What I need now,” he says, “is for a woman who has never known a man to piss on the grave.”

  Everybody waits in earnest silence.

  “I’ll do it,” announces Katja suddenly.

  Hanna tries to hold her back. Not in front of all these people, she signals. You cannot humiliate yourself like that.

  “No one will even see,” says Katja. “It is too dark.”

  Shaking off Hanna’s hand the girl steps forward towards old Tookwi.

  “Now take off your clothes,” he says, his voice barely audible.

  This makes Katja hesitate. But then she shrugs. It is indeed very dark; and there is no hint of lewdness in the procedure. On the contrary.

  Still, Hanna tenses somewhat as she discerns from the vague movements in the darkness in front of her that Katja is indeed stripping off her dress, stepping out of her underclodies, untying her shoes. Without bidding, all the men in the crowd have silently turned their backs on her to show respect, while Tookwi has moved to one side. Katja squats over the cobra’s grave. There is a slight hissing sound as her urine sprays the grave, a brief glint of wetness as the jet is caught in the faint light of the stars – the striding Hunter, the Southern Cross, the seven lights of Khuseti, Tsaob’s arc of glimmering embers – a hint of frothiness on the black ground, before it is absorbed and disappears.

  A very old memory stirs in Hanna’s mind, bringing with it a pang of loss: that day on the narrow strip of beach along the river when the little girl from Ireland helped her to scoop a small hollow from the sand so that she could pee in it; the day of the shell, the rustle of silence. And she knows, as she peers through the darkness at the squatting Katja, that she is still obsessed by the same silence; but at least, at last, she has now a clearer notion of where she is going, of being on the way there. She thinks: To the end of my days that small person will give meaning to my life, a sense of direction.

  Her pale body opalescent in the night, Katja gets up, stoops to retrieve her clothes, and returns to Hanna who helps her to get dressed again.

  Now what? she wonders.

  “Now we dance again,” announces Tookwi, as if he has read her thoughts. “But we must do it very slowly, otherwise we wake up the rain-bull and that is not good. We must call the rain-cow who comes gently to soften the ground, so that it may be wet inside the earth, like the wetness of a woman who loves. If the bull wakes up it is too much noise.” He resumes his slow-motion dancing gait around the spot where the cobra has been buried, but this time he has a kind of flat tambourine in one hand – his t’koi-t’koi, no more than a hairless skin stretched tightly across a ring of bent wood or reeds – which he raps with the palm of the other, a slow rhythmic tam-tam, tam-tam, tam-tam, without variation, only growing steadily louder, more urgent. And the Namas in the congregation start murmuring, spontaneously, to the same cadence; the other people are drawn in as well, until even Katja and Hanna find themselves humming, tam-tam, tam-tam, tam-tam.

  For how long it would have gone on is impossible to tell; but at some stage there is an unexpected interruption: a tall gaunt shadow taking shape from the night, a smudge of ink against the sky, blackest black on black. It i
s the Reverend Gottlieb Maier.

  “What is going on here?” his deep voice booms in the background as he comes striding through the people, pushing them this way and that, until he is standing in the open spot right in the middle. Peering at the women, he asks in shock, “You too, sister Hanna? Little sister Katja? What heathen ceremony are you taking part in, in a sacred place like this?”

  “We are making rain,” says Katja is a quiet but steady voice.

  “This is preposterous!” the missionary explodes. “All these years I have been devoting my life to the struggle against the forces of superstition and evil among the black heathens. Now I must find that white women have joined the enemy.”

  From all sides there are voices protesting from the assembled crowd; a few babies start crying. It has grown very dark indeed.

  Kahapa pushes his way through the people who are beginning to edge away from the scene. He is barely visible in the night, only a sound thundering in their midst: “Who are you to tell us what is good, what is bad?” He pauses; the silence is like rock walls caving in on them from all sides. “You are a godless man.”

  “God will smite you with his wrath!” shouts the pastor, beside himself.

  At that moment, altogether unexpectedly, the rain begins to fall. It is hardly more than a drizzle, a rustling over the earth as if a large soft kaross is gently dragged across the dry surface.

  For a moment the people are silent. Then there is an eruption of sound: shouts of fear and dread from some, jubilation and amazement from others.

  “There is the rain,” pipes Tookwi in his small reedy voice.

  No one seems in a hurry to find shelter. Instead, they respond to an atavistic urge to throw off their clothes, to soak up the unexpected wetness as the earth does, through their skins, deep into their bodies.