The Other Side of Silence

by Andre Brink

  In the communal silence Katja says, prompted by Hanna, “It is good. Tookwi, you will go with us.”

  “I don’t want to see any of your unchristian band defiling my station for one more day!” shouts Herr Maier. “God himself is insulted by your presence.”

  “We have brought you rain,” Katja reminds him. “Is that not a sign that God has given us his blessing?”

  The man of God stands heaving in the dark. The rain is coming down harder now. Instead of exploding again, as they all expect, the gaunt man gasps in a deep breath. “It is not rain you have brought,” he hisses, “but lewdness and ungodliness.” He turns on his heel and begins to stride back to the parsonage where a tentative rectangle of orange light spills through the open door.

  For some reason Hanna and Katja follow him.

  They are met by Gisela on the doorstep, clutching a small bundle in her arms.

  “The child is dead,” she says.

  ∨ The Other Side of Silence ∧

  Fifty

  In a largely ineffectual battle against the rock-hard earth (for the rain penetrated no more than a few inches into that recalcitrant soil), the men labour for nearly two days to make a dent in the form of a shallow grave in the small enclosure reserved for white people, away from the already overpopulated graveyard for members of the congregation. It will be the first burial in that restricted place. Two almost unbearable days spent mostly in prayer and droning readings from Scripture. The children huddle dumbly in church or front room, forbidden to indulge in any form of mourning, which the father regards as signs of questioning the will of the Lord. Only Gisela refuses to stir from the conjugal bed where she lies prostrate, without eating or drinking, staring mutely at the beams that support the roof of reeds and thatch.

  She only gets up, as if sleepwalking, when she is summoned to the funeral. The service is held in the church and lasts even longer than usual; after the last melancholy wail of the hymn has been drawn out for as long as it can be made to stretch without snapping, the congregation proceeds to the grave. Gottlieb Maier leads the procession outside, carrying the small coffin fashioned from a crate in which flour was once delivered from Windhoek. The box is laid in the shallow hole. There is, inevitably, another reading from the Bible to which no one seems to be paying attention – something from the Psalms, rejoicing in the wonders of the Lord – and another prayer, followed by a thin hymn struggling to trail its way upward like an ineffectual plume of smoke into the angry sky. There are the immemorial words – The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away, blessed be the name of the Lord – and then the long body of the pastor stoops down to pick up a handful of earth and drop it into the grave. He waits for Gisela to follow suit, but she doesn’t move, doesn’t even seem to be aware of what is going on. He nudges her in the side. No reaction. Another nudge, this time so forceful that she loses her balance and nearly falls. She glances at him blankly. Muttering something under his breath he nods at the oldest girl to proceed, followed by all the others. Then the guests. Then the members of the congregation.

  Disconsolate, they disperse under the sun. The clouds that brought the rain have long gone. Already the entire episode seems unreal.

  The following day life at the station resumes its predestined course. The men go out again to work on the wall. But Gisela does not get up to teach the children and lead the women in their domestic drill; instead, her oldest daughter slips quietly into her place. The girl seems to have become, overnight, much older than her years, and her hunched shoulders and drawn face seem, now, indicative more of age than of the embarrassments of adolescence.

  Preparations for the departure of Hanna’s trek begin in earnest; the missionary has reiterated his decision that their godless practices will not be tolerated in his vale of grace any longer. To remove any shadow of doubt about his attitude, from now on only a thin tasteless broth will be served to the visitors at mealtimes; they have come a long way from the abundance of that first supper. Trying to conceal from his febrile gaze their pangs of hunger they concentrate on the work at hand. Provisions are sorted, considered, loaded. The selection of recruits is finalised. In addition to the three chosen earlier, a few new ones presented themselves during the morning following Tookwi’s rain. Two of them are refugees from Albert Gruber’s farm – T’Kamkhab, ‘rescued’ years ago from certain death by the army in the desert where he had been left to die, one of twins, and then kept by the soldiers as a mascot, and given more beatings than food until he escaped many years later and ended up with Gruber; and his wife Nerina, whose spit is said to be more venomous than that of a puff-adder. In her youth she was abducted from her people by a police patrol who used her as their common whore; twice she forced abortions on herself to rid her of their offspring, and the second time was so bad that she could never have children again. The third new recruit is a woman who calls herself Koo, which means Death, and who drifted, half-crazed, to the mission after her only son had been abducted by soldiers when during a raid on her Nama village she’d refused to disclose to them the whereabouts of the men of her tribe. She knew they were going to kill the boy – the long terrible process had already begun before they left – and there has never been news of him again. But she will not rest, she swears in a sepulchral voice, before her eyes have seen his bones.

  Now, at last, they are on their way, with their oxcart, into the desert. They have kept only the two oxen they need to pull it; the other cattle and goats and chickens they brought from Albert Gruber’s farm have been left behind at the mission station; and the labourers not selected by Hanna, Katja and Kahapa will also remain there, prematurely stunned by the prospect of enforced salvation as members of the missionary’s abject congregation.

  As they are trekking due north, the early sun casts the dark shadow of the meaningless wall over them for the first lap of their journey. The whole settlement is assembled to see them off; in the forefront is the Reverend Gottlieb Maier and his skinny brood, silent, motionless. Occasionally some of the women and children from the congregation break into ululation, song or dance; here and there a wisp of coloured cloth flutters dispiritedly; the more morose figures of the men from time to time wave after them, their deep voices a rumble difficult to fathom. But at every new outbreak of sound or movement a single glance from the man of God is enough to impose order on the latent energies of the crowd.

  Hanna is following the cart on foot, dragging one leg as is her wont, with Katja at her side. The rainmaker Tookwi leads the oxen; Kahapa marches beside them, brandishing a long whip. Abreast with him, on the other side of the small team, walks the battle-scarred warrior Himba. On the back of the cart sits the medicine woman Kamma. The others trundle along on either side of the cart. They do not look like an army.

  Hanna is still brooding on the events of the last few days and how they have marked her, like everything that has happened since they left Frauenstein. Unlike the snake skin she found in the desert, she thinks, she carries her sloughs with her, all her past lives, her accumulated deaths. What lies ahead, not even God knows.

  But before they are very far from the mission station, the wall still on their right, there is a commotion behind them. There seems to be a scuffle going on just outside the gate. From the oxcart they can hear voices shouting in anger, the screams of a woman. And then, as they watch, the woman appears to break loose from the crowd and comes running towards the cart.

  “It is Gisela!” Katja exclaims and darts off to meet her.

  Far in the background another figure detaches himself from the churning group. It is the missionary himself. He is waving at them, shouting.

  “Go to hell!” they can make out.

  Gisela hurls herself against Katja. Her face is streaked with tears, in which the dust has formed smudges of dirt. Her breath comes in furious gasps.

  Hanna brings an earthenware jar of water from the cart. Even then it takes some time before the agitated woman can speak. At last, looking imploringly at Hanna, she says, “I want to com
e with you.”

  “But your children?” protests Katja, shocked.

  “My baby is dead. There’s nothing I can do for the others anyway. He will not let me.”

  In the distance the man of God is still standing, straight and tall, unmoving now, like a black scarecrow in the sun, one arm outstretched towards them in a silent apocalyptic curse.

  Hanna puts her arm around Gisela’s shoulders. Let us go, she motions. Thinking: Let us all go to hell together. Hate will show us the way.

  ∨ The Other Side of Silence ∧

  Fifty-One

  The suddenness of seasons. The gentle rain – indeed, as Tookwi has foretold, a rain-cow rain that touched the earth with female moisture – has made a difference. Although only a few days have elapsed there is already a hint of green on the veld, and a myriad of flowers have sprung miraculously from the parched soil, in extravagant patches of yellow, orange, white and purple. The once unforgiving landscape appears less intractable. In the evenings there is already the slightest shiver of coolness in the air, and they find that they draw closer to the fire not just because it keeps predators and scavengers at bay (every night, as soon as the dark closes in, the maniacal cackling of jackals erupts) but because they have come to cherish the warmth.

  It is the second night after they have left the mission station and Hanna is sitting in the thin circle of light surrounding the fire, but slightly apart from the rest. They are surrounded by emptiness. There seems to be no living creature left in this land under the sun or the moon.

  One after the other she studies the faces in the erratic light of the flames. Katja, so achingly young, the smooth face framed in long blonde hair, as yet unmarked by what she has already experienced in her life. Gisela, old before her time, worn out by childbirth and the abuse of religion and her husband. The medicine woman Kamma, toothless and wise, little more than a small skull covered in wrinkled skin and tufts of hair, gimlet eyes staring grimly into the fire, where she seems to see what no one else can dream of. Old Tookwi, like a mantis absorbed in meditation. T’Kamkhab, who has come to look like the pert, angry monkey he was trained to be for the soldiers. His strong but bitter wife Nerina, her broad face quietly brooding over the rage she has sealed up inside her, with a lasting resentment against the world that has made her barren. And the woman of death, Koo, scowling at the memory of a son who disappeared without leaving a footprint or a bone behind. And then the two men who close the circle: the lame warrior Himba, his light-brown face scarred with ancient wounds; and the giant Kahapa, towering over all the others, his beautiful but stern face closed like a mask carved from very dark very smooth wood, wearing day and night the incongruous hat of the man who killed his wife and tried to kill him too. What on earth, she wonders with a small shudder, could have scooped up from the dregs and rejects of this godforsaken land such a disparate little band? Can it really be only hate? Or is there, behind the hate, something else, a smouldering force of life that refuses to be denied any longer? So many things, ultimately; and also the sound of the wind.

  Lightly, lightly, it blows across the vast wilderness in which they find themselves, stirring in the dry grass, shivering like the breath of ghosts against their cheeks; and then moves on into what seems in the dark like emptiness but isn’t. Past the fire and past the faces she stares into it, invisible but unavoidable. Such an ancient landscape, older than anything people could have thought up. And reassuring for that reason. It has its own memory; perhaps is memory itself, turned to stone. Bits of it may be shared by the Namas, the Hereros, the Ovambos, lurking in the stories she has heard. But most of it remains ungraspable, secret, remote. It teases and challenges – yet it instils a profound confidence precisely because nothing about it is easy or immediately accessible, however much it may seem reduced to elements and essentials.

  How much of herself will be left behind in this place? What will it remember of her? Once again, as many times before, the thought brings a stirring of unease. She turns her head to look at Katja, whose face is obscured by the long hair that falls over it. She is the one who will have to carry and protect the memory. To make sure it does not entirely disappear.

  As if Hanna’s thoughts have summoned her, Katja moves away from her place in the thin circle next to Gisela to come and sit beside her. Kahapa, looking up as she comes past behind him, follows her. The others briefly glance at them, then lapse again into their own several silences.

  “There are ten of us now,” says Kahapa after a moment. “So where we go now? What we do?”

  Hanna makes her rapid gestures to Katja; the girl interprets: We are far away from the mission station now. Far away from anywhere. So we shall stay here for a few days. First of all, we must train everybody to use the weapons. You are the one to do that. After that, we can move on.

  “Ten people is not an army,” Kahapa objects. “Even if I teach them to use the guns and do the things of war. The German army have hundreds and thousands of people.”

  We won’t be fighting them in a crowd, Hanna says through Katja, as she had explained to the girl before. We must learn to be clever. Catch them one or two at a time.

  “For that we need more than guns,” says Kahapa. “Gun make noise. To kill, the people must learn other ways. Very much more tough.”

  Can you do it?

  “I must have time.”

  We shall give you time, Kahapa.

  He nods with a grunt of satisfaction. “We shall do that then,” he says. “And then, if we die, we die. All of us together, but each one alone. Because a man cannot die of what another man eats.”

  She knows this is facing the impossible. But they have left the world of the possible behind – the world of safety, of certainty, of calculation, of reason. Their domain, now, is the impossible. (The whole German Reich, Katja said once before. The whole world.) If this is madness, so be it. When sanity depends on the logic of violence her only choice is the kind of madness with which to oppose it. The day she and Katja left Frauenstein they set foot in that part of life from which there is no hope of returning.

  She looks at Katja, intently; into the lambency of her eyes. That, she thinks, is how her own eyes must once have looked. The time of stories: the tale of the wretched creatures of Bremen, the ragtag band disowned and beaten and thrown out by their masters when they could no longer find any use for them; the history of Jeanne and her voices; the story of the little Gooseherd, of Bluebeard and his wives; of young Werther as he wandered through the forest pining for his Lotte. All the stories she and her own Lotte used to tell each other in the dark. Lost, for ever, with the loss of her tongue. This, now, what she has left, is no longer a story to be told. Her life itself is the only story she has been reduced to: and that cannot be told, it can only be endured.

  She remembers the fury of frustration she suffered when she was with the Nama tribe and had to rely on her signs and what they knew of German: the hopelessness of not being able to speak their language (those clicks!). To speak at all. At least that rage has been assuaged. She need no longer grope for words. Where she is moving – she, her whole band of dispossessed, her inglorious army – is a landscape beyond, or before, words. Meaning is different here. It resides in sand and stones, in the meagre and momentous events of the desert: a tortoise labouring past, the quick gliding of a snake, a whirlwind on the horizon, a hawk or a vulture overhead, every change of light, every flicker of movement far-reaching, unforeseeable in its consequences. Suffering, oh yes. Above all the suffering of everything discarded or lost on the way, everything that can no longer be, like children forever unborn. But suffering itself can become a kind of comfort, a reassurance about life.

  Everything as simple and as profound as Kahapa’s terse utterance. A man cannot die of what another man eats. They have eaten. Of the fruit of knowledge, of good and evil. They can face life. And if it comes to that, they will take charge of their own death.

  ∨ The Other Side of Silence ∧

  Fifty-Two

&n
bsp; Hanna spends much time with Gisela on the way. Conversation is difficult, because Katja has to be there to interpret; and Gisela does not yet feel at ease enough to talk freely in a young girl’s presence. Occasionally she tells brief snatches from her life with the pastor – how she tried to keep faith, to support him in his covenant with a God she couldn’t understand or accept; how, slowly, it was eroded by the daily and nightly proximity to his pettiness, his lust, his silent rages – but otherwise she tries to find neutral territory, or to turn away from her own life (which to her now seems utterly worthless, grey, without interest to anybody) to their present journey and its prospects.

  “I don’t know how you can hope to fight against evil,” she tells Hanna. “It is too big, it has too many forms.”

  I have no illusions, Hanna answers. I know I cannot change the world. I just want to do something. To show that it is possible to say No. I have started. I must go on. The important part still lies ahead.

  “But that is simply the way the world is,” counters Gisela. “If we think it’s different, or that it can be made to look different, or feel different, we’re fooling ourselves.”

  I’ll tell you what the difference is, Hanna responds through Katja. That is the only thing I can be sure of. All my life things have been happening to me. I cannot allow that to go on. From now on, whatever happens, I must be the one who makes it happen. Can you understand that?

  Gisela nods slowly. “I think I do,” she says. “But right now I’m simply too tired. I just want to go with you.”

  But if you go with me you cannot stay out of anything. You must know that. There will be violence. If you are not ready to face that, I shall send you to Windhoek with one of the men.