Read The Other Side of Silence Online
Authors: André Brink
“Listen, woman,” he brushes her off gruffly, “I don’t know what
is up with you. We have gone through all the records, you have
given us a lot of trouble, so why don’t you just accept the
facts?”
“The facts are wrong,” she says. “Look at me.”
He gives an indulgent, superior smile. “Suppose,” he says, “just
suppose you are right, which you are not. Even then, do you really
think we can change the documents now? Do you realise how many
forms we have had to fill in?”
“Then who am I?” she asks him. “If you are so sure, tell
me.”
“I really could not care less,” the officer says brusquely. “Now
please just leave me in peace and accept that Hanna X is dead and
buried.”
T
he wind. The wind
always comes from
somewhere else
. At night in the orphanage,
slowly retreating from the edge of death, she lies listening to the
comforting sound of her friend, the wind. She must have been very
small when she first became aware of it. She was suffering from a
bad cold and couldn’t sleep; and all the time the wind was there to
keep her company. In the morning she told Frau Agathe, “The wind
has a cold too, I could hear her sniffing all night.”
And Frau Agathe replied, “If you can think up such nonsense
you’re not sick any more. So get up, make your bed and go and weed
the garden.”
Ever since then she has been thinking about going on a journey
to find out where the wind comes from. The far side of the wind
would also be the other side of silence.
I
n the early days
after her arrival at Frauenstein with the band of Namas Hanna keeps
mostly to the small grey room assigned to her, exposed to all her
memories. The in-between time with the Nama tribe – between an old
life and the beginning of a new, between the sea and the desert,
between the train and Frauenstein, between life and death,
consciousness and oblivion – remains a fluid and confused
assortment of images, watercolours running together on a sheet of
paper, a space of stories and possibilities and impossibilities.
Her thoughts keep wandering. The train journey – no, not that; that
must be excluded from memory. The voyage on the
Hans
Woermann
, then. Lotte. For the first time she is free to mourn,
and she does. A mourning as much for herself as for the young woman
who briefly shared her bunk, her life. A woman undone by the
vagaries of officialdom when the name of Hanna X was entered on the
records. She is dead, she will think. And that is true, for nothing
remains of the person she once was or may have been. So she must be
dead. And in a way this links them even more fatally and more
wonderfully together.
She need not fear the outside world any more. The worst that
could ever have happened to her has happened. Lotte’s death, the
train, her own death in the desert. There is nothing more they can
take from her. She has arrived at an inviolate stillness. That
careless action by the scribe on the
Hans Woermann
, sealed
by what then happened on the train, has put her at a remove from
the ordinary lives of ordinary people.
It is confirmed, if confirmation is needed, by what occurs when
the commando bring the news about their triumphant expedition
against the Namas to avenge the wrong they believe has been done to
her.
To celebrate the victory they are invited in, and as is the wont
of Frauenstein, they are treated to dinner and granted the freedom
of the house. As has happened in the past and will be repeated in
the future. Hanna, who at first hid in the attic, is now cowering
in her room, still petrified by the news, and even more so by the
memories of the train they rekindle. But there is no need to fear.
When three, four, five of the soldiers burst into her room she
looks up at them from the small rough table where she is seated;
and when they see her face they gape, and stop in their tracks, and
retreat, and close the door very solemnly after them. Which brings
the reassurance that, indeed, she has nothing more to fear. But
also the painful confirmation of final and utter rejection. Even
these scavengers have turned her down. She has sunk lower than any
woman, lower even than the animals or wild melons with which these
men will copulate if there is nothing else at hand.
From that day on she will never go about with her features
exposed. The large pointed kappie will cover her head and obscure
her face, day and night. Not even the remonstrations of Frau
Knesebeck will make her reconsider. But why does she really wear
it? To spare others, or herself? To confirm, finally, her
indignity, or to safeguard an ultimate shred of pathetic
dignity?
Not that anyone would bother to ask. They know, now, that she is
incapable of answering. But it goes beyond that. Because she cannot
speak they seem to assume that she is mentally deficient. When they
address her, they choose simple words, which they articulate very
slowly, and very emphatically. For God’s sake, she would like to
tell them, I am not deaf; I am not an idiot; I understand
perfectly. In the first days, even weeks, it will make her cry in
helpless rage when she is alone; she will tear curtains from the
windows, or break things, or beat her hands or her head against the
walls until her knuckles bleed or her forehead is swollen with
unsightly bruises. (Their only reaction is to shake their heads and
commiserate: the poor thing, the mad woman whose mind is quite
unhinged; one has to be very patient with her, treat her even more
circumspectly, she is like a small child.) But very slowly she
comes to resign herself. There is no sense in trying to resist.
This is her life, now. It has to be lived somehow. And perhaps it
is not without consolation that she is allowed to retreat ever more
deeply into herself.
In the Little Children of Jesus she used to go to the most
extreme lengths to please Frau Agathe and the others, to invite
their approval if not their love. True, in their eyes she never
went quite far enough: she could not prostrate herself utterly, or
ingratiate herself, or be obsequious – which is why they continued
to think of her as stubborn and intractable, and punish her the
more for it. And of course she had her long, flowing cascade of
hair, which convinced them that she must be suffering from the sin
of pride. But what she craved,
because
she was so clumsy and
always spilled things, or broke things, or did the wrong things,
was to make them realise – please, God! – that she was
trying;
that she, too, needed to be acknowledged, however
grudgingly. But now not even that effort is necessary. She can
withdraw entirely and they will shrug it off: that is the way she
is; after what those savage Nama people have done to her, how can
one not grant her the right to be ‘otherwise’? Poor thing, poor
ugly wretch.
In the beginning, particularly after the visit from the avenging
commando, Hanna has an unbearable urge to speak. She has to tell
Frau Knesebeck about her stay with the Namas. The ghastly mistake
made by the soldiers cannot go uncorrected. But there is no way she
can communicate in grunts and moans and wails: when she reacts in
this way to the soldiers’ tale, the staff believe that she has lost
her wits by the reminder of her ordeal among the savages, and she
is forcibly if sympathetically taken to her room. That is when she
decides to write down her story. Communicating in frantic signs to
Frau Knesebeck – who somehow has assumed that she is illiterate –
she is finally pacified with a stack of paper, a pen, spare nibs,
an inkwell. It has become the only way open to her to grope through
the wall of silence surrounding her, reaching out to someone out
there who may respond. There
must
be someone, something, at
the other side.
Throughout the night, by the dull light of her single candle,
she writes, in the large looped childish calligraphy they taught
her in the orphanage. It is irregular and spoiled by blots and
splashes and smudges, because the emotions are still not under
control. Two nibs are broken. Her hands are stained black, and some
of it has come off on her face.
From time to time she has to step altogether to calm down,
walking around the room, or wandering up and down the stairs
through the huge gloomy building. But always she returns to the
task, driven by the need to tell her story. It may be too late to
do something about the fate of her Namas – ‘her’ Namas is how
she always thinks of them – but at least someone must know; it may
change the future for others.
Laboriously, painstakingly, she writes down everything she can
remember about her stay with the tribe – her confused memories of
the early days, faces, words; the way the women cared for her, the
herbs and concoctions they made her swallow, the ointments and
unguents they applied to her wounds. The singing she listened to,
the dancing when the moon was full, the curious instruments they
used to make their music, the monotonous but mesmerising rhythms of
the
t’koi-t’koi
and the
ghura
. And then the stories
in their pidgin German, the endless inventions of the old women.
The care they took of her, the generous attention to ensure she
wouldn’t get too tired on the long trek to Frauenstein.
In the early dawn she takes the wad of papers covered in her
messy scribbling down to Frau Knesebeck’s office.
“You’re up early,” the spruce woman says.
Hanna merely shrugs impatiently, thrusting the papers into her
hands.
“Very nice,” says Frau Knesebeck in the tone one adopts for a
small child. “Not very tidy, but I’m sure you have done your best.”
She opens a drawer and puts the papers into it.
Agitated, Hanna comes round the desk, opens the drawer again,
points excitedly at the papers.
“Don’t worry,” Frau Knesebeck assures her. “I promise you I
shall read it with great attention.”
But Hanna tugs at the woman’s elbow, points at her eyes, pats on
the papers, pulls them out of the drawer again.
Read, read
now!
she tries to say.
“Now calm down,” Frau Knesebeck reprimands her firmly, with a
hint of annoyance in her voice. “I’m very impressed with the effort
you have made. Now you must give me some time to peruse it.”
Breathing heavily, Hanna remains standing for some time. Only
when Frau Knesebeck makes it very clear that she has other business
to attend to does she turn to go out, her shoulders sagging. In the
late afternoon, hearing Frau Knesebeck in the laundry, Hanna
returns to the office, removes the papers from the drawer and
replaces them on the middle of the desk.
Exhausted as she is, she finds it impossible to sleep that
night. Once again she spends hours at her table writing, writing.
This time she doesn’t dwell on the Nama tribe but writes randomly
whatever comes to her mind about the more distant past – her life
in the orphanage, Frau Agathe, the long-ago day beside the river
when she met the little Irish girl (the shell is gone now, she
writes, lost in the course of that nightmare on the train, lost for
ever, and the sound of the sea with it), about Trixie and Spixie
and Finny. In the morning she takes the new clutch of papers down
to the office.
Frau Knesebeck motions to a corner of the desk where Hanna can
put down her latest offering.
But Hanna remains standing.
“What are you waiting for?” After a moment, Frau Knesebeck
forces one of her thin-lipped smiles that look like wincing. “Oh I
see.” She pulls open the drawer and removes the previous stack of
papers, pushes them across the desk towards Hanna. “Yes. Well…” She
presses her fingertips together. “I have read your outpouring with
great attention. It must have been unbearable, subjected to the
whims and the cruelties those natives inflicted on you. Even worse
than I’d imagined before. You are a very brave person indeed. I
commend you for it. Now” – she rises briskly – “hopefully you
have written it all out of your system. You will soon feel a new
woman.” She looks at the new pile on her desk. “I shall look at
this as soon as possible. But I do think you should now put this
behind you. We do not want to perpetuate such a bad memory, do we?
The crime has been punished, your suffering has been avenged. We
can now move on.”
The third night Hanna does not even try to make sense in what
she writes on the many pages she covers with her rambling notes –
increasingly tired, disconnected, leaden. Quotations she recalls
from old books, snatches from the lives of Werther or Jeanne d’Arc,
random rhymes, nursery songs, slogans from the streets of Bremen,
long words from school dictations, deliberately misspelt; and then,
driven by a rage she cannot explain herself, all the curses and
swear words she has ever heard, the ones for which her mouth used
to be rinsed out with the foul-smelling black soap. Even the
unforgettable sentence the man on the train spoke that night.
Almost gleefully she takes the new stack down to Frau Knesebeck
in the morning and exchanges it for the previous instalment.
“Another effort?” the woman asks, irritation now on the surface
of her voice. “I’ve looked at yesterday’s of course. Well done,
indeed. But I really believe we have now exhausted the experience.”
She places the latest pile of papers in her drawer. “I shall
naturally look at this too. But you realise I have other work to
attend to as well. I shall let you know when I am ready.”
Three days later Hanna returns to Frau Knesebeck’s office and
patiently waits at the door until the woman sharply raises her head
to ask, “Well, what is it this time?”
Hanna points towards the drawer.
“Yes, yes, of course.” She opens the drawer and takes out the
manuscript. “It is quite remarkable that you should have made the
effort. You can be proud of yourself. We certainly are.”