The Other Side of Silence (21 page)

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.

Hanna motions in their direction with a brief movement of her
head. Her young companion nods.

She is still not sure she should have brought the girl with her.
But what else could she have done? When she heard that voice softly
calling her name in the dark as she prepared to leave Frauenstein
she froze in her tracks, one foot already poised on the top step.
Katja. She’d counted on the girl being still trapped in her
death-like sleep. Now something would have to be done, and quickly.
It cannot be long to daybreak. Leaving her bundle at the top of the
stairs she hurries back and takes the girl by the arm, motioning
urgently that she must return to her room. But Katja stands her
ground.

“Where are you going?” she asks again.

Hanna gestures impatiently: outside, away,
now
.

“You’re not going without me. You can’t leave me here.”

You don’t understand
, Hanna tries to convey to her in me
sign language they’ve begun to devise.
I cannot stay in this
place
.

“After what has happened…” says Katja, her voice choking.
“Please. I need you. I won’t let you go.”

Without a tongue, how can she possibly persuade Katja to stay?
And time is running out. Also, even if she has no wish to admit it,
she has become, in a way, responsible for the girl. Ever since
Katja began to cling to her, following the death of her sister in
the desert; and much more so, now, after the events of me night.
For a long time Hanna cannot make up her mind. What finally
resolves the question is the strange feeling she has, looking at
the terrified young girl, that she is again looking in a mirror and
seeing, this time, a younger version of herself. Katja is prettier
than she has ever been, yes; but there is the hair, the long blonde
hair cascading over her shoulders, the hair that used to cause
people seeing her from behind to assume that she was beautiful; the
hair that once captivated Pastor Ulrich, the hair that men urged
her to wind around their privates as she caressed them with closed
eyes; the hair she cut off soon after she’d come to Frauenstein, to
help rid her of the nightmare on the train. And here is Katja now,
thin and vulnerable in the pauper’s dress she put on after the
murder, Katja with the selfsame wealth of hair. Taking the girl
with her into the wilderness will be like giving
herself
a
second chance, rescuing her not only from this forbidding fortress,
but from everything that can restrict and immure and menace her,
all the rules and regulations and prescriptions of the world –
Katja the orphan, lonely, threatened from all sides.

So in the end she resigns herself to what has come to seem
inevitable. She accompanies Katja back to her own room and helps
her pack another bundle. The first feeble daylight comes leaking
through the small windows as they pick their way downstairs and
then outside, across the bare yard, past the outbuildings and the
vegetable garden and the graveyard, past the rocky outcrop that
marks the spring, past the rock formation in the shape of a woman
turning back to whatever she has left behind, and out on to the
open plain that stretches ahead of them to meet the sky where the
first streaks of dawn are beginning to show.

Below the rock she stops to glance back one more time, almost as
if expecting to see something, someone, following. But who? The
ghosts, perhaps. In a way it might have been reassuring to see them
following in her wake, that grey, immaterial host. But they must
have their own reasons for staying. They must remain behind as
once, lost in the distance, she left behind her imaginary friends
when she was transported from her first and unremembered life to
the unforgiving walls of the orphanage. And now another life is
beginning. What it may be, she does not know yet. But she has
chosen it, and must go on.

No need to hurry. After her previous experience, and Katja’s,
they know there is little danger of being followed: Frauenstein
will rely on the efficacy of the desert either to destroy them or
to send them staggering back. Unless the corpse is found, and there
is little chance of that, no one is likely to care about them any
more. She takes her time to initiate the girl, as they go on, into
the skills she can remember from the Namas: how to find
tsammas
, roots and tubers, thick-leaved succulents, and to
distinguish between the edible and the lethal; how to recognise the
markers of buried ostrich eggs filled with water by nomadic Namas
and Bushmen; how to be alert to the flutterings and the brief
twitterings of the small grey birds that can lead them to the nests
of bees in hollow tree-trunks or anthills ripe with the sweetness
of golden honeycombs.

They communicate as they have done in the past: Katja talking
and asking, Hanna replying with spare but eloquent gestures or with
a scribble of key words, no longer on paper as once in Frauenstein,
but scratched on a patch of sand or hard bare earth. They should
try to find a Nama settlement or a group of nomads, she has
suggested. For the moment she is not yet ready to offer any further
explanation. Apart from the time she spent with the Kreutzers, and
with Lotte on the boat, her stay with the Namas has been the only
interlude in her life in which she has approached a state of
near-contentment, containment, perhaps of happiness. That tribe is
now annihilated, but they may find others. And for what she has in
mind she will need the strength of numbers. As many as she can
find. An army. But she has no hurry. This clear, limpid hate that
drives her is as patient as the desert sun; as inexorable too. A
fire in the guts.

What strikes Hanna as almost uncanny is the way in which Katja
seems to need fewer and fewer written words or phrases from her:
their communication is becoming almost telepathic; as if the girl
is turning indeed into a version of herself. She is tough too, much
tougher than one would expect from her frail body. It was, perhaps,
not a mistake after all to have brought her along. Even if two
weeks is hardly enough thoroughly to put her to the test.

From time to time they come across the remains of some Nama
settlement – burnt-out huts, kraals of branches torn apart, the
carcasses of goats, a few cattle, dogs; bones of people scattered
by scavengers. These must be signs of the war that has been
ravaging the land and of which they have heard so much; but except
for the single recent occasion when the army detachment and its
prisoners arrived at Frauenstein it has never been more than
rumours or reports. This is more real, more stark, yet there is a
curious sense of absence about it, a denial of life. Ultimately the
signs point nowhere.

But now there is something happening ahead, announced by the
slowly wheeling vultures. It is unnecessary for Hanna to gesture or
for Katja to say a word; they do not even exchange glances. Yet
both have quickened their step. The discoveries of their desert
trek, so far, have been unremarkable, although to the two women
they are momentous in their way: a secretary bird caught in what
seems like an extravagant and faintly ludicrous dance with a snake;
a family of meerkats surveying the plains; tufts of dry grass swept
up in an otherwise invisible whirlwind; small clouds sailing across
the sky and disappearing again; a trail of ants crossing their
path. Insignificant in themselves, yet each a portent of life and
death pursuing its course without a moment’s respite. But this –
those vultures and their still unseen target – is more overtly
dramatic in the total stillness of the desert.

“A sick animal perhaps?” Katja suggests as they draw nearer.
“Perhaps a buck wounded in a fight or mauled by a lion? Or a little
one abandoned by its mother.”

Hanna shrugs.

They come still closer.

Hanna touches the girl’s arm to hold her back. She clenches her
fist to indicate a man.

Yes, it is a man. Or was once. Before he was tied down, on his
back, over an anthill, outstretched arms and legs fastened to
stakes driven into the ground. The front of his body, from neck to
knees, is black with dried blood through which a criss-cross
pattern of stripes can be discerned. His sex has been mutilated,
the testicles cut off. A cloud of flies rises in an angry buzz as
they approach. Hanna tries to turn Katja’s head away, but the girl
resists as she kneels beside the spreadeagled body, her eyes
staring.

“Is he dead?” she asks after a while, her lips dry and barely
moving.

As if in reply the man utters a low groan; his body twitches,
the only movement of which he seems capable.

Hanna kneels beside him, unties her bundle, takes out her long
knife, proceeds to hack and saw through the thongs that tie his
wrists and ankles.

Water
, she signals to Katja.

The girl approaches with an earthenware jar she has brought with
her. There is little liquid left, but what there is she sprinkles
on the man’s dark, swollen, cracked and bleeding lips.

Careful
, motions Hanna.
Take your time. Otherwise it
will all be wasted
.

They try to move him into a more comfortable position, but he
seems unable to comply, even to understand. His back, they discover
as they cautiously and clumsily drag him from the anthill, is
inexplicably unscathed. It is a giant of a man, built like a bull,
but now in such a sorry state that they may well have come too
late. He appears delirious.

Who could have done this to him?
Hanna tries to convey to
the girl.
And why? Do you think he was punished for doing
something terrible? Murder, or…
She drops her arms, unwilling
to proceed.

“He is black,” says Katja. “In this land, I have found out, that
can be enough of a crime. I sometimes saw them when they came
crawling on all fours to my father’s trading post. He always tried
to shoo us away; it was not for our eyes, he would say. But we
would look anyway.”

But how can they beat a man like this…?
Hanna tries to
ask.
On his chest and stomach and the front of his legs…and
there
– she points –
and not on his back?

Katja shrugs. “This is how they do it here,” she says in a
small, strained voice. “The Hereros call it the German way.”

We must find some shade for him
, gestures Hanna.

“There is no shade.”

He will die here
. Involuntarily Hanna glances up. The
vultures have descended much lower than before. At times they come
so close that one can make out the obscenely naked necks, the
fierce stare in the unblinking yellow eyes. She looks around,
gestures.
We’ll have to make shade to protect him
.

“How?”

Gire me a hand
.

From a stunted thorn tree they spread open the sheet that held
Hanna’s few possessions and into its inadequate shade they half
carry, half drag the body of the man who moans weakly in agony.
Hanna drapes a shirt from her bundle over the blackened, bloody
stump that remains of his genitals. Overhead, the vultures utter
screeches of protest, flutter their wings in anger, then take off;
after a while a few of them return again, dive down as if to hurl
themselves into the ground, only to swoop up at the last moment and
resume their spiralling, but now upward, higher and higher,
dwindling into mere pinpricks.

There is little more the women can do. The man’s wounds should
be cleaned, he is racked with fever, but they have no water. And in
this shimmering heat which blinds the eyes every motion is
exhausting. They can only wait. When at last the sun begins to
liquefy, Hanna leaves Katja in charge and goes off to look for
medicine. It is so long ago that she was tended by the Namas; she
has forgotten much. But she does find a few small dry shrubs which
look vaguely familiar; if they are what she hopes they are, they
might help for fever. And a
gli
root for a concoction to
make him drunk and numb the pain.

The dark comes very suddenly, but there is an abundance of
firewood about and using one of the tinderboxes they have brought
with them they can get a fire going. Just beyond the reach of the
flames there are green eyes shining in the night, appearing now
here, now there; and the eerie cackling of jackals, the calls of a
hyena. Katja is terrified. Hanna holds her close, making soothing,
humming sounds; and from exhaustion the girl drifts off into uneasy
sleep. But Hanna stays awake to feed the fire, and from time to
time to force some more of the bitter juice from her shrubs through
the swollen lips of her delirious patient. He responds with low,
rumbling groans like an ox in pain. If he makes it through the
night, Hanna thinks, he may survive. If not, the vultures will be
back in the morning.

∨
The Other Side of Silence
∧

I
n the morning the
vultures have not returned. The dark giant will survive. They feed
him small morsels from the hard stale bread they still have left,
and moisture from a
tsamma
. Katja keeps at a safe distance:
she has too many nightmare memories from the time the Hereros
attacked her father’s trading post and killed all the men. But she
watches intently while Hanna feeds him from the
tsamma
. What
an amazing melon it is, Hanna thinks as she cautiously makes a hole
at the top as she once saw the Namas do, and inserts a sturdy twig
which she twirls until the flesh inside is pulped into a liquid
which she feeds to the debilitated man. Once it is all finished,
she will shake and scratch out the seeds to roast, or to grind into
flour. And the shell, carefully preserved, will be kept to serve as
a container or even a cooking pot.