The Other Side of Silence (28 page)

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
∧

I
t 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 is 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.

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.