Read The Other Side of Silence Online
Authors: André Brink
The more enterprising ventured outside into the garden, wearing
outsized kappies they had made with the same studious care and lack
of skill that marked their other endeavours; and with grim Teutonic
determination persuaded the earth to bring forth thirty-, sixty- or
hundred-fold. Pumpkins and carrots and leeks, potatoes and gnarled
sweet potatoes, even tomatoes, cabbages, beans, peas, gooseberries.
This is the secret of Frauenstein: that high up against the rocky
promontory, behind the statue of the Woman sculpted by the wind,
there is a magic fountain. Invisible unless you accidentally
stumble across it, it bursts white and rapid from a fissure in the
rocks, courses briefly among the boulders and then disappears
underground again as if it has never been there at all, except in a
febrile dream.
T
he whole shipwrecked
house is straining against the cables that creak and tense to keep
it anchored in the shifting sands. Suppose at a given moment they
can hold it no longer. Suppose it takes off, and sails into the
pitch-dark sky, sailing through space, moonless starless space,
back to beginnings. Like a stream returning to its
fountainhead.
T
he fountain is where
Hanna X buried the dead man. The event will still be with her as
she scrutinises her naked face in the mirror, all of its history
folded into itself as if it were a single moment. Because this is
where her whole life converges: what has happened until now, what
is waiting yet to happen. A death, a birth.
The sound of the man’s head as she descends the staircase,
dragging the body down, the two heavy boots tucked under her
armpits. Thud thud thud. With a curious jerk of the head at every
thud, as if he is still alive, nodding in approval, or perhaps
convulsed in silent laughter. A muted sound, for she has swathed
the head in a sheet to stanch the blood. Thud thud thud. The girl
Katja is not with her. She must still be crouching in her room, on
the stripped bed, against the wall, naked as a small plucked
chicken, the pillow crumpled against her insignificant breasts,
stricken eyes staring. It is a long way down, two storeys, but
Hanna is not aware of it. All thought is suspended. Attending to
the matter at hand as she would otherwise concentrate on washing
flagstones, emptying a bucket of nightsoil, working her way through
a pile of dishes, washing a bundle of dirty laundry, slitting a
chicken’s throat. For now, this is the only necessary action,
descending step by step, as if all her life she has been waiting
for this moment. Thud thud thud.
She stops only at the bends to check for leaking blood. The man
is as messy as a slaughtered pig. But a trickle or a smear here or
there need not be a cause for concern. It is that time of the month
in Frauenstein. Her own sheet had been stained even before she tore
it from the bed to wind around the man’s pulped head. All the
inmates have tuned in to the same rhythm. Which made it a less than
propitious time for the visiting garrison earlier in the day – no
doubt the reason why the encounters between officers and women were
so much more violent than usual. Little Katja must have been the
only one not in flow; her bleeding had been very irregular since
she came stumbling from the desert that day under the spiralling
vultures. Poor thing. Now this. Thud thud thud.
It used to be the same in the girls’ orphanage when Hanna was a
child. All of them in unison with the dark rhythms of the moon,
under the forbidding eyes of the women in charge:
That time
again. Now the bread won’t rise, the milk will turn, the meat will
go off in the cool-room, the knives will become blunt, the mirrors
will tarnish
. The curse, the curse. Except that tonight she has
turned it against a man, this pink bloated pig. He is outlandishly
heavy. It is hard work. But she is strong. It has always been her
one commendable virtue.
Hanna is as strong as an ox
. They
would add:
And as thick-skinned
. Or:
As stupid
.
Anything heavy to be lugged from one room to another, the groceries
to be carried from the market or the joint of meat from the
butcher’s or the shit bucket to the pit at the bottom of the
garden, call Hanna. She’s strong, and she doesn’t mind. Thud thud
thud.
Tonight the mirrors won’t tarnish, the bread will rise, the
knives will remain sharp, exhilaratingly and exquisitely sharp. It
is the celebration of the blood. For once she has not flinched.
(There was that other time, on the train. But that was different.
God, how different that was.) Thud.
She opens the front door. Behind her the great house groans and
murmurs in its sleep. Outside there is wind. It has been blowing
all day, in long sweeps and waves interspersed with shorter,
angrier gusts, drowning out the possibility of other sounds,
confirming the fearsome solitude of the house below the outcrop on
the plains. She drags the body after her, returns to shut the door,
closing off behind her a dimension of existence, something that can
never return to her or be returned to. Like a mule yoked to a
plough, bent double into the wind, every muscle of her awkward body
strained, she moves on, hearing now only the hiss of the thing
behind her as it is dragged over bare earth and patches of scrub
and scales of stone. She knows that what marks there may be will be
obliterated by the wind in no time.
In a wide curve past the vegetable garden and the graveyard. Up
the incline towards the rocks from which the spring erupts. In the
silence of the wind she can already hear its subterranean liquid
libidinal sound. A smoothness embroidered with a delicate sibilant
tracery. She moans in response, a deep low sound from her guts, up
through her heaving chest, into the wet darkness of her throat,
past the miserable brief stump of a missing tongue, through parched
lips. Without waiting, except for a brief moment to stretch her
back, she proceeds to strip the clothes from the body. There is no
moon, though the stars are strewn recklessly through the sky,
almost within reach. By their disinterested light the bare body
seems faintly luminescent, a pale anonymous lump which she drags
across the boulders and through the icy water to heave it into the
black hole from which the stream comes gushing. Infinitely patient,
tireless, she labours to lug and carry stones from lower down back
to the source where she rolls them into the hole. She works with
admirable economy. This, too, seems to have been prepared and
rehearsed for a long time, a lifetime; not in the mind but in the
very body, the body that is right now ridding itself of another
fruitless waiting and an accumulation of unnecessary blood as it
prepares for a new beginning.
The clothes and boots, wrapped in the stained sheet, she carries
back with her to the outside baking oven behind the kitchen wall.
There she meticulously tears all the brass studs and buttons from
the uniform before she opens the half-round metal door of the oven.
Using twigs and dried grass from the firewood boxes beside the
woodpiles she soon coaxes new flames from embers still smouldering
inside from the afternoon’s baking. She adds one piece of wood
after another until the fire is burning with impressive vigour.
Giving it time to settle, she picks up the brassware stripped from
the now anonymous uniform and goes down the footpath to the latrine
pit where she can dispose of it. By the time she returns to the
back of the house the blaze in the oven is so fierce that it singes
her hair and eyebrows. But she adds even more wood, stands back for
a few minutes, contemplating the flames with the intensity of a
meerkat waiting for a snake to move; at last, with a small grunt of
satisfaction, she hurls into the fire the uniform jacket, the
trousers, the jackboots, the helmet, the soiled sheet in which
she’d wrapped the officer’s head. A brief glance reassures her that
there is no sign of human or animal life around. She tears the long
stained shift, which is all she is wearing, from her body and adds
it to the raging fire in the oven.
From a safe distance, bent over to peer into the flames, she
surveys for another few minutes the burning clothes, and men,
swiftly now, she flits like a shadow around the house and pushes
open the heavy front door. Back inside, she listens warily in the
great dark entrance hall, then steals, naked, upstairs to Katja’s
room. The girl is sleeping now. Fitfully, and whimpering, but
bludgeoned into oblivion by exhaustion. So let her be. With a nod
of satisfaction, perhaps relief, Hanna returns downstairs. In the
kitchen she fills a large basin with water from the tub beside the
stove which is gleaming at her with the eye of a wicked cat in a
robber’s house; and although the water sends a shock of cold
through all her limbs she begins to wash and scrub and scrub
herself, from head to toe, with a controlled rage that is at odds
with her seeming placidity. Then dries herself with clean kitchen
towels from the bottom drawer of the sternly formal dresser. Still
naked, but mostly invisible, gleaming only briefly, palely, as she
passes the windows on the landings, every movement of her ungainly
long limbs soundless, she returns to her room.
It is when she comes past the large mottled mirror on the second
landing that she catches sight of herself. And goes to fetch a
candle from her room, and returns to stare, for the first time in
three years, seven months and thirteen days. At her face. Then at
the rest of her body, all the way down. Everything
they
have
seen and she must now dare to look at. What has happened has
finally set her free to look.
T
his is what has
happened before the burial. It is late that night when she hears
the scream from Katja’s room, across the landing from her own. She
sits up in her bed. No one will come. Many inmates scream or cry in
the night. And Katja, everyone knows, has nightmares since she came
stumbling back from the desert on bleeding feet. But this scream,
Hanna recognises immediately, is not provoked by any dream. She
knows the child; she knows nightmares. She knows screaming. One
does not need a tongue for that.
Clothed only in her shift, and not bothering to cover her face,
as she has the habit of doing, with her voluminous kappie, Hanna
moves across the floor on bare feet to open her door. One leg drags
after her, but she has long become used to it and moves swiftly.
Tense, pressing her forehead against the jamb, she waits. There is
a second scream, followed by what may be a blow, or a body falling,
and then more muffled sounds, a man’s voice raised in anger. She
reaches Katja’s door and pushes against it. It is not bolted.
As she bursts across the threshold she has a heavy brass
candlestick in her hand. How it came there she doesn’t know. It
happens. Once before, soon after her arrival at Frauenstein, she
was walking in the veld far from the house, when she put her foot
down right beside a bloated beautiful brown-and-yellow puff-adder.
As the snake struck she jumped up to get away and when she came
down she had a rock in her hand. Only after she had killed the
puff-adder did it occur to her to wonder about the rock. The earth
was bare and sandy there, no stones lying about. But she didn’t
stop to tease the thought for long. Such things happen. And this
time she has the candlestick. The man is standing beside the narrow
bed with its striped grey blanket. It is the officer from this
afternoon. She recognises the uniform even though he is wearing
only the khaki jacket with the fancy golden braid. The helmet lies
discarded on the bed. His trousers are crumpled on the floor. His
buttocks show up very white through coarse black hair. The girl is
lying naked, huddled like a foetus at his feet, whimpering. His
right arm is raised above his head, a heavy-buckled belt hanging
down from it like a snake. Hanna has seen the posture before. In
the orphanage. On the train.
The snake strikes down. The girl screams and rears up, her face
streaked with tears through her long tousled hair. On the
half-formed mounds of her breasts the tiny nipples seem to stare
like horrified dark eyes.
The man is bellowing with rage, “You’re not bleeding! Why did
you tell me you were? You’re not bleeding! You’re not bleeding, you
lying little slut!”
Clearly beside himself, he brings the heavy belt down again with
so much violence that he almost loses his balance. This time Katja
sees it coming and half evades the blow. She also sees something
behind him. For a moment she freezes in disbelief.
She exclaims, “Hanna!”
The man, in the motion of raising his arm again, swings round to
look. As a result the heavy candlestick comes down on his nose
instead of the back of his head. He is momentarily stunned. As he
goes down on his knees to cup his face in his hands the second blow
breaks his knuckles. The third cracks his skull. He is blinded by
blood. A bellowing sound turns into a gurgle in his throat. And
still she goes on striking, beating, smashing, as if breaking the
bars of a cage. From her throat come grunting, growling sounds.
They may be smothered sobs, or not. She has never heard sounds like
this coming from herself.
It is only when she gets too tired to raise the heavy brass
thing any more that she is forced to pause, panting and gasping,
her whole body heaving.
“You must stop now,” pleads Katja in a low moan. “You have
killed him.”
Hanna nods, dazed. She sits down heavily on the bed. The girl
flops down beside her, reaches out to touch her, then withdraws her
hand.
“What are you going to do now?” she asks.