The Other Side of Silence (30 page)

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
∧

H
anna 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
.

Gisela only shrugs. After a while she says, “All right. I shall
go where you go. I have been passive long enough.” She gazes around
her. “But this land…It has been going on for so long, for
centuries. You know, I once read – we were still in Dresden then, I
told you I was a history teacher before we got married – I read
about the first Portuguese explorers who came down the coast of
Africa. Diego Cam. Bartolomeu Diaz. Well, they said that Diaz
kidnapped four black women from the coast of Guinea to drop them at
different spots. He thought they could make friends with the
natives – of course in those days they believed everybody in Africa
spoke the same language – and then he’d pick them up again on the
way back. The first woman was set down at Angra Pequena here on the
coast of this land, and the second further down, I think they
called the place Angra das Voltas. But then things went wrong, the
little fleet was driven off course, and Diaz never came back for
the women. Perhaps they never survived anyway. But what always
shocked me was how they could just be abandoned like that. No one
thought of the families, the children, the lives they left behind.
They were like markers, like the wooden crosses the men planted
along the coast. Just because they were
women
anything could
be done to them. And how often during the years I was married, I
thought that, really, that was all I was to Gottlieb too. A beacon
to mark his progress.”

That is why you must stay with us
, insists Hanna, through
Katja.
All these wooden crosses must rise up to say No
.

Gisela nods. Whether she is convinced remains to be seen.

∨
The Other Side of Silence
∧

W
hat will be the
turning point begins in an ordinary enough way. And although they
have been preparing for just such an eventuality – days of
strenuous weapons training, directed by Kahapa – a ripple of
unease, even of fear, moves through the small company when, on the
afternoon of the fourth or fifth day, he announces the news.

He has gone down on all fours, pressing his ear to the ground.
“There is people come this way,” he says. “With horses and
all.”

“How far?” asks Gisela, apprehension showing in her tightly
drawn features.

“Still far.”

“How many?”

“I don’t know,” says Kahapa. “We must wait. More than five.” He
holds up one hand, fingers spread wide.

“Good,” says Himba. “We kill them all dead.”

“Not if there are too many,” Gisela objects.

If they are soldiers
, Hanna gestures to Katja,
we must
get ready. You know what to do
.

Gisela, it has been decided, will lie down on the cart
pretending to be sick. (Not much pretence is needed; she is still
in bad shape.) She will be the wife of a high official, who fell
ill during a visit to the mission station and is being taken back
to Windhoek for medical care. Over the past days they have
rehearsed a number of possibilities; and Kahapa and Himba,
sometimes the crafty and agile monkey man T’Kamkhab, have taken
them through routines of attack and defence – with guns, with
knives, with bows and arrows, with kieries, of which by now they
have quite an assortment. But practising, Hanna knows only too
well, is different from facing a real enemy. However, unlike the
other women, she feels little fear. What makes the prickly hairs on
the back of her neck stand up is excitement. At last, perhaps, at
last something is going to happen.

It is a long wait, over two hours, before the dull thudding
sounds Kahapa has picked up materialise into figures approaching
from the horizon in the east. Eight of them.

“Too much men,” says Kahapa quietly. “We are not ready for them.
Not yet.”

We’ll see
, responds Hanna, her eyes revealing a
determination which makes him feel slightly apprehensive.

The approaching figures resolve themselves into six soldiers on
horseback; and two native batmen, presumably Namas, on mules. The
soldiers are in uniform, the batmen in odds and ends of clothing,
most of it too big for them. Each of these two holds a small figure
in front of him on the saddle of his mule. They are young girls,
Hanna discovers as they approach; naked but for the very small
aprons worn by the barely nubile of their tribe. She feels herself
tensing. And when the group dismounts and she sees the telltale
thin streaks of blood on the thighs of the girls her mind is made
up. Whatever reservations Kahapa may have, this will not be a
peaceful encounter.

The six soldiers – five of them young men who have barely
outgrown their adolescence, the sixth an officer of more mature
years and rather stocky compared to the slender agility of the
others – dismount very rapidly in a small cloud of powdery dust,
their guns held in the crook of their arms. They seem prepared for
trouble; and the sight of the three white women surrounded by
blacks of various tribes and sizes clearly increases their
tension.

“Who are you?” demands the officer. “What are these natives
doing here? Are you in danger?”

Hanna gestures to Katja, who takes over. “There is no danger.
These people are escorting us through the desert. The lady on the
cart there, Frau Wunderlich of the Kolonialgesellschaft, was on a
visit to Pastor Maier’s mission station in the south when she fell
ill. We are taking her to Windhoek to see a doctor.”

“What is the matter with this one?” asks the officer, trying to
peer under Hanna’s kappie and recoiling from what he dimly
perceives in there.

“She is badly hurt,” says Katja. “She cannot speak.”

“We heard gunfire earlier today,” says the officer. “Were you
involved in that? And what happened?”

For a fleeting moment Hanna feels worried: the soldiers must
have heard, from afar, their shooting practice this morning. But
Katja lies calmly: “Just a band of robbers,” she says very quickly.
“Our escort managed to beat them off quite easily.”

The man glares suspiciously at Kahapa and his group. “Which way
did they flee?”

Katja makes a vague sweeping gesture towards the south. “They’ll
be well out of reach by now, they got quite a scare.”

“We have to pursue them,” the officer says grimly. “The whole
desert is swarming with robbers and vagabonds dislodged by the war.
It is not a safe place for women. Or anyone else, for that
matter.”

“
We
haven’t seen anybody,” Katja says pointedly. “The few
Nama settlements we found were all razed to the ground.”

There is a satisfied grin on the man’s face. “This is how
General von Trotha taught us to make war,” he says. “Leave nothing
behind that can move or make a sound. Not even a chicken.” He seems
unaware of the contradictions in his statements.

“Then you have nothing to fear, do you?” the girl comments.

For a second the officer examines her intently. Then he motions,
once again, towards her companions. “Are you quite sure this lot
can be trusted?”

“They have been very loyal,” Katja assures him.

“You can never be too sure, Fraulein. They’re like jackals, you
know. You can tame them like a dog, but one day, when you least
expect it, they suddenly bite your hand. Or go for your
throat.”

“We’ve known these people for a long time, General.”

He gives a small smile, slightly embarrassed. “Leutnant Auer,
Fraulein. At your service.”

As if she has been born to it, Katja puts out her hand. He
clicks his heels and bends over to brush her fingertips with his
lips. Then he turns to his men. “We must go off and track down
those bastards before they get away.”

Hanna prods her with an elbow. “It is so late already,
Leutnant,” says Katja with her most beguiling smile, tossing back
her long blonde hair. “Why don’t you and your men stay with us for
the night? You must be exhausted. When last did you have a proper
meal?” She makes a gesture towards Kahapa. “This man shot a gemsbok
today. We’ll be only too happy…” And with a flutter of her
eyelashes she offers the: “We’ll feel so much safer with you
here.”

There is a murmur of approval from the eager young men behind
him.

“Well, if it’s a matter of a lady’s safety.” He makes a brief,
stiff bow and motions to his men. A series of staccato orders sends
them scuttling in all directions to unsaddle the horses and pitch a
camp and collect firewood for the night.

The two Nama batmen approach with some hesitation, shoving their
scared young charges in front of them. Dust has caked on the drying
blood on their legs. The tiny flaps of skin covering their genitals
are trembling although there is no wind. Glancing at their bare
bodies Hanna realises that they are even younger than she has first
thought.

“What do we do with these two?” asks one of the batmen.

“Tie them to the back of the cart for now,” says the lieutenant
curtly. “We’ll think of something later.”

Prompted by Hanna, Katja turns back to the officer. Her breath
is shallower now. “What are the girls doing with you?” she
asks.

“Well…” For a moment he seems at a loss. Then, precipitately, he
explains. “We found them near our fort, when we set out yesterday
morning.” He motions to the east. “They were lost, their people
must have abandoned them when they fled. We’re trying to take them
back to where they belong.”

“With their hands tied?”

“It is for their own protection,” he assures her, flustered.

“How very kind of you,” says Katja. “I have no doubt you will
look after them very well.”

He glances at her with narrowed eyes. “This is not an easy time
for anybody, Fraulein,” he says brusquely. “Our men have been
stationed in the desert for months now. Night and day, they cannot
relax for a moment. Sometimes a fort is not much different from a
prison. Can you imagine what it is like when you are young?”