The Other Side of Silence (4 page)

Hanna shakes her head. She gestures towards the girl’s skinny
body and makes a movement with her elbows to say,
Put on
something
.

Mortified, Katja briefly covers her chest with her hands, turns
away, starts fumbling with the pile of day-clothes on the small
table near the window (the shreds of her night-shift are scattered
across bed and floor). As she stretches her hands above her head to
put on the pauper’s dress donated by well-meaning ladies of the
church, she unexpectedly breaks into a giggle. It turns into
uncontrollable, hysterical laughter which goes on and on until she
collapses on the bed. Only when Hanna reaches over to press the
girl’s body against her own does the laughter change into
wailing.

“He looked so funny,” she sobs. “In that smart uniform. And with
his bare arse.”

Uttering low comforting sounds Hanna rocks the thin body; she
can feel the girl’s ribs.

Slowly the sobbing subsides. Katja begins to talk. It is
confused and random, an uncontrollable flood interrupted only by
deep convulsions which rack her body.

“This afternoon. There were so many of them. You remember? And
then you hid me. But I could still hear them. Everywhere. And the
women. It was like when we were on the farm where my father had his
trading store. They killed him. With an axe they found in the shop.
He was repairing the gate to the cattle kraal. My brothers were
helping him. Gerhardt and Rolf. But those Ovambos didn’t just kill
them, first they…You know? And Mother and Gertrud and me just stood
there. But they never touched us. They even left some food for us
when they went away. The next day we went to the mission station
that’s six hours away. We first dragged the bodies into the house.
To keep the vultures and stuff away, you know. Mother didn’t want
to go, but we made her. And then on the way she fell and broke her
leg. Oh Jesus. We went to the station and brought the people back
with us but the hyenas had got to her before we could. And there
were vultures all over her. And flies, just everywhere. All over
Father and Gerhardt and Rolf when we got back. The missionary tried
to shield them from us, but we saw them. And smelt them. Later the
soldiers came to take us away. The same ones as this afternoon. I
don’t mean the same men, but the same uniforms. The German army. We
were so happy when they came. Gertrud was smelling too, when she
died in the desert. For a whole day I tried to scare the vultures
off. And the jackals. But I was frightened of the hyenas. So I had
to leave her there, you know. And anyway I couldn’t stop the flies.
All over the bodies. Over hers. I don’t know where they came from.
They were just there. But it was better when the soldiers came. No
one came when Gertrud died. Only when my parents were killed. After
two days, I think. Perhaps three. And the solders were really so
kind to us. They gave us food and water and everything. Only when
they found black people in the veld they were not so kind. On the
way to Windhoek…” She shudders. “You know what they did?”

Hanna presses the girl’s face against her chest to smother the
talk. But Katja struggles free from her fierce embrace.

“So when they came this afternoon I wasn’t scared. Not in the
beginning. Only when they…When he…” She tries to turn so that she
can look again at the heavy half-naked body crumpled on the floor,
but Hanna forces her head back.

That is enough now
, her face says.

“What are we going to do with him?” the girl asks again.

Hanna looks at her, staring hard into her eyes.
Will you help
me?

They kneel down and begin to put the uniform trousers back on
the dead man, turning their heads away, which makes the task more
difficult. The girl starts giggling again.

Hanna utters an angry sound of reprimand.

“When they found black people in the veld they caught them and
beat them and gouged their eyes out and tied them to anthills and
left them there and some they hanged from thorn trees, you know,
those big ones, the camel-thorns, and some they took and cut off
everything, their ears and noses, their hands, their feet, their
things, everything. And they put their things in their mouths and
stood round them and laughed and smoked and drank schnapps. But
they really were so kind to us, as if they were our fathers or our
brothers, only some were still quite young.”

Hanna grabs her by the shoulders and shakes her.
Now stop
this! For God’s sake, shut up!

“You don’t believe me? I tell you, I saw everything.”

You think I don’t believe you? You think I haven’t seen or
lived it?

“And when they came this afternoon, I was happy to see the
uniforms. This one too, he looked like the leader. When he put his
arms round me and kissed me it was like my father, and I felt like
crying, I was so happy, I remembered so many things, you know, from
long ago, when we all, when Gerhardt and Rolf and Gertrud and I,
but of course Gertrud died. And then all of a sudden he wasn’t like
my father any more.”

∨
The Other Side of Silence
∧

T
his, as Hanna
recalls it, is what happened in the afternoon. The detachment
arrives just after noon, from the south. A group of officers on
horseback, followed by a crowd of haggard soldiers on foot, fifty
or sixty or eighty, then a wretched line of naked prisoners, hands
tied behind their backs, strung like dusty beads on a rosary with
thongs running from one neck to the next. Namas, by the look of
them: short, slight people, yellowish in colour, their faces
pinched and furrowed. Most of them are men, but there are women as
well, and even a number of children. The rear is brought up by
another band of soldiers with guns and whips and sjamboks.

They must be followers of Hendrik Witbooi, fighting on out of
sheer habit or stubbornness even after their captain’s death five
months ago. In the early days of this war that has been ebbing and
flowing through the vast land for years now there used to be a kind
of gentlemanly code of conduct determining relations between the
German army of occupation and the indigenous people; it is known
that on one occasion, after Witbooi had been beleaguered on a
koppie for weeks, he sent a letter to the German commander on the
plain below (‘My dear German imperial Herr Franz’) detailing his
needs: food, water, two boxes of Martini Henry ammunition, ‘as is
only fit and proper between large, decent and civilised nations’.
But soon there was little evidence of honour remaining; and as time
dragged on, particularly after Generalleutnant von Trotha took
command, the war became as beastly as any other, engulfing large
tracts of the colony as the general implemented his Tabula Rasa
strategy. Sometimes it was reduced to a mere dribble of incidents,
isolated guerrilla attacks on farms and outposts and military
camps, but two years ago, in 1904, there was a sudden and total
conflagration. The Hereros, finally uprooted from their ancestral
lands by German expropriation and by the cattle disease that
ravaged their herds and having nothing more to lose, unfurled wave
upon wave of desperate attacks to drive the Germans –
Schütztruppen
, settlers, merchants, all – into the
white-crested waters of the Atlantic. This time they were joined by
most of the other native peoples, from the Kunene all the way down
to the Orange. And after the violence had burnt itself out in the
north it raged on in the south. Now, even after von Trotha has been
recalled, his military successor, Oberbefehlshaber Dame, is
continuing the campaign against the Namas. Which is where this
detachment comes from.

Someone looking from a high rear window in Frauenstein gives the
alarm. Within moments there are women clustered in every window
like bats in a cave while the staff, with the diminutive but
formidable Frau Knesebeck in front, form a protective phalanx in
the backyard, between the kitchen and the barns and stables. The
whole edifice is trembling with excitement. Strangers: visitors!
And such a multitude of them. There is a sense of real occasion,
something almost unheard of. And at the same time there is
apprehension, fear, terror. All these military men – they cannot be
up to any good. Such visits in the past have been restricted to
small patrols of two or three or half a dozen soldiers at a time;
and God knows what havoc they left behind. What lies ahead today
cannot be imagined. Such an incursion from beyond the desert has
all the impact of an event greater than history, it is the stuff of
legends and of myth. This is the closest the war has yet come to
Frauenstein; suddenly it is no longer a murmur of rumour and
conjecture and possibility but something overwhelmingly real. It is
here, it is now. They are aquiver with anticipation.

The commander is the first to alight from his horse. Clicking
his heels, he bows stiffly to Frau Knesebeck.

“Gn’adige Frau!”

“Whom do I have the honour to meet?” she enquires, tentatively
extending a stiffly formal hand.

On a level with him, she finds his figure less impressive than
when he was on horseback. Stockier, more fleshy, his legs somewhat
too short for the heavy torso; and sweating copiously. Even so the
khaki uniform with its many braids and brass accessories makes him
seem a splendid specimen of imperial manhood.

“Colonel von Blixen,” he says, pressing sun-blistered lips to
her knuckles.

His company is on its way back from Namaland, he informs her. He
is happy to say that behind them lies an appeased land. There
should be nothing more to fear from that direction. But his men are
exhausted. Some refreshment would be in order. He glances up at the
windows thronged with female bodies. Some entertainment too. If
what they have heard about this admirable establishment is
true.

“We keep a decent German house,” says Frau Knesebeck, pursing
her lips. But it may well be accompanied, to the keen and possibly
wishful observer, by the hint of a wink.

“We shall abide by all the rules of gentlemanly behaviour,” he
assures her. His wink is less ambiguous.

“We lead frugal lives here,” she informs him. “We do not have an
abundance of victuals at the ready.” Noticing a narrowing of his
eyes she hastens to add, “But what we have is at Your Excellency’s
disposal.”

“Once back in Windhoek,” he says with a gesture of magnanimity,
“we shall arrange to make good to you whatever my men consume
today. Tenfold.”

Frau Knesebeck makes a few quick calculations before she turns
to her staff to give her own instructions. Six goats will be
slaughtered, and any number of chickens. From the garden an
abundance of vegetables will be brought in.

A foreign fever spreads through the corridors and recesses of
the building as the women begin to make preparations for the feast
while the men take charge of roasting the meat over large bonfires
from the woodpiles outside the kitchen. From a distance, covered in
ochre dust which leaves only eyes and mouths exposed, the prisoners
stare in abject apathy. Two guards with sjamboks keep moving slowly
along the rows to deal with anyone tempted to topple over from
fatigue, hunger or pain. Before the afternoon is out, two bodies
will be dragged off some distance from the house and left exposed
to the predators that have been following them at a judicious
distance over the last few days.

The soldiers eat outside. The officers are served at the long
refectory table set in the middle of one of the seldom-used
reception rooms on the first floor of the residence. Because very
little light intrudes through the tall narrow windows – the whole
place appears to have been designed from the need to shut out as
much as possible of the outside world – there are chandeliers on
the table and erratically flaming torches in brackets on the bare
walls, lending a medieval, unreal aspect to the place. Frau
Knesebeck is seated at one narrow end of the table, Colonel von
Blixen at the other. Huddled against the surrounding walls, visibly
torn between fascination and terror, are the thirty or forty female
inmates, peremptorily summoned by the mistress of the house, ogling
the excesses of the meal and the men partaking of it. They range
from what seems like toothless crones (although it is doubtful that
there is anyone above fifty) down to the barely nubile Katja. The
girl is squeezed in between Hanna X and a squint-eyed youngish
woman, Gerda Kayser, a comparatively recent arrival, whose face has
been ravaged by smallpox. There is a constant flow of movement up
and down along the broad stone staircase (where much later, in the
night, Hanna X will drag her victim downstairs, thud thud thud) as
the women on the staff carry off used plates to the kitchen and
return with new laden dishes. Frau Knesebeck has had brandy brought
up from the cellar. Very few of the inhabitants of Frauenstein have
even been aware that such a supply is hoarded there. It must date
back to the early, half-forgotten years of the place, presumably
transported from Windhoek or perhaps Luderitz on one of the wagons
which still, a few times a year, traverse the desert with
provisions Frauenstein cannot produce on its own – salt and sugar,
oil and vinegar, coffee, paraffin and lanterns, small quantities of
chewing tobacco, medicaments, shoes and clothing, needles and wool
and reels of cotton, cutlery and crockery, occasionally paper and
ink and pens for records and registers which are supposed to be
kept although it is hardly ever done, bales and bolts of chintz or
cheesecloth or sheeting, some basic farming implements. (From time
to time there is some official error which results in large
quantities of unexpected and unnecessary items being dumped in the
yard: once a whole wagon-load of porcelain pisspots, once a pile of
army uniforms, once a mountain of left shoes, a consignment of
sheep-shears, a supply of pickaxe handles intended for a mine in
Otavi or Otjiwarongo. So, too, presumably, once, the superfluity of
brandy.)