The Other Side of Silence (5 page)

As the meal progresses and the spirits flow more and more
copiously, the officers grow steadily more rowdy. Some resort to
eating with their hands, tearing meat from bones with their teeth;
glasses and plates are broken; brandy is gulped directly from the
bottles which continue to be brought up from the dark bowels of the
building. And judging by their ever more irresponsible comportment
several of the serving women must also be partaking of the liquid
fire as they shuttle along an increasingly unpredictable route
between cellar and dining hall. Frau Knesebeck’s mouth resembles
more and more the rear end of a fowl as Colonel von Blixen’s
gestures, accompanying his account of exploits on and off the field
of battle, become more recklessly expansive and more
precarious.

Here and there on the long sides of the table the general
carousing erupts in raucous song; among members of conflicting
groups of singers scuffles break out. More crockery is smashed, no
longer in exuberance but in anger. Colonel von Blixen rises to his
feet, steadies himself on his long arms, and thunders a long
command ending in a string of verbs. Escorted by four more senior
officers, the gang leaders in the brawl are ordered out. Stripped
of the insignia of their ranks, they will accompany the
footsoldiers outside on the resumption of their march. For a short
while, under the scorching stare of their commander, the men
remaining at the long table fall silent as they attempt, with
varying degrees of success, to pour the next round of brandy in the
abandoned glasses. The escorting officers return up the broad
staircase, two of them on all fours.

“It is time to drink our toasts,” announces the colonel, who
appears to have forgotten that they have already done so.

The officers rise with studied dignity. Three toasts are
proposed and drunk. To their gracious hostesses. To the high
command in Windhoek. To His Imperial Majesty, Kaiser Wilhelm II in
Berlin.

“We shall now proceed with the enjoyment of the other delicacies
so graciously put at our disposal,” announces Colonel von
Blixen.

He pushes out his chair, takes a moment to steady himself with
his hands on the high back, and begins to move in slow measured
strides towards the nearest cluster of women against the wall. He
stops to wipe his perspiring forehead with a large kerchief drawn,
not without effort, from his pocket. Beaming the goodwill of the
conqueror, he raises the chin of the first woman, briefly studies
her face, moves on to the next.

“Herr Oberst,” says Frau Knesebeck, rising hesitantly at the far
end of the table.

He pays no attention. By the time he reaches the fifth or sixth
woman his comportment has become more brazen. He no longer merely
lifts a head or a hand or pinches an earlobe but palpates a breast,
tweaks a nipple, forces a knuckle between the lips of the woman in
front of him. The tweaks become fiercer as he moves on. One woman
moans lightly in pain. He raises his other hand to pinch both
nipples. This time she makes no sound, but her face grows very
white. When he comes to the twelfth woman he orders her to turn
round and fondles her buttocks, grunts, moves on. At the next he
grips with both hands the high collar of her dark dress and rips it
open, exposing her breasts. In a reflex movement the woman tries to
cover them with her hands. Von Blixen slaps her very hard across
the face.

“Herr Oberst,” says Frau Knesebeck.

The woman drops her hands, looking down at the floor.

The commander moves on and on. Soon he no longer bothers to tear
open the shirts or dresses in front of him, but barks brief
commands at the women to do it themselves. It becomes boring. He
returns to the table, refills the empty glass at his place, drains
it in a single gulp, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand,
resumes his inspection. They are now ordered to raise their skirts
and remove their underwear, some with their backs turned to him,
others facing him. He glances at their lower bellies, tugs at pubic
hair, inserts a finger in a vulva, withdraws it in disgust when he
discovers that the woman is menstruating. As is the next, and the
next.

“Herr Oberst,” pleads Frau Knesebeck.

“Gottverdammt!” snarls von Blixen. He turns back to the table,
instructs his officers to complete the inspection on his behalf.
They draw blood every time. The colonel contents himself by
finishing his round at some distance from the inmates lining the
walls, merely glancing in passing at the odd face that appears
briefly to interest him and gesturing to the nearest officer to
sample her more intimately. More blood.

It is only when he reaches the girl Katja that the colonel comes
to a standstill.

“You,” he says. “Come here.”

Katja tries to slide behind Hanna X.

“Come here!” he shouts, so loudly that some of the women exclaim
in fright.

The trembling girl approaches a pace or two. He beckons her with
a finger. She stands in front of him.

“Now, girl,” he says. “No need to be afraid.” With surprising
gentleness, almost fatherly, he takes her face between his hands
and leans over to kiss her on the forehead. “Was this so bad?” he
asks.

“No.” She manages to force a little smile.

“And this?” Von Blixen takes her by the shoulders – such thin
shoulders, the blades behind protruding like incipient wings. He
presses her slight body against him, still with a show of tender
care.

She seems briefly to overcome her fear, even leans her head
against his shoulder.

“Show me your tits,” he says.

“I don’t have any,” she whispers. Coyly, archly, ashamed,
terrified? It is hard to tell.

“Herr Oberst,” says Frau Knesebeck.

“I’ll take this one,” he says, grasping the girl by the
hand.

Hanna X makes a deep sound of protest in her throat.

There is a general low-key commotion among the women, inmates
and staff alike.

“Silence!” shouts the colonel. His face is once again shiny with
perspiration. It even glistens among the bristles between the
joints on his fingers. He is still grasping Katja’s narrow hand in
his free hand. For another moment he glowers at the assembled
women, then turns towards the nearest door, pulling the girl after
him.

“I’m sorry, Herr Oberst,” says Frau Knesebeck. Suddenly
resolute, she leaves the table and hurries past the colonel to
block his way to the door. “You cannot take this girl. She is in
our special care.”

“Stand aside!” he bellows.

The small woman hesitates for a moment, then shakes her head.
“I’m afraid she is here under a special dispensation.”

“From whom?” he asks. “What difference does it make?”

She stands her ground. “We have instructions from the chief
commanding officer of the German army in the colony,
Oberbefehlshaber Dame himself,” she informs him without batting an
eyelid.

He stares at her in silence, then looks down at the girl. “Is
that true?” In sudden rage he shakes her the way a dog tussles with
a rag.

Katja merely whimpers.

Von Blixen faces his hostess again. “I don’t believe you,” he
says, but his voice has lost some of its assurance.

“I have instructions to report directly to Governor von
Lindequist,” says Frau Knesebeck calmly. “If anything happens to
this girl, who is Oberbefehlshaber Dame’s niece, you will have to
answer to him.”

∨
The Other Side of Silence
∧

F
or what must be a
full minute Colonel von Blixen stares piercingly into the eyes of
his small hostess before he abruptly turns away from the girl,
heads for the nearest woman, grabs her by the elbow and snarls,
“Come!” On his way out he snatches a full bottle of brandy from the
long table in his free hand.

Katja blunders back to Hanna X, who puts her arms around the
shaking girl and presses her against her own body. The other
officers give them a wide berth, eddying past them like a stream
past a boulder, each claiming a woman – prey or trophy – whom he
drags off through the nearest doorway into the vast and various
spaces beyond. Without deigning to cast another look at the girl,
Frau Knesebeck turns to the members of her staff who are thronging
in the doorway to the staircase. “What are you waiting for?” she
asks. “There is all this mess to clear away.”

Throughout the interminable hours of the afternoon the place
rings and shudders with the sounds of the men on their rampage as
they go about their business. The walls reverberate with cursing
and shouting, the screams of women, the crashing and thundering of
furniture and utensils being smashed – beds and chairs, pitchers
and ewers, pisspots, mirrors and window panes, doors, chests. In
her own sparsely furnished room Hanna sits on her narrow bed,
straight-backed and quiet, stroking the thin shoulders of the girl
who is lying beside her, half asleep, whimpering occasionally like
a dreaming puppy. From time to time the din appears to the down,
then suddenly flares up again, moving from one part of the building
to the next, up and down the stairs, spilling outside through doors
or windows, then sweeping back. But at last the worst of the rage
seems to have spent itself. From the yard come the first sounds of
horses being saddled and readied to resume the journey.

That is when the door is violently thrown open and a man comes
staggering across the threshold of Hanna’s room. It is Colonel von
Blixen.

“Ah!” he exclaims, steadying himself against the doorpost. “I
have been looking for you all over the place. You juicy little
bitch!”

The girl struggles up through the confused remains of dreams.
Hanna puts a hand on her hip. She appears calm, but her body is
very tense.

“Come here,” says the colonel. In his red face the grin appears
like a gash. There are smudges of blood on his uniform, and on his
hands.

Katja shakes her head.

“Come here!” he thunders.

Hanna X draws the girl closer to her side.

The officer is clearly blind drunk, and now apoplectic with
fury. He stumbles as he tries to approach, manages to get hold of
one of the bedposts, stands swaying for a moment, then lunges
towards the women.

Hanna X tries to move in between him and the girl but in the
power of his rage he simply sweeps her out of the way, sending her
sprawling on the floor.

“You heard what Frau Knesebeck said,” whispers Katja.

“To hell with her. To hell with Oberbefehlshaber Dame.”

Hanna comes to her feet, stroking into place the kappie with
which she habitually covers her face. She makes a sound, but he
doesn’t even turn his head.

“Come here,” he tells the girl again. They can both smell him
now. The drunk, the soldier who has marched through the desert for
days, maybe weeks, and who has been fucking and vomiting his way
through the labyrinthine afternoon.

This time, as if mesmerised, Katja does obey.

“That’s a good girl,” approves von Blixen. He stretches both
arms out, stiffly, with fierce concentration, and places them on
her breasts. The girl goes red in me face, but she appears too
scared to move.

“Blood,” he says, and spits on the floor. “All these miserable
women, bleeding, it’s like a bloody slaughterhouse. But you are too
young for that, I’m sure. It’s you I want.”

He slides one hand down the front of her body and cups it over
her pubis, grunting with satisfaction.

Several things happen at the same time. The girl jerks away from
his grasp, loses her balance against the edge of the bed and falls
on her back, her legs kicking briefly. “I
am
bleeding,” she
screams at him. “I’m bleeding like all the others.”

Hanna X removes the kappie from her head to expose her face.

And right then Frau Knesebeck speaks from the doorway, “Herr
Oberst.”

Colonel von Blixen reacts as if he has been struck by a snake.
What ultimately shatters him – the girl’s taunt, Hanna X’s face, or
Frau Knesebeck’s appearance – they will never know. But without a
word the military man draws himself up, squares his shoulders, and
marches out. They hear him all the way down the great staircase.
The front door slams. Outside there are sounds of men and horses.
Hooves trotting off, growing ever fainter in the distance. The
interminable silence of the desert reimposes itself.

“Make yourself proper,” Frau Knesebeck curtly tells the
girl.

Katja gets up and straightens the dress which has rucked up in
her fall. Hanna X puts on her kappie again. The mistress of
Frauenstein leaves, closing the door behind her with a firm, quiet
click.

It is only several hours later, after night has fallen and the
girl has gone back to her own room, that the colonel returns,
unaccompanied, shaking in a silent inner rage that will not subside
before he has vented everything that has been building up for so
long.

Frauenstein is quiet. The dark has restored, a curious bitter
innocence to the place. The sad innocence of an orphanage when all
the ordinary diurnal sounds have drained from it.

∨
The Other Side of Silence
∧

S
ounds do not
disappear, not ever, not really. Hanna knows this even when she is
very small. What happens when they appear to fade away, like the
sounds of the bell from the square, particularly at night, is that
they grow very small in order to fit into a hiding place where they
cannot readily be found by those who do not know how to listen. A
small round place like a shell. This is what she discovers on the
narrow grey beach of the Weser opposite the Europahafen one day
when the girls of the Little Children of Jesus are taken on an
outing by Frau Agathe. The day is gloomy and cold, but the river
entrances her. Not for itself but because she knows it runs to the
sea, which she has never seen, except in her dreams. And perhaps in
her lost life before she was left at the orphanage, a life of which
she remembers only brief unconnected flashes – one of which is of
the sea, its sounds and smells, its white waves breaking. The sea
is a place of miracles and magic. It goes all the way from
Bremerhaven to the other side of the world, where the wind comes
from, and where the palm trees of the Children’s Bible grow
and camels come by and the sun always shines. It is not cold and
grey like here beside the Weser in Bremen, but an endless warmth.
One can be naked in it and feel the sun on one’s body, it turns you
golden brown all over. Here in the orphanage, to be naked is very
bad. There is the little girl, Helga, who is new and stays in bed
all day crying, so Hanna crawls in beside her and they take off
their shifts to be closer together, and Helga’s sadness disappears
and her own as well, but then Frau Agathe finds them together and
it turns out that their badness is so bad that it is not enough for
Frau Agathe to punish them, they have to be taken all the way up
the street, both still bare as small skinned fruit, to the
parsonage to be dealt with. That is where Pastor Ulrich awaits
them, enormously round and fat, his moon-shaped red face beaded
with sweat, the front of his black waistcoat stained by the past
week’s meals – egg yolk and cabbage and beetroot and meat and gravy
– his large soft hands resting on his stomach. In his high-pitched
voice he tells them that their nakedness is evil, a sin never-ever
to be forgiven. In future he will summon Hanna every Sunday after
church for an account of her sins during the week, and every week
he will insist on finding out for himself – he can feel with his
fat hand – if she has sinned again. And he will pinch her there,
viciously squeezing the little lips together until they’re bruised
and sometimes blood-blistered. The sound of his voice, like the
sounds of the great bell and of the oxen bellowing at the abattoir
to which they’re driven right past the orphanage in the
Hutfilterstrasse, all those sounds shrink and grow very small in
order to hide away. The same happens with good sounds. Like the
sounds on midwinter day when everyone goes out in their brightest
clothes, except for the orphan girls who wear grey, to skate on the
frozen Weser. Everyone, even the very old who can no longer walk by
themselves, but who can somehow still skate if they’re put down on
the ice upright, every single person in the town is there; there is
such a crowd, Hanna is convinced that even those who have been dead
for years must have come out to join them; and the noise they make
mingles into one huge sound like the blast of the trombone in the
brass band that plays on the Rathausplatz on holidays, and then it
grows smaller and smaller until it can fit into that secret space
of the shell she brings home from the grey pebbly beach of the
Weser that day.