The Other Side of Silence (8 page)

Hanna lies with closed eyes and lets the words of the old woman
wash over her like bright cool water. Xurisib, says Taras, was so
vain that she even scorned the flowers that covered the earth after
the good god Tsui-Goab had sent his rains. “They don’t last,” she
said. “Tomorrow they shrivel up and die, but my beauty will never
wither.” All the people warned her, warned her, but Xurisib
wouldn’t listen. Then Tsui-Goab himself came to her in the shape of
a mantis in a small bush that burned and burned and burned without
burning itself out. “You give me great pain, Xurisib,” he said to
the girl. “It is I who make those flowers come out after the rains,
I am the giver of all good things.”

But Xurisib laughed proudly and shook her head and her breasts
quivered and her bangles sang. “I don’t need your flowers,” she
said, “and I don’t need you. My beauty is all I’ll ever want.” Then
Tsui-Goab grew very sad and he went away, and Namaland became the
dry place it is now. The rivers dried up and the trees died and the
reeds withered and the voice of the birds grew silent, and all that
was left was white sand and red sand and long thorns that scraped
her legs. When Xurisib went back to her village, she found her
people packing up their possessions to trek away, taking all the
young men with them too. The girl wanted to go with them, but the
headman wouldn’t let her because he said there was a curse on her
head. From that day on the Nama people have never stayed in one
place. Always, always, always they are on the move. Xurisib stayed
behind, and her skin became as dry as the husk shaken off by a
snake, and her black hair turned grey, and in no time at all she
was an old hag of a woman. She lay down on the ground to die. That
was when the mantis came back to her and said from the burning
bush, “Xurisib, your life is over. But if you say my name I shall
take away my curse.” And softly, softly, softly, Xurisib whispered
the name of the god. And where the sounds of her voice fell,
flowers sprouted from the parched earth. Again and again she said
his name, “Tsui-Goab, Tsui-Goab, Tsui-Goab,” until with her last
breath she was shouting so loudly that the koppies in the distance
reverberated with the sound. And the rains came, and the veld was
covered in flowers from horizon to horizon, and Xurisib became a
young girl again, with a shining face and firm breasts and strong
legs and beautiful hands, and she danced the dance of the rain.

The voice of the wizened old woman turns into a chant, and some
of the other women join in:

“Oh the dance of our Sister!

First she peeps over the hilltop, slyly,

and her eyes are shy;

and she laughs softly.

Then, from afar, she beckons with one hand;

her bangles glitter and her beads shimmer;

softly she calls.

She tells the winds about the dance

and invites them too, for the yard is wide and the
wedding great.

♦

The big game come surging from the plains,

they gather on the hilltop,

their nostrils are spread wide

and they swallow the wind;

and they bend down to see her delicate tracks in the
sand.

The small creatures deep below can hear the rustle of
her feet,

and they draw closer, singing softly:

“Our Sister, our Sister! You have come! You have
come!”

♦

And her beads dangle,

and her copper rings glimmer in the dying of the
sun.

Her forehead bears the fire-plume of the mountain
eagle;

she steps down from up high;

she spreads the grey kaross in both her arms;

the breath of the wind dies down.

Oh the dance of our Sister!”

There is a long pause. Then the old woman resumes, “A few days
later the flowers began to fade and shrivel up and die, and Xurisib
quietly died with them. And from that day,” she says, “if the rains
come in Namaland and you listen very carefully, you will hear in
the far-off thunder the voice of Xurisib calling out, ‘Tsui-Goab!
Tsui-Goab! Tsui-Goab!’ And then we know the land will live
again.”

Story upon story, through days and nights, to while away the
time, to make Hanna forget, to ease memory. For everything she sees
or hears, everything silent or moving around the tentative
settlement – casually shaped huts of rush and straw mats or skins
laid on a latticework of bent branches – there is a story;
sometimes various stories about the same object or event, stone or
thorn tree, birth or death. No koppie or rock or aloe or
quiver-tree or dried-up river bed or dust devil or erosion ditch or
limestone ridge is without its divinity, benevolent or evil; all of
it gathered in an eternal battle between the good god Tsui-Goab who
lives in the red sky, and the devilish Gaunab who lives in the
black sky.

When Hanna raises her hands to question what it all means, old
Taras smiles and answers with a question of her own, “How is your
pain?” And Hanna nods, to indicate that she is feeling better. And
Taras says, “That is what stories are for.”

Sometimes she forgets to listen to the words and submits herself
only to the flow of the language, the rhythms and repetitions and
cadences, even in the old woman’s halting and garbled German –
Dann liefen sie, dann liefen sie. Sie treckten, treckten,
treckten: Then they walked and they walked, then they trekked,
trekked, trekked
…– the pure and intricate music of the
stories.

Or she listens to the Namas talking among themselves in their
own tongue. All those complicated clicks. Sometimes she opens her
silent mouth to imitate the movements of theirs, but gives it up.
How can she ever converse with them? It is not just the loss of her
tongue which forces her into silence, but knowing that there is
nothing in the language she has brought with her which could
conceivably say what she would so urgently wish to articulate. The
things of this place, this space, in words not yet contaminated by
others, or by other places. But that is impossible. Words bring
their own past and their own dark geography with them, she thinks.
Theirs are different. She listens intently when Taras patiently
repeats them, as to a dull-witted child. Khanous, the evening star;
sobo khoin
, people of the shadows, ghosts;
sam-sam
,
peace;
torob
, war. The names of animals:
t’kanna, kbmob,
t’kaoop, nawas, t’kwu
. Words that shut her out and turn their
backs on her.

When at last Hanna is persuaded to take a few hesitant steps
outside – first supported on the arms of women, later by herself –
she is almost scared to set down her feet, for fear that it will
not be the earth she feels under her soles but stories, live and
hidden beings, natural and supernatural in turn, or at the same
time.

∨
The Other Side of Silence
∧

T
he whole Nama tribe
– fifty or sixty of them, men, women and children – accompany Hanna
X when at last she is ready to be taken to Frauenstein. And they
walk, walk, walk, they trek and trek through a landscape of
stories, until the strange unworldly edifice rises up from the
horizon.

On their approach they pass sprawling vegetable gardens,
surprising in this desert; and what appears like a desiccated patch
of the garden, some distance apart, but which must be a graveyard.
It is surrounded by a low wall, irregularly stacked. However, there
are no headstones. Each of the graves, of which there may be a good
fifty or so, in straight rows, has a crude wooden cross at one end,
but these bear no inscription. There are no flowers either, no sign
that anyone has bothered to tend the place and keep it in some
order. The last row is not completed, but the remaining three or
four graves in it have already been dug and are loosely covered
with old weathered planks, with mounds of earth heaped up beside
them, patiently waiting to receive whoever may be coming their
way.

The small band of Namas hesitate for a while to inspect the site
which seems so much less permanent than the burial cairns their
people have raised across the barren land to commemorate their own
dead and the many deaths of their hunter-god Heiseb – on the way
here they have passed no fewer than three. After some time they
press on towards the towering structure of stone.

A woman in a drab dress opens the huge front door to their
knocking. She takes a step back when she sees the black people
massed outside, but as she prepares to shut it in their faces she
notices the white woman among them – blistered from the sun,
haggard, her face mutilated – and hesitates.

“What do you want?” she asks.

“We brought a woman we found in the desert,” says the leader of
the tribe, whose name is Xareb.

“Why did you come here? Why didn’t you take her to Windhoek?”
asks the woman.

“They tell us this is a place for women,” says the man.

The woman turns to Hanna X in horror. “What have they done to
you?”

Hanna merely shrugs, a hopeless gesture.

It is Xareb who turns to her and motions her to open her mouth.
When she hesitates he does it for her, his sharp fingers pressing
into her hollow cheeks. She moans with pain; the wound through
which her teeth are visible has not quite healed yet. An angry
altercation between Xareb and old Taras erupts in their Nama
tongue.

“Wait,” the woman at the door says quickly and hurries into the
dark interior, then comes back to close the door.

It takes a long time before Frau Knesebeck makes her appearance,
flanked by several members of her staff. Two of them have guns,
although from the way they are holding them it seems doubtful
whether they know how to use them. There follows a near-endless
discussion between Xareb and Frau Knesebeck, during which Hanna is
once again required to open her mouth.

Then another wait in front of the closed front door. Some of the
children are getting restless. There are many flies about them.
Cicadas are shrilling ear-splittingly. The sun is right
overhead.

When Frau Knesebeck returns she is accompanied by the four women
who were on the wagon with Hanna X.

“My God!” exclaims one of them. It is Dora, the young one who
tended her in her delirium. “We thought you were dead.”

“So you know her?” Frau Knesebeck asks unnecessarily.

All four vociferously confirm it; then appear to be ashamed by
the admission and try to retreat out of reach.

“You never said anything about another woman,” Frau Knesebeck
challenges them.

“We lost her in the desert,” says Dora. “She was already more
dead than alive. There was nothing we could do for her. And the
soldiers who came with us…”

“What about them?”

A pause. “They said they didn’t want trouble.”

Frau Knesebeck snorts with contempt. She comes a step towards
Hanna. “Come inside. You are in need of care. One shudders to think
what happened to you among these savages.”

Hanna makes a sound, raises an arm in futile protest, then
meekly comes forward.

“We looked after her,” Xareb argues in anger.

“You?!” Frau Knesebeck waves dismissively at them. “A white
woman, a German woman, in
your
hands!” Annoyed,
businesslike, she takes Hanna by the shoulder and pulls her across
the threshold. “Now get away from here, or there will be big
trouble. All of you.”

Xareb stands his ground. “We need food.”

“You are a no-good filthy lot!” says Frau Knesebeck in an icy
rage.

The heavy door is flung shut. The sound reverberates through the
dark building which feels dank even in midsummer. Outside there are
voices raised in anger, the crying of children. Then silence.

“We shall have to bath you first,” says Frau Knesebeck. “God
knows what vermin you are infected with.” Orders are given; women
hurry off to draw and boil water. They wait for a long time, to
make sure that the Namas have vanished into the dull drabness of
the desert, a mirage among mirages, the trickery of memory. Then
Hanna is taken out through the front door again and round the house
to the back: they cannot risk having the whole place infected
before she has been thoroughly scrubbed and washed and cleaned.

It must be at least an hour before Hanna has been painfully
ridden of all possible contamination, given a shift to cover the
shame of her broken, scarred body, and taken upstairs to a room. It
must have been standing closed for a long time, because it smells
overpoweringly of dry rot and decay.

“We shall pray for your soul,” announces Frau Knesebeck. “Only
God could have brought you alive through the ordeal with those
savage scavengers.” Hanna raises, again, a hand in protest, but is
stopped by the formidable small woman in front of her. She takes a
deep breath. “Unless it was the Devil.” But grimly she resolves,
“When we are through with you, Fraulein, you will be cleansed like
a newborn babe. In the meantime we shall communicate with
Windhoek.”

How the communication is effected, Hanna will never learn.
Possibly through a
smous
who happens to turn up at
Frauenstein three days later.

What she does get to know, about a month later, is the outcome
of the enterprise. A small detachment of soldiers arrives at
Frauenstein (Hanna, scared out of her wits, hides in an attic when
she first sees them) to report that they have undertaken a punitive
expedition to track down the malefactors. Deep in the desert they
surrounded the tribe who had abducted and terrorised the woman
taken from the transport wagon, and killed the lot of them – men,
women and children all. “We cannot allow this to be done to our
women,” concludes the victorious commander; and his words are
faithfully transmitted by Frau Knesebeck herself, to Hanna; who
reacts by vomiting.

For ever after this news will be impregnated with the smell of
the kitchen where she learns about it after she has been dislodged
from the attic. The smell of cabbage soup. The smell of the
orphanage.