Read The Other Side of Silence Online
Authors: André Brink
Not for a moment does the pain abate. It is like a body of
liquid in which she has been immersed. Pain, God, pain. Why didn’t
she die? Surely no sin can be so terrible as to deserve this. Can
they not simply leave her behind here to die? It should be so easy.
But no death so far has been strong enough to take her. On and on,
the pain goes on. On and on, they go on.
With every jolt of the wagon she feels diminished, eroded,
dismantled, bone by bone. She is no longer who she is, nor who she
ever was, only what she may be, a mere possibility of herself,
circumscribed by pain.
There might have been some comfort to be drawn from her shell;
but that has been lost somewhere along the way, possibly during the
ordeal on the train. Such a small thing, but not having it marks
the difference between memory and blankness, a possibility of hope
and the certainty of despair.
Almost imperceptibly the wagon creeps through the vast landscape
under the malignant sun. Occasionally they espy a tortoise, a
blue-headed lizard on a flat brown rock, a gemsbok in the distance
with heraldic horns; or birds. Quail fluttering up, screeching,
when the oxen come too close; small freckled partridges; sometimes
the specks of vultures drifting with wide wings on invisible
currents of air. Once, miraculously, a flight of storks with
black-tipped wings and beaks dipped in blood. She recognises them.
At the end of summer she used to see them gathering on trees and
rooftops in Bremen before they took off. ‘To the south’. That was
what people said. No one could be more specific. To the south. And
now here they are. This must be the summer south. For a moment a
strange elation fills her. She, too, has migrated like a bird.
Perhaps she too will learn to fly. But the mere thought makes her
dizzy. The white sun blinds her. Perhaps she has imagined it. This
is a country of the imagination. There are mirages on the horizon,
great lakes which shimmer in the heat and disappear as suddenly as
they have appeared. A beach with palm trees waving in the breeze,
upside down. Children playing on the sand, she can see the
colourful patches of their clothes against the glare. She has
another blackout. But the visions persist. A small black-haired
blue-eyed elfin girl. A sudden donkey, a dog, a cat, a rooster with
outrageous plumage. She can hear them bray and bark and meow and
crow. And then she blacks out again.
When she wakes up there is no change in the landscape. It is as
empty as before – emptier, because the brief creatures have
disappeared – as empty as the world must have been just after God
had said,
Let there be light
, and before there was anything
else. Or perhaps this is the ultimate fulfilment of creation, this
desert. The solid earth liquefying at the edges, melting into the
sky. Its nothingness is complete. It requires nothing else, it is
what it is, no more, no less, this sky, this earth, this glorious
emptiness full of itself. God has withdrawn from it before his
supreme failure, man, could leave an imprint here. The only
redundancy is this wagon with its labouring trundling beasts, its
accompaniment of men, its huddling women, she, Hanna X. Without
them, without her, the landscape would be perfect.
To all sides it stretches out to meet the smouldering hollow of
the sky. It undulates very gently. Like the sea on the equator. It
is endless as the sea. Again she abandons herself to the motion.
She is on the open deck. There is no one else. And suddenly she
knows what she has to do. At last she will have peace, world
without end. So easy. Why hasn’t she thought of it before? Just
move to the railing, lean over, one small heave, and over she goes,
a falling, and a falling, a falling into nothingness, she will not
even try to swim or come up for air, sinking, sinking, through all
the layers of pain, into a deep oblivion, a susurration, fading,
fading, as she dies at last.
T
here is a kind of
punishment in the orphanage which Hanna actually comes to enjoy,
although she takes great care never to let on, otherwise they will
devise something else. It consists of being ordered to spend hours,
sometimes a whole afternoon, sitting on a hard bench at one of the
long bare dining tables, reading the Bible. Afterwards she has to
give an account of what she has read to Frau Agathe. For a long
time she hates it, because the Bible is the book of the people who
most terrorise her, stalking her even in her dreams. But then she
discovers the good stories. And gradually she finds ones she likes
more than the others. Mostly, they concern women who in one way or
another cheat or charm or fight or wangle their way out of
adversity. There is Ruth, poor and miserable, gleaning the field –
whatever that might mean – of the rich man Boaz; until one night
she crawls under his blanket with him and makes him notice her, so
that he decides to marry her. (A rather silly story, she finds, as
a matter of fact, but at least it got Ruth out of her misery.) And
the shrewd Esther who marries King Ahasuerus after he has callously
rejected his wife Vasthi, and then uses her power to promote her
friends and punish her enemies. And of course the fabulous Salome
who dances her way into the heart of King Herod and persuades him
to give her the head of John the Baptist on a plate; a rather nasty
one that, but how else could the girl have had her way?
There are others that bring a glow of deep and dark
satisfaction. The sister of Moses who deceives the daughter of
Pharaoh to save the life of her little brother. Tamar, who tricks
her father-in-law into sleeping with her so that she can unmask him
as the hypocritical lord-and-master he really is. Hagar, rejected
by the man who used her upon the wicked advice of his old wife
Sarah, and then saved by an angel in the desert. The daughters of
Lot who make their father drunk and lie with him so that their
tribe won’t die out. (Hanna is not quite sure about how lying with
a man can lead to the survival of a tribe, but somehow it seems a
shrewd way of getting what they want.) Deborah who becomes a judge
over the whole of her nation and leads the armies of Barak against
the enemy Sisera. And Jael who cajoles that same fearsome man,
Sisera, into accepting some milk to quench his thirst, after which
she covers him with a blanket and puts him to sleep in her tent,
and hammers a long nail through his temples, pinning him to the
ground. Good for her. And Delilah who betrays the savage,
swaggering Samson to her people and makes him pay for the many men
he has battered to death with the jawbone of an ass. And on and on,
through all those gold-rimmed pages, to the triumphant vision of
the woman arrayed in purple and scarlet colour and sitting on a
scarlet coloured beast, with seven heads and ten horns: now that,
Hanna thinks, is how she would like to ride through the streets of
Bremen one day, accompanied by all the great bells of the
cathedral.
I
have never been
able to understand why the wagon did not stop, or turn back. Even
if Hanna X’s absence was discovered only later, surely the most
obvious reaction would have been to retrace the route as far as was
necessary. Or can it be that they did indeed turn around but
finding her motionless gave her up for dead and moved on again? But
wouldn’t they at least have made an attempt to bury her, even if it
consisted merely of covering the body with stones or dry branches?
Then again, there may have been so little communication between the
women on the wagon and their drivers and escorts that the loss
wasn’t discovered before they arrived at Frauenstein – and by the
time they returned the body would have disappeared; nothing unusual
about that, given the prevalence of scavengers. But what about her
female companions then? Or were they so deeply sunk in their own
abjection that they didn’t notice, or didn’t care? Even so, we know
that at least one of them, the young one, used to be concerned
enough to look after Hanna from time to time – unless she preferred
not to attract undue attention after the fact. A most irritating
mystery, and not the only one in this story. Hanna X, forever
hiding behind the trite symbol of the unknown.
She doesn’t die, of course, even if to her it seems so at the
time. When she comes to – hours later? days? she doesn’t know, it
doesn’t matter – she is with a group of Nama people at their place
in the desert. Her first thought as she struggles from darkness
back to light, through many tiers of pain and dizziness, is that it
must be an orphanage concert and that everyone is in fancy dress.
Though ‘fancy’ makes a mockery of the weird blend of clothing and
ornaments they are wearing: roughly sewn caps of lynx or musk-cat
skin, but also wide hats with ostrich or pheasant feathers stuck to
the brim; some shirts and skirts, but also strings of shell-beads
or the bunched tails of jackals or zebras; a few jackets, but also
ample karosses made of the pelts of dassies or gazelles; moleskin
trousers, but also skimpy skin aprons to cover their shameful
parts. A few of the men have guns, others bows and arrows. The
women are naked to the waist, exhibiting breasts ranging from
pubescent buds to the dugs of old crones, empty folds of skin
sagging down to their wrinkled bellies, nipples like the scaly
heads of lizards.
They are all chattering in what sounds like the twittering of
birds, with strange clicks and sibilants and gutturals; but when
they discover that she has opened her eyes some of them approach
excitedly and start addressing her in broken German, which they
must have learned from the occupiers of their land. Hanna can only
shake her head. When they persist, she reluctantly opens her mouth
and points inside at the absence of a tongue. Exclamations of shock
and surprise and what may be sympathy. But even this small effort
has so exhausted her that she sinks back into oblivion, though she
is aware of hands lifting her head and a calabash pressed against
her aching mouth and some sour, smelly, curdled liquid forced down
her throat. Pain, pain.
Still, she must be getting better. The dark intervals become
shorter. The returns to painful lucidity last longer, her thoughts
grow more coherent, memory filters back. She would still prefer to
be dead, and helplessly resents these people for not allowing her
to die in peace. But the pain, she notices almost against her will,
the pain is slowly dulling, ebbing, fading, no longer – or not
always – as overwhelming as it was.
When she feels a warm wetness between her thighs and tests it
with a finger she discovers that her bleeding has begun – the old
bleeding from inside, not the bleeding of the wounds. Some of the
women, the oldest ones, draw her legs apart to stanch it with tufts
of grass; she can hear them clicking their tongues, tsk-tsk, as
they stare at the mutilation of her sex. Only now does the
nightmare on the train come back to her, and she retches at the
memory. First there was her face. Then her mouth forced open, a
piece of wood wedged between her teeth to give access to her
tongue. Choking in blood. And then her nipples cut off. The viscous
chicken-livers of her labia excised. Oh God, oh God. Give me a
knife, she thinks, let me kill myself, how can you let me live like
this? I am no longer a woman, a human being, I am a thing.
What would Pastor Ulrich say if he could see her now? She groans
and grimaces. The Devil’s hiding place, he used to call it. After
what has happened to her on the train, how innocent his probings
and pinchings and furtive fondlings seem now. But then the bitter
bile rises up in her. The women have to keep her down with force.
She tries to shout,
No!
but no recognisable sound gurgles
from her throat. There was nothing innocent about that, she thinks
in rage as the futile tears of her anger run down her burning
cheeks. There may be a difference in degree, but not in kind. What
happened to the woman on the train was just a variation and an
extension of what had been done to the girl. It is all the same,
there has been no let-up, not ever.
She sobs and groans in helplessness, which brings the pain back,
and it goes on and on, until at last there is the respite of a
blackout again. And this time, when she comes round, she has no
energy for anger left. She can only moan and lie with drawn-up
knees. There is no hope, no hope, there is no resistance left; this
is her life, it has to be lived, that is all.
Through days and nights the old Nama women attend to her,
bringing foul-smelling herbs and ground powders to apply to the
wounds, feeding her unspeakably vile potions, forcing her to suck
on a long-stemmed pipe and inhale the sickeningly rancid-sweet
smoke which eases the tension and the pain, and brings oblivion in
the end. They coax her into drinking curdled milk, sucking on
strange-tasting roots and bulbs and tubers from the veld, slurping
the yolk of an ostrich egg ladled from a shell positioned in the
remains of a fire, until she can cautiously, painfully chew very
small chunks of meat. Birds, probably. Later the strips cut from
small buck, sometimes raw and succulent, sometimes boiled or
roasted, sometimes dried.
More vividly than food or medicine or the comforting clicks with
which both are administered, Hanna will remember the way they feed
her with stories, of which the oldest of the women seems to have an
inexhaustible store. It begins soon after she wakes up for the
first time and lies staring dully, in a kind of uncomprehending
stupor, at the landscape throbbing with sunlight and timelessness,
under a sky from which all colour has been scorched. After watching
her for a while, the oldest of the women – her name is Taras, which
she says means ‘Woman’ – makes a sweeping gesture towards the
surrounding desert. “You wonder how it can be so dry?” she asks in
her rudimentary German. “It comes from a woman. The woman Xurisib,
who was very beautiful, but very vain, the vainest woman in
Namaland. And all the young men lusted after her, their purple
wattles drawing lines in the dust. Even the old men would wake in
the night with a branch planted in their loins, the way they
dreamed of her.”