The Other Side of Silence (11 page)

He whispers, “Hanna.”

She does not answer.

“Surely it cannot be worth it,” he says, as if he is talking to
himself. “We can come to an understanding. You can go back to
school. You can even go on reading your books, provided they are
not too lewd or ungodly.”

She does not answer.

“My only concern is for your well-being,” he says. “You had us
all very worried indeed. Double pneumonia. But you will soon be
well, the doctor says. Are you not glad?”

She remains wrapped in silence as in a cocoon. No butterfly will
hatch here.

“You are really a good girl, Hanna. I am prepared to talk to
Frau Agathe.”

Hanna says nothing, but her whole body keeps rigid. He must know
she is not asleep. The hand begins to move across from her hip. It
reaches what it has been trying to find, and comes to rest, the
thick fingers cupped over it.

“Hanna?”

“I shall tell God,” she says through clenched teeth, her eyes
still tightly shut.

He utters a small harsh laugh. “If God has to choose between you
and me, who do you think he will believe?”

“Then I shall tell Fraulein Braunschweig. She will believe
me.”

The hand freezes, goes limp, moves away. She can breathe
again.

“Whatever happens,” he says, “you will have brought upon
yourself. You understand that, don’t you?”

“I’m going to die,” she says quietly.

Suddenly he erupts. “Then die!” he shouts at her. “For God’s
sake, die! But don’t come crawling back to me afterwards asking for
forgiveness.”

She doesn’t bother to respond. Her eyes are still closed when he
leaves. The bed is swaying, rocking, drawn along by a gentle
invisible current, like a small boat on the sea.

∨
The Other Side of Silence
∧

T
here are a hundred
and ten women on the
Hans Woermann
which leaves Hamburg
harbour on a miserable dark day in mid-January. The ship carries
twenty first-class passengers, so the women transported to the
colony of German South-West Africa are housed in rather
unprepossessing quarters. Thirty of them, entered on the register
as the more educated or cultured of the crop, the
gebildeten
Mädchen
, because they can afford to contribute the sum of 150
marks to then-passage, are lodged in second-class cabins, each with
a bunk to herself. But the majority, the sixty
einfachen
Mädchen
, transported at the government’s expense in third
class, are herded into dingy cabins below sea level, two to a bunk
designed for one, four bunks to a cabin. It is the only way to
create space for the five thousand tons of freight which make the
journey affordable; the Company turns a blind eye, and the
passenger lists are amended accordingly.

It is on the list supplied by Frau Charlotte Sprandel of the
Kolonialgesellschaft in Berlin, on behalf of Johann Albrecht,
Herzog zu Mecklenburg, that an unfortunate spattering of black ink
first designates one of the passengers as Hanna X.

The woman assigned to share a bunk with her is Lotte Mehring.
The name immediately calls up the most intimate memories from
Hanna’s past,
Die Leiden des Jungen Werther
. But it is so
much more than a name. It is a new reality. Lotte is a small
slender girl with wispy blonde hair, mousy but not unattractive. A
few years younger than Hanna, widowed at twenty-two, she has been
shipped off by her late husband’s family before she could claim any
of the meagre inheritance his seven brothers preferred to keep to
themselves. Not that she would have wished to hold any reminder of
the brief marriage which brought her little more than sweat and
tears, black eyes and broken arms and a miscarriage, which she will
relate in a low whisper to Hanna during the long nights they lie
together on the narrow bunk which reeks of despair and stale
urine.

“Why did you marry him then?” Hanna will ask one night.

“He wanted me,” Lotte says simply.

“Did you not know he would use you so?”

“No. But even if I had…” Lotte presses her small forehead
against Hanna’s hard shoulder. “I’m sure I would have married any
man who came along to take me away from our family.”

Hanna shakes her head uncomprehendingly. “At least you
had
a family,” she points out. “I had only the orphanage,
until they placed me out in service.”

“You don’t know how lucky you were.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Lotte. You should
have seen that place. If I told you about Frau Agathe.” A quiet
shudder. “And Pastor Ulrich…”

“He could not have been as bad as my father. And my two
brothers.”

“But surely…” She cannot speak the rest.

“The first time he came to me in the night,” says Lotte, “I was
not quite ten. My brothers began soon after.”

“But where was your mother then?”

“She pretended not to know. She was too scared, you see. If I
went to her she would get very cross and say it was all lies. And
then she’d tell him what I said and he would beat me. And her
too.”

Lotte will begin to moan softly, as if in pain, and Hanna will
hold her against her body, rocking her very gently until the crying
has subsided.

“Please keep holding me,” says Lotte after a long silence. She
moves her fingers across Hanna’s face in the dark, and then stops
in surprise. “Why is your face wet? Have you been crying too?”

She cannot speak. She only nods. The dark makes confidences
possible which would otherwise be unthinkable.

“But you…”

“Don’t talk now,” says Hanna.

In the dark, in the slow dance of the ship on the sea-swell,
they hold one another, the small slight body and the stronger more
unwieldy one. Holding, holding. Lotte is almost as real to her as
Jeanne d’Arc, years ago, in her small bed in the orphanage. And
almost imperceptibly their hands move across each other’s face,
more lightly than the quivering of a butterfly wing.

“You know,” says Hanna once, “no one has ever held me. Not even
when I was very small. No one came at night to tuck us in. We were
taught to be strong, to devote ourselves to God and good things,
touching was bad, it made one weak. Except once, when a new little
girl came to us, Helga, and she was crying so much, she would keep
us awake at night, I went to put my arms around her and hold her.
Just hold her. But then Frau Agathe found out about it.”

“Tell me,” says Lotte.

And so it becomes Hanna’s turn. And then Lotte’s again. And in
the dark they hold each other very close, body to body, feeling the
new warmth they generate between them. Conscious, always, of the
night outside, and the cold of the sea, the endless near-black
depths below them, this warmth becomes infinitely precious, a
wholeness, a small but brave affirmation that yes, they are here,
Hanna and Lotte, two lonelinesses merging, two histories, a single
breathing living being, beautiful in the dark, vulnerable yet
strong while it lasts. What is this I, this you? From what
immeasurable distances do we come, what light or darkness are we
heading for – nights swarming with stars, palm trees waving in the
wind, glimmering in the sun – how much of eternity can be stored up
in an hour, a single moment? I love you.

She invents not only the geography of Lotte’s body but her own,
a new and breathtaking discovery: that this body she has learned to
despise, to loathe, can be capable of so much pleasure, can give so
much joy. That what used to be a source of pain and revulsion can
now be an affirmation, a place of celebration. This you have given
me, this I can give back to you. This is me, at last, now and for
ever. Me, Hanna X.

Their bodies are slowly turning and moving, their hands are
moving, fingers clasp and unclasp, what journeys of discovery they
undertake through the nightscapes of bodies folding together,
intertwining, turning the everyday into miracle – you, me, us,
always – naming and unnaming, ears, eyes, throat, shoulders,
elbows, breasts, belly, knees, feet, hills and valleys, palm trees,
hidden springs, the ever-secret depths and folds of your body, mine
and not mine, yours and not yours, tongue to tongue, breathing in
of my breathing out, whisper of my whispering, you, me, us.

If anyone ever finds out, something terrible is bound to happen,
so they take great care never to be seen together during the
daytime. They go about their business with the other women. The
einfachen Mädchen
in third class are required to help the
sailors with domestic duties: cleaning their own cabins, scrubbing
the deck, serving in the kitchen. But the night belongs to them.
They lie talking for hours, sometimes until daybreak (even though
one cannot see the day dawn in the perpetual darkness of the lower
decks). In between they make love, or simply lie together in a long
embrace.

“What will happen when we get there?” asks Lotte.

“We will find somewhere to live together,” says Hanna.

“The government paid for us, they will claim us. We owe
them.”

Does Hanna not know all about this kind of owing? It is what she
learned to hate more than anything else about her indenture. “I
will not let it happen again,” she assures Lotte.

“But
how
? We are in their hands, we are not allowed to
make decisions, we are women.”

“We shall find a way.”

“It won’t happen by itself,” Lotte persists. “We’ll have to plan
before we get there.”

“Something always happens. You didn’t plan your husband’s death,
it just happened.”

“One of his brothers killed him.”

“But you were saved. And you were not involved in the
killing.”

There is a long silence, before Lotte says, “I was. I planned
it. I bribed his brother to do it.”

“How did you do it?”

“I promised him – it doesn’t matter. It worked. That is
all.”

“It will work again.”

“They will find a way to stop us.”

With all the heedlessness of her newly discovered state Hanna
says, “Nothing can stop us.”

“My Hanna, my Hanna.” And in love and anguish she begins the
stroking movement which she knows will drive Hanna to hopeless
pleasure.

But she is, of course, right. It cannot last. The irruption into
their joined privacy comes unexpectedly. As the journey continues
the sailors take to visiting the women at night, particularly the
most vulnerable among them, in third class. And the fact that they
are welcomed by some of the women – for all kinds of reasons that
proliferate in the dark – makes them bolder in imposing on others.
There are small profits to be made from such encounters: favours in
various forms, food, inconsequential gifts, promises of one kind or
another. And these alleviate the tedium of the weeks at sea,
instilling flickerings of hope in some who have already given up or
resigned themselves to deception and disappointment.

For some time this does not affect Hanna and Lotte. They inhabit
a small island which seems inviolable. Until one night a few very
drunk men blunder their way into the cabin at the end of the
passage. They do not bother to pick or choose, but grope at random
at the female flesh barely concealed under shapeless cotton or
linen shifts. One of them drags Lotte away. She fights with all the
viciousness of a trapped rodent, but it only makes him randier.
When Hanna joins in and attacks him from behind he is nearly
overpowered. But then she is set upon by one of the other sailors
and sent sprawling in a corner by a blow to the head. By the time
she is on her feet again they are gone.

One of the other women takes her by the hand. “Just leave them,
dearie. They’re in such a state they’ll kill you if you try to
interfere.”

“But you don’t understand,” sobs Hanna. “They can’t take Lotte.
They have no right.”

“They have every right, my girl,” says the other woman. “We
should just be thankful that we’ve been spared. For tonight. There
are still six nights to go.”

There is a sickness in her which is not of the body. She remains
hunched up in a corner of the bunk, waiting for Lotte to come back,
praying open-eyed, praying to the God she doesn’t believe in, to
make sure Lotte isn’t hurt too much. What this may do to them, she
is too scared, too numb, to figure out.

But Lotte doesn’t return. Has the man killed her?

No, she discovers later the next day, it is much worse. The man
has claimed her. Lotte will spend the rest of the voyage on his
bunk with him. Even during the daytime he keeps a hawk’s eye on her
as he goes about his tasks, never far away. The two of them are not
allowed a minute together to talk.

It is soon over though. Two days later, in the afternoon, the
news spreads from deck to deck: a young woman has committed
suicide. She has slit her wrists in the bathroom. Hanna does not
need anyone to tell her who it is.

It is only the next day when, after a cursory service presided
over by the captain, Lotte is buried at sea – her body, that small
beloved body, sewn into a canvas bag, laid out on a wooden
stretcher and summarily tipped overboard, followed by some
makeshift wreaths – that Hanna discovers the horrible mistake. The
name of the dead woman is announced to have been hers, Hanna
X’s.

She hurries to the captain afterwards to have the mistake
corrected, but the officers surrounding him deny her access. When
she finally grabs one of them by the lapels to shout, half
dementedly, that she, Hanna X, is still alive, that the dead woman
is Lotte Mehring, he disengages himself with visible irritation and
promises to look into it. But when she corners him again a day
later, he tells her she is mistaken. Enquiries have been made, they
have checked the cabin number and the bunk, and the deceased woman
is indeed Hanna X.

“But I am Hanna X!” she exclaims. “Here I’m standing before you.
Do you think I don’t know who I am?”