The Other Side of Silence (2 page)

For me, for reasons too dark to unravel, that moment when Hanna
X’s life breaks into story comes – not the moment of death, but in
between deaths – in the lugubrious building of Frauenstein, as it
looms against the night sky like a huge ship marooned in the heart
of the desert: she is staring by the light of a dripping candle
into a cracked mirror on the landing where her image has been
caught, in passing, like a ghost. It is the first time since she
has been brought here, the first time in three years, seven months,
thirteen days, that she faces herself in a mirror.

She does not flinch. The reason is that the reflection is so
alien, there is no memory to set beside it. (She hasn’t always
looked like this.) This may as well be a ghost, one of the
innumerable shadows that steal through Frauenstein at night,
sometimes even by day. She studies it, detached, unmoved, as if it
is a curious large pale moth suspended in the glass. Not scary,
because it is not alive. The tufts of blonde or greying hair,
hacked off unevenly with a kitchen knife, surrounding the face like
ectoplasm. Part of the right ear missing, leaving a dark hole set
in a kind of mushroom growth. Only half an eyebrow on the left,
trailing off into a twisted line of scar tissue. The eye below it
protruding slightly, as if it has been removed and carelessly
thrust back. The bony nose crooked. The entire surface of the face
criss-crossed with scars, some white, others purplish. Most
startling is the grimace that widens the thin-lipped mouth, itself
more scar than orifice: it opens across part of the right jaw,
below the cheekbone, so that the broken teeth are visible, stuck
unevenly into the jaw. A face already partly resolved into skull.
Perhaps she is, or slowly becomes, as she stands and stares,
fascinated by the image after all. Raising the candle an inch or
two, she opens her mouth. She makes a sound. Ahhhhhh. There is no
tongue. Only a small black stub, far back. Ahhhhh.

This must be she. This must be what they see, when they face
her. But usually of course they look away.

Now she sees. It has come to this. Tonight she has killed a man.
She alone is awake in this dark rambling house.

∨
The Other Side of Silence
∧

T
he house. More an
outcrop of the earth than a house. Set in an Old Testament
landscape, a moonscape, a dreamscape. To the women transported here
the days and weeks by mule-cart or ox-wagon must have seemed not so
much a journey through geographic and geological space as the
traversal of a region of the mind, an abandonment of uncomplicated
time, and undoubtedly of hope; the arrival an entry into a peculiar
mentality, an emotional state, warped most likely. Kilometres and
kilometres and days of arid earth with tentative patches of brittle
grass, or scrub, small flinty koppies or ridges, flat sheets of
scaly rock showing through the unrelenting ground like blackened
bones through the skin of a massive primordial animal left to the
ravages of sun and wind. Then the gradual sloping upward to the
high tumulus of eroded rocks which especially at sunset or by
moonlight would appear like a congregation of petrified figures.
(
There were giants in the earth in those days
.) Dominated by
what to half-crazed sex-starved men from the desert might seem like
a giant woman, a figurehead on the prow of an absent ancient ship,
face turned up, breasts exposed, a grotesque parody perhaps of the
Victory of Samodirace. The strayed wife of a Biblical Lot. The
Frauenstein, the Woman Rock.

Just beyond the Woman looms the house, improbable even in the
full glare of daylight. No one knows its origins. “It’s always been
there,” people say if you ask. It certainly bears little
resemblance to the early colonial buildings of Swakopmund or
Windhoek. Those not inclined to ascribe its foundations to some
lost tribe, black, brown or white, ‘from the north’, with obscure
connections to the vanished Monomotapa, Mapungubwe or Great
Zimbabwe, if not to Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, or to the
inhabitants of a sunken Atlantis, advance theories about early
Scandinavian whalers, or possibly crew members who jumped ship when
Bartolomeu Diaz first set foot in Africa at Angra Pequena.
Historical reality is likely to be much less fanciful. It may well
have been begun somewhere in the eighteenth or nineteenth century
by a band of explorers or adventurers, including in their midst
someone with delusions of architectural grandeur and bribing or
coercing indigenous people into their service.

From the early days of German settlement, over a period of
several decades, that much we know, it was extensively rebuilt into
its present shape; but its purpose has remained obscure. A country
residence for some fabulously rich retired dignitary or general
from Bismarck’s army (or even the Iron Chancellor himself!)? A
grandiose fortress against enemies real or imaginary? A vast prison
for Hereros, Ovambos, Damaras or Namas captured in the colony’s
never ending wars and raids, or even for invaders from elsewhere in
Africa or abroad? A hunting lodge for huge parties disembarking
from the Reich to decimate the fauna of the interior on a scale not
even the British could match? A religious retreat and sanctuary? A
house of sexual extravagance? Or did whoever embarked upon it
simply lose himself (it could only have been a ‘he’) in the crazy
excess of the act of building for its own sake? An outrageous
statement that
I was here
, even though no one remembers any
longer who that I could have been?

In one way or another, at some time or other, it may have served
all those purposes, perhaps several of them simultaneously. Its
magnificence lies in the fact that it has no reason to be there at
all. Frauenstein exists, dream or nightmare, a phantasmagoric
Schloss, not on the Rhine or in Bavaria but in the African desert.
And from the turn of the last century, it found a new designation
as asylum to those women transported to the colony for the support
or delectation of its menfolk, and then turned down.

Upon the arrival of a female shipment in the bay of Swakopmund,
after a journey of thirty days along the west coast of Africa,
hundreds of men, consumed by the fires of lust unslaked by native
women or domestic animals, would throng and wrestle and clamour on
the quayside. Some of them had registered their written requests
and requirements weeks or months before; many others came purely on
the off-chance, or just to ogle and cheer before drinking
themselves into a stupor in the taverns of the teeming town. Then
followed the four-day train journey to Windhoek, a seething and
brawling sleepless rage in which women were tried out and passed on
and exchanged or reclaimed among battling suitors. Men died on
those journeys. Sometimes women too. But generally, after four days
and nights, the majority would have settled into bleary-eyed
couples; and the churches were in business.

Invariably, however, some of the women would remain unclaimed.
And these, the ultimately rejected, found unworthy by even the most
disreputable of men, were candidates for Frauenstein. In their
latter-day tumbrels they were driven through streets of jeering
males forming a guard of dishonour baring their backsides or
shaking their veined pricks at their rejected quarry; and carted
off into the interminable silence of the desert.

And so to Frauenstein, colossal against the shimmering black sky
(arrival always seemed to occur at night). Prison, convent,
madhouse, poorhouse, brothel, ossuary, a promontory of hell; but
also asylum, retreat and final haven. Into which, at long
intervals, bedraggled individuals or bands of marauding soldiers,
hunters,
smouse
or remittance men from distant mines would
stumble in search of shelter or refreshment. And under cover of
darkness the most intrepid, or drunk, or desperate of these would
find among the inmates some not too utterly irredeemable with whom
to disport themselves; and if even then a face would appear too
repulsive the act could be performed from behind, as must be the
wont of men more used to quadrupeds anyway.

Not all the women were flotsam from the fatherland washed up in
search of employment or matrimony. But they had in common the fact
that they were all rejects of society, whether through widowhood,
indigence, moral turpitude or disability of one kind or another,
and that no one else could or would be burdened with the care of
them.

The place was overseen by a small flock of females resembling
nothing so much as an aviary, birds of all shapes and sizes and
dispositions, but all of a feather. Some of them had drifted there
to escape from various fates all worse than death, or had been
attracted by misplaced missionary zeal; others had presumably been
recruited – but by whom? Various churches, it would seem, were
involved in one capacity or another, in a rage of righteousness to
prove through good works and divers acts of dour charity their
Christian worthiness as a step towards everlasting reward and
grace. The colonial authorities also had a hand in maintaining the
institution: the women incarcerated there had after all been
shipped out under a governmental scheme, and the turning of a blind
eye might be frowned upon from distant Berlin.

Not that anyone compelled the inmates to remain within those
forbidding walls. They were never locked up, not even at night. It
was as much by their own choice as by a decision of the provincial
authorities that they remained there. But of course, there was also
the consideration that even if someone might
wish
to escape,
the surrounding desert was more effective than any lock or
barrel-bolt. Twice in the early days of Hanna X’s sojourn a woman
did abscond. On both occasions the skeleton was later found,
half-buried in the ever drifting sand.

There were also, barely a year ago, the girls Gertrud and Katja:
two young sisters from Windhoek, fifteen or sixteen years old,
orphaned by the war in the north, their parents slaughtered by
Hereros on the run from the terror perpetrated by the colonial
armed forces of Generalleutnant Lothar von Trotha. Placed in the
care of a series of foster-parents, the girls had been detained
several times for running away and loitering in the streets; held
in prison cells or army barracks for a while, reprimanded and
punished, all without effect; and then, as a measure of desperation
until a decision about repatriation could be taken in Berlin,
transported to Frauenstein. There they seemed meek and obedient
enough, but only until the doughty woman in charge, Frau Knesebeck,
believing all was well, began to relax her vigil; and then they ran
away. After a week the older girl, Katja, returned, a dishevelled
and emaciated rag doll with half its stuffing torn out; Gertrud had
died in the desert. What remained of her after the vultures, the
jackals and hyenas had done their bit, was brought back to
Frauenstein in a hessian bag and buried with little ceremony in the
quietly expanding cemetery beyond the pumpkin patch. After that
Katja was like a dispirited puppy broken by too many beatings,
whimpering as she wandered through the halls and passages and empty
spaces like one of the many ghosts that haunted the place.

The only person to whom she appeared to relate was Hanna X; at
night the girl slipped into the woman’s room to find comfort in the
dark they both feared. No one could fathom the reason for this
attempted closeness; no one cared. And as time went by they became
almost inseparable.

Katja could be silent for days on end, a silence interrupted
suddenly and unpredictably by bouts of uncontrollable chattering.
It was not necessary for Hanna to respond much, which was just as
well, as without a tongue she could of course not speak. But from
dark recesses in her memory she began to retrieve snatches of the
sign language she’d had to learn at a time when she’d looked after
an angry deaf old man and his angry deaf young daughter; this she
taught to Katja, in fits and starts, and the girl was a ready
learner. Where she couldn’t recall the original signs she made up
new ones. They even had fun – in that grim place – devising these
together: a clenched fist for
man
, an open hand for
woman
, thumb and forefinger opened and closed for
bird
, a hand cupped in a crescent shape for
moon
, a
hand with fingers spread wide for
sun
, a rippling motion for
water
, easy and obvious gestures to indicate walking,
running, sleeping, while body parts were simply pointed out.

Soon Katja was the only person in Frauenstein with whom Hanna
could, in a way, communicate; and Hanna the only one to whom Katja
cared to talk. This sealed the unusual bond between them. As it was
frowned upon by Frau Knesebeck and her staff, they tried as best
they could to keep it secret. But most nights Katja would come
tiptoeing from her room to Hanna’s and creep into her bed with her.
Which sometimes stirred painful memories of another girl, another
woman, in her mind: but these she resolutely repressed. That was a
territory sealed within her, where no one would readily be allowed
to obtrude. And if there was, in the occasional unguarded moment, a
fleeting memory of the arcane yearnings and urges a body was
capable of, it would be denied almost before it could be
acknowledged. If anything, Hanna’s reaction to Katja was maternal,
not carnal. And this made it possible, for both, to survive between
the barren walls of the great building surrounded by the desert,
swept by the wind.

Frauenstein was too vast for its inhabitants. Rooms on some
floors had not been opened or entered in years. By the time Hanna X
was dumped there parts of the ground floor had already been invaded
by desert sand, blown in through broken shutters and shattered
windows and gaping holes where doors had been hacked up for
firewood; sand accumulating in corners and against walls, as very
slowly the desert began to reclaim the space that once was part of
it. Even the inhabited rooms were subjected to the long inexorable
process of decay: erstwhile ballrooms and refectories, kitchens
with gaping furnaces, cavernous halls and lobbies with ornate
ceilings; or the smaller rooms and cells and cubicles where the
inmates slept or spent their days staring and mumbling, shuffling,
masturbating, moving restlessly to and fro, doing useless
embroidery, making patchwork quilts or curtains or tablecloths or
shifts for imaginary trousseaux, or just sitting, or preening in
front of real or non-existent mirrors, or slicing patterns into
their skin, using knives and forks and shards of glass or scraps of
rusty tin.