The Other Side of Silence (29 page)

∨
The Other Side of Silence
∧

I
n a largely
ineffectual battle against the rock-hard earth (for the rain
penetrated no more than a few inches into that recalcitrant soil),
the men labour for nearly two days to make a dent in the form of a
shallow grave in the small enclosure reserved for white people,
away from the already overpopulated graveyard for members of the
congregation. It will be the first burial in that restricted place.
Two almost unbearable days spent mostly in prayer and droning
readings from Scripture. The children huddle dumbly in church or
front room, forbidden to indulge in any form of mourning, which the
father regards as signs of questioning the will of the Lord. Only
Gisela refuses to stir from the conjugal bed where she lies
prostrate, without eating or drinking, staring mutely at the beams
that support the roof of reeds and thatch.

She only gets up, as if sleepwalking, when she is summoned to
the funeral. The service is held in the church and lasts even
longer than usual; after the last melancholy wail of the hymn has
been drawn out for as long as it can be made to stretch without
snapping, the congregation proceeds to the grave. Gottlieb Maier
leads the procession outside, carrying the small coffin fashioned
from a crate in which flour was once delivered from Windhoek. The
box is laid in the shallow hole. There is, inevitably, another
reading from the Bible to which no one seems to be paying attention
– something from the Psalms, rejoicing in the wonders of the Lord –
and another prayer, followed by a thin hymn struggling to trail its
way upward like an ineffectual plume of smoke into the angry sky.
There are the immemorial words –
The Lord giveth, the Lord
taketh away, blessed be the name of the Lord
– and then the
long body of the pastor stoops down to pick up a handful of earth
and drop it into the grave. He waits for Gisela to follow suit, but
she doesn’t move, doesn’t even seem to be aware of what is going
on. He nudges her in the side. No reaction. Another nudge, this
time so forceful that she loses her balance and nearly falls. She
glances at him blankly. Muttering something under his breath he
nods at the oldest girl to proceed, followed by all the others.
Then the guests. Then the members of the congregation.

Disconsolate, they disperse under the sun. The clouds that
brought the rain have long gone. Already the entire episode seems
unreal.

The following day life at the station resumes its predestined
course. The men go out again to work on the wall. But Gisela does
not get up to teach the children and lead the women in their
domestic drill; instead, her oldest daughter slips quietly into her
place. The girl seems to have become, overnight, much older than
her years, and her hunched shoulders and drawn face seem, now,
indicative more of age than of the embarrassments of
adolescence.

Preparations for the departure of Hanna’s trek begin in earnest;
the missionary has reiterated his decision that their godless
practices will not be tolerated in his vale of grace any longer. To
remove any shadow of doubt about his attitude, from now on only a
thin tasteless broth will be served to the visitors at mealtimes;
they have come a long way from the abundance of that first supper.
Trying to conceal from his febrile gaze their pangs of hunger they
concentrate on the work at hand. Provisions are sorted, considered,
loaded. The selection of recruits is finalised. In addition to the
three chosen earlier, a few new ones presented themselves during
the morning following Tookwi’s rain. Two of them are refugees from
Albert Gruber’s farm – T’Kamkhab, ‘rescued’ years ago from certain
death by the army in the desert where he had been left to die, one
of twins, and then kept by the soldiers as a mascot, and given more
beatings than food until he escaped many years later and ended up
with Gruber; and his wife Nerina, whose spit is said to be more
venomous than that of a puff-adder. In her youth she was abducted
from her people by a police patrol who used her as their common
whore; twice she forced abortions on herself to rid her of their
offspring, and the second time was so bad that she could never have
children again. The third new recruit is a woman who calls herself
Koo, which means Death, and who drifted, half-crazed, to the
mission after her only son had been abducted by soldiers when
during a raid on her Nama village she’d refused to disclose to them
the whereabouts of the men of her tribe. She knew they were going
to kill the boy – the long terrible process had already begun
before they left – and there has never been news of him again. But
she will not rest, she swears in a sepulchral voice, before her
eyes have seen his bones.

Now, at last, they are on their way, with their oxcart, into the
desert. They have kept only the two oxen they need to pull it; the
other cattle and goats and chickens they brought from Albert
Gruber’s farm have been left behind at the mission station; and the
labourers not selected by Hanna, Katja and Kahapa will also remain
there, prematurely stunned by the prospect of enforced salvation as
members of the missionary’s abject congregation.

As they are trekking due north, the early sun casts the dark
shadow of the meaningless wall over them for the first lap of their
journey. The whole settlement is assembled to see them off; in the
forefront is the Reverend Gottlieb Maier and his skinny brood,
silent, motionless. Occasionally some of the women and children
from the congregation break into ululation, song or dance; here and
there a wisp of coloured cloth flutters dispiritedly; the more
morose figures of the men from time to time wave after them, their
deep voices a rumble difficult to fathom. But at every new outbreak
of sound or movement a single glance from the man of God is enough
to impose order on the latent energies of the crowd.

Hanna is following the cart on foot, dragging one leg as is her
wont, with Katja at her side. The rainmaker Tookwi leads the oxen;
Kahapa marches beside them, brandishing a long whip. Abreast with
him, on the other side of the small team, walks the battle-scarred
warrior Himba. On the back of the cart sits the medicine woman
Kamma. The others trundle along on either side of the cart. They do
not look like an army.

Hanna is still brooding on the events of the last few days and
how they have marked her, like everything that has happened since
they left Frauenstein. Unlike the snake skin she found in the
desert, she thinks, she carries her sloughs with her, all her past
lives, her accumulated deaths. What lies ahead, not even God
knows.

But before they are very far from the mission station, the wall
still on their right, there is a commotion behind them. There seems
to be a scuffle going on just outside the gate. From the oxcart
they can hear voices shouting in anger, the screams of a woman. And
then, as they watch, the woman appears to break loose from the
crowd and comes running towards the cart.

“It is Gisela!” Katja exclaims and darts off to meet her.

Far in the background another figure detaches himself from the
churning group. It is the missionary himself. He is waving at them,
shouting.

“Go to hell!” they can make out.

Gisela hurls herself against Katja. Her face is streaked with
tears, in which the dust has formed smudges of dirt. Her breath
comes in furious gasps.

Hanna brings an earthenware jar of water from the cart. Even
then it takes some time before the agitated woman can speak. At
last, looking imploringly at Hanna, she says, “I want to come with
you.”

“But your children?” protests Katja, shocked.

“My baby is dead. There’s nothing I can do for the others
anyway. He will not let me.”

In the distance the man of God is still standing, straight and
tall, unmoving now, like a black scarecrow in the sun, one arm
outstretched towards them in a silent apocalyptic curse.

Hanna puts her arm around Gisela’s shoulders.
Let us go
,
she motions. Thinking:
Let us all go to hell together. Hate will
show us the way
.

∨
The Other Side of Silence
∧

T
he suddenness of
seasons. The gentle rain – indeed, as Tookwi has foretold, a
rain-cow rain that touched the earth with female moisture – has
made a difference. Although only a few days have elapsed there is
already a hint of green on the veld, and a myriad of flowers have
sprung miraculously from the parched soil, in extravagant patches
of yellow, orange, white and purple. The once unforgiving landscape
appears less intractable. In the evenings there is already the
slightest shiver of coolness in the air, and they find that they
draw closer to the fire not just because it keeps predators and
scavengers at bay (every night, as soon as the dark closes in, the
maniacal cackling of jackals erupts) but because they have come to
cherish the warmth.

It is the second night after they have left the mission station
and Hanna is sitting in the thin circle of light surrounding the
fire, but slightly apart from the rest. They are surrounded by
emptiness. There seems to be no living creature left in this land
under the sun or the moon.

One after the other she studies the faces in the erratic light
of the flames. Katja, so achingly young, the smooth face framed in
long blonde hair, as yet unmarked by what she has already
experienced in her life. Gisela, old before her time, worn out by
childbirth and the abuse of religion and her husband. The medicine
woman Kamma, toothless and wise, little more than a small skull
covered in wrinkled skin and tufts of hair, gimlet eyes staring
grimly into the fire, where she seems to see what no one else can
dream of. Old Tookwi, like a mantis absorbed in meditation.
T’Kamkhab, who has come to look like the pert, angry monkey he was
trained to be for the soldiers. His strong but bitter wife Nerina,
her broad face quietly brooding over the rage she has sealed up
inside her, with a lasting resentment against the world that has
made her barren. And the woman of death, Koo, scowling at the
memory of a son who disappeared without leaving a footprint or a
bone behind. And then the two men who close the circle: the lame
warrior Himba, his light-brown face scarred with ancient wounds;
and the giant Kahapa, towering over all the others, his beautiful
but stern face closed like a mask carved from very dark very smooth
wood, wearing day and night the incongruous hat of the man who
killed his wife and tried to kill him too. What on earth, she
wonders with a small shudder, could have scooped up from the dregs
and rejects of this godforsaken land such a disparate little band?
Can it really be only hate? Or is there, behind the hate, something
else, a smouldering force of life that refuses to be denied any
longer? So many things, ultimately; and also the sound of the
wind.

Lightly, lightly, it blows across the vast wilderness in which
they find themselves, stirring in the dry grass, shivering like the
breath of ghosts against their cheeks; and then moves on into what
seems in the dark like emptiness but isn’t. Past the fire and past
the faces she stares into it, invisible but unavoidable. Such an
ancient landscape, older than anything people could have thought
up. And reassuring for that reason. It has its own memory; perhaps
is memory itself, turned to stone. Bits of it may be shared by the
Namas, the Hereros, the Ovambos, lurking in the stories she has
heard. But most of it remains ungraspable, secret, remote. It
teases and challenges – yet it instils a profound confidence
precisely because nothing about it is easy or immediately
accessible, however much it may seem reduced to elements and
essentials.

How much of herself will be left behind in this place? What will
it remember of her? Once again, as many times before, the thought
brings a stirring of unease. She turns her head to look at Katja,
whose face is obscured by the long hair that falls over it.
She
is the one who will have to carry and protect the
memory. To make sure it does not entirely disappear.

As if Hanna’s thoughts have summoned her, Katja moves away from
her place in the thin circle next to Gisela to come and sit beside
her. Kahapa, looking up as she comes past behind him, follows her.
The others briefly glance at them, then lapse again into their own
several silences.

“There are ten of us now,” says Kahapa after a moment. “So where
we go now? What we do?”

Hanna makes her rapid gestures to Katja; the girl interprets:
We are far away from the mission station now. Far away from
anywhere. So we shall stay here for a few days. First of all, we
must train everybody to use the weapons. You are the one to do
that. After that, we can move on
.

“Ten people is not an army,” Kahapa objects. “Even if I teach
them to use the guns and do the things of war. The German army have
hundreds and thousands of people.”

We won’t be fighting them in a crowd
, Hanna says through
Katja, as she had explained to the girl before.
We must learn to
be clever. Catch them one or two at a time
.

“For that we need more than guns,” says Kahapa. “Gun make noise.
To kill, the people must learn other ways. Very much more
tough.”

Can you do it?

“I must have time.”

We shall give you time, Kahapa
.

He nods with a grunt of satisfaction. “We shall do that then,”
he says. “And then, if we die, we die. All of us together, but each
one alone. Because a man cannot die of what another man eats.”

She knows this is facing the impossible. But they have left the
world of the possible behind – the world of safety, of certainty,
of calculation, of reason. Their domain, now, is the impossible.
(
The whole German Reich
, Katja said once before.
The
whole world
.) If this is madness, so be it. When sanity depends
on the logic of violence her only choice is the kind of madness
with which to oppose it. The day she and Katja left Frauenstein
they set foot in that part of life from which there is no hope of
returning.