The Other Side of Silence (35 page)

The old man already seems to have resigned himself to death. “It
is the sacrifice of Tsui-Goab,” he mumbles whenever someone tries
to encourage him. “He is angry because I was in too much of a hurry
to bring this rain. We already saw the sign when he sent the
shooting star the other night.” Which wounds Hanna with a pang of
guilt and remorse; but there is nothing to be done about it now,
except urge Kamma to do her utmost.

Something else has happened to disturb her. The three grooms in
the stable have been shot, but it is not clear by whom. Hanna is
outraged. For a long time she confers intently with Katja, whose
eyes appear unnaturally large and shiny in the torchlight and who
seems, still, on the verge of hysteria.

If they were killed by someone from our side
, Hanna
instructs Katja to tell them,
this is the last time a thing like
that will he tolerated. We kill in fighting, when we must, but we
do not murder. Anyone who does this will be shot, even if I have to
do it myself
.

“We not take risk with people who can be traitors,” Kahapa
objects gruffly.

We cannot kill them before we have first made sure. Those
three men could have been useful to us
.

“One of the two batmen want to betray us,” Kahapa reminds her.
“That Lukas. All the time we think they are on our side, then the
fight come and he go over to the soldiers. So I kill him.”

That was different. These grooms had no chance to show which
side they were on
.

“You are a woman,” grumbles Kahapa. “What you know about men and
war?”

It is my war
, she responds, in a rage.
I shall decide
what we do, and when, and how. If you don’t like that you can go
now
.

He is clearly taken aback. But for the moment he refuses to
yield. “You need me,” he retorts defiantly. “If I am not here you
can do nothing.”

And if I did not save your life you would not have been here
at all
.

The dense silence weighs on them like a burden almost too heavy
to bear. Hanna has removed her kappie to expose the terrifying
reality of her appearance. Unmoving, they stare at each other,
watched by all the others. Their faces appear like blotches in the
treacherous light.

After a long time Kahapa slowly inclines his head. “You give me
my life,” he says, his voice like a very subdued roll of thunder.
“I stay with you.”

∨
The Other Side of Silence
∧

M
uch later, when
Hanna and Katja lie close together on the oxcart – all the others
have chosen to bed down inside the barracks – the girl whispers,
“You took a risk with Kahapa.”

I had to make sure. In his heart he is a man
.

“He is no longer a man,” Katja reminds her. “Don’t you remember
what they did to him?”

It is not that thing alone that makes a man
.

There is a silence. Overhead, so close they can almost be heard,
the stars are shining in a sky washed luminous and black. Then
Katja says, “I have never lived a day like this.”

I am proud of you
. Hanna holds the girl tightly against
her, a mother’s comforting, possessive clutch.
For everything
you’ve done. Especially this morning
.

“You don’t know what happened.”

You did what you had to do. That is all that matters
.

“It wasn’t just the killing,” says Katja in a drained voice,
beyond distress or fear or hurt. “Before I killed him, he…” She
breathes in. “I let him take me.”

Hanna feels her whole body go rigid.
What do you mean, ‘take
you’?

“That is why I could not have peed on Tookwi’s chameleon even if
he’d asked me. I am no longer a girl who has never been with a
man.”

Hanna shakes her furiously.
I don’t want to hear about
it!

“He was very gentle,” says Katja. Clearly she has to speak now,
nothing can silence her. “Perhaps he was more afraid than I was.
But I made sure he wouldn’t stop. I was in such a hurry I didn’t
even take off my shoes. I didn’t want to waste time, because then
he might have given up. And I had to go through with it. It was the
only way in which I could forgive myself for what I had to do.
Perhaps it makes no sense. Perhaps, where we are now, nothing makes
sense. It is a madness. You yourself said so before. I’m not sure I
understood what you meant then. But now I understand, and I believe
you.” This time the silence lasts so long that Hanna asssumes she
has said all she could. But then Katja asks in a wavering voice,
“Is this what it means to be a woman?”

Hanna shakes her head very decisively.
No. No. No, it
doesn’t. I think it has very little to do with it
.

“Still,” Katja persists, “I know I had to do it. There was no
other way. I had to find out what it is like.”

It could have waited
.

“No. It was the right time. The only time. When we rode out from
here I didn’t think of it happening at all. But when we got there I
knew it was the only way I could do it.” Another silence tense with
the unspoken; the unspeakable. “And when it was over, he was still
lying on me, I killed him. Because that was what you expected of
me. The first part was for me, the second for you.”

∨
The Other Side of Silence
∧

I
s this what she has
become – an avenging demon? Nothing but this? In the dark silence,
long after Katja has gone to sleep, Hanna remains looking up at the
night. Words cannot reach where she wants to go. Only sounds and
images remain. The sound of a piano broken apart, all its strings
exploding, releasing the pent-up sound of years, lifetimes,
darknesses. And behind the sound, the shadow of a woman she will
never know and has never met, yet who will haunt her for ever, the
shadow of whatever has remained unrealised in herself.
The
second part is for you
.

∨
The Other Side of Silence
∧

I
can imagine how
difficult it will be for Hanna to fall asleep that night. And
listening to Katja’s breathing – disturbed at intervals by anxious
gasping, and once a bout of unrestrained crying – unsettles Hanna
so much that at last, in some small hour into which no sound can
reach, she rolls off the mattress and slips from the oxcart. It is
a curious sensation to wander, barefoot, soundless, through the
silent fort which until so recently teemed with life.

In the barracks she visits the quiet dead. But she does not stay
long, because old Tookwi’s moans suggest that he is awake and may
awaken others too. Outside, she creeps up the stone staircase to
the top of the walls where the sentries used to be posted. Her eyes
move across the moonlit plains, trying to pick out the dark thicket
into which Katja rode with her young suitor, the trip from which
she returned alone.
I was in such a hurry I didn’t even take off
my shoes
. No, she must not think of that. But she cannot
restrain her thoughts. Too much has happened over the past two
days. It has gone so well. As such things go. And she, who has all
her life been so clumsy in everything she attempted, has passed
this test with so much confidence and efficacy that it would seem
as if it she’s always been destined for it. But is this really what
she has foreseen? Is this what was supposed to happen? And for how
long, how far, must it go on? Until they reach Windhoek, she
imagines. And then…?

Throughout this day, and through everything that has led up to
it, she has had to contain herself, keep a tight, tight rein on her
feelings. But now, at last, alone in the vastness of the night, she
can feel a tremor building up inside. She still tries to control
it. She must not, dare not, give way. She must keep the end in
sight, otherwise nothing can be justified.

A slight moan escapes her. She tries to stifle it. At that
moment a hand touches her shoulder from behind. The shock is so
great that her whole body contracts; she would have fallen had two
enormously strong arms not taken hold of her.

“Is me,” says Kahapa, so softly that it feels like a rumbling in
the earth itself. “I watch for you.”

As at the mission station. As everywhere. As always.
I watch
for you
.

This is too much for her. She collapses against his massive
shoulder. He sits down with her, his broad back supported against
the high parapet, his arms holding her.

“If you want, you cry,” he tells her.

She doesn’t know for how long she keeps shaking, her body
sheltered against his, his hands holding her, making long stroking
movements over her shoulders, her arms, her scarred face.

“You cry,” he says again.

It is an animal sound that comes from her, a sound from the
depths of her being, the accumulated crying of a lifetime in which
all her pain and bitterness, the lack of understanding, the futile
gropings, the emptiness, the hope against all hope, the
disappointments, the agonies, break out. And it takes a long time
to subside. But he is patient, there is no irritation or haste or
urgency in him, he has all the time in the world, she feels.

Spent, exhausted, she sinks into silence. Now she needs to talk,
more urgently than ever since the night she lost her tongue. And
yet she knows that even if she had a tongue tonight there would be
no words for what she so desperately wants to say.

Perhaps he senses it. What he says, at last, without
interrupting the slow rocking of her body cradled against him, is,
“I talk now?”

She nods her head against him in the dark.

“You tell me it is your war,” he says. “I understand. But you
must know it is my war too. It is a war of all of us. And you
cannot fight, fight, all the time. You rest now. It is better like
that. You understand?”

She nods. She is too tired to do more. She hears his voice
rumbling in his chest again, but she can no longer make the effort
to listen. She slides into sleep. For how long it lasts she cannot
tell. But when she wakes up he is still holding her. Early light
washes across his face which looms dark and peaceful above her.

I watch for you
.

Empty, yet at the same time inexplicably fulfilled, she moves to
her feet. Hesitates. Then bends down and presses her mouth against
his forehead. Before she returns to the oxcart in the courtyard
below.

∨
The Other Side of Silence
∧

A
fter that, I know,
there will be other battles, skirmishes, encounters, other forts,
other encampments on the veld which seems without end. Behind them
they leave the spectacle – in due course the memory – of their
conquered fort exploding, clad in flames, an unforgettable display:
having loaded as much of the arms and ammunition on their cart as
the oxen can haul, everything else was taken to the barracks. Drums
of fuel kept for lamps, many bags of gunpowder, piles of thatch,
stacks of roughly made furniture, were all heaped up, and once
everybody had vacated the enclosure Hanna and Kahapa lit the
torches and hurled them inside. There was an ungodly explosion, and
the place burned for hours while they began to move on, almost
reluctantly.

They have kept a few of the horses. All the others – and this
was an almost unbearable thing to do – had to be shot, as they
would either die if turned loose, or arouse suspicion should they
find their way back to wherever they came from. The two oxen will
be slaughtered along the way for food, and replaced by the salvaged
horses. What happens to these, will be determined when the time
comes by balancing their usefulness against their requirements of
fodder and, especially, water.

The small trek zigzags across the plains, trying to track what
Katja remembers of the directions young Werner had mapped out for
her before she killed him: from one well to the other, the wells
constructed a good time ago by von Trotha’s troops to make his war
possible, to keep his army supplied as they trekked through the
untamed land to subdue and destroy Ovambos, Hereros, Damaras,
Namas, wherever there was still resistance to the might of the
imperial homeland. Sometimes they meet a lonely
smous
in his
wagon; then time must be spent to establish the side he’s on, and
whether he is prepared to take them seriously or will treat them
with derision. Depending on this, his life will be forfeited or
spared. The same happens when they reach a farm, a small or
extended family in the remoteness of the semi-desert.
You are
either for us or against us
. To this immemorial formula
everything is reduced. Life or death. It is so simple. When they
espy a detachment of soldiers on some errand – and the powers of
Kahapa, Himba and old Tookwi (still suffering from his injuries,
often delirious) in detecting them never cease to stupefy Hanna and
Katja and Gisela – they usually try to set up an ambush. They will
use bows and arrows to pick off the last soldier in a straggling
line, then the next, then the next; so that enough are eliminated
by the time the vanguard discovers that something is amiss behind
them. Only then will they resort to open battle.

Forts are often avoided, depending on how well-manned they
appear to be. It is not necessary, or wise, to lay waste the whole
land. And if a garrison is too large, and the opposing forces
involved in open violence too uneven, and stealth and subterfuge
too risky, they prefer to move on. They do not want news of their
movements, their slow inexorable advance, to precede them.

More and more clearly, as they proceed, as one obstacle after
the other is removed, their destination comes into focus. It may
take months; late summer will be, abruptly, replaced by the
translucent shivers of winter: but that is where they are heading
for, and where the trek will end.