The Other Side of Silence (38 page)

The place is bustling like a broken anthill. After the silence
of the desert even a normal day here would have been bewildering;
but this is clearly not a normal day. Judging from the number of
carts and carriages and wagons of all descriptions cluttering the
streets (there are even a few motor cars) many of the people must
have arrived from elsewhere in the colony. Perhaps there is a fair?
The crowd gets more and more dense as they approach what Katja
recognises as the railway station. In this turmoil no one pays any
attention to the two women.

Katja stops a man in lederhosen to ask about the crowds.

A train has just arrived from Swakopmund, he tells them, so
eager to move on that half of what he says is spoken over his
shoulder. They’re bringing in passengers from a ship that landed
four days ago. A new consignment of women, he explains, his face
glowing with excitement.

Hanna feels her guts contract. For a moment she wants to turn
around and head for the desert again.

Katja, sensing her distress, reaches for her hand. “We needn’t
do this,” she says. “We can go round the crowd.”

No, I have to see it
.

Of course she has no recollection at all of her own arrival. She
was, after all, dead.

From the station building, obscured by the crowd, they can hear
the deep farting of a brass band, oompah-oompah.

Troubled but fascinated, unable to move – because of the crowd,
because of the leadenness in their own limbs – they stare ahead.
The people are shuffling laboriously out of the way to let the new
arrivals pass. The two sides are lined by soldiers in uniform,
staring stiffly ahead, as if they are not even aware of the
passengers they are allowing through, a thin band straggling
through a parted sea, heading towards some as yet unseen tract of
land promised by the Lord of Hosts. Oompah-oompah, the band goes.
It is like the Rathausplatz in Bremen on a Sunday afternoon.
Deutschland, Deutschland über alles
.

The newly disembarked passengers approach, two by two, like
animals from an ark, one couple after another, man and woman, man
and woman, a seemingly endlessly procession. Most are holding
hands, some walk in a tight embrace; others simply stride stiffly
beside each other, not exchanging looks, not saying anything. Many
of the men are red-faced, several openly drunk; a few have to be
dragged along by cronies, with embarrassed women shuffling after
them. There are pale and haggard faces among the women, but most
have a determined look about them, as if to defy the world. They
are
happy, goddamnit. They
are
in a new land of
opportunity. They
are
going to make a success of it. They
will get married. They will have many children to populate the
empty land and ensure a future for civilisation, Christianity, the
German Reich. Oh God have mercy.

After the couples there follows a large and rumbustious crowd of
men, uproariously drunk, shouting obscenities, collapsing with
mirth, lurching forward to vomit, singing songs from the distant
fatherland. Occasionally soldiers intervene to remove some of the
more obnoxious elements. Right at the back, like a small bundle of
sheep somehow cut off from the flock, follow a group of women. They
are the ones not chosen, the outcasts, unwanted by man or beast.
They look dishevelled and unwashed, crumpled like dirty laundry,
lank hair hanging tattily over their wan faces. They are not
crying, but it is only, one surmises, because they have no tears
left. They are way beyond all that. Clearly they have all been used
on the four-day journey from the coast. And thrown away, like
snotty handkerchiefs. They are covered in film, grime, spittle,
semen. And even as they stumble along people in the crowd hurl peel
and eggs and tomatoes at them, jeer at them, spit at them. Drunken
men tear open their flies to piss on them, then collapse with
laughter. At the far end of the tunnel through which they pass, two
ox-wagons are waiting. Most likely they will take the discarded
women through the desert to that out-of-reach place everyone has
heard about but no one wants to see, the prison, the nunnery, the
brothel, the shithouse, Frauenstein.

On moonless nights, Hanna remembers – a quite irrelevant memory
– the huge house, the ship stranded in the desert, breaking away
from its moorings, straining against gravity, and soaring up into
sky, a magical journey, beyond the reach of the world, its load of
grey ghosts intact.

The two women do not cry, they do not speak. They just stand
there.

“We must go on,” Katja says at last, gently tugging Hanna by the
arm. “We still have a lot to do today.” This may be the completion
of a circle, but it is not yet their destination.

I need some time on my own
.

Katja breathes in slowly, quietly, and nods. She knows this is
not the moment to protest. And there is no need to discuss what
remains to be done: they have gone over it so many times
already.

“I’ll do my best to find him,” she says. “Take care. I shall be
back.”

∨
The Other Side of Silence
∧

T
he station is
deserted by now. The people have dispersed in the wake of the
procession, the band has packed up and left, the last few drunks
have staggered to their feet from their puddles of piss and vomit.
Only their litter remains behind. Hanna instals herself on a corner
of the wide stoep, her back resting against a pillar. Vacantly she
stares ahead. This moment, she knows with a sense of sadness, but
also of deep satisfaction, is perhaps the most necessary of her
life. A life that suddenly feels immeasurably longer than it has
been. Behind the anxiety and the tumult of her emotions is an
awareness of the inevitable. She cannot have too much longer to go
on. And there are still so many memories to sort out.

Leaning back, she looks up at the fronds of the high palms in
front of the brown sandstone building with its red roof. At last
she is where she has wanted to be, even if it is so very different
from her dreams. She remembers the first picture of palm trees she
saw in the Children’s Bible in the orphanage, and how it
enthralled her, transported her to places as yet without names,
long before in her sessions with Fraulein Braunschweig the names
began to sound in her mind like a memory of bells. Guadalquivir,
Macchu Pichu, Smolensk, Barbezieux, Parramatta, Ondangua, Omaruru,
Otjiwarongo. How they soothed and comforted her in the dark hole in
which they locked her up when she was a child, when she fell ill
and died and led her army of rats up the stairs to sweep into the
room where Frau Agathe was waiting, all in black. Her own glorious,
victorious army, from Chinon to Poitiers to Orleans to Rheims.
Closing her eyes, she can still hear the soft droning of Fraulein
Braunschweig’s voice reading and reciting. The stories of Jeanne,
of young Werther, of Bluebeard, of Cinderella, of the little
Goatherd, of the poor outcast Musicians of Bremen who took their
revenge on an unaccommodating world. A voice that imperceptibly
becomes smaller, speaking now with an accent that must be Irish.
Susan with the little mole below her navel, peeing frothily in the
dam they have made in the sand, holding against her ear the shell
that will change her life, a shell that reaches out, far beyond all
silence, to what lies forever beyond, like a world without end.
There are the sounds of her voices, some stern and damning, others
sugary with evil (
Stand closer, child, let us see where you are
trying to hide your sins – Now take off your shirt, I promise not
to touch
…), the shrill giggly whispers of Trixie, Spixie and
Finny, speaking from the far side of the Little Children of Jesus,
deep within her dreams, the screeching of cicadas, the call of a
hadedah in the twilight, the explosion of a piano smashed to
pieces.

Not only sounds does she recall. Smells too. The smells of the
orphanage – sauerkraut, leeks, potatoes, fish heads steaming in a
pot. So much later, the smells of the sea, of Lotte’s hair, of
Lotte’s love. The tobacco and stale sweat in the office at
Swakopmund. The cellary smells of Frauenstein, of mustiness and
ghosts and dry rot, of women menstruating. And then the smells of
Africa, its dryness and its acrid shrubs, its bitter aloes, its
veldfire smoke, the sudden generosity of its rain, Tookwi’s rain,
the good god Tsui-Goab’s rain, sometimes female and gentle,
sometimes fierce and devastating and male.

And tastes. Carrots stolen from the orphanage garden, small
gritty lumps of mud still clinging to them. Stew in Fraulein
Braunschweig’s cosy kitchen. Kassler ribs with Opa and Oma. Salted
pork on the ship, and the tang of sea-spray on the equator. The
bitter, healing concoctions of the wise old woman Taras. The thin
broth of the parsonage at the mission station. The taste of rain,
of an ostrich egg, of a strip of roasted springbok meat, a
locust.

Yes, and textures. The polished wood of the desk in the
Herrenzimmer. The pockmarked column against which she presses her
face when she hides in the cathedral to listen to the organ. The
smoothness of a chess piece, ebony or ivory, between her fingers.
The stone bannisters in Frauenstein. The eroded surface of the rock
formation in the shape of a woman forever trying to look back. The
coarseness of desert sand, the silkiness of an aloe leaf. The
powdery dust of a skin shed by a snake.

Sight, then. The beads of perspiration on Pastor Ulrich’s upper
lip. Frau Agathe’s sewed-on button eyes. Frau Knesebeck’s fowl-arse
mouth. Cobblestones in Bremen glistening in the rain. A bleeding
sunset. The pale wash of the squat little church at the mission.
The hat perched on Kahapa’s head. The skinny girls of the
missionary. A fort erupting spectacularly in flames. The slow,
unstoppable progress of a tortoise in the veld. The smooth
porcelain of a chipped figurine – a donkey, a dog, a cat and a
rooster – displayed on a crude matchbox dresser at the church
Messe
.

All the memories subsumed in her many deaths. The vaguely
remembered blackness from which she first awoke in me
Hutfilterstrasse, knowing there must have been something before it,
without ever retrieving more than ragged ends trailing off, back
into the dark. The peat-cellar below the orphanage. The bitter
pills she took after old Opa’s quiet death. Lotte changing places
with herself. The night on the train, watching the buckled belts
come off. Her fall – her jump? – from the wagon on the road to
Frauenstein. Succumbing to exposure in the desert. Hurling herself
from the wall of the fort. Followed every time by a return to life,
because there was still unfinished business to assume.

Her years in the Little Children of Jesus: wetting her bed,
caught out on lies or her many ‘stories’, running back to her
imaginary friends, to the moon or the place where the wind comes
from; beatings, beatings, beatings. Her first bleeding,
I think
you’re growing into a woman
, says Fraulein Braunschweig who
gives her cloths and books.
Die Leiden des jungen Werther
.
Her years in service: Herr Dieter depositing the small pile of
coins on the corner of his desk, the list of sins in Frau
Hildegarde’s spidery handwriting. Herr Ludwig’s face in the light
of the lamp. Opa’s fabulous instrument that makes no sound. Frau
Sprandel behind the long table with the dusty light from behind:
As long as you don’t expect too much of your palm trees
. And
the sea voyage with the silvery flying fishes and the
phosphorescent water and the swell sighing in its equatorial sleep,
and Lotte’s breathing in her ear, her body wrapped in canvas and
tipped into the black waves. The man to whom she is assigned in the
drab office at Swakopmund, his narrow head, his broad hands, his
rasping voice:
All it takes is a little firmness. There are ways
and means
. Then the men with the knives and the belts and the
rough wedge of wood. The swaying and jolting of the wagon. Waking
up among the Namas with their herbs and stories. A whole land, a
whole continent of stories. The beautiful vain woman Xurisib, the
Milky Way of Tsui-Goab. The omumborumbonga tree from which the
first man and the first woman emerged. Frauenstein with its hidden
fountain where a body lies buried, restored to bone by now.
Frauenstein with its ribbed dunes of sand invading the lower rooms,
its mottled mirrors and dark empty spaces, its barren women. Her
attempts to write her story for Frau Knesebeck, to find someone who
will read it, going up in flames. So much has gone up in flames
these last months. And then that night after the clamour and
cavorting of the military men had died down, the thud-thud-thud of
a head dragged down the stone stairs, Katja cowering naked in a
corner. The truth of her own face, her body, for the first time in
years, in the mirror, by candlelight. This once she must look and
not avoid anything. Then out towards the emptiness outside, and the
voice behind her saying,
Where are you going?
Oh God, little
Katja. Could you ever have suspected what would happen? Those early
days, living on
tsammas
and tortoises and roots and
sometimes honey. The vultures circling over the anthill with
Kahapa’s mutilated body.
The German way
. The rage of Albert
Gruber, the unmarked grave enclosing the bones of a woman who once
played the piano. The pitiful little oasis of the mission station,
the prayers in the church, the stifling nights in the parsonage,
the tiny coffin deposited in the much-too-shallow grave. She
reviews her troops. The mighty Kahapa who feared no man and held
her in his arms and then was flayed alive. Himba the wounded
warrior who stormed a fort on his own and drew all the fire on
himself. Kamma who dispensed life and death with her potions. The
sad monkey T’Kamkhab and his smouldering wife, playthings of an
occupying army. Tookwi who brought rain when they needed it, a
merciful rain-cow followed by the mad rage of a rain-bull. The
woman of death, Koo, who never found the bones of her child and did
not even leave her own behind. And Gisela with her beaked face, her
dead eyes, briefly thriving on violence before it all became too
much for her.