The Other Side of Silence (6 page)

It is given to her by a small stranger she meets in the bright
shallow water. Her name, she says without being asked, is Susan.
She comes all the way from an island called Ireland and does not
speak German very well (she has come here with her father, she
explains, who is employed at the harbour with a lot of other
foreign Catholic people from Thuringia and Bohemia and other places
where there is no work for the men). Hanna asks to see the shell,
and the little girl hands it to her with an endearing mixture of
shyness and eagerness. It is beautiful, whispers Hanna, almost too
beautiful to believe. Hold it to your ear, Susan tells her, you
will hear the sea. Hanna has never heard of a thing like that, but
the little girl nods solemnly and insists, Just listen. And she
does and indeed, she hears the distant sea which hisses very softly
in her ear, and brings to her all the lost sounds of the world,
even from the far side of the earth where the palm trees are and
the wind is born, and the singing of the sun, for oh the sun does
sing. They play together for the rest of the day, Hanna and the
little girl Susan with her very blue eyes and her very black hair,
and it is as if the day itself, all of it, can now fit into a shell
which will never stop its faint, small, perfect sound.

When she needs to pee and wants to run off, Susan says, Don’t be
silly, just squat down here, I’ll keep watch so no one comes, and
afterwards I shall too. So they first make a small round hollow in
the sand and she squats carefully over it, her feet wide apart and
her dress hitched up high so that it won’t get wet, and when she
stands up again to correct her clothes, Susan peers at her stomach
with large surprised eyes, and asks, What is this? And puts a
cautious finger on Hanna’s protruding navel. It’s my belly-button
of course, says Hanna, don’t you have one then? And Susan pulls up
her little red dress to take her turn to pee, displaying a sweet
and perfectly indented navel. (There is a small mole a little way
below it, and somewhat to the right.) You see? says Susan, yours is
quite different. I suppose it’s because you’re not Catholic. Just
then, from far away, where the other children are, Hanna hears Frau
Agathe calling her name. Oh dear Jesus, I’ll be in trouble, she
says, breathless with fear. And they run back together, the small
shell-gift still clutched tightly in her sweaty hand. You are not,
says Frau Agathe, do you hear me? you are not, not ever again, to
talk to strange children on the beach. They are Catholics, and that
is worse than heathens. And on Sunday she has to report it to
Pastor Ulrich who as always tells her to approach so he can feel
with his fat finger if she has sinned, only it is not her
non-Catholic navel he insists on probing. She is instructed again
to pray, to be vigilant, and to repent of her evil nine-year-old
ways, and he reads to her from the Bible, terrible things about
hell and sulphur and damnation, but the sounds of the words are
beautiful, whatever they may mean, words stored in her small magic
shell with all the other sounds. This side of the shell there is
only silence; if you look at it at arm’s length, you will never
guess what is enclosed in it, a sea, a whole world of sound, past
and present and who knows future, and if you listen very carefully,
holding it close to your ear, you can hear it all. Not just from
the other side of the world, but the other side of everything, the
other side of silence itself.

It is a silence which she carries deep within her, from the lost
time before she ever arrived at the orphanage, a time before the
real time of hours and bells and loud voices began, the time of the
invisible sea, a time when the silence surrounded her and her three
friends, the friends no one but she could see but who were as real
as her feet or her belly-button or her narrow face in a mirror,
their names were Trixie, Spixie and Finny, but when she was brought
to the Little Children of Jesus they got lost along the way and she
has never found them again. She cried for days, until Frau Agathe
put an end to it with her strap, maintaining that such creatures
could only be manifestations of the Devil. Even so Hanna continued
to run away, albeit at increasingly long intervals, in search of
them, only to be found and brought back and beaten every time by
Frau Agathe and probed by Pastor Ulrich.

Beatings happen all the time in the Little Children of Jesus
because it is a Christian place where evil will not be tolerated.
You get beaten if you’re late at prayers or for school, or for not
being able to recite the names of the books from the Old Testament
in the proper order, or for forgetting to bring in the washing, or
for soiling your clothes or scuffing your shoes, or for talking in
the dark after the candles have been put out, or for wetting your
bed, or for having lice in your hair, and most certainly if you run
away to the big cathedral on the Domplatz and hide behind a pillar
to listen to the organist practising Bach. Sometimes a beating is
not enough and has to be accompanied by other forms of punishment
like being sent to bed without supper, or locked up in the linen
cupboard for an afternoon or overnight or for a night and a day, or
being forced to sit for a given time in a cold bath, or to stand on
two bricks in the corner until you faint, or to learn long passages
from the Bible by heart (never the easy or interesting ones, but
the genealogies) and if you don’t get it right you get a stroke for
every mistake, on your hands or your legs or the soles of your feet
or on your bare buttocks with everybody assembled to watch. But
this hasn’t happened for quite some time now, for she no longer
needs to run off in search of her lost friends, she now has this
new friend Susan from her distant Ireland, and one day they will
run away together and live happily ever after, the way it happens
in stories.

Her favourite story is about the musicians who run away, the
donkey and the dog and the cat and the rooster, all of them old and
poor and no longer wanted by their cruel masters, and who then take
over the robbers’ house in the dark wood where they, too, at last,
can live happily ever after. This is why she covets the small
porcelain figurine which a girl called Ute brings to school one
day. It is a sin to covet, God knows how severely she will be
punished for it if they find out; but there is a worse sin, and
that is to steal. Thou shalt not – thou shalt not – thou shalt not.
Everywhere she goes she is surrounded by the dense hedge of
Thou-shalt-nots. This small exquisite porcelain ornament showing
the minute donkey and dog and cat and rooster is the one thing in
the world she covets and which she decides to steal. There is no
other way for her to hold it in her hands, to cherish it, to caress
its delicate outline. During the interval she slips into the
classroom and takes it from Ute’s satchel, then hurries outside to
hide it behind the girls’ lavatory. After the break, when the
disappearance of the figurine is discovered, they all have to open
their satchels and sit with folded arms while the teacher moves
along the rows to ransack their belongings. The little ornament is,
of course, not found. Hanna leaves it in its hiding place for a
week – furtively checking every day – before she carries it back to
her bed in the Little Children of Jesus. It lives in her drawer
inside her single spare pair of drab knickers; at night it sleeps
under her pillow. But one of the smaller girls finds her with it
and when Hanna tries to conceal it she drops it and now it is
chipped. This is how she discovers that nothing one loves one is
allowed to keep. Because now she has to get rid of it, but how?

God himself provides a solution. It is time for the Easter
Messe
, after the weeks of starvation when the meagre rations
of the orphans are cut down to just under subsistence level (one
has to suffer for the Lord). The girls are expected to produce
small objects to be sold at the
Messe
, contributing a few
pfennig to the church coffers and the greater glory of God. Most of
them knit shapeless socks or crochet doilies. Hanna fabricates a
small, rather wobbly chest of drawers from matchboxes smudgily
glued together and a skewed cardboard mirror covered with silver
paper. And on it, neatly centred, she places the Musicians of
Bremen in all their fragile glory. This, she calculates, should
appease God and perhaps cancel out the sins of coveting and
stealing. She has already taken her leave of it. Now God may have
it. He has so many useless things already. She has lately begun to
have serious doubts about God. He’d better be careful, or she will
stop believing in him altogether.

When Frau Agathe calls her in after the
Messe
to question
her about the figurine, she can say with a very straight face that
she ‘found’ it and thought God might like it. Even Pastor Ulrich’s
probing hand cannot elicit any further confession, and she is let
off with a mere warning. With a profound feeling of relief she lies
in her small bed that night, listening to the rain pouring down
outside, her sole possession of any importance, her shell, pressed
against her ear as she listens to the distant hiss of the sea and
imagines going off very far away, hand in hand with a small girl
from a strange land, a girl with very black hair and very blue
eyes, across all the seas of the world to the palm trees of an
oasis beloved of the breezes and the sun.

∨
The Other Side of Silence
∧

I
n the desert through
which they are travelling now there are no palm trees. Nor any
breezes, just a terrible February heat beating down day after day,
gathering inside the canvas hood of the ox-wagon, suffocating,
sweltering. But Hanna X is only distantly aware of it. She has no
interest in finding out how, or why, or when she landed on the
wagon which is taking her towards a place which is only a name as
yet. Frauenstein. Below her aching back – there is no part of her
body that is not aching; this must be the undying fire of hell
itself – the motion of the wagon, jolting and rolling and swaying,
is so much like that of the sea that on the verge of consciousness
she believes that she is indeed, still, or again, on the ship on
its indolent but relentless voyage from midwinter to midsummer.

The train journey is over; somehow, through a perverse and
unwanted miracle, she must have survived that too. But she will not
think about it. It is a black hole in her mind which she doesn’t
care to visit. In her thoughts it has not happened, it will never
happen. (Even now, standing in front of the ancient mirror on the
landing outside her room in Frauenstein, studying her reflection,
she will not think of that journey. Not now. Soon it will
have
to be faced; before she eventually turns away she will
have to face everything; but for now, please God, not yet.)

Adversity, Pastor Ulrich would say, is an ordeal of the
Almighty. Catastrophe even more so. What would this journey on the
wagon qualify as? But the question makes no sense. She and the
Almighty parted company long ago. Who abandoned whom is a moot
point. But surely it cannot just go on: there must be an end to
suffering. At the moment just going on is all that happens, and all
she can endure. She doesn’t even know where they are taking her.
She doesn’t know who ‘they’ are.

The driver of the wagon and his two companions make no attempt
to talk to their passengers, their load. They are black, and she is
scared of them. She has never seen black people before; terrifying
tales were told about them in Hamburg, before she left, when people
found out where she was going. If one were a missionary, there
might be some redeeming grace in the enterprise; but simply to go,
like that, into a wilderness inhabited by godforsaken naked
savages…? It is a German colony, she would reply. There are good,
ordinary German people living there. They need housekeepers and
helpers. And wives, her interlocutors would insist, knowingly. That
remains to be seen, she said. It still remains to be seen.

A military escort accompanies the wagon, four surly outriders.
Good, ordinary German people. After what has happened on the train
she is more scared of them than of the blacks; but at least, like
the driver and his companions, they make no attempt at
conversation. Sometimes two of them will ride off and return after
some hours with an antelope draped over one of the horses. Kudu,
gemsbok. The names are strange to her.

There are four other women on the transport wagon, rejects like
her. They, too, will not talk, or only rarely. From time to time
one of them may come over to the thin palliasse where she lies, to
wipe her face or chase away flies or moisten her lips (or what
remains of them) with a dirty rag. One of them, the youngest by the
looks of her, tries initially to talk to her. “What have they done
to you?” she asks. Hanna shakes her head; they do not know about
the painful throbbing stub in her mouth. “Why did they do it?” the
girl asks again. “What on earth did you do to provoke them so? Why
didn’t you just let them be? We are not meant to resist the men.
They always have their way. A woman must know her place.”
Presumably this one knew her place: yet what good has it done her?
Here she is with them on the same wagon, going towards the same
end, whether destiny or destination. The girl is silent for a
while. But in the end she starts again, now with a whining tone of
voice: “One never knows, of course. I tried so hard to please them,
but they just didn’t want me. What do you think I did wrong?” Hanna
makes no reply. “You despise me,” says the girl, “I know you do.
But what right do you have? Just look at you. I mean, what kind of
man would want you anyway?” Hanna turns away her head. Then she is
left alone again. When her dizziness, or the pain, permits, she
lies looking at them. They do not bear the kind of wounds and scars
that disfigure her; but they have been marked too. Their bodies
carry the imprint of their histories as hers does. It shows in the
way they sit or stand or he, the hunched shoulders, the knees drawn
up, the faces turned away, the silent crying which they make no
attempt to suppress, the snot they allow to congeal on their faces,
the odour of armpits and groins they no longer try to hide. Rejects
all. Yet these things hardly matter, they are no more than signs.
There are other scars, invisible, which are incomparably worse and
will not heal.