The Other Side of Silence (10 page)

Hanna clutches it to her chest.

“Burn it.”

Hanna shakes her head. Frau Agathe grabs a stove-iron from a
hook on the wall. For a moment it seems as if she is going to
attack the girl with it. But then, breathing heavily, she slowly
replaces the iron. “You will go to Pastor Ulrich,” she says with a
strange kind of elation in her rasping voice. “I shall give you a
letter. Then we shall see.”

Half an hour later she is in the parsonage with the large fat
man.

“Ah Hanna,” he says. “What brings you here on such a pleasant
day?”

“I have brought a letter from Frau Agathe,” she says stiffly.
She hands it over, then stands back.

In silence he peruses it. His face turns as purple as a turkey’s
wattles, which signals unfailingly what is to come.

“Where is the book?” he asks.

“I have put it away, Your Reverend.”

“You were instructed to bring it here, were you not?”

“Yes, Your Reverend. But it belongs to Fraulein Braunschweig. It
is not for burning.”

He gets up from the deep easy-chair, comes past her, closes the
heavy door, and bolts it. She doesn’t move.

He comes back, paddling like a large black waterfowl. Turns
round to face her.

“Come over here,” he says, his face shiny with sweat.

Hanna doesn’t move.

“I won’t be touched today,” she says. It is like another’s voice
speaking through her, surprising her. It feels as if she isn’t
really down here with him, but somewhere high up on the rafters,
looking down on the two of them, the large shapeless man, like a
bundle of washing wrapped in black, the girl with the gawky
body.

Pastor Ulrich gives a benign smile. “And why won’t you be
touched today?” he asks in an unctuous voice. He seems almost to
welcome the signs of defiance.

“Because Fraulein Braunschweig told me a month ago that I have
now become a woman.”

“Indeed?” He raises his heavy eyebrows. He is sweating more
profusely now; she can smell it. “And how would we know that?”

For a moment she panics. Then a strange calm spreads through
her. She raises her head and says, “I am bleeding.”

His reaction briefly surprises her: “Then it is time you start
taking great care of yourself.”

“Thank you, Your Reverend. I shall take care. Fraulein
Braunschweig has already told me all about it.”

He narrows his eyes as if he suspects she may be sarcastic.
“Your body is the temple of God,” he says. “Men may feel tempted to
defile it.” He takes out a large kerchief to wipe his face, then
blows his nose in it.

“What do you mean, Your Reverend?”

“They may…” He clears his throat. “They may attempt to touch you
in lewd ways.”

“The way you touch me, Your Reverend?”

He seems ready to explode with indignation. “How dare you say
that?” he asks in a near-whisper.

“The way you touch me: is that not a sin then, Your Reverend?”
she asks.

“What I have done to you, my daughter,” he says, “has been done
in purity of mind and generosity of spirit, in the name of God. To
exorcise the devils which reside within you. In that place…” He
makes a gesture towards her, but drops his hand. There is a long
silence. Then he approaches slowly. “What you need right now,” he
says, “is a proper cleansing. Before you are consumed by the fires
of hell that burn in that secret place of your body.”

“If there are devils in me, then they’re mine. And you have no
right to drive them out,” she says. There is a recklessness and a
passion in her now, which seem to excite him unbearably.

He comes still closer. She backs away. He follows. It is a scene
an onlooker might find comical; to them, trapped in it, it is
deadly serious. She backs. He follows. Until she feels the wall
against her shoulderblades and knows that no further retreat is
possible. He comes still closer.

“Don’t do this, Your Reverend,” she says. Her voice falters
briefly.

“It is for your own good,” he says. She can smell his lunch on
his breath. Leeks, onion, chicken. “It is my duty to take you in
charge.”

“Can you not leave it to God?” she asks. “Or do you think he may
also take advantage of me?” For the first time ever her defiance is
open; but it is her life she is fighting for.

“This is blasphemy!” he gasps. “Are you not scared unto death?
It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living
God
.”

She mustn’t say this, she mustn’t; but she does: “If God is like
you, Your Reverend, I won’t have anything more to do with him. Not
ever.”

∨
The Other Side of Silence
∧

I
t has dire
consequences. In later years – and also this night when she stares,
darkly, at her reflection in the mirror on the landing – she will
think of it as her first death. (The very early one, before she
came to the Little Children of Jesus, doesn’t count, because she
has no recollection of it.) Pastor Ulrich personally accompanies
her back to the orphanage. On the way he tries several times to
clutch her hand, but she evades his grasp.

She has to spend a week locked up in the cellar where the peat
is kept. A dark so absolute she cannot see her fingers when she
holds them up to her face. She has always been terrified of the
dark, but this is so far beyond terror that she can no longer
consciously feel it. It is just something that is lodged inside
her, a blackness into which she retreats and which paralyses her.
They have taken away all her clothes. She is given no food. Only
water, twice a day. Once a day someone comes with a cane to
administer a beating. When at last she is allowed out she can
barely walk. The light hurts her eyes, piercing them like shards of
broken glass. She is taken to Frau Agathe’s cramped study cluttered
with heavy dark furniture. Pastor Ulrich is there too. She can
smell him before she sees him.

“My child,” he says, his voice marinaded in loving concern. “I
hope you have used your time to think on God and his mercy.”

Hanna shows no reaction.

“It is the Devil,” whispers Frau Agathe.

“What do you have to say?” Pastor Ulrich prods her gently.

“Why do you hate me so?” she asks with stiff lips.

“You are wrong, my daughter,” he says. “We love you. God loves
you. What we hate is the Devil that has taken hold of you. We shall
get rid of him whatever it takes.”

She shrugs wearily.

“This weekend you have your Christmas concert,” he reminds her.
“Are you ready to take part in a spirit of celebration, with a mind
and a body cleansed of sin, to the greater glory of God?”

“I do not want to have anything to do with your concert,” she
says. “I do not want your God.”

Frau Agathe sits down on a chair, gasping for air like a fish on
land, too horrified to speak.

He, too, is breathing deeply. He asks, “What is it you
want?”

“I want my books,” says Hanna. “I want to go back to Fraulein
Braunschweig.”

“Unless you repent you will never set foot in that school
again,” says Frau Agathe in a piercing voice. “All you bring back
from there is bad habits and an evil heart.”

She cannot believe it. She stares at the grownups in dismay. All
her thoughts go tumbling in disorder through her mind. But she does
not speak.

Frau Agathe stands up. “I shall leave you to Pastor Ulrich,” she
says. As she prepares to close the door behind her, she adds, “I
shall pray God for your immortal soul. But I have very little
hope.”

“Please don’t go,” says Hanna.

Frau Agathe looks at her with a frown between her pale grey
eyes. “What do you mean?”

“Pastor Ulrich does sinful things to me when we are alone.”

The tall thin woman stares at her as if she has seen a ghost.
Then she thrusts her bony face into her hands and starts shaking.
“How dare you, how dare you, how dare you?” she stutters. But Hanna
cannot make out whether it is addressed to her or the pastor.

He is livid. But is it with rage, or fear?

“Do you think,” he asks in a voice so low she can hardly hear
it, “do you think any man – do you think that I, a man of God –
will even consider laying a finger on one as despicable and as
wretched and as evil and as ugly as you?” He is breathing deeply,
unevenly, as he does when he is alone with her.

I may be despicable, she thinks. And I know I’m wretched. I may
be evil. But don’t tell me I am ugly. For God’s sake, don’t.

She is taken back to the cellar for another week. She no longer
feels the hunger. She is barely conscious of the pain when they
come for the daily beating. But she is aware of the cold. It creeps
into the marrow of her bones. She is shivering, day and night. Her
head throbs with pain, she is racked with fever. Sometimes she
hears voices. Fraulein Braunschweig saying, “You must read this.
Die Leiden desjungen Werther
. It is a very beautiful book.”
The small piping voices of invisible children, Trixie and Spixie
and Finny. And unknown voices too, chanting the music of far-off
names – Guadalquivir and Macchu Pichu and Smolensk and Ondangua and
Barbezieux and Parramatta. They may be the voices of angels.
Sometimes they change into animal sounds, the braying and barking
and mewing and crowing of the Musicians of Bremen, drowned out by
the glorious booming of the cathedral bell, and then silence,
nothing but silence.

“This child is dying,” says an unfamiliar voice one day.

Frau Agathe’s voice replies, “She is acting up.”

Then back into the dark. There are rats scuttling about. They
gnaw at her hair, her fingers, her frozen toes. They are speaking
to her in eerie squeaking voices. Come with us, they tell her. Let
us get out of here and drive out the grownups from the Little
Children of Jesus and take possession of it. But how will we get
out of this black hole? she asks. No problem, they say, we’ll gnaw
through the door.

It happens so quickly that she can hardly believe it. A
shimmering of daylight filters into the cellar.

Come, they shriek at her. We can’t wait, we must surprise them!
Her weakness, the fever, the shaking of her body, all miraculously
flow out of her as she gets up and, grabbing a coal shovel from the
wall next to the broken door, follows them up the broken stone
staircase. The rats must have communicated with others of their
tribe beforehand, because, when they reach the ground floor above
they are joined by thousands of other rodents that come swarming
from all sides, through doors and windows, down chimneys, pouring
from the ceilings.

They part to all sides like a dark sea to let her pass. “You
must lead us,” they say. “You know the place. Take us straight to
them.”

With Hanna at the head, they converge on Frau Agathe’s room. The
door is locked, Hanna discovers when she tries to force it from
outside. From inside they can hear a humming of low, anxious
voices. Frau Agathe and some other women. Pastor Ulrich. This is
perfect. Waving her blue-and-silver-and-gold standard, Hanna
motions at her cohorts to storm the place. Once again the rats
swoop to the door. Within minutes there is nothing left but a heap
of white splinters and a gaping hole. The grownups are cowering
against the far wall.

“Please understand,” squeaks Pastor Ulrich in a falsetto voice.
“Everything we have done has been in the name of God. We really
mean well. We bear you no malice.”

They are not permitted any further argument. The rats come
swarming forward and overrun the five or six figures in black.
There is one large general sound of gnawing, within which smaller
eddies can be distinguished – the wet slithering of mastication,
squeaking tussles and fights over fingerbones and toes. And in no
time at all only bones are left, smooth and very white.

From there the rats spread out in all directions. Children are
set free from dormitories and study halls in which they have been
locked up. In a frenzy of jubilation they ripple through the
corridors and spill out into the streets. They are heading for the
river, and from there to the sea, Hanna knows. And as soon as the
work is done – the great stone building crashing to the ground
behind them, sending up a huge cloud of dust – she runs to join
them. The sea, the sea. And playing on the beach, blissfully
unaware of catastrophe as she builds a sandcastle at the lacy edge
of the water, a small girl with black hair and the bluest of eyes
is caught in the dazzle of the sun. Behind her are palm trees
waving like tall hands beckoning. This way, this way.

She comes to, hazily, when her body is picked up by many hands,
and a blanket is thrown over her, and she is carried out, and
upstairs.

“I’m afraid it is too late,” a voice says. “The girl is
dead.”

“She had to sit out her punishment,” says Frau Agathe. “What
will become of discipline if we give in to every little prank? At
least we’ve driven the devils out, praise God.”

When she wakes up again she is in a strange white room. So she
must be dead, she thinks, and this is heaven. God may turn up at
any moment. Which may be problematic, as she no longer believes in
him. Perhaps she should tell him, Can we agree on this? I will not
believe in you, if you will not hold it against me.

But the man who comes in is not God. It is Pastor Ulrich. (He
had eggs for breakfast, and pork sausages, the stains on his
waistcoat disclose.)

She shuts her eyes, but he doesn’t go away. Through trembling
lashes she peers at him. He stands looking down at her for a long
time, before he goes to find a chair from a corner and pulls it up
right next to her bed.

“My daughter,” he says.

Hanna pretends to be asleep.

“Hanna.”

She still says nothing. Will he not get tired and go away?

He will not. She feels a movement on the bedclothes. He has
inserted his hand under the top blanket. For a while he keeps very
still, then the hand begins to move closer as if it has a life of
its own, like a fat crab. It touches her hip and goes still again.
She lies very rigid.