The Other Side of Silence (13 page)

Shaking with barely controllable rage Hanna rushes to the desk.
In a long raking movement she sweeps up her papers and goes to the
door. Tears are streaming down her face, but she makes no
sound.

“I do think you should take more care with your writing,
though,” says Frau Knesebeck behind her. “It gives the impression
of being rather hastily written. The letters are not always shaped
properly, the lines are uneven, and there are far too many
blots.”

In the oven at the back door, where a fire is flaring in
preparation for the day’s baking, Hanna spends half an hour burning
everything she has written, each sheet separately. At first she is
shaking with rage. Burn, burn! As if it is her own pyre. But as she
grows more weary and her movements slow down, a deeper,
inexplicable satisfaction spreads through her. Yes, this is a
necessary act. How could it be otherwise? What she has written did
not deserve to be told. It was not the truth, couldn’t ever have
been the truth, the whole, and nothing but. How could she have
presumed so much? The truth cannot be told, that is why it is the
truth.

Later in the day she leaves Frauenstein to die.

∨
The Other Side of Silence
∧

A
little way down
from Lotte’s navel, and slightly to the right, is a small mole.
Hanna will often linger there before she resumes with the tip of
her tongue the journey of love.

∨
The Other Side of Silence
∧

T
here is nothing
furtive about her going off into the desert. In her childhood when
she ran away from the orphanage, she always made sure that her
absence would not be detected too soon. Also, in those days, on
every occasion she had a clear idea of where she was going. Once,
when she was very small, she hoped to reach the moon. On another
occasion she tried to reach the place where the wind comes from.
Sometimes she tried to find the way back to Trixie, Spixie and
Finny. At least twice, in a more practical frame of mind, she left
the dank building in the Hutfilterstrasse, followed the intricate
warren of streets to the Rathausplatz and the St Petri
Cathedral, cut through the Schnoor quarter and crossed the darkly
flowing river on the free ferry to the Weserstrand on the far side,
opposite the large basin of the Europahafen. But on neither
occasion was there any sign of the girl who had once played there.
And so both
Ausflügen
ended in a sad return.

This time, however, it is different. She is not going towards
anything at all: it is purely a movement
away from
. And she
neither hides nor advertises her going. It is immaterial to her
whether she is observed or not. In the early days of her stay at
Frauenstein she was never left alone; there were always women
appointed to keep an eye on her. But their vigilance soon wilted in
the heat. Why should it matter to them whether she is here or
somewhere else? No one particularly likes or dislikes her. She is
tolerated, as everybody else is; no more, no less.

She has taken nothing with her, no food, no clothes, not even a
bottle of water. If she still had her shell, she might well have
brought that along; but now it is gone, with all its irretrievable
memories. Her wide bonnet, too, is left behind; someone else may
find it useful, it is still quite new. One needs so little on this
last trek. There is no sadness in her, not even reluctance. It is
simply something for which the time has come. If anything, she
feels anticipation at joining Lotte in death. It is not a religious
expectation of an afterlife – in her early rejection of God she has
also turned her back on both salvation and damnation – but a quiet
contentment in accepting that what has happened to Lotte will now
happen to her. In a way the Namas are also drawn into it. But they
didn’t choose their death, they were overcome by it; with Lotte and
with her it is different, an act of choice.

It is Lotte she feels closest to in this infinite space. All
boundaries, even of time, are quietly effaced. In this extremity,
as in the extremities of love, they are together again. How would
Lotte react to her scarred face and body, if she were here now? The
question is irrelevant. They
are
together, there is no
difference between them, they are the same, body and body, mind and
mind, dream and dream, more intimate than marriage. It is such a
necessary journey, into the self.

At the same time, she may think, this is perhaps the closest one
can get to that
beyond
which she has always sensed at the
far side of everything she knew. When she was a child it was
associated with the other side of the sea, which to her was
Ireland, where the little girl Susan came from. Much later, when
she applied to go to German South-West Africa, that distant land
nudging the turbulent Atlantic came to represent
beyond
. But
now that
there
has become
here
she knows it is much
more complicated man she has ever thought. What defines
beyond
is, after all, the acknowledgement that it cannot,
ever, be attained. Except possibly on this final journey.

Desolate as the landscape around her may appear to be – red
earth, rocks scorched brown and black, outcrops and ridges and
banks of stone, stunted trees and
bossies
, sparse dry tufts
of grass – to her it is not empty but dense with the life of the
stories the Namas so endlessly told her. The thin dust devil
twirling in the distance is the Evil One,
saris
, in search
of a victim. The shrilling cicadas are praise-singers of the god
Tsui-Goab. The dry bed of a long-disappeared river is the trace of
a magical snake. And when night falls and she lies down to rest,
prostrate on her back, her head on her folded arms so that she can
gaze up at the slow cartwheeling of the stars above, she recognises
in the Milky Way the white ashes scattered by Tsui-Goab after he
had defeated the evil god Gaunab so that all the world could be
warned of the route he took to his home in the Black Sky. And the
brightest light of all, that of the evening star Khanous, was once
a brilliant girl among the Namas who warded off an attack by
treacherous San warriors by sacrificing her virginity to the enemy
in order to save her father’s tribe.

Hanna is amazed to discover how much she can recall of what she
was told by Xareb’s people. Even during the days and nights when
she was dazed and only half awake the stories must have insinuated
themselves into her torn and bruised body like draughts and
ointments with healing powers beyond all explanation. (“There is no
pain and no badness,” she still hears the dry voice of old Taras in
her ear, “that a story cannot cure.”)

The journey becomes, not a return to, but a kind of consecration
of her stay with the tribe. They are the only people who have
never, not once, recoiled or gaped in horror or disgust at her
disfigurement; she was simply a person in need. Even among the
outcasts in Frauenstein she remains an aberration and a curiosity.
And how can she blame them? To herself she is a freak. When she
wanders through the hollow space by day or night and catches in
passing the merest glimpse of her reflection in a mirror, she
averts her eyes; she will not face the ghoul she has become. But
here in the desert, restored to the memory of the small people who
saved her life and tended her – and paid the price for it – there
is no danger of reflections; she can be whole again. She no longer
feels the need, as in her bed in Frauenstein at night, too scared
to face a mirror, to palpate the surface and contours of her face,
her breasts, her cunt as if, like one newly blinded, she has to
learn to read with her fingers the half-obscured and horrifying
text of herself. Here, back with the Namas of her mind, she can
simply
be
, there is no need of confirmation from the
outside. It is a kind of purification of body and mind, stripping
herself down to the elements, the perfect preparation for
death.

It is not only the stories that come back to her. On the second
day, when the thirst grows really bad, she finds herself kneeling
beside a shrivelled plant that looks like nothing on earth; and as
she instinctively begins to burrow into the gritty earth she
realises suddenly that she is doing what Xareb himself has shown
her: digging for a
nona
root. The satisfaction the cool
acrid juice brings her is better than anything she can remember
from Bremen. It is an experience repeated with other forms of
nourishment from the veld: the prickly leaves of
aiuma
, the
small green melons of the
tsamma
, the orange pods of
kukemakranka
. Many of the names she has forgotten, but she
remembers what the plants look like, where to look for them, what
they taste like. A couple of times she does make a mistake and pays
for it with excruciating cramps or bouts of vomiting or diarrhoea;
once it is so bad that she is convinced she will die.

But she recovers, and feels inordinately proud of herself. That
is when, with a wan smile, she realises how mixed up everything has
become in her mind: for why should she be relieved to have
recovered if death is in fact what she has been looking for? She
knows now that this is not the way she will meet her end, just as a
good swimmer would be foolish to attempt suicide by drowning.

Xareb’s people have saved her again, she thinks. And having
revived herself with the juices of another tuber and some fiercely
bitter aloe leaves, she calmly turns back to the east where she has
set out from and begins to retrace her steps – quite invisible, her
feet having left no imprint on the hard earth to start with – all
the way through the desert which has now become a home to her, back
to Frauenstein.

From very far away she sees the fantastic fortress rearing up
against the lurid blaze of the sky. And a little distance beyond,
the rocky outcrop which marks the head of the magic fountain. From
this direction the formation in the shape of a woman is clearly
recognisable, her torso half contorted as if struggling against her
own petrifaction to turn back, back, to whatever lies behind her.
This, she thinks, perhaps wryly, is what happens to women who try
to look back.

A story told by the old woman, Taras: of the trickster-god
Heiseb who left his tribe as a young man to see the world, and
stayed away for a time without time; and when one day he came back,
covered in dust and dirt, his skin wrinkled with memories and
distances, a prodigal son stumbling at last into the
almost-not-remembered village, there is no one left to welcome him,
only an assortment of rocks and stones. Which is why dotted all
over the landscape the innumerable graves of Heiseb are still
marked with cairns to which every passer-by, woman or man, is
required to add another stone. And Hanna, too, carries home a stone
from her wandering and deposits it below the outcrop before she
turns to enter the forbidding house of the women. It is difficult
to say what she feels. Sadness? Regret? Fear? Shame? Relief?
Satisfaction? Probably only something like resignation: she has
gone away, she has come back, she is here now. And will be for the
rest of her life.

She is tired, yes, to the point of exhaustion. Emaciated. Her
shoes have been worn through and her feet are bleeding. Her face is
blistered from the sun, a fiery purple red as if the skin has been
stripped off. Now there will be shade and water and rest. Not
necessarily sleep: it is not oblivion she wants, but an even,
continuous consciousness.

Frau Knesebeck is in her office when she comes in. Hanna
hesitates in the doorway. The woman at the desk looks up. Her
expression registers no surprise. “You are back,” she says.

Hanna nods.

Frau Knesebeck looks at the clock on the wall, its formal face
flanked by eagles with spread wings, carved from dark wood, highly
polished. “It is time to milk the cows.”

Hanna goes out. She is not even upset that there will not be
time to wash or change her clothes before she goes to the cowshed.
It can wait. The routine is more important: it has been running its
course since long before she arrived and will continue after her
death. Rising early – no bells are rung at Frauenstein, the women
are expected to follow the daily timetable by rote – to milk the
cows and turn the animals to graze, then to separate the milk and
keep the cream in the cool-room to make butter. Taking out the
slops to the garden and the long outhouse with its row of holes in
the wooden bench. Preparing breakfast, then washing the dishes.
After which it will be time to do the laundry, or the ironing, or
the darning and mending, or washing the windows, or polishing the
floors, or cleaning the sheds, or chopping firewood, depending on
the day of the week. Something for every hour of the day. Making
oneself useful, keeping oneself occupied.

And there is reassurance to be drawn from the unvarying course
of the daily programme, leaving little time for private emotions,
for dwelling on an irrecoverable past or an impossible future.
Everything is here, now, and for ever. She must cut herself off
from feeling, even from the acknowledgement of feeling. It is too
dark, too dangerous, too unpredictable, a wilderness into which she
dare not venture. Only at night, sometimes, there is the treachery
of dreams. Most of them are terrifying. Pastor Ulrich, Frau Agathe,
the peat-shed, the closing of the heavy door in the parsonage
study. Or the train, always the train – nightmares so horrendous
that she is awakened by her own screams. The comforting dreams are
more rare. Hearing the voice of old Taras in her ear, spinning her
stories; or watching the children at play; or joining the tribe as
they gather food or repair their huts or bring in bundles of
firewood or slaughter a goat. Even more rare are the nights when
Lotte takes shape from the dark to share her bed; within the dream
she will awake to feel the caress of a hand, light as the whisper
of the wind or a butterfly alighting on her breast (she still has
nipples) or between her thighs (she still has a cunt). And with her
own hands and lips she will return the caress and feel a body
assume its substance from her touch. And she will discover that
desire is still possible, even if it is unbearable. Then she will
lie awake for the rest of the night, her body rigid with yearning;
waiting for the bleak dawn to spill into her room and bring with it
the first sounds of a new day, an old routine resumed.