The Other Side of Silence (17 page)

“You did not!” she screams. “You’re not so stupid, you did it on
purpose. You let me win. Because you despise me, because you think
I can never win on my own. I won’t play with you again, not ever!”
And she runs to her room, sobbing.

In the night her rage makes way for shame. What on earth has
possessed her? She never knew she had this in her. But at the end
of it all there is only one simple and terrible fact to face: he is
the master, he can do anything he wants, she has no right, no right
at all, to question him, whatever he may wish to do. And to storm
at him like that! Calling him
du
. It is the end. She will be
sent away in disgrace again. And she deserves it. She has wrecked
everything. Any chance of beating him, of winning books from him,
of studying, of one day working for his company and travelling the
world, everything, everything.

When she takes his breakfast in to him (Frau Liesel and little
Peter are still in bed) she starts to apologise but breaks into
tears and cannot go on. He gets up from the table, takes her by the
shoulders and says gently, “I am sorry, Hanna. I am very, very
sorry. I never meant to hurt or insult you. Will you please forgive
me?”

It makes her cry more hopelessly. But that evening, very
quietly, and without talking about it again, they return to the
small chess table against the wall.

And a month later, perhaps a bit more, the unimaginable happens.
After an intense and drawn-out game spread over two long evenings,
which Hanna tries to approach like the siege of Orleans, it dawns
on her that she has him at her mercy. One move of a bishop and his
king will be cornered. There is no way out. She has done it. Never
in her life has she felt such a sense of power. That is when she
sits back, the shadow of a smile on her lips, savouring it, only
for a moment, before she leans forward again and moves her bishop
out of the way, letting Herr Ludwig’s smooth white ivory king off
the hook. Which will make it possible for him to capture hers.

Herr Ludwig looks up in dismay. He studies her face as if it
were a military map and cannot believe what he sees.

“What have you done?” he asks in a smothered voice.
“Hanna…?”

“What do you mean?” she says, unperturbed. “You win.” In the
caress of the light her face looks timeless, much older than her
tender years – how old is she? fifteen? sixteen? – but at the same
time much younger, with all the intricate innocence of a child
building castles on the sand.

After that they continue with their evening games; more often
than not he wins, occasionally they play to a draw, but from time
to time she beats him fairly, squarely, and wins a book. Especially
when she imagines Jeanne hovering behind her to repeat her early
triumphs – Jargeau, Beaugency, Patay – or to attempt new strategies
which will convert previous defeats into victory, even below the
walls of Paris and Compiegne.

Not that it has any hope of lasting. And afterwards,
predictably, she will come to think of it as having been inevitable
from the beginning: the very fact that happiness exists, means that
it will end. As simple as that.

What happens can be directly blamed on the chess. Frau Liesel is
not unaware of their games in the evenings, but this causes no more
than a fleeting whiff of annoyance, certainly no serious suspicion;
if anything, the discovery allows Frau Liesel more scope for her
own diurnal fugues. It only turns problematic when Hanna begins to
take more time off from her lessons with Peter in order to practise
her chess strategies.

One afternoon while she is in the study working out a new move
Peter, bored stiff with being alone, is tempted outside by some
boys kicking a ball in the small park across the road. Hanna does
not become aware of it until the front bell is rung and she finds
Peter on the doorstep, writhing in agony and gasping for breath,
his new-found friends having dissolved into the crisp wintry
air.

By the time Frau Liesel returns from wherever she has spent her
day the boy has been revived, thank God, but he is still shaking
and deathly pale. Before the distraught mother has administered her
own medicaments and concluded her hysterical inquisition of Hanna,
the father arrives. Even much later, thinking back, the girl will
remember it as a scene of total confusion, everybody speaking at
the same time and the boy, finding himself the centre of attention,
acting up in high melodrama. Inevitably, Hanna is designated the
culprit for having abandoned her precious charge; but what Herr
Ludwig demands to know is where his wife has been. There is a
hailstorm of accusations and counter-accusations, but the more
Hanna tries to cover for Frau Liesel the less the latter’s absence
can be explained. Only one outcome is possible, since it just
wouldn’t do for the mistress of the house to bear the brunt of all
the accusations.

“I hate you, I hate you!” Frau Liesel shouts after them as Herr
Ludwig and Hanna finally drive off in their cab, back to the Little
Children of Jesus; but whether it is directed at her husband or the
girl, or perhaps even at Peter or herself, is impossible to say for
certain.

“I am so very sorry,” Herr Ludwig apologises along the way
through the glistening cobbled streets. “Please believe me, this is
not what I wanted at all.”

Before they reach their destination in the Hutfilterstrasse he
slips her some money, and he assures her that her box of books will
be dispatched the following day. (Although these will be promptly
confiscated by Frau Agathe.) A few days later a small chess set
will also be deposited for her at the orphanage, but Hanna will
refuse to accept it. All that matters, as far as she is concerned,
is that she is, once again, back where she first came from.

∨
The Other Side of Silence
∧

T
his will happen so
many times over the ensuing years that Hanna loses count. All she
knows is that with every return and every new beginning there is a
diminution of hope, like light draining from a winter’s day.

There is only one advantage, if it can conceivably be called
that, which is that in the process she is exposed to an amazing
variety of skills – though it should be said that she remains as
clumsy at all of them as ever she was. She brings the same
anxiousness to please to each new placement, accompanied by the
same inability to do anything quite right. She still breaks
crockery and loses cutlery or shrinks or stains items in the wash,
still forgets exactly what has to be done exactly when, still
catches her fingers in drawers or cupboards or bumps against
furniture or door jambs. But oh God, she tries so very hard.

Over the years Hanna will look after infants, poultry and even
larger livestock; change the nappies of the very young or the
incontinent old; milk cows and goats and once a sickly young
mother; read to a woman with cataracts on her eyes, to somebody’s
illiterate uncle and any number of boisterous children; look after
the irascible deaf man and his even more irascible daughter
mentioned before (which involves the need for proficiency – at the
cost of many a frenzied beating – in sign language); keep senile
old women of both sexes occupied; prepare food and wash dishes,
sheets, clothes of any description and feet of various sizes; make
beds, butter and cheese; do hair and odd bits of carpentry; unblock
drains, sewage pits and ears; cut down trees and the amorous
attentions of sons, fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers,
uncles or nephews in the household; kill chickens, lice, newborn
kittens, rats and expectations; wax floors and moustaches; prepare
poultices, plasters and concoctions to cure or calm headaches,
inflammations, congested lungs, stomach cramps, gallstones, bladder
infections, female complaints, male complaints, rheumatism, bunions
or cancer.

Some of her placements are better – less appalling – than
others. She may be allowed a full day off every week (the luxury of
spending unhurried hours from dawn to dusk with Fraulein
Braunschweig); she may be granted access to an employer’s library;
she may be given the same food as the rest of the family (though
never sitting down at table with them); she may have light in her
room, or a bed; she may be allowed to sleep until six in the
morning, seven on Sundays; she may be fitted out in a new uniform
for Christmas; she may be given permission to lie down when she is
sick or has menstrual cramps; she may go to church of a Sunday
morning to listen to the organ even if she pays scant attention to
the preacher. Some placements, of course, are worse than whatever
passes for the ‘rule’: there may be stiffer penalties for
transgressions than even Frau Hildegard could dream up, or savage
beatings administered by the master of the house (usually on Friday
evenings when she has to line up with the children, and sometimes
the wife, to review the week’s infractions), or black bread
infested with weevils, or rats running riot in her bedroom, or icy
draughts cutting right through her in winter, or a criminal
insufficiency of food or clothes.

Often there is some form of sexual harassment to contend with.
In a few homes it does not progress beyond predictable gropings in
passing. Others are more serious. Some nights, when the lord of the
house slides into her narrow bed at hours when she least expects
it, she has to make an escape – pleading sickness, or the curse, or
an infectious disease; excusing herself to go to the outhouse and
not coming back (on one occasion spending the whole night shivering
outside after he has locked her out)…More often than not she is
required to offer variations of her administrations to Herr Dieter;
but she soon learns to absent herself: it is not she who performs
these slightly silly obscenities, but someone else, while she
migrates for the while to a different space where she may observe
from a distance the man observing her. And she never agrees to go
beyond the limits once imposed on Herr Dieter. On a few occasions
her refusal provokes assault, but she perceives very soon that the
masters cannot always let themselves go completely. Because at the
other end there is always a wife to account to.

Even in the better positions she cannot always rely on payment,
whether in money or in kind, for these unscheduled services. In
fact, the first time she dares to request, in a very subdued
manner, some kind of reward she gets her face severely smacked. But
in the end there is a weird pliability in them: as if not she, but
they, are in a position of supplication. A man remains a mystery to
her – that someone so big, so strong, so imperious, so peremptory,
can be at the mercy of such a very small squiggle of his anatomy.
(Once the seed has been spilled, of course, his manner tends to
change abruptly, as if there is now in him a need to avenge the
humiliation he invited in the first place; and she rapidly learns
when to make her getaway.) And so she can continue, like a squirrel
or a crow, to hoard away her ‘little gifts’, in the hope, always in
the hope against hope, that one day she will be able to buy herself
out of her debts and be free to go where the wind or her wildest
dreams take her.

∨
The Other Side of Silence
∧

T
hen always back to
the Little Children of Jesus, in disgrace; humiliated, cast away,
waiting for the punishment to come and the new confirmation of her
utter worthlessness as she lies on the hard narrow bed temporarily
assigned to her, or sits huddled in the branches of a tree laden
with luminous fruit like dull red lights glowing in the dark,
apples heavy as sin.

And always out again, after Frau Agathe has forged new
references and testimonials in order to rid the orphanage of her.
For better or for worse. No, after the Hartmanns it is always
worse. Except once; and that will be the last of her placements, a
good twelve years after the first. It is an old couple who come for
her in a coughing, smoking, straight-backed car, black as a coffin,
a Daimler-Benz. It is Hanna’s first ride in a car and she is
terrified, but under the collective envious gaze of the entire
orphanage assembled in the Hutfilterstrasse, she tries to strike a
regal pose and can barely refrain from waving her nail-bitten hand
like a queen.

The Kreutzers live on a small farm some distance out of town, on
the road to Hamburg. Herr Wolfgang, who insists on being called
Opa, used to be a violinist with an orchestra in Bremen until his
hands turned useless with arthritis; and Frau Renate – Oma –
designed costumes for the opera. Now they are happy to spend their
old age on the farm, driving into town for the occasional concert;
when they learn about Fraulein Braunschweig, they even drive Hanna
to her ageing teacher’s apartment once a month, otherwise she would
no longer be able to visit. They have several grown-up children but
haven’t seen them in years. The life they lead is very quiet. There
are a few farmhands to take care of the animals and the fields, so
Hanna has only the house to look after. The old people grow very
fond of her; soon she is like a child of their own. Having
generously taken charge of her debt to the Little Children of Jesus
they will pay her the full 50 marks she nowadays earns every month.
And when they die, Opa says, she will inherit the farm.

Her main task is to read to Oma in the afternoons, as the old
woman’s eyes are very bad. Opa spends most of his time in his music
room, reading old scores and chuckling from time to time, as he
constantly finds secret jokes in them, particularly in Haydn and
Mozart. For the rest he works on his ‘instrument’, which no one but
Oma has ever been allowed to see as it is reputed to be something
exceptional. He does like to talk to Hanna about it, mainly because
she is such a good listener: she can sit for hours without moving,
drinking in every word, never allowing her eyes or her attention to
stray.