The Other Side of Silence (20 page)

But it is still only the beginning. And the evening and the
morning are the first day.

In the deep of the night, while the train is stationary at some
unnamed siding and the sheer weight of a yellow bulbous moon seems
to drag it down to the horizon, men make their appearance from
elsewhere on the long train and converge on the string of women.
Some are asked, even obsequiously; others are simply dragged off by
the arms. It is the second round. What Hanna will remember,
afterwards, is how one man after the other approaches her from
behind, saying things like, ‘Hello, beautiful’ or combing fingers
through her hair; and how they withdraw in disappointment or
disdain when she turns round and they see her face. How many times
in the past has it happened to her? Yet this must be the first time
their derision comes as a relief, a bitter pleasure. But it does
not last. The men are too drunk, and too desperate. Hanna will be
unable to recall details later; she will not want to. And by the
time the disgrunded lovers grow too unsteady on their feet, too
inebriated, too frustrated to persevere in their hunt and are
replaced by soldiers who initially kept to their own coach at the
front, the macabre version of musical chairs becomes increasingly
hectic, with ominous undertones no one can mistake any longer for
pleasure or play.

It must be on the second day, or perhaps the third, that Hanna –
the worse for wear and weariness, yet still in a manner of speaking
unscathed – is forced into a compartment by what, from his braids
and insignia, must be a particularly high-ranking officer. There
are two others looking on, too drunk to join in but not too drunk
to contribute crude interjections of encouragement or jest. When
she tries once again, only more tired and dejected than before, to
evade what seems at last to be inevitable – by turns arguing,
pleading, shouting abuse, appealing to his sense of honour as a
military man representing the Kaiser – he merely laughs.

“Why pretend to be what you’re not?” he asks. “You’re a whore.
That’s why you’re here.”

“I am not a whore,” she says in quiet rage. “I came here to find
work. I have never slept with a man.”

“You’ve never slept with a man?”

She raises her head, stares him defiantly in the eyes. “No, I
haven’t. And I will not do it now.”

For a long time he studies her with the keenness of a botanist
looking at a new species of plant, or perhaps a boy inspecting a
beetle he has shorn of its legs. “Do you know who I am?” he asks at
last.

“It makes no difference.”

“I am a captain in the imperial army.”

Hanna shrugs.

“I am Hauptmann Heinrich Bohlke.”

“It is a name,” she says.

“You can count it an honour that I have selected you. You do not
look like a woman who has much choice.”

“My body is my own,” she says.

“Not on this train. You are here at our pleasure. More
precisely, at
mine
.”

“I would have expected you to show some respect.”

“I am a man, you are a woman. That’s all. And I think we have
wasted enough time.”

She shakes her head. But she cannot control the trembling of her
body.

“After this,” he says, “you can return to whatever way of life
you choose.” A brief but humourless smile. “In fact, after this you
will not want another man.”

She does not know – and afterwards will not understand – where
she finds the temerity to say, “That is not for you to decide.”

“Look, Lotte,” he says. There is now a low, more dangerous edge
to his voice. “That is your name, isn’t it?”

“No, it isn’t.”

“Then what is it?”

She shrugs.

He narrows his eyes. “It makes no difference,” he says. “There
is only one thing you have to understand. Are you listening to
me?”

She shakes her head.

There is a very small, very unpleasant grin on his face. “When I
fuck a woman,” says Hauptmann Bohlke of the imperial army in a
voice as still and keen as a blade of very fine steel, “she stays
fucked.”

And then he fucks her.

∨
The Other Side of Silence
∧

I
t is still not the
end. It is actually a long way from the end. She will refuse to
remember what happens, but it will come back to her regardless. At
some stage she is alone in the corridor again, her whole body
aching, a feeling of blood and singeing fire between her legs. At
another stage there are, as before, women with her. Some of them
cannot stand and are crawling on hands and knees. And then the men
return. Different ones, or the same ones. No one seems to care any
more. Hanna doesn’t.

But this, whether she wants to or not, this she will remember.
That Hauptmann Bohlke comes back to find her. It is night. Some
time in the night, one of the nights. Has he not had enough? Or is
he furious that when he first took her, when she realised there was
nothing more to be done about it, she neither resisted nor showed
any sign of life at all? He might have had his way with a corpse.
And now, who knows, his pride may be at stake. Otherwise the woman
may not stay fucked.

Of this time she will remember that she is stripped naked.
(There are not many tatters of clothing remaining anyway.) And that
she is forced on her knees in front of him. And that something is
pushed against her mouth. It is very hard, yet it has the softness
of human flesh. And that he is shouting at her in a kind of frenzy,
“I’ll make you remember this! Take it! Slut! Whore!”

She thinks of what so many others have tried to make her do; but
they never succeeded. Only this time she cannot avoid it. She gags,
but he will not let her go. His hands are clamped to her head, on
either side, his fingers entangled in her long hair. She hates her
hair. He goes on shouting obscenities.

And she will remember – but this will never be a clear, precise
memory – that after a long time, when she cannot resist any longer,
she breaks down and accepts in her mouth what is thrust into it.
And that, then, blindly, when there is no other way out, she bites.
And that she doesn’t stop, not even when the blood comes streaming
from her mouth, more blood than she would ever have believed
possible, a red fountain pulsing into her mouth, choking her,
gushing all over the place and the braying men. Screaming, his body
collapses over her.

Whether the end comes soon after, or only much later, she does
not know. All she knows, and this quite clearly, is that it is now
indeed the end because it can go no further.

She is thrust into a compartment. It is crowded with men in
khaki uniforms. In a far corner huddles the captain. He is wrapped
in a blanket and looks very pale, but it seems he insists on being
there.

“Now I’ll show you what I meant,” he says through clenched
teeth, but whether in rage or pain is hard to tell.

She wants to clutch her shell in the palm of her hand but there
is only emptiness.

They are all around her. They are taking off their belts with
the heavy pointed metal studs. Some of them have army knives. One
of them produces a piece of wood which he wedges between her
teeth.

That is how Hanna X dies, this time.

∨
The Other Side of Silence
∧

I
must return to the
scene in front of the mirror, where the life of Hanna X first
assumed, for me, the shape of a story to be patched together, piece
by piece, from the threadbare facts of history. Here, in front of
this mirror, it is time for her at last to look. Nothing can be
avoided any longer. Her face. Her body. The whole of her physical
truth, everything that has been inscribed on her to tell her where
she has been, who she is. Obscurely in the background, barely
visible in the light of the candle on the blemished surface of the
mirror, looms the host of dull grey ghosts – not threathening, but
as it were in solidarity, to show that they are here too.

Holding up the long candle close to her, she gazes at the image
of herself she has eschewed for so long. With her free hand she
lightly touches the surface of her face and of her body. Almost the
touch of a lover – if she closes her eyes she may imagine Lotte’s
fingers, Lotte’s lips; but this is not a time for closing the eyes.
It is a time to see, to see, in order never to forget again.

This is what has been done to her. Not because of anything she
has done, but purely because she is a woman. And because they
could
.

This is who she is now. Almost in wonder she moves her fingers
along her skin. How curious, this urge they have, all of them, to
leave their mark on a woman’s body. As if despair lies behind it,
and fear, a deep but very ordinary fear, a fear perhaps of death,
their own. In each the need, the terrifying urge, to scar and leave
his mark. And only her body available for their inscription. Ever
since Pastor Ulrich first took her lips between his fingers to hurt
them, to try and make her wince and cry (which she didn’t). Until
that last man on the train, Hauptmann Heinrich Bohlke.

She touches with a single fingertip the scars where her nipples
used to be. Her belly, her protruding navel (for she is not
Catholic). Then slightly parts her legs and leans forward,
reluctant to look; but for once she knows it cannot be disowned or
avoided. The site of the ultimate humiliation. The secret
tenderness, the small extremity of pure and infernal joy, once
offered to Lotte and assumed by her, now gaping and absent.
When
I juck a woman she stays fucked
.

Wax drips on her naked belly. The pain is almost pleasurable.
I am still alive
, she thinks. It comes like relief, like
rain to this parched land.
I can still feel pain; I can still
feel. It is not all gone. I have returned from the dead
.

She is ready to take her leave. This is not another escape. She
will not be running away from something again, but
towards
something. What has happened in this place today, what they tried
to do to little Katja, has awakened her from her sleep of death.
Because it was to her that it was done. Like all the humiliations
of her life, inflicted by all those involved in her slow
dismemberment. Now she must begin to remember herself. There is
something in her which has never been there before and which gives
shape to all that has happened to her, and inside her. It is hate.
Tongueless, she tastes the word in her mouth. Hate. It has the
bitterness of a medicine that restores life.

On the face of it, she has always borne whatever they chose to
visit on her, but she has never yielded, she has always withheld
consent. However meek she may have seemed, this deep stern
resistance has always been there. When they went too far, sometimes
the only way to express her protest was to run away; at other times
it made her stand up to Frau Agathe and Pastor Ulrich and Frau
Hildegard, or draw the line with Herr Dieter and his successors;
always, deep down, she has lived a restrained and muted No to them
and their world. Now she will no longer do it quietly. She has at
last acknowledged hate. It gives a purpose to all the turmoil
inside her. It has made her kill the man who tried to rape Katja.
The knowledge brings with it a strange, almost exhilarating,
freedom. They no longer have any power over her. Because now it is
up to her to decide what she will do with her hate.

Breathing very calmly, holding the tall candle in her steady
hands, she returns to her room. She puts on a long dress and her
sturdy boots, then packs a few necessities on a sheet from her bed.
On top of the clothing she puts the dead man’s Mauser and its
bandolier of cartridges, and the Luger pistol she removed from his
belt before she dragged his body to the fountain, thud thud thud.
Then she goes down to the kitchen to find a good strong knife and a
few indispensable utensils. The journey may be long. Once she is
satisfied that nothing important has been left behind, she returns
to her room, ties the sheet into a bundle which she slings over her
shoulder.

She blows out the candle. On the dark landing she stops in front
of the mirror for a last look. She gazes past her own image to the
rustling throng of grey shadows behind her. The sisterhood of
silence. There is almost a smile on her disfigured face. She will
not be fucked for life.

As she turns to descend into the deep stairwell that reaches
down, in the faint light, towards the darkness below, a voice says
behind her, “Where are you going?”

∨
The Other Side of Silence
∧

∨
The Other Side of Silence
∧

E
ven in
well-documented accounts of the men who dominated the turn of the
twentieth century in South-West Africa – the early governors who
took charge after nearly a century of pioneering by missionaries
and traders and miners: Curt von François (1891–1894), Theodor
Leutwein (1894–1904), the infamous Lothar von Trotha (November
1904–November 1905), his less bloody-minded successor Friedrich von
Lindequist (1905–1907) – the individuals tend to remain shadowy
figures in the background of their own story, obscured by
historical facts. This is also true of indigenous leaders like
Samuel Maharero or the redoubtable Nama captain Hendrik Witbooi
(whose extensive diary, for all its vividness, relies more on the
consideration of external facts than on the internal motions and
impulses and calculations that made him the man he was). Which
means that in all these cases documented history still has to be
reconstructed, reimagined for a grasp of the identities caught up
in it. How much more so the life of someone like Hanna X. And yet
she was
there
, that much I know. And having reached this
turning point in her story I have no choice but to continue. I
believe more and more that as a man I owe it to her at least to
try
to understand what makes her a person, an individual,
what defines her as a woman.