The Other Side of Silence (22 page)

Slowly, as the days creep by, the man’s condition improves. In
the beginning, when he is awake, he just lies staring at them with
suspicion in his eyes narrowed into slits. But after a day or two
he utters something in a voice like a subterranean rumble. It is in
a language they do not understand.

Hanna nudges Katja, who asks, “Do you speak German?”

“They make me learn,” he replies, his mouth struggling to shape
the words. “Otherwise I get no work.” Then he adds with what seems
to be a statement of superiority, “I am a Herero.”

“The land of the Hereros is up north,” Katja quickly reminds
him. “The other side of Windhoek. Not down here.”

“They kill my cattle,” he says in a rush of anger. “They kill
all our cattle. They kill the fire of our ancestors. So what must I
do? I come here to find work. Otherwise my people will die. My
wife, my family. That way, far away.” He motions to the north. He
tries to push himself up on his arms. In what sounds like a tone of
accusation he demands, “Who are you?”

Katja first glances at Hanna, then says, “I am Katja. She is
Hanna.”

“Why are you in this place?”

“We found you here. We couldn’t just leave you.”

“We cannot stay here. He will come back to see if I am
dead.”

“Who will come back?”

“The one who put me here. The baas.”

“Where does he live?”

“His farm is that way.” He gestures. “Not far. One day.”

For the first time Katja ventures a question on her own: “Why
did he do it to you?”

He mumbles something unintelligible.

He must tell us
, Hanna conveys to Katja.
We must know
if he is a thief or a murderer
. The girl puts it into
words.

For a long time the stranger stares at them; his attitude is
defiant, hostile, even menacing.

“Why you ask?”

“We must know who you are,” explains Katja, at Hanna’s
prompting.

“And I must know who you are.” His gruff voice sounds almost
taunting.

“We come from the farm Frauenstein.”

“People go to that place. Nobody come from there. That is what I
hear. If you go there you stay there.”

“We were not safe there.”

“Why does she not speak?” he asks, pointing his chin at
Hanna.

“She has no tongue.”

“Who do that to her?” He moves his hand across his face.

“Soldiers,” says Katja. “An officer in the German army.” Hanna
communicates something to her in sign language, and she asks, “Why
did your baas do this to you?”

A long silence. Then a smothered growl. And he says,
precipitously, and in a fury too urgent for his broken German, “The
baas want to take my wife. I stop him.”

“Who is your baas?”

“His name is Albert Gruber. He is a farmer.”

Doesn’t he have a wife of his own then?
Hanna wants to
know, through Katja.

“He bring a wife from Germany, yes.”

“Then what happened?”

“She make music. He beat her. She drink poison stuff.” A pause.
“Now he want my wife, he take her.”

“What is your name?” asks Katja.

“Kahapa.”

For the moment that is the end of their conversation. But over
the next few days, as he gradually grows stronger, he becomes less
obdurately reticent. And once they have given in to his
increasingly insistent demands to be moved away from that place,
his suspicion about them seems to be allayed. Between the two of
them they help him to hobble along, stopping to rest every fifty or
hundred metres, until they can no longer see the spot where he was
exposed. In the shelter provided by a small koppie they make a new
halt, shifting around it as the sun moves the deep shadow.

On Hanna’s firm instructions, Kahapa has torn a broad strip off
the sheet from her bundle to wind it round his waist. His attitude
makes it clear that he resents the outfit; perhaps it makes him
feel like a woman. But he keeps his protests down. He owes them too
much.

Hanna draws a peculiar satisfaction from the care she bestows on
the still almost helpless giant. For perhaps the first time in her
life someone depends utterly on her. Even the woman with the
cataracts she once read to, the deaf man and his daughter to whom
she spoke in signs, were not truly dependent on her: she was a
hired help, she was paid to do her work (however paltry the wage),
she could be – and was in the end – fired. Here is a life for which
she alone is responsible. And it has been her choice. Katja is in
it with her, yes. But it is no simple role the girl fulfils: Hanna
has come to rely on her – as an interpreter, a helper, a support –
but she also needs Hanna in the intricate processes of survival;
and she has her own needs, fears, hopes, demands.

Sometimes, when the injured man dozes, they talk with their
hands, a language that becomes more nuanced by the day. If they
need to talk at all: for long periods they simply sit together,
looking at each other or not, allowing their thoughts to come and
go in a silent osmosis.

“What are we going to do with the man?”

We must wait until he is healed. Then we’ll see
.

“Is it for him to decide then?”

No, but he is with us now. We shall decide together
.

“And after that?”

We’ll go on into the desert
. (She will not yet talk to
the girl about the hate. The hate that burns like a sun and gives
light like a sun.)

This is what it means to move into the interior, she thinks. Not
arriving on a boat, meeting people, talking to strangers, bringing
with one a language made beyond the seas, bestowing words on things
– stone, bush, root, earth, sky – but walking into it, merging with
it, body to body. The way, perhaps, it was with Lotte in the total
darkness of their submarine cabin.

“But how far do we go on?” asks Katja. “Until what happens?”

Until we know what is on the other side
.

“Suppose it never ends?”

Then at least we’ll know the desert
.

“Are you not afraid, Hanna?”

Of what?

“If someone comes, some time…?”

We are armed
.

“Do you know how to use a gun?”

No
. A smile.
You are right. We must learn. Perhaps
this man, this Kahapa, can teach us
.

Kahapa does, once he can stand up on his own again and the smell
of his festering wounds diminishes and his strength returns. With
endless patience he shows them how to load, and take aim, and
shoot. When Katja finds the Mauser too unwieldy she is given the
Luger. Neither becomes really proficient, but at least they no
longer pose a danger to themselves. Then Kahapa takes them on a
hunt. He shoots a springbok, an old crippled animal presumably
rejected by its herd. The meat is tough and stringy, but they feast
on it for days.

It is while they are sitting beside the fire Kahapa has made to
roast the meat that he begins to tell them about how his people
first came from what he calls the Far Country, a place without a
name, hundreds of years ago, bringing the sacred fire of their
ancestors with them. And where they settled in the new Hereroland,
from Aminuis to Epukiro, to Otjimbungue, to Otjituuo, to
Otjihorongo, to Ovitoto, to Tses – all these places with the magic
names that ring in Hanna’s ears – they brought their fire with
them, each new settlement or tribe lighting its own from the coals
of the first fire, so that it would never die. At the great
omumborumbonga tree in the region of Okahandja, he explains, the
two brothers who arrived together first separated. The descendants
from the one became the Ovambos, who remained in the north; from
the other brother descended the Hereros who spread down across the
whole countryside as far as the Nossob River and covered the grassy
plains with their great herds of cattle.

But then came the Germans – and Kahapa’s voice trembles with
subdued rage – and started occupying their land and taking their
cattle; and the Namas from the south began to make raids into
Hereroland to lay waste great tracts of it; and the terrible cattle
disease destroyed the herds; and the destitute people were forced
to become labourers on the farms of the very whites who had
scattered the ashes of their forefathers’ fires.

“And now I am here,” he says. “But I shall not stay here. First
I shall go to the farm where he do this to me and take back my
wife. And one day I shall go back to our Great Place in Okahandja
where our chiefs lie buried.”

A few days later, when the last of the meat has been consumed,
they finally set out in the direction Kahapa has pointed out.

Are you sure you’re strong enough for this?
Hanna makes
Katja ask him.

The tall man growls deep in his throat. “I am ready,” he says.
“Ndjambi Karunga, the god of my people, will help me.”

They are both in trepidation of what may come from a
confrontation. Katja, especially, shudders at the prospect.

“We must try to keep him away from that farmer,” she pleads with
Hanna. “The violence will be terrible.”

What must happen must happen
, Hanna replies.
Kahapa
has to do his duty
.

Katja shakes her head in despair, but she is given no
choice.

Proceeding very slowly and making many halts, they take a full
day and a half to reach the farm. Kahapa leads the way. The
landscape has become more turbulent, with high ridges and outcrops
breaking the plains; and the farmhouse, little more than an
unplastered hovel of stone and reeds, sits high and exposed against
a rocky slope. The farmer must have spied them from a long way off
because he comes down to meet them, gun in hand, clearly intrigued
by the unusual visitors. He is a man with a wild beard discoloured
by tobacco juice, on his head a filthy hat decorated with a strip
of leopard skin around the brim. They are very near to him before
he recognises Kahapa. His small eyes set close together register
unspeakable shock.

“I left you for dead,” he stammers. “How the hell did you
survive? And what are you doing here?”

“I come for my wife.”

“The
meid
is not here.”

Kahapa takes a deep breath. “You kill her too?” he asks.

The man retreats a step. “She ran away.” He is clutching the gun
very tightly, evidently not prepared to take any chances.

“You lie,” snarls Kahapa. “If she run away she come to me where
you put me.” He takes a menacing step closer.

“She didn’t know her place,” the farmer retorts. But behind the
anger in his voice one senses real apprehension.

“Where is she?”

“How must I know? I told you she ran away.” In the background,
at the front door and around the corner of the house, other figures
appear. Judged by their miserable appearance they must be
labourers. Three barefoot women, a shirtless man with tattered
trousers. Sensing their presence, the farmer glances round. He
appears openly nervous now. “Go ask them,” he says curtly.

Kahapa stares hard at him. “I want my wife,” he says, coming
slowly past the farmer.

The man edges out of his way. For a moment Hanna and Katja are
afraid that he may shoot from behind, but their presence appears to
make him hesitate. They prepare to follow after Kahapa, covering
his rear.

“You two can stay here,” says the farmer quickly, stepping
forward to block their way. He is looking at Katja with some
interest. In a way Hanna finds this more ominous than his
belligerence towards Kahapa.

“Where do you come from?” the farmer asks, an unpleasantly
cajoling tone in his voice. “Did this bastard try to do you any
harm?” Only then does he notice Hanna’s face under the hood of the
kappie. He takes a step back. “What in God’s name has happened to
you? You look like something out of hell.”

Hanna puts a hand on Katja’s arm. The girl tries to keep her
voice in control. “Kahapa told you. We are here with him to find
his wife.”

Many unarticulated feelings move like shadows across his blunt
face. There is a difficult pause before he lets them past. The gun
is shaking visibly in his ferocious grip.

At the front door Kahapa is talking to the women. They appear
reluctant to comply with whatever he may be asking, and furtive
glances are cast in the direction of the farmer with the gun. But
in the end they lead him round the house. Hanna and Katja follow to
the back, skirting the rocky top of the outcrop, and down the side
of the rise, past two makeshift sheds, a few untidy enclosures of
stacked branches, towards parched, dispirited fields.

Only now, out of earshot of the hovel, in angry spurts, do the
women dare to inform Kahapa about what has happened. It is as he
has feared. His wife was killed. And as Albert Gruber had refused
to give permission for a funeral, which would interfere with the
work on the farm, the dead woman was buried in the night, without
any fire or light to betray the mourners. There was no time, and
the soil was too hard, for a proper grave to be dug, so the body,
rolled in an old blanket, was laid to rest in a shallow trench at
the far end of the mealie land, among the stalks of the last failed
harvest.

When the small procession comes to a standstill, Hanna and Katja
remain a few yards away. In the full glare of the midday sun they
take off their kappies and hold them against their breasts.

Kahapa is standing beside the small mound of the grave, staring
down at it.

“Tell me what he do to her,” he asks the three women who have
guided him to the place. He is speaking in his threadbare German,
as if he wants to make sure that Hanna and Katja will
understand.

They hear one of the black women protest, “Hau! It is better not
to ask.”

“I must know.”

For a while they stubbornly hold out, but when his attitude
becomes threatening they relent. Retreating a few paces, as if
scared that he might vent his anger on them, they take turns to
tell the story, haltingly, drastically truncated. For it would
indeed have been better not to know. How Albert Gruber kept on
calling Kahapa’s wife to his bed, and how she went on refusing,
trying to persuade him by pointing to her swollen belly. She was
five months pregnant. In the end he lost his temper and attacked
her with his fists and beat her to the ground. When she went on
resisting, he ordered two of his labourers to hold her down with
force. Then he had his way with her. And afterwards he ordered the
men to flog her in the ‘German way’, tied down on her back. They
beat the child out of her. They didn’t stop before every movement
in the battered body had ceased.