The Other Side of Silence (9 page)

∨
The Other Side of Silence
∧

T
he orphanage is
pervaded with smells. Urine, carbolic acid, old leather, mould,
despair. And food: sauerkraut, leeks, potatoes, fish heads steaming
in a pot. But good smells too. Newly baked bread, milk straight
from the udder frothing in the pail, freshly ironed laundry, shoe
polish, a candle that has just been blown out. The parsonage smells
of rat droppings and mould. But for her religion will always reek
of Pastor Ulrich. A staleness, the smell of an old sofa on which
dogs have slept. “Closer, my girl, come closer. What sins have you
brought us today?” He is so eager to hear. She will recite her
little litany, knowing beforehand that he will answer, “I’m not
sure that is everything. But we’ll soon find out, won’t we?” First
there will be his sermonising, the words spilling from his mouth
and staining her: that must be, she sometimes thinks, why he wears
his silly little bib, to catch the flow of words he spills as
messily as the bits and pieces of the meals that smudge his
waistcoat. And after the talking it is time to bruise what to him
has always been the site of evil. She knows he is expecting her to
wince, to mewl, to cry out, but she never does. That makes it
worse, but she will not give him that satisfaction.

When she first notices the blood, one evening, she believes it
is from the pinching. Only when it persists the next day does she
realise that something is seriously wrong. Perhaps she will die.
Which will be a pity because in a month they will be having their
Christmas concert, to which she has been looking forward. They will
all be getting starched white dresses. Not new ones, but newer than
they have ever had before. She wouldn’t like to have it marked with
blood.

This she confides to the one teacher she cares for, Fraulein
Braunschweig, who teaches geography and who encourages her to read
when she discovers how famished the girl is for books. Sometimes
Hanna spends several hours after school in Fraulein Braunschweig’s
classroom reading, reading, oblivious to the passing time. And
there is no risk attached. For once, if she returns to the
orphanage late, she can explain that she was kept in detention;
Frau Agathe approves of such strictness. When she isn’t reading,
they talk endlessly. Fraulein Braunschweig has travelled much – all
over Germany, from Hamburg in the north down to the Bavarian Alps,
from Dresden in the east to Saarbrücken. Even to Vienna and Prague
and Budapest; and once to Paris.

“When I grow up I want to travel too,” says Hanna. “I’ll go
right round the world. I want to see everything.” There is a fever
glowing in her chest. She puts her hand on the smooth surface of
the globe in Fraulein Braunschweig’s classroom. It spins slowly
under her touch. “All these places with the singing names.” She
moves her finger randomly. “Cordoba. Carcassonne. Tromso. Novgorod.
The Great Wall of China. The Bosporus. Tasmania. Saskatchewan.
Arequipa. Tierra del Fuego. Sierra Leone. Yaounde. Okahandja.
Omaruru. I want to go where the birds go in winter. To the warm
places of the earth. The far side of the wind. Where there is sun,
and strange animals, and cannibals, and dragons, and palm
trees.”

Fraulein Braunschweig encourages these imagined excursions. “One
day,” she says, “perhaps I’ll go with you.”

“You?!”

To her surprise Fraulein Braunschweig blushes. “I’ve always
dreamed of travelling too,” she confesses, like a schoolgirl.
“Years ago I had it all planned. I would be going with…a friend.”
She pauses, then ends abruptly, “Then he died.”

“I am so very sorry.”

The teacher never ceases to surprise the girl. To everyone else
Hanna is the clumsy one, the one who always spills things, bumps
into things, knocks things off tables and chests, loses her shoes,
or her hat, or her pinafore, forgets to close doors or windows,
mislays socks in the wash, stumbles over whatever finds itself in
her way, the one who cannot tie her long hair up properly or fold a
sheet straight, and who catches her thumbs in doors or drawers, and
whose arms and legs are always mottled with bruises old and new;
but to Fraulein Braunschweig she is more like a companion than a
child.

Above all, Fraulein Braunschweig cares. It is she who sends for
medicine when Hanna is not feeling well; or lets her lie down on a
sofa, covered with a rug, when she faints in a class because she
has been deprived of breakfast for some infringement or other. So
it is she who notices that something is amiss that Thursday at the
beginning of November and asks, “What is the matter, child? You’re
looking pale.”

At first she is too shy to tell. But when Fraulein Braunschweig
insists, she confesses with hanging head and burning face, “I’ve
been bleeding for two days now, Fraulein.”

“Where?”

Shamefaced, Hanna makes a vague gesture towards her lower
belly.

“How old are you, Hanna?”

“Twelve. I’ll be thirteen later this month, on the
twenty-fifth.”

There is the shadow of a smile on the teacher’s face. “I think
you’re growing into a woman, Hanna.”

She is too bewildered to respond. And she is scared to admit
what she still suspects to be the real reason, that Pastor Ulrich
has fatally injured her. Because then too much will have to be
explained.

“From now on you will be bleeding every month, my child.”

“How can that be?”

“We all do. Now sit down and listen carefully.”

At the end of it Fraulein Braunschweig provides her with a few
strips of linen from the drawer where she keeps an endless supply
of the most unexpected things for all possible emergencies; and she
gives Hanna a letter for Frau Agathe, and an extra book to take
with her to the Little Children of Jesus.

∨
The Other Side of Silence
∧

I
t is a book that
will mark Hanna for the rest of her life. Not a book of stories or
of travels, like most of the others Fraulein Braunschweig
encourages her to read, but history. An account of the life and
death of Jeanne d’Arc. In due course it will fill the emptiness
left by the loss of her imaginary friends Trixie, Spixie and Finny;
Jeanne will become more real to her than any of the other girls in
the orphanage, including little Helga. In the fragrant darkness
after the candles have been snuffed at night, she will exorcise her
fear of the dark by imagining Jeanne in the narrow bed beside her;
they will conduct long conversations that sometimes continue until
the early dawn. Over and over the
Pucelle
will recount the
simple facts of her short life: going about her domestic duties in
the small dark family home in the hamlet of Domremy in the valley
of the Meuse, and playing truant, whenever she can, by visiting the
tiny whitewashed chapel of Bermont lost in the woods, to which she
is lured by the sound of bells. All her life she will be enchanted
by bells. At the age of twelve, on a summer’s day in her father’s
garden, she first hears the Voices which tell her that she has been
chosen by God to put on man’s clothing and lead an army to save
King Charles VII from the English forces which have occupied her
country. But for God’s sake, what can
she
do? She is a slip
of a girl, she is scared of the big world of violent men and
political intrigue and battling armies beyond the humble hovels of
Domremy. Who will even listen to her? Her father would rather drown
her with his own hands than see her in the company of soldiers. But
through the years the Voices persist. At times she wonders whether
she has gone mad. But this Hanna will not accept. Has she not,
herself, spent hours with Trixie, Spixie and Finny? Such voices are
only too real.

At last Jeanne breaks down the resistance of a credulous cousin
who consents to take her to Vaucouleurs, the small garrison town
twenty kilometres up the valley to meet Robert de Baudricourt, the
first of her powerful patrons. After protracted negotiations, when
Jeanne has just turned seventeen, he agrees to send her to Chinon
where she will meet the knock-kneed, shifty-eyed, big-nosed Dauphin
already hailed as Charles VII by some, although uncrowned as yet.
Charles sees an opportunity to further his own interests without
running any risk himself. After thorough examinations at Poitiers,
Tours and Blois, including an intimate probing by no less a person
than the Queen of Sicily, the Dauphin’s mother-in-law, to establish
her virginity, Jeanne is given permission to lead an army of
several thousand men to the besieged town of Orleans. Officially
there are several men in command (how Hanna, with her love of
exotic names, relishes the taste of those syllables on her tongue:
le Marechal de Sainte-Severe, le Marechal de Rais, Louis de Culen,
Ambroise de Lose, the rough and rude La Hire), but from the first
day no one is allowed to doubt who is in charge. And on 8 May 1429,
the six-month siege is lifted. The English begin to beat a retreat;
throughout France the name of Jeanne d’Arc, a girl who cannot even
read or write and signs her name with a cross, acquires the force
of legend. Clouds of butterflies accompany her standard of buckram
and silk, in blue and silver and gold; flocks of small birds
descend on trees and bushes to watch her do battle. Barely a year
later she will be betrayed and taken prisoner, in another year she
will be condemned to death by the inquisitorial tribunal presided
over by a bag of blubber, Pierre Cauchon, bishop of Beauvais, and –
accompanied by the booming cathedral bells – burned alive on the
Old Market Place of Rouen as a witch. How small the interval
between virginity and sorcery. She is forced to suffer even the
ultimate disgrace of having the last tatters of her burning clothes
stripped from her to expose her blackened genitals to the jeering
crowd. But from the pyre an English soldier sees a white dove
flying out of the flames towards the heartland of France. Soon the
English will be driven from the continent. And in 1456 a new
tribunal will clear her name and annul her condemnation.

Which goes to show, Fraulein Braunschweig insists time and time
again, that there are more important things than life or death.
What matters is that Jeanne d’Arc prevailed because she remained
true to herself all the way. She did what no one had thought
possible. Her country was liberated. “It is impossible truly to
understand her, even after four centuries,” she argues with great
conviction. “All we can say is that she makes us think and she
makes us question. She uncovers the dark places into which we may
fear to look.”

Burning with pride and resolution, night after night, Hanna will
drift off to sleep with Jeanne held so close to her in the small
bed that she feels like flesh of her own flesh, dreams of her
dreams. And when the day dawns, the book will be waiting under her
pillow.

∨
The Other Side of Silence
∧

B
ooks will be her
undoing. Barely a week before the Christmas concert Frau Agathe
summons Hanna one afternoon as she comes back from school. Though
it is the middle of winter, it is an exceptionally bright day, so
Hanna knows Frau Agathe will be worse than usual. She is always
like that: when the sun is shining she will talk about the cold
which is sure to come and kill all the flowers; and when she sees
fruit she thinks of the vile worms inside; and when she hears
someone laughing she will predict the tears that are bound to
follow; and when everybody is celebrating Frau Agathe knows it will
not last and then they will be sorry afterwards. Nothing is as
liable to be punished as happiness. And on this bright day, when
the solemn woman swathed in black awaits Hanna, clutching the
girl’s latest book in one ominous talon, she knows there is heavy
weather ahead.

“What is this I found in your chest?” asks Frau Agathe.

“A book,” says Hanna.

“Do you care to tell me what book it is?”

“A book I’m reading. It is very beautiful.”

“
Die Leiden des Jungen Werther
,” snarls Frau Agathe.

“Yes,” admits Hanna, unable to fathom what the fuss is about.
“By Herr Goethe,” she adds, in an attempt to clarify the
matter.

“It is not fit reading for a young girl,” says Frau Agathe,
quaking with anger. “In fact, it is not fit reading for any decent
person.”

“I don’t understand, Frau Agathe.”

“Don’t play dumb with me.” The angular face of the pale, thin
woman is contorted with fury. “This is unadulterated filth. It is
designed to lead the young astray, to deprave the mind. I will not
tolerate such smut under my roof. This is a Christian
institution.”

“Fraulein Braunschweig will not let me read filth,” says Hanna
vehemently.

“Are you talking back to me?” exclaims the woman. “A mouth like
that deserves to be rinsed out with soap.”

Hanna turns to go.

“Where are you going?” demands Frau Agathe.

“Fetching the black soap for you,” says Hanna.

“You are indeed a child of the Devil,” the woman rages. “God
knows, we have done our best with you. But you are incorrigible.
Now you will burn the book in the stove. I shall go with you.”

“I cannot do that,” says Hanna. “It is not mine.”

“You’re right. It is the Devil’s book. Go to the kitchen.”

“I will not burn it,” says Hanna. There is no open defiance in
her attitude, only a quiet resolution. And that makes Frau Agathe
lose all control. She smacks the girl in the face with the
book.

“Now come with me.”

Hanna touches her smarting cheek, and follows the woman to the
kitchen. Frau Agathe flings open the small black hatch in the front
of the stove. A deep red glow flares briefly into flames.

“Take the book.” Frau Agathe thrusts it into her hand.