The Other Side of Silence (18 page)

“It is the ultimate instrument,” he often tells her. “The whole
of the history of music has been a movement towards this. Not a
piano, not a cello, not a violin, not a harp or a flute or a French
horn, although each of these has its small share of the sublime.
No, this is different. I think of it as the
summum
of music,
the absolute, the
ne plus ultra
.” (Half of the words Hanna
cannot understand; but she memorises them and will later look them
up in Fraulein Braunschweig’s dictionaries or encyclopaedias.) “You
know what happens when pure white light strikes a prism?”

“It becomes a rainbow,” says Hanna, faithfully recalling
Fraulein Braunschweig’s teachings.

“Just so.” He beams his satisfaction over the half-moons of his
gold-rimmed reading spectacles. “You’re a clever girl. Now you can
think of all the colours of the rainbow as different musical
instruments. Do you see what I mean?”

She frowns and shakes her head. “I’m not sure, Opa.”

“You wait.” He smiles. “It will soon be finished. It has taken
me years to think it through, but actually it is very, very simple.
You shall see. You and Oma will be the first to hear it.” He raises
a gnarled finger: “And the beauty of it is of course that I shall
be able to play it. Even with these old hands.
Anybody
will
be able to play it.”

“I don’t think so, Opa. I’ll try, but I’m sure I’ll be too
clumsy. At the Little Children of Jesus they tried to teach us so
many things, but I’ve never been good at anything. Running or the
high jump or embroidering or making rag dolls for charity or
playing the recorder. I’m just not good enough.”

“You will play my instrument like an angel,” Opa assures her.
“Just be patient.”

It takes two years of patience, but there is a special
satisfaction in the waiting: the old man has so much confidence in
her, he is so sure of the outcome, so truly delighted at the
prospect, that Hanna gradually dares to believe that perhaps, who
knows, this once…And while Opa is locked up in his soundless music
room for afternoons on end, she hums or whistles out of tune while
she cleans the house or washes the dishes or reads book after
glorious book to Oma in the living room where they even have
electricity.

When she isn’t busy and the weather is good – not very often,
but it happens – she goes up the stairs to the large balcony that
juts out from the top floor. Sometimes she reads. Mostly she just
lies on her back, staring up at the sky, watching the drifting
clouds, the shapes they form, their endless changing, dissipating
and reforming, their slow swirling, their near-motionless dreaming
like white swans on water. She loses herself in their fantasies of
ships and birds and dromedaries and waving palms and unicorns and
magic castles on faraway beaches of Ireland and Africa. Shapes that
come and go and are lost for ever and remain in the memory for
ever. It is as if she herself becomes a cloud and drifts and sails
and swims, it is like flying, it is bliss, the only true bliss she
has ever known – except for that forever day with Susan on the
beach.

Sometimes a fleeting, never-quite-catchable memory filters into
her mind and she seems to remember lying just like this, in green
grass, as a very small child, in a time before the Little Children
of Jesus. And her three imaginary friends are with her. But the
image is too vague, and too brief, to hold on to. Still there is
reassurance in it, as her life before memory began is now strangely
reconciled with the hereness of her lying on the balcony and the
possible shapes of the future. Even God becomes slightly, if only
slightly, more comprehensible – not the dirty old man of wrath and
vengeance who presides over the Little Children of Jesus, but
someone altogether more smiling and musical, who resembles Opa in
many ways.

Then at last, out of the blue, one day, Oma comes upstairs to
the balcony to call her: “Hanna, Opa has something to show
you.”

She sits up quickly. “Not the…?”

“The instrument,” says the old woman, her fading eyes bright
with light. “It is finished.” She pauses and adds, “I hope you
won’t be disappointed.”

“How can I be disappointed? We’ve all waited for so long.”

“Well,” says Oma soberly, “it is perhaps not quite what one
expected.”

“But it
is
special?” she asks breathlessly.

“Oh it is special enough. And if you think of it, exactly what
he promised.”

She hurries down the stairs, misses the last step, falls, gets
up again, dusts her torn dress and dashes to the music room where
Opa sits at the window. Light falls through the small panes, making
delicate brush strokes across his bald head and the shiny object he
is holding on his lap. She stops and stares. For a moment she is
disappointed. It looks so ordinary. Like a violin, somewhat
rounder, the wood beautifully polished, and with a single string.
It isn’t taut at all, but hangs limply over the surface where the
sound hole of an ordinary violin would be.

“Try it,” he says, handing her the instrument, and the bow to go
with it.

“How does one hold it?” Hanna asks.

“Any way you like.”

She glances at him, holds the instrument some distance from her
body, and lightly touches the single string with the bow.

“It makes no sound,” she whispers, embarrassed.

Opa laughs with deep contentment. “That is it,” he says. “Do you
understand now?
That is it
.”

Two days later, without warning, Opa dies quietly in his
sleep.

“I want you stay here with me,” Oma tells Hanna at the
funeral.

But the couple’s children, who have never put in an appearance
in the two years Hanna has been there, arrive from all over Germany
and insist that the farm be sold and their mother move in with
them, one after the other. They annul the inheritance Opa has
promised Hanna long ago.

Now she will have to fend for herself, or return to the Little
Children of Jesus. But she is in too much shock to choose either.
Instead, she takes a handful of Opa’s pain pills, and dies.

∨
The Other Side of Silence
∧

F
rom the very
beginning of her stay at Frauenstein Hanna becomes aware of the
ghosts that haunt the place. At first they are visible only in
mirrors in passing; and when she turns round there is nothing to be
seen. But once she has become used to them, or they to her, the
encounters are more direct, face to face. Sometimes she meets them
singly, at night, when she cannot sleep for fear of dreaming about
the train; otherwise in twos or threes. Sometimes there is a whole
dark throng of them swarming up the broad stairs, with a whispering
sound, and a movement of glacial air sweeping past. But for some
reason they do not scare her. If anything, they stir up a feeling
of great sadness. They look at her with their terrible and
terrified eyes; and she understands as no one could who has only
ever lived and who hasn’t travelled through the landscapes of death
as well, as she has. And looking into her own eyes in the mirror
tonight, she recognises herself and realises why. With them, only
with them, she shares the intimacies of life as well as death. She
knows they are the women from the unmarked graves outside, the
nameless ones, forgotten by everyone, relegated to obscurity as if
they had never existed. Which is why they cannot come to rest but
have to go on wandering, to be accosted, and in some obscure way
acknowledged.
Someone
must know. She feels so close to them.
Not only because she herself has died so many times, but because
she will be forgotten like them, and take to wandering too, until
perhaps someone, someone, somewhere, will one day be reminded of
her story and speak her name in the silence, Hanna X.

∨
The Other Side of Silence
∧

N
o, the pills do not
kill her. She vomits copiously and is ill for three days, and then
recovers and knows she has to leave the Kreutzers’ farm. But this
time she will under no circumstances return to the Little Children
of Jesus. She is no longer a child, she has a life of her own.
Behind the backs of the spiteful Kreutzer children Oma manages
surreptitiously to slip her some money and an eloquent letter of
reference, and arranges for a neighbour to take her to Bremen, with
a suitcase of clothes and a box of books; and oh, her magic shell.
For a few weeks she stays in Fraulein Braunschweig’s small
apartment where she sleeps on the couch until they can devise a way
out.

It is the teacher who first brings news of the drive to recruit
women – as domestic workers, possibly as consorts – for the German
colony of South-West Africa. And in no time the decision is made.
Is this not what she has been dreaming about all her life?
Moreover, the news seems to revive some of the teacher’s own deep
memories – of the time she was engaged, and bow she and her Otto
used to talk about their travels around the world, and how
enthusiastic he was about going to East Africa or South-West Africa
with her. If Hanna goes it will be, in a way, a rounding off of
some of her own dreams. Fraulein Braunschweig accompanies her on
the train to Hamburg. With some of the money Oma has given her,
they buy her a new outfit; and this gives Hanna new confidence,
even after the train journey and two days in a ratty little
boarding house in Hamburg. The interview with Frau Charlotte
Sprandel of the Kolonialgesellschaft, who has travelled all the way
from Berlin, is constantly postponed because of the stampede of
women – some as young as fourteen or fifteen, others as old as
fifty or sixty – clamouring for the opportunity of being
chosen.

“There are too many,” Hanna says several times. “They will never
take me.”

“You are exactly what they are looking for, Hanna.”

“I am too severely plain, Fraulein.” The phrase has been branded
into her mind where it hurts most and lingers longest. She tells
Fraulein Braunschweig about the conversation between Frau Hildegard
and her friend.

“They were jealous of you, that’s all.”

She cannot suppress a bitter laugh. “What on earth do I have
that anyone could be jealous of?”

“You have a good mind, child. And you’re a willing worker. You
have genuine enthusiasm. Not many people have that.” She smiles,
and suddenly looks years younger: “And you do have beautiful
hair.”

The interview, when at last it is Hanna’s turn, takes place in a
high bare room in a yellow office building near the harbour. Frau
Sprandel, splendid in black and fur (for the day is cold and
drizzly), sits behind a long table, flanked by several other
people, all of them men, most of them elderly and officious. Nobody
shows any interest in the new applicant; they must have interviewed
so many already.

“Come, come, Fraulein,” says the furred lady with visible
irritation as Hanna tarries on the doorstep, “we don’t have all
day.” She reads Hanna’s name from a document in front of her. “This
is your name?”

“Yes, Frau Sprandel.”

“You are aware of the kind of person we are looking for?”

“I have read the notices, Frau Sprandel.”

“All the applicants – and there are many of them – are evaluated
on the basis of their merit and health.” She places great emphasis
on the impressive-sounding words
Wurdigkeit und Gesundheit
.
“What makes you think you qualify?”

“I don’t think I qualify at all, Frau Sprandel.” There is a
sudden rustle among the papers in front of the dignitaries at the
table. Now they are all paying attention. Hanna presses on
resolutely: “I’m a clumsy person and I always break plates and
things and often I don’t finish my work on time. But I’ve never
been scared of work and I try very hard and I have always had good
health.”

“Hm.” Somewhat to Hanna’s surprise she detects a hint of
approval in the lady’s attitude. Frau Sprandel returns to her
documents. “I have looked at your references. I notice that you
were brought up in an orphanage. The Little Children of Jesus. A
good Christian institution, I believe.”

Hanna feels her jaws contract. But as evenly as possible she
says, “That is what Frau Agathe and Pastor Ulrich used to say.”

“You don’t agree with them?”

“No, I don’t,” Hanna says quietly. “But there is really no need
for you to take my word. Few people do.”

Frau Sprandel changes her angle of approach: “Would you say the
orphanage was the kind of place you would rather not have
been?”

“I often ran away when I was small,” Hanna replies with complete
candour.

“Would you do it again now, if you could?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because it doesn’t work.”

“Yet you are interested in going to South-West Africa. Is that
not running away?”

“It is not Germany I want to get away from, Frau Sprandel. It is
Africa I want to go to.”

This prompts much whispering all the way down the long jury
table, while Frau Sprandel sits studying Hanna with narrowed eyes.
It takes quite a while before she returns to her notes. “Would you
describe yourself as a city girl?”

“No, Frau Sprandel. Bremen is not a big city. And for the last
few years I have been working on a farm.”

“Hm.” She nods and looks sideways a her co-adjudicators. “The
one requirement we are very strict about is that our recruits must
be
vom Lande und nicht von der Stadt
.” A murmur of approval
ripples along the table. “You must realise that Africa is not
Germany. It is a wild place.”

“I have always wanted to go to wild places, Frau Sprandel.”

“It is not for the romantically inclined,” the woman says
curtly. “German South-West Africa is a country larger than the
whole of Germany. It has half a million of inhabitants of which
fewer than five thousand are colonists.” She pauses to let the
information sink in. “In addition there is a garrison of some eight
thousand troops. But the vast majority are natives. Raw,
uncivilised, savage tribes from which one can expect neither help
nor mercy, only open hostility.”