The Other Side of Silence (23 page)

Throughout the whole narrative Kahapa utters no sound. His face
is contorted, but he does not speak. For a long time, minutes,
perhaps half an hour, he stands beside the mound. Until, in the
distance, from behind the derelict little dwelling, the figure of
the farmer reappears, staring down towards them. Only then does
Kahapa begin the long walk back, very slowly, moving his arms as if
he is rowing upstream. As he comes past them, Hanna reaches out to
touch his arm, but he shakes her off.

“Kahapa,” whispers Katja.

He does not even seem to hear.

They follow at a distance, their hands clenched together.

∨
The Other Side of Silence
∧

“W
hat do you want?”
demands the farmer as Kahapa comes up to him.

“I come for you,” says the dark giant.

“You know what you wanted to know, now get the hell off my
farm.”

“You kill my woman dead,” says Kahapa. “You try to kill me. Now
I kill you.”

Albert Gruber raises his gun. There is outrage in his small
eyes, but also – perhaps – a glint of fear. Above all
incomprehension, for this is something that has never happened to
him before, something beyond the reach of the possible.

The black man lunges at him. The white man tries to step aside
but stumbles. Before he can get his rifle to his shoulder Kahapa
grabs hold of the barrel. A furious tug of war begins. Kahapa is
much taller, but he is still weak from his ordeal; and Gruber,
though shorter, is heavy and stocky, he has the body of a primate,
with hunched shoulders and long arms.

“You’ve got to help Kahapa,” pleads Katja, clutching Hanna’s
hand.

But Hanna pulls away.
This is the men’s fight
, she
gestures.
Let them be
.

They are like two fighting dogs, grunting and snarling, pulling,
pushing, stumbling this way and that. But at last, managing to drag
the white man off balance, Kahapa wrenches the gun from his grasp
and flings it away. Now they have only their hands.

Using his slight advantage of higher ground, the farmer hurls
himself down against Kahapa. They land on the ground, grappling,
wrestling, hitting, tearing. They are covered in grit and dust.
Both are bleeding. The white man manages to head-butt Kahapa in the
face; there is a crunching sound. The black man bellows in rage and
pain, rears up, digs his knee into his opponent’s groin. He doubles
up. Kahapa staggers to his feet, his face bleeding profusely. But
seeing his chance he kicks the white man in the stomach. The farmer
grabs him by the leg and tries to pull him down again. Then they
are both on their feet once more, thrashing about, stumbling up and
down the incline in front of the hovel.

More figures appear in the background, hovering. Not just the
three women who escorted Kahapa to the grave, but a small crowd of
farm workers, dusty and dishevelled, ribbed like mongrels,
clustered together in horrified eagerness, grunting and moaning as
if they, too, are in the fight; but not daring to take sides.

At one stage the two wrestling men lurch through the front door
into the house. There is a sound of breaking and splintering wood
as they reel and stagger from the single room into the lean-to
kitchen and back, then out into the fury of the sun again. Strip by
strip their clothing is being torn from them. Soon they are naked,
black and white, body against body, but both so covered with blood
and grime and dust that the colour of their skins has become almost
indistinguishable.

Hanna finds herself staring at the spectacle, transfixed, in a
kind of awe, unable to turn away. Always in the past, when there
was violence, she was involved in it, the victim, unable to watch
from the outside. Now there is an urge to observe. She
has
to see, for this is what men do and she cannot deny or ignore it.
She has to see
how
pain is inflicted, how it is made to
hurt, what it does to the one who causes it as much as to the one
who suffers it.
She must know
. She isn’t even aware of
Katja’s nails digging into her arm as the girl keeps on repeating
in a wail of distress, “Just stop it. Just stop it, Hanna, please
make them stop…”

Kahapa shows the first signs of weakening. His breath comes
gasping from his throat and he seems dazed, trying to wipe blood
from his eyes, groaning deeply like some dying large animal.

“That man is going to kill him,” whimpers Katja. She is crying
without realising it. Tears are making wet patterns through the red
dust that covers her cheeks. “He’s going to kill him, Hanna, you’ve
got to do something.”

And indeed the white man seems to be preparing for a final
assault, going down low on his knees, then rearing up and grabbing
Kahapa round the neck, his arms tightening, his muscles moving like
moles under the skin. The black man is making choking sounds. His
knees are buckling. On his forehead large veins bulge out,
throbbing.

“For God’s sake, Hanna!” sobs the girl, crouching on her knees
now.

Kahapa’s large body is going limp.

Only now does Hanna come forward. Katja hasn’t even noticed that
she has removed the Luger from her bundle. She cautiously steps up
to the tangle of sweating, bleeding bodies, making sure she isn’t
drawn into the fray. For a while she has to step this way and that
to avoid their thrashing. Then she presses the barrel against the
back of the white man’s head, and closes her eyes, turns her face
away, and pulls the trigger.

The report is stunning. In the background the miserable
spectators erupt in sound, but whether it is jubilation or jeering
is impossible to make out.

There is a lot of blood.

The bodies remain locked together, twitching, jerking. But at
last Kahapa shakes himself like a big dog coming from the water,
and crawls away on all fours, squats down, his head buried in his
arms.

The other body no longer moves.

“How did you do it?” asks Katja, gaping in awe.

It is only the first time that it is difficult
, Hanna
tries to say.

No one makes any sound or movement. They are waiting for Kahapa.
After a long time he raises his face from his hands and looks at
them. He gets up, swaying on his legs, walks down to where the dead
farmer lies, prods him with a foot. The body rolls over. It is not
an appetising sight. The face, where the bullet has come out, has
been blown away.

“You do this for me,” says Kahapa, still panting. He looks at
Hanna. “Two times you save my life.” He nods towards the dead man
as if to conclude an argument with himself. “This is my man,” he
says. “Now we go find your man.”

∨
The Other Side of Silence
∧

N
o, she could never
have thought that hate would be like this. So beautiful. So
singular. So utterly pure. So abundantly full of life. It is as if
she has always had an emptiness inside her – sometimes invaded
temporarily by fear, by dread, by uncertainty and restlessness,
occasionally even by a surge of love, all kinds of turbulent and
opaque emotions, but mostly just empty – which is now filled with
this resplendent hate. It’s like a magnifying glass which forces
together a great number of disparate light beams to focus with
terrible precision on one spot only, setting it alight, and in one
amazing moment giving direction and meaning to her whole life. Over
so many years so many separate moments have prepared her,
unknowingly, for it. Frau Agathe in the orphanage. Pastor Ulrich.
The people she worked for, the men with their sordid needs, their
power, their helplessness in her hands. The officer on the ship who
denied her the right to her own name. The men on the train.
Hauptmann Heinrich Bohlke. The blood spurting in her mouth and
dripping down her chin on to her breasts. His subalterns in the
crowded compartment taking off their studded belts.
When I fuck
a woman
. That was the furthest she had ever been driven. But it
was also the moment of ultimate emptiness. A space in which nothing
could grow or move. Until the so-recent day when the army
detachment came to Frauenstein with its wretched collection of
prisoners. For the first time in all these years something stirred
inside her when Colonel von Blixen drew Katja to him and said,
“I’ll have this one.” Temporarily thwarted by Frau Knesebeck. But
when he returned in the night and she found him beating the naked
Katja, a flame was lit inside the darkest recess of herself. A
flame as livid and dazzling as the sun. As if everything that had
been gathering in her throughout her life had suddenly exploded.
When she attacked him with the brass candlestick something broke
free in her, an animal kept caged and tethered all its life. For
the first time in the years since the train journey she could look
at herself in the smudged and faded mirror. She looked, and she
knew, everything she’d never even attempted to grasp. It was the
beginning of hate, a liberation, an ecstasy she would never have
dreamed possible. As if Herr Goethe himself was shouting inside
her,
Herrlich wie am ersten Tag
…! From that instant she has
known where her life is heading for. She has light, she has fire,
she has the will, a passion that can never be extinguished again.
That is what has brought her here. And will take her from here, to
where she knows, with such clarity, she must go. There is no haste
or impatience in her. Everything is serene, all is transparent in
that light. No love can possibly be as fulfilling and as rich as
this hate.

∨
The Other Side of Silence
∧

T
hey are ready to set
out on their way to the Rhenish mission station which, if Kahapa is
to be believed, is five days from the farm, even if one travels by
oxcart as they are doing.

So many things have shifted in the short time since they set
foot on the farm. What Kahapa said on that first day, standing over
the dead body of the man who had made his life hell and murdered
his wife, has given a shape to her own thoughts:
This is my man.
Now we go find your man
. Because this is what her hate is
focused on, she now knows very clearly. It is not just an escape
from Frauenstein, from living an immured existence, having the
details of her life regulated and determined by others, being at
the disposal of those who have assumed power over her. Nor is it
just an attempt to forge a new kind of life for herself and Katja.
It is, above all other things, a journey towards a confrontation
with the man – the men – who turned her into what she is now.
You look like something out of hell
. Only when that has
happened can her freedom have meaning and substance. And Kahapa is
in it with her. There has been no need even to discuss it. She has
helped him – not simply to take his revenge, for that notion,
revenge
, is too simple and too shallow; but to do what has
to be done in order to be what he can be – and now he will help
her. They are together.

Others have come with them. The labourers on the farm of Albert
Gruber, thirteen men and women altogether (and any number of naked,
snot-nosed children), ran amok after the death of their baas.
Katja, shocked by the excesses of their rampage, wanted Hanna to
intervene, but the woman shook her head.
Anyone who tries to
interfere will be hacked to pieces
. And Kahapa agreed, though
probably more from exhaustion and pain than conviction. There was
no whole furniture left in the house when they were done. Not that
there had been much to begin with: a carved wooden bedstead,
presumably of German origin, some chests, a long table and eight
chairs, all very roughly hammered together, a number of rickety
shelves. The only object of value – fantastically out of place –
was a dark rosewood piano, which collapsed under the blows of the
frenzied labourers in an unbelievable cacophony of breaking
strings. It must have belonged to the dead man’s wife. Hanna
remembered Kahapa’s laconic account:
She make music. He beat
her. She drink poison stuff
. A life in ten words.

Hanna intervened only after everything had been smashed,
including doors and window frames, and the labourers prepared to
set fire to the place. Pushing the still dazed Kahapa forward, she
made him stop the plunder to salvage at least a number of utensils,
some provisions (oil, sugar, salt, coffee, flour), a kaross and an
old sheet from the broken bed, and all the guns and ammunition she
could collect (seven guns in all, of various sizes and calibres,
and ranging from an old-fashioned frontloader to Mausers and a
Lee-Enfield). Then they stood back to watch the wretched place go
up in flames until only a few blackened walls remained. After that
the people quietened down. A strange calm beset them, almost a
sense of melancholy, a
tristitia post coïtum
. Perhaps they
were even, suddenly, inexplicably, too late, feeling ashamed of
what they had done.

Without talking among themselves they went to a shed behind the
house and emerged with picks and shovels to dig a shallow grave for
the dead farmer, not to show him any consideration, merely to be
rid of the carcass. Then some of the women took Kahapa away to wash
him; water was drawn from a deep well a hundred yards downhill.
(How many weeks, months had it taken how many men to dig it?) At
long, long last, as dusk was already falling, they came to
rest.

Kahapa engaged in conversation with them. To Hanna, he
interpreted: “They say who will be their baas now?”

Through Katja she responded:
For God’s sake, they’ve just got
rid of one, why should they want another?

“They say who will look after them?”

Why can’t they look after themselves? They are free
now
.