The Other Side of Silence (24 page)

“They need food, they must work, they have families to look
after.”

What did they do before they worked for Albert
Gruber?

“They work for other white people.”

Hanna made a series of signs to Katja. And the girl interpreted,
“She stayed with a tribe of Namas once. They did not work for
anyone.”

The people snorted and laughed dismissively. How could she
presume to tell them what to do? A woman? One looking like
that?

Then what will you do?
asked Hanna through Katja.

That was when a man said, “We must go the mission station. They
will help us there.”

The following day, before they could begin to round up people
and animals (twelve head of cattle apart from the two drawing oxen,
a flock of bedraggled, foul-smelling goats, a few makeshift coops
of chickens and muscovy ducks) two of the labourers announced that
they had decided to set out on their own, with their families, to
return to wherever they had once come from. All the others elected
to accompany the oxcart, the men on foot, the women and children to
take turns on the back of the jolting, swaying, creaking cart.

The entire small crowd is assembled on the
werf
at the
back of the house watching the two families leave. Kahapa stands in
the forefront, scowling into the sun. He is wearing Albert Gruber’s
clothes. The shirt is too short and too wide and Kahapa hasn’t
bothered to do up the buttons; the trousers, too, are ill-fitting.
He doesn’t care for shoes. But he is proud of the hat with the band
of leopard skin around it, which he wears with a swagger. Like the
others he follows with his brooding eyes the two men and their
families as they move off with their paltry possessions balanced on
the women’s heads, and driving before them two of the cows and some
goats. It seems an ordinary enough leavetaking. But it is
interrupted in a completely unexpected way when, moving slightly to
one side, Kahapa stretches out a hand to pick up one of the guns,
the Lee-Enfield, from the back of the cart. He must have prepared
everything beforehand, because without needing to load, he raises
the rifle to his shoulder and pulls the trigger. The sudden
explosion is greeted with shouts and screams of dismay; some of the
children start hollering. Fifty yards away one of the two departing
men falls down in a small cloud of dust, convulsing; the rest of
the group appears to be in disarray. But before they can start
scrambling out of the way, Kahapa ejects the spent shell, slips in
a new cartridge, and lowers the hammer to repeat the action. This
time Hanna comes running to him and grabs him by the arm, but it is
too late: already the second man drops in his tracks.

“What are you doing?” screams Katja.

Hanna is shaking Kahapa this way and that in inarticulate
rage.

He calmly frees himself from her grasp. “That two men,” he says.
“They are the ones that hold my woman down for him to fuck. They
are the ones that beat her dead.”

The children in the distance are scattering in all directions,
screaming and howling with fear, as the women kneel down in the
dust beside the killed men. There is much shouting and wailing on
the
werf
too.

Hanna prepares to run after the others, but Kahapa holds her
back.

“Leave them now,” he says. “We go.”

She signals furiously to Katja; the girl says, “But what about
the women and children?”

“They bury their men. Their place is not with us.”

Katja hides her face in her hands.

In an uncharacteristic gesture of compassion Kahapa puts a hand
on her shoulder. “This is the way it must be,” he says.

In numbed silence they move away, without looking back again.
The mission station will be only the first stop on the long road
that lies ahead.

∨
The Other Side of Silence
∧

A
long the way, as
Hanna walks on her own some distance from the oxcart, she finds the
slough of a snake, long and thin and quite perfect, silvery against
the reddish brown of the earth. When she squats down to pick it up
it disintegrates into dust more insubstantial than ash at the touch
of her finger. It leaves her unsettled. Once this skin was
inhabited by something alive and quick, a feared shiver of
lightning rippling through the scrub and stones. Now that life has
moved on, leaving only this trace behind; and even the trace
dissolves. There will be nothing left, nothing at all.

∨
The Other Side of Silence
∧

T
he Rhenish mission
station is a modest cluster of buildings set among low windblown
makalani palms, held in the tight embrace of a high wall; from the
entrance it juts out into the desert like a jetty into the sea, a
resolutely straight line into the distance, a riddle which the eye
cannot solve. In the middle of the tiny settlement is a small
whitewashed church with a squat steeple and a freestanding
bell-tower; there is a single long low house, also whitewashed, and
a scattering of round huts. Someone must have sounded the alarm
because in the deepening dusk quite a gathering awaits the
travellers who all look the worse for wear. The group is led by a
very tall, very thin, white man, his face burnt a fiery red by the
sun, his long wiry arms covered in ginger hair. A step or two
behind him is a woman who must be his wife, also very thin, with
lanky blonde hair, a prominent beak-like nose, a long chintz dress.
She is flanked by children, who at first sight seem like an
innumerable brood, later distinguishable as eleven; all of them
shockingly thin, and all of them girls – the youngest a baby in the
mother’s arms, the oldest trying to conceal, with self-consciously
hunched shoulders, the first signs of budding breasts. They are all
barefoot. So are the members of their congregation massed some
distance behind the whites, a motley crowd that appears to
represent a variety of types and tribes, from wiry ochre-coloured
Namas to pitch-black Damaras and a number of Hereros and Ovambos in
various shades of brown.

“Welcome to our vale of grace,” says the missionary in a booming
voice much too large for his frame. “God must have brought you
here. To which purpose, we shall soon find out, I trust.”

Hanna pushes Katja forward with a series of quick
hand-signs.

“These people are refugees from a farm,” explains Katja. “The
farmer died and they have nowhere to go. I am Katja Holtzhausen. My
parents were traders, far from here, near Gobabis. Hanna here, and
I, stayed at Frauenstein in the desert. This is Kahapa, our friend
and guide who has brought us here.”

“You are most welcome, little sister,” says the man, extending a
skeletal hand in a gesture of blessing. Yet there is something very
severe in his attitude. He turns to Hanna, glances under the
kappie, winces involuntarily in the reaction to which she has
become accustomed. Then he continues in his studied, bookish way,
as if he has memorised every phrase and trusts his audience to find
it memorable too. “God seems to have visited a terrible retribution
on you, sister, for what vile sin I shall not presume to ask. But
if ever you wish to discuss it, remember his mercy is infinite and
as his servant I am at your disposal.” He looks round at his
congregation and, in an unexpectedly stentorian tone, shouts a
number of commands about preparing food, shelter and water for the
white visitors. Only then does he summon the thin woman to his
side. “This is Gisela, whom God has appointed to care for me and
support me in the performance of his work.” A mirthless and
possessive smile: “And these are the olive branches at our table.
As you can see, we have been fulfilling his great command to be
fruitful, and multiply and fill the earth. Amid the mass of dark
heathens on this continent we try to form a small but growing
source of light.” The line of girls blush and fumble and giggle
until a withering look from their father imposes the fear of God on
them. “Now let us go forth to praise the Lord for his many
blessings.”

Only after the many blessings have been duly – and individually
– acknowledged in the swiftly darkening little church, does the
Reverend Gottlieb Maier lead the way to the house for more earthly,
and more needed, refreshment. Black women come in with large basins
of warm water in which the feet of the visitors are washed. And
then, at last, by the light of several crude home-made candles,
they are seated at the very long, narrow dining table: the parents
at the head, Hanna and Katja at the bottom, the girls on low
benches at either side. They are served from a large dish of
goat-meat with pumpkin and sweet potatoes, and bowls of milk. As
the missionary seems temporarily to have forgotten about Kahapa,
Katja – nudged by Hanna – has to remind the man of God that their
guide, too, is in need of sustenance. To this end a Nama servant is
summoned and ordered to serve the man some bread in the kitchen.
The other visitors are, hopefully, looked after by members of the
congregation in their huts.

A safari of kitchen-women has appeared to clear the table and
wash the dishes (Hanna and Katja, who both rise to give a hand, are
curtly instructed to resume their seats). It is followed by a
session of reading from a huge Bible. The children sit staring at
the visitors in silent, breathless awe. After the reading each
child except the youngest two or three is required to recite a
verse from the passage read by the father. After a
near-interminable prayer in which the visitors and their destinies
are amply included, four of the children, who have botched their
recitation, are summoned to be given cracking blows on their hands
with a strap. One, who dares to succumb to tears, is punished with
a second stroke. And then, at last, everybody may bed down. Ten of
the children, as well as Hanna and Katja, will sleep on reed mats
on thedung floor of the main room, while the parents and their baby
retire to the small bedroom at the far end. Within a few minutes,
while the house is still reeking of candle smoke, muffled rhythmic
moaning sounds from next door signal the missionary’s enthusiastic
performance, undoubtedly to the greater glory of God, of his
marital duties.

Hanna begins to feel nauseous; with a dozen breathing bodies
gathered in the less than generous space of the front room and all
doors and windows shut against the night, the interior is close and
stifling. Rising from her mat which fortunately has been spread out
right beside the front door, and moving cautiously so as not to
wake the sleeping Katja, she unbars the door, pulls it open and
slips outside into a night riddled with uncannily large stars. Even
her fear of the dark subsides before this pale shimmering. It is as
if a large, very dark blue moth-eaten cloth has been stretched
across the earth, through the holes of which shines some distant
cosmic fire.

Alone in the innocent night she stares up at the stars, trying
to find the ones the Namas have named for her: the seven sisters of
Khuseti, the bright eye of Khanous, the mighty hunter Heiseb
striding towards the dark horizon. They seem like old friends. And
yet, as a small shiver moves down her spine, she wonders whether it
can all be really as innocent as it seems. What violence, what
danger may lie behind it, lurking, looming, waiting?

The ground feels reassuring and cool under her bare feet.
Nothing moves; there is no sound. She looks at the low steeple of
the little church, pointing upward like a stubby finger. She thinks
of the service, of the prayers that followed the supper, the
pastor’s laborious piety, the heavy hand with which he rules his
family and his congregation. The words he spoke to her when he
first looked at her. God’s retribution for some vile sin she has
committed. It is as if in her mind she is looking right through the
shadow of his drawn, ascetic features at the fleshy face of Pastor
Ulrich. How concerned they all are about her immortal soul. How
enthusiastically they conspire to hasten it on its way to
perdition.

But perhaps she is being unfair. The missionary has welcomed
them generously enough. It must be her old suspicion of the
subplots of religion which has prejudiced her. She should be
grateful for this station on their violent road which has only just
begun. Again she sees the half-clad body of the officer subsiding
under the blow of her heavy candlestick. The two naked bodies, one
black, one white, locked together outside the dilapidated
farmhouse. Kahapa shooting the two labourers on their way into the
desert. Blood, blood. Is there no other way at all? There
are
other worlds, she knows. She has entered them, however
briefly, in the stories from Fraulein Braunschweig’s books.
Simplicity, so powerful and so perfect. If only one’s life could be
like that. But that seems out of reach, a wholeness beyond her
grasp except in dreams. And the only way, now, to move towards that
is along this bright road of hate on which she has set out. At
least, she tries to reassure herself, there is the brief respite in
this place with its paltry palm trees.

A crunching sound makes her swing round with a small gasp of
fright. A large dark figure is approaching. She tries to efface
herself, but he must have seen her for he is coming directly
towards her. The night is indeed no longer innocent.

Then she recognises Kahapa and breathes deeply in relief.

He stops. “You must not walk alone,” he says, his voice a deep
rumble in the silence. “This is not a good place.”

But it’s a mission station!
she would like to counter.
Then thinks:
Perhaps he knows more than I do, more than he will
let on
.

“I cannot sleep,” he says, as if he has guessed her thoughts. “I
wonder if you are all right.”

She puts her hand on his shoulder and nods, not knowing whether
he can even see it.