The Other Side of Silence Read online

  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 ∧

  Fifteen

  It 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 pyr
e 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 ∧

  Sixteen

  Books 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.

  Hanna clutches it to her chest.

  “Burn it.”

  Hanna shakes her head. Frau Agathe grabs a stove-iron from a hook on the wall. For a moment it seems as if she is going to attack the girl with it. But then, breathing heavily, she slowly replaces the iron. “You will go to Pastor Ulrich,” she says with a strange kind of elation in her rasping voice. “I shall give you a letter. Then we shall see.”

  Half an hour later she is in the parsonage with the large fat man.

  “Ah Hanna,” he says. “What brings you here on such a pleasant day?”

  “I have brought a letter from Frau Agathe,” she says stiffly. She hands it over, then stands back.

  In silence he peruses it. His face turns as purple as a turkey’s wattles, which signals unfailingly what is to come.

  “Where is the book?” he asks.

  “I have put it away, Your Reverend.”

  “You were instructed to bring it here, were you not?”

  “Yes, Your Reverend. But it belongs to Fraulein Braunschweig. It is not for burning.”

  He gets up from the deep easy-chair, comes past her, closes the heavy door, and bolts it. She doesn’t move.

  He comes back, paddling like a large black waterfowl. Turns round to face her.

  “Come over here,” he says, his face shiny with sweat.

  Hanna doesn’t move.

  “I won’t be touched today,” she says. It is like another’s voice speaking through her, surprising her. It feels as if she isn’t really down here with him, but somewhere high up on the rafters, looking down on the two of them, the large shapeless man, like a bundle of washing wrapped in black, the girl with the gawky body.

  Pastor Ulrich gives a benign smile. “And why won’t you be touched today?” he asks in an unctuous voice. He seems almost to welcome the signs of defiance.

  “Because Fraulein Braunschweig told me a month ago that I have now become a woman.”

  “Indeed?” He raises his heavy eyebrows. He is sweating more profusely now; she can smell it. “And how would we know that?”

  For a moment she panics. Then a strange calm spreads through her. She raises her head and says, “I am bleeding.”

  His reaction briefly surprises her: “Then it is time you start taking great care of yourself.”

  “Thank you, Your Reverend. I shall take care. Fraulein Braunschweig has already told me all about it.”

  He narrows his eyes as if he suspects she may be sarcastic. “Your body is the temple of God,” he says. “Men may feel tempted to defile it.” He takes out a large kerchief to wipe his face, then blows his nose in it.

  “What do you mean, Your Reverend?”

  “They may…” He clears his throat. “They may attempt to touch you in lewd ways.”

  “The way you touch me, Your Reverend?”

  He seems ready to explode with indignation. “How dare you say that?” he asks in a near-whisper.

  “The way you touch me: is that not a sin then, Your Reverend?” she asks.

  “What I have done to you, my daughter,” he says, “has been done in purity of mind and generosity of spirit, in the name of God. To exorcise the devils which reside within you. In that place…” He makes a gesture towards her, but drops his hand. There is a long silence. Then he approaches slowly. “What you need right now,” he says, “is a proper cleansing. Before you are consumed by the fires of hell that burn in that secret place of your body.”

  “If there are devils in me, then they’re mine. And you have no right to drive them out,” she says. There is a recklessness and a passion in her now, which seem to excite him unbearably.

  He comes still closer. She backs away. He follows. It is a scene an onlooker might find comical; to them, trapped in it, it is deadly serious. She backs. He follows. Until she feels the wall against her shoulderblades and knows that no further retreat is possible. He comes still closer.

  “Don’t do this, Your Reverend,” she says. Her voice falters briefly.

  “It is for your own good,” he says. She can smell his lunch on his breath. Leeks, onion, chicken. “It is
my duty to take you in charge.”

  “Can you not leave it to God?” she asks. “Or do you think he may also take advantage of me?” For the first time ever her defiance is open; but it is her life she is fighting for.

  “This is blasphemy!” he gasps. “Are you not scared unto death? It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”

  She mustn’t say this, she mustn’t; but she does: “If God is like you, Your Reverend, I won’t have anything more to do with him. Not ever.”

  ∨ The Other Side of Silence ∧

  Seventeen

  It has dire consequences. In later years – and also this night when she stares, darkly, at her reflection in the mirror on the landing – she will think of it as her first death. (The very early one, before she came to the Little Children of Jesus, doesn’t count, because she has no recollection of it.) Pastor Ulrich personally accompanies her back to the orphanage. On the way he tries several times to clutch her hand, but she evades his grasp.