The Other Side of Silence Read online

  She has to spend a week locked up in the cellar where the peat is kept. A dark so absolute she cannot see her fingers when she holds them up to her face. She has always been terrified of the dark, but this is so far beyond terror that she can no longer consciously feel it. It is just something that is lodged inside her, a blackness into which she retreats and which paralyses her. They have taken away all her clothes. She is given no food. Only water, twice a day. Once a day someone comes with a cane to administer a beating. When at last she is allowed out she can barely walk. The light hurts her eyes, piercing them like shards of broken glass. She is taken to Frau Agathe’s cramped study cluttered with heavy dark furniture. Pastor Ulrich is there too. She can smell him before she sees him.

  “My child,” he says, his voice marinaded in loving concern. “I hope you have used your time to think on God and his mercy.”

  Hanna shows no reaction.

  “It is the Devil,” whispers Frau Agathe.

  “What do you have to say?” Pastor Ulrich prods her gently.

  “Why do you hate me so?” she asks with stiff lips.

  “You are wrong, my daughter,” he says. “We love you. God loves you. What we hate is the Devil that has taken hold of you. We shall get rid of him whatever it takes.”

  She shrugs wearily.

  “This weekend you have your Christmas concert,” he reminds her. “Are you ready to take part in a spirit of celebration, with a mind and a body cleansed of sin, to the greater glory of God?”

  “I do not want to have anything to do with your concert,” she says. “I do not want your God.”

  Frau Agathe sits down on a chair, gasping for air like a fish on land, too horrified to speak.

  He, too, is breathing deeply. He asks, “What is it you want?”

  “I want my books,” says Hanna. “I want to go back to Fraulein Braunschweig.”

  “Unless you repent you will never set foot in that school again,” says Frau Agathe in a piercing voice. “All you bring back from there is bad habits and an evil heart.”

  She cannot believe it. She stares at the grownups in dismay. All her thoughts go tumbling in disorder through her mind. But she does not speak.

  Frau Agathe stands up. “I shall leave you to Pastor Ulrich,” she says. As she prepares to close the door behind her, she adds, “I shall pray God for your immortal soul. But I have very little hope.”

  “Please don’t go,” says Hanna.

  Frau Agathe looks at her with a frown between her pale grey eyes. “What do you mean?”

  “Pastor Ulrich does sinful things to me when we are alone.”

  The tall thin woman stares at her as if she has seen a ghost. Then she thrusts her bony face into her hands and starts shaking. “How dare you, how dare you, how dare you?” she stutters. But Hanna cannot make out whether it is addressed to her or the pastor.

  He is livid. But is it with rage, or fear?

  “Do you think,” he asks in a voice so low she can hardly hear it, “do you think any man – do you think that I, a man of God – will even consider laying a finger on one as despicable and as wretched and as evil and as ugly as you?” He is breathing deeply, unevenly, as he does when he is alone with her.

  I may be despicable, she thinks. And I know I’m wretched. I may be evil. But don’t tell me I am ugly. For God’s sake, don’t.

  She is taken back to the cellar for another week. She no longer feels the hunger. She is barely conscious of the pain when they come for the daily beating. But she is aware of the cold. It creeps into the marrow of her bones. She is shivering, day and night. Her head throbs with pain, she is racked with fever. Sometimes she hears voices. Fraulein Braunschweig saying, “You must read this. Die Leiden desjungen Werther. It is a very beautiful book.” The small piping voices of invisible children, Trixie and Spixie and Finny. And unknown voices too, chanting the music of far-off names – Guadalquivir and Macchu Pichu and Smolensk and Ondangua and Barbezieux and Parramatta. They may be the voices of angels. Sometimes they change into animal sounds, the braying and barking and mewing and crowing of the Musicians of Bremen, drowned out by the glorious booming of the cathedral bell, and then silence, nothing but silence.

  “This child is dying,” says an unfamiliar voice one day.

  Frau Agathe’s voice replies, “She is acting up.”

  Then back into the dark. There are rats scuttling about. They gnaw at her hair, her fingers, her frozen toes. They are speaking to her in eerie squeaking voices. Come with us, they tell her. Let us get out of here and drive out the grownups from the Little Children of Jesus and take possession of it. But how will we get out of this black hole? she asks. No problem, they say, we’ll gnaw through the door.

  It happens so quickly that she can hardly believe it. A shimmering of daylight filters into the cellar.

  Come, they shriek at her. We can’t wait, we must surprise them! Her weakness, the fever, the shaking of her body, all miraculously flow out of her as she gets up and, grabbing a coal shovel from the wall next to the broken door, follows them up the broken stone staircase. The rats must have communicated with others of their tribe beforehand, because, when they reach the ground floor above they are joined by thousands of other rodents that come swarming from all sides, through doors and windows, down chimneys, pouring from the ceilings.

  They part to all sides like a dark sea to let her pass. “You must lead us,” they say. “You know the place. Take us straight to them.”

  With Hanna at the head, they converge on Frau Agathe’s room. The door is locked, Hanna discovers when she tries to force it from outside. From inside they can hear a humming of low, anxious voices. Frau Agathe and some other women. Pastor Ulrich. This is perfect. Waving her blue-and-silver-and-gold standard, Hanna motions at her cohorts to storm the place. Once again the rats swoop to the door. Within minutes there is nothing left but a heap of white splinters and a gaping hole. The grownups are cowering against the far wall.

  “Please understand,” squeaks Pastor Ulrich in a falsetto voice. “Everything we have done has been in the name of God. We really mean well. We bear you no malice.”

  They are not permitted any further argument. The rats come swarming forward and overrun the five or six figures in black. There is one large general sound of gnawing, within which smaller eddies can be distinguished – the wet slithering of mastication, squeaking tussles and fights over fingerbones and toes. And in no time at all only bones are left, smooth and very white.

  From there the rats spread out in all directions. Children are set free from dormitories and study halls in which they have been locked up. In a frenzy of jubilation they ripple through the corridors and spill out into the streets. They are heading for the river, and from there to the sea, Hanna knows. And as soon as the work is done – the great stone building crashing to the ground behind them, sending up a huge cloud of dust – she runs to join them. The sea, the sea. And playing on the beach, blissfully unaware of catastrophe as she builds a sandcastle at the lacy edge of the water, a small girl with black hair and the bluest of eyes is caught in the dazzle of the sun. Behind her are palm trees waving like tall hands beckoning. This way, this way.

  She comes to, hazily, when her body is picked up by many hands, and a blanket is thrown over her, and she is carried out, and upstairs.

  “I’m afraid it is too late,” a voice says. “The girl is dead.”

  “She had to sit out her punishment,” says Frau Agathe. “What will become of discipline if we give in to every little prank? At least we’ve driven the devils out, praise God.”

  When she wakes up again she is in a strange white room. So she must be dead, she thinks, and this is heaven. God may turn up at any moment. Which may be problematic, as she no longer believes in him. Perhaps she should tell him, Can we agree on this? I will not believe in you, if you will not hold it against me.

  But the man who comes in is not God. It is Pastor Ulrich. (He had eggs for breakfast, and pork sausages, the stains on his w
aistcoat disclose.)

  She shuts her eyes, but he doesn’t go away. Through trembling lashes she peers at him. He stands looking down at her for a long time, before he goes to find a chair from a corner and pulls it up right next to her bed.

  “My daughter,” he says.

  Hanna pretends to be asleep.

  “Hanna.”

  She still says nothing. Will he not get tired and go away?

  He will not. She feels a movement on the bedclothes. He has inserted his hand under the top blanket. For a while he keeps very still, then the hand begins to move closer as if it has a life of its own, like a fat crab. It touches her hip and goes still again. She lies very rigid.

  He whispers, “Hanna.”

  She does not answer.

  “Surely it cannot be worth it,” he says, as if he is talking to himself. “We can come to an understanding. You can go back to school. You can even go on reading your books, provided they are not too lewd or ungodly.”

  She does not answer.

  “My only concern is for your well-being,” he says. “You had us all very worried indeed. Double pneumonia. But you will soon be well, the doctor says. Are you not glad?”

  She remains wrapped in silence as in a cocoon. No butterfly will hatch here.

  “You are really a good girl, Hanna. I am prepared to talk to Frau Agathe.”

  Hanna says nothing, but her whole body keeps rigid. He must know she is not asleep. The hand begins to move across from her hip. It reaches what it has been trying to find, and comes to rest, the thick fingers cupped over it.

  “Hanna?”

  “I shall tell God,” she says through clenched teeth, her eyes still tightly shut.

  He utters a small harsh laugh. “If God has to choose between you and me, who do you think he will believe?”

  “Then I shall tell Fraulein Braunschweig. She will believe me.”

  The hand freezes, goes limp, moves away. She can breathe again.

  “Whatever happens,” he says, “you will have brought upon yourself. You understand that, don’t you?”

  “I’m going to die,” she says quietly.

  Suddenly he erupts. “Then die!” he shouts at her. “For God’s sake, die! But don’t come crawling back to me afterwards asking for forgiveness.”

  She doesn’t bother to respond. Her eyes are still closed when he leaves. The bed is swaying, rocking, drawn along by a gentle invisible current, like a small boat on the sea.

  ∨ The Other Side of Silence ∧

  Eighteen

  There are a hundred and ten women on the Hans Woermann which leaves Hamburg harbour on a miserable dark day in mid-January. The ship carries twenty first-class passengers, so the women transported to the colony of German South-West Africa are housed in rather unprepossessing quarters. Thirty of them, entered on the register as the more educated or cultured of the crop, the gebildeten Mädchen, because they can afford to contribute the sum of 150 marks to then-passage, are lodged in second-class cabins, each with a bunk to herself. But the majority, the sixty einfachen Mädchen, transported at the government’s expense in third class, are herded into dingy cabins below sea level, two to a bunk designed for one, four bunks to a cabin. It is the only way to create space for the five thousand tons of freight which make the journey affordable; the Company turns a blind eye, and the passenger lists are amended accordingly.

  It is on the list supplied by Frau Charlotte Sprandel of the Kolonialgesellschaft in Berlin, on behalf of Johann Albrecht, Herzog zu Mecklenburg, that an unfortunate spattering of black ink first designates one of the passengers as Hanna X.

  The woman assigned to share a bunk with her is Lotte Mehring. The name immediately calls up the most intimate memories from Hanna’s past, Die Leiden des Jungen Werther. But it is so much more than a name. It is a new reality. Lotte is a small slender girl with wispy blonde hair, mousy but not unattractive. A few years younger than Hanna, widowed at twenty-two, she has been shipped off by her late husband’s family before she could claim any of the meagre inheritance his seven brothers preferred to keep to themselves. Not that she would have wished to hold any reminder of the brief marriage which brought her little more than sweat and tears, black eyes and broken arms and a miscarriage, which she will relate in a low whisper to Hanna during the long nights they lie together on the narrow bunk which reeks of despair and stale urine.

  “Why did you marry him then?” Hanna will ask one night.

  “He wanted me,” Lotte says simply.

  “Did you not know he would use you so?”

  “No. But even if I had…” Lotte presses her small forehead against Hanna’s hard shoulder. “I’m sure I would have married any man who came along to take me away from our family.”

  Hanna shakes her head uncomprehendingly. “At least you had a family,” she points out. “I had only the orphanage, until they placed me out in service.”

  “You don’t know how lucky you were.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Lotte. You should have seen that place. If I told you about Frau Agathe.” A quiet shudder. “And Pastor Ulrich…”

  “He could not have been as bad as my father. And my two brothers.”

  “But surely…” She cannot speak the rest.

  “The first time he came to me in the night,” says Lotte, “I was not quite ten. My brothers began soon after.”

  “But where was your mother then?”

  “She pretended not to know. She was too scared, you see. If I went to her she would get very cross and say it was all lies. And then she’d tell him what I said and he would beat me. And her too.”

  Lotte will begin to moan softly, as if in pain, and Hanna will hold her against her body, rocking her very gently until the crying has subsided.

  “Please keep holding me,” says Lotte after a long silence. She moves her fingers across Hanna’s face in the dark, and then stops in surprise. “Why is your face wet? Have you been crying too?”

  She cannot speak. She only nods. The dark makes confidences possible which would otherwise be unthinkable.

  “But you…”

  “Don’t talk now,” says Hanna.

  In the dark, in the slow dance of the ship on the sea-swell, they hold one another, the small slight body and the stronger more unwieldy one. Holding, holding. Lotte is almost as real to her as Jeanne d’Arc, years ago, in her small bed in the orphanage. And almost imperceptibly their hands move across each other’s face, more lightly than the quivering of a butterfly wing.

  “You know,” says Hanna once, “no one has ever held me. Not even when I was very small. No one came at night to tuck us in. We were taught to be strong, to devote ourselves to God and good things, touching was bad, it made one weak. Except once, when a new little girl came to us, Helga, and she was crying so much, she would keep us awake at night, I went to put my arms around her and hold her. Just hold her. But then Frau Agathe found out about it.”

  “Tell me,” says Lotte.

  And so it becomes Hanna’s turn. And then Lotte’s again. And in the dark they hold each other very close, body to body, feeling the new warmth they generate between them. Conscious, always, of the night outside, and the cold of the sea, the endless near-black depths below them, this warmth becomes infinitely precious, a wholeness, a small but brave affirmation that yes, they are here, Hanna and Lotte, two lonelinesses merging, two histories, a single breathing living being, beautiful in the dark, vulnerable yet strong while it lasts. What is this I, this you? From what immeasurable distances do we come, what light or darkness are we heading for – nights swarming with stars, palm trees waving in the wind, glimmering in the sun – how much of eternity can be stored up in an hour, a single moment? I love you.

  She invents not only the geography of Lotte’s body but her own, a new and breathtaking discovery: that this body she has learned to despise, to loathe, can be capable of so much pleasure, can give so much joy. That what used to be a source of pain and revulsion can now be an
affirmation, a place of celebration. This you have given me, this I can give back to you. This is me, at last, now and for ever. Me, Hanna X.

  Their bodies are slowly turning and moving, their hands are moving, fingers clasp and unclasp, what journeys of discovery they undertake through the nightscapes of bodies folding together, intertwining, turning the everyday into miracle – you, me, us, always – naming and unnaming, ears, eyes, throat, shoulders, elbows, breasts, belly, knees, feet, hills and valleys, palm trees, hidden springs, the ever-secret depths and folds of your body, mine and not mine, yours and not yours, tongue to tongue, breathing in of my breathing out, whisper of my whispering, you, me, us.

  If anyone ever finds out, something terrible is bound to happen, so they take great care never to be seen together during the daytime. They go about their business with the other women. The einfachen Mädchen in third class are required to help the sailors with domestic duties: cleaning their own cabins, scrubbing the deck, serving in the kitchen. But the night belongs to them. They lie talking for hours, sometimes until daybreak (even though one cannot see the day dawn in the perpetual darkness of the lower decks). In between they make love, or simply lie together in a long embrace.

  “What will happen when we get there?” asks Lotte.

  “We will find somewhere to live together,” says Hanna.

  “The government paid for us, they will claim us. We owe them.”

  Does Hanna not know all about this kind of owing? It is what she learned to hate more than anything else about her indenture. “I will not let it happen again,” she assures Lotte.

  “But how? We are in their hands, we are not allowed to make decisions, we are women.”

  “We shall find a way.”

  “It won’t happen by itself,” Lotte persists. “We’ll have to plan before we get there.”

  “Something always happens. You didn’t plan your husband’s death, it just happened.”

  “One of his brothers killed him.”

  “But you were saved. And you were not involved in the killing.”