Read Online The Other Side of Silence by André Brink - Free Book Online

is on the open deck. There is no one else. And suddenly she
knows what she has to do. At last she will have peace, world
without end. So easy. Why hasn’t she thought of it before? Just
move to the railing, lean over, one small heave, and over she goes,
a falling, and a falling, a falling into nothingness, she will not
even try to swim or come up for air, sinking, sinking, through all
the layers of pain, into a deep oblivion, a susurration, fading,
fading, as she dies at last.

∨ The Other Side of Silence ∧
Eleven
    T here is a kind of
punishment in the orphanage which Hanna actually comes to enjoy,
although she takes great care never to let on, otherwise they will
devise something else. It consists of being ordered to spend hours,
sometimes a whole afternoon, sitting on a hard bench at one of the
long bare dining tables, reading the Bible. Afterwards she has to
give an account of what she has read to Frau Agathe. For a long
time she hates it, because the Bible is the book of the people who
most terrorise her, stalking her even in her dreams. But then she
discovers the good stories. And gradually she finds ones she likes
more than the others. Mostly, they concern women who in one way or
another cheat or charm or fight or wangle their way out of
adversity. There is Ruth, poor and miserable, gleaning the field –
whatever that might mean – of the rich man Boaz; until one night
she crawls under his blanket with him and makes him notice her, so
that he decides to marry her. (A rather silly story, she finds, as
a matter of fact, but at least it got Ruth out of her misery.) And
the shrewd Esther who marries King Ahasuerus after he has callously
rejected his wife Vasthi, and then uses her power to promote her
friends and punish her enemies. And of course the fabulous Salome
who dances her way into the heart of King Herod and persuades him
to give her the head of John the Baptist on a plate; a rather nasty
one that, but how else could the girl have had her way?
    There are others that bring a glow of deep and dark
satisfaction. The sister of Moses who deceives the daughter of
Pharaoh to save the life of her little brother. Tamar, who tricks
her father-in-law into sleeping with her so that she can unmask him
as the hypocritical lord-and-master he really is. Hagar, rejected
by the man who used her upon the wicked advice of his old wife
Sarah, and then saved by an angel in the desert. The daughters of
Lot who make their father drunk and lie with him so that their
tribe won’t die out. (Hanna is not quite sure about how lying with
a man can lead to the survival of a tribe, but somehow it seems a
shrewd way of getting what they want.) Deborah who becomes a judge
over the whole of her nation and leads the armies of Barak against
the enemy Sisera. And Jael who cajoles that same fearsome man,
Sisera, into accepting some milk to quench his thirst, after which
she covers him with a blanket and puts him to sleep in her tent,
and hammers a long nail through his temples, pinning him to the
ground. Good for her. And Delilah who betrays the savage,
swaggering Samson to her people and makes him pay for the many men
he has battered to death with the jawbone of an ass. And on and on,
through all those gold-rimmed pages, to the triumphant vision of
the woman arrayed in purple and scarlet colour and sitting on a
scarlet coloured beast, with seven heads and ten horns: now that,
Hanna thinks, is how she would like to ride through the streets of
Bremen one day, accompanied by all the great bells of the
cathedral.

∨ The Other Side of Silence ∧
Twelve
    I have never been
able to understand why the wagon did not stop, or turn back. Even
if Hanna X’s absence was discovered only later, surely the most
obvious reaction would have been to retrace the route as far as was
necessary. Or can it be that they did indeed turn around but
finding her motionless gave her up for dead and moved on again? But
wouldn’t they at least have made an attempt to bury