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

her, even if it
consisted merely of covering the body with stones or dry branches?
Then again, there may have been so little communication between the
women on the wagon and their drivers and escorts that the loss
wasn’t discovered before they arrived at Frauenstein – and by the
time they returned the body would have disappeared; nothing unusual
about that, given the prevalence of scavengers. But what about her
female companions then? Or were they so deeply sunk in their own
abjection that they didn’t notice, or didn’t care? Even so, we know
that at least one of them, the young one, used to be concerned
enough to look after Hanna from time to time – unless she preferred
not to attract undue attention after the fact. A most irritating
mystery, and not the only one in this story. Hanna X, forever
hiding behind the trite symbol of the unknown.
    She doesn’t die, of course, even if to her it seems so at the
time. When she comes to – hours later? days? she doesn’t know, it
doesn’t matter – she is with a group of Nama people at their place
in the desert. Her first thought as she struggles from darkness
back to light, through many tiers of pain and dizziness, is that it
must be an orphanage concert and that everyone is in fancy dress.
Though ‘fancy’ makes a mockery of the weird blend of clothing and
ornaments they are wearing: roughly sewn caps of lynx or musk-cat
skin, but also wide hats with ostrich or pheasant feathers stuck to
the brim; some shirts and skirts, but also strings of shell-beads
or the bunched tails of jackals or zebras; a few jackets, but also
ample karosses made of the pelts of dassies or gazelles; moleskin
trousers, but also skimpy skin aprons to cover their shameful
parts. A few of the men have guns, others bows and arrows. The
women are naked to the waist, exhibiting breasts ranging from
pubescent buds to the dugs of old crones, empty folds of skin
sagging down to their wrinkled bellies, nipples like the scaly
heads of lizards.
    They are all chattering in what sounds like the twittering of
birds, with strange clicks and sibilants and gutturals; but when
they discover that she has opened her eyes some of them approach
excitedly and start addressing her in broken German, which they
must have learned from the occupiers of their land. Hanna can only
shake her head. When they persist, she reluctantly opens her mouth
and points inside at the absence of a tongue. Exclamations of shock
and surprise and what may be sympathy. But even this small effort
has so exhausted her that she sinks back into oblivion, though she
is aware of hands lifting her head and a calabash pressed against
her aching mouth and some sour, smelly, curdled liquid forced down
her throat. Pain, pain.
    Still, she must be getting better. The dark intervals become
shorter. The returns to painful lucidity last longer, her thoughts
grow more coherent, memory filters back. She would still prefer to
be dead, and helplessly resents these people for not allowing her
to die in peace. But the pain, she notices almost against her will,
the pain is slowly dulling, ebbing, fading, no longer – or not
always – as overwhelming as it was.
    When she feels a warm wetness between her thighs and tests it
with a finger she discovers that her bleeding has begun – the old
bleeding from inside, not the bleeding of the wounds. Some of the
women, the oldest ones, draw her legs apart to stanch it with tufts
of grass; she can hear them clicking their tongues, tsk-tsk, as
they stare at the mutilation of her sex. Only now does the
nightmare on the train come back to her, and she retches at the
memory. First there was her face. Then her mouth forced open, a
piece of wood wedged between her teeth to give access to her
tongue. Choking in blood. And then her nipples cut off. The viscous
chicken-livers of her labia excised. Oh God, oh God. Give me a
knife, she thinks, let me kill myself, how can you let me live like
this? I am no longer a woman, a human