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

being, I am a thing.
    What would Pastor Ulrich say if he could see her now? She groans
and grimaces. The Devil’s hiding place, he used to call it. After
what has happened to her on the train, how innocent his probings
and pinchings and furtive fondlings seem now. But then the bitter
bile rises up in her. The women have to keep her down with force.
She tries to shout, No! but no recognisable sound gurgles
from her throat. There was nothing innocent about that, she thinks
in rage as the futile tears of her anger run down her burning
cheeks. There may be a difference in degree, but not in kind. What
happened to the woman on the train was just a variation and an
extension of what had been done to the girl. It is all the same,
there has been no let-up, not ever.
    She sobs and groans in helplessness, which brings the pain back,
and it goes on and on, until at last there is the respite of a
blackout again. And this time, when she comes round, she has no
energy for anger left. She can only moan and lie with drawn-up
knees. There is no hope, no hope, there is no resistance left; this
is her life, it has to be lived, that is all.
    Through days and nights the old Nama women attend to her,
bringing foul-smelling herbs and ground powders to apply to the
wounds, feeding her unspeakably vile potions, forcing her to suck
on a long-stemmed pipe and inhale the sickeningly rancid-sweet
smoke which eases the tension and the pain, and brings oblivion in
the end. They coax her into drinking curdled milk, sucking on
strange-tasting roots and bulbs and tubers from the veld, slurping
the yolk of an ostrich egg ladled from a shell positioned in the
remains of a fire, until she can cautiously, painfully chew very
small chunks of meat. Birds, probably. Later the strips cut from
small buck, sometimes raw and succulent, sometimes boiled or
roasted, sometimes dried.
    More vividly than food or medicine or the comforting clicks with
which both are administered, Hanna will remember the way they feed
her with stories, of which the oldest of the women seems to have an
inexhaustible store. It begins soon after she wakes up for the
first time and lies staring dully, in a kind of uncomprehending
stupor, at the landscape throbbing with sunlight and timelessness,
under a sky from which all colour has been scorched. After watching
her for a while, the oldest of the women – her name is Taras, which
she says means ‘Woman’ – makes a sweeping gesture towards the
surrounding desert. “You wonder how it can be so dry?” she asks in
her rudimentary German. “It comes from a woman. The woman Xurisib,
who was very beautiful, but very vain, the vainest woman in
Namaland. And all the young men lusted after her, their purple
wattles drawing lines in the dust. Even the old men would wake in
the night with a branch planted in their loins, the way they
dreamed of her.”
    Hanna lies with closed eyes and lets the words of the old woman
wash over her like bright cool water. Xurisib, says Taras, was so
vain that she even scorned the flowers that covered the earth after
the good god Tsui-Goab had sent his rains. “They don’t last,” she
said. “Tomorrow they shrivel up and die, but my beauty will never
wither.” All the people warned her, warned her, but Xurisib
wouldn’t listen. Then Tsui-Goab himself came to her in the shape of
a mantis in a small bush that burned and burned and burned without
burning itself out. “You give me great pain, Xurisib,” he said to
the girl. “It is I who make those flowers come out after the rains,
I am the giver of all good things.”
    But Xurisib laughed proudly and shook her head and her breasts
quivered and her bangles sang. “I don’t need your flowers,” she
said, “and I don’t need you. My beauty is all I’ll ever want.” Then
Tsui-Goab grew very sad and he went away, and Namaland became the
dry place it is now. The rivers dried up and the trees died and the
reeds withered and the voice of the birds grew silent, and