Free The Other Side of Silence by André Brink

all that
was left was white sand and red sand and long thorns that scraped
her legs. When Xurisib went back to her village, she found her
people packing up their possessions to trek away, taking all the
young men with them too. The girl wanted to go with them, but the
headman wouldn’t let her because he said there was a curse on her
head. From that day on the Nama people have never stayed in one
place. Always, always, always they are on the move. Xurisib stayed
behind, and her skin became as dry as the husk shaken off by a
snake, and her black hair turned grey, and in no time at all she
was an old hag of a woman. She lay down on the ground to die. That
was when the mantis came back to her and said from the burning
bush, “Xurisib, your life is over. But if you say my name I shall
take away my curse.” And softly, softly, softly, Xurisib whispered
the name of the god. And where the sounds of her voice fell,
flowers sprouted from the parched earth. Again and again she said
his name, “Tsui-Goab, Tsui-Goab, Tsui-Goab,” until with her last
breath she was shouting so loudly that the koppies in the distance
reverberated with the sound. And the rains came, and the veld was
covered in flowers from horizon to horizon, and Xurisib became a
young girl again, with a shining face and firm breasts and strong
legs and beautiful hands, and she danced the dance of the rain.
    The voice of the wizened old woman turns into a chant, and some
of the other women join in:
“Oh the dance of our Sister!
    First she peeps over the hilltop, slyly,
    and her eyes are shy;
    and she laughs softly.
    Then, from afar, she beckons with one hand;
    her bangles glitter and her beads shimmer;
    softly she calls.
    She tells the winds about the dance
    and invites them too, for the yard is wide and the
wedding great.
    ♦
    The big game come surging from the plains,
    they gather on the hilltop,
    their nostrils are spread wide
    and they swallow the wind;
    and they bend down to see her delicate tracks in the
sand.
    The small creatures deep below can hear the rustle of
her feet,
    and they draw closer, singing softly:
    “Our Sister, our Sister! You have come! You have
come!”
    ♦
    And her beads dangle,
    and her copper rings glimmer in the dying of the
sun.
    Her forehead bears the fire-plume of the mountain
eagle;
    she steps down from up high;
    she spreads the grey kaross in both her arms;
    the breath of the wind dies down.
    Oh the dance of our Sister!”
    There is a long pause. Then the old woman resumes, “A few days
later the flowers began to fade and shrivel up and die, and Xurisib
quietly died with them. And from that day,” she says, “if the rains
come in Namaland and you listen very carefully, you will hear in
the far-off thunder the voice of Xurisib calling out, ‘Tsui-Goab!
Tsui-Goab! Tsui-Goab!’ And then we know the land will live
again.”
    Story upon story, through days and nights, to while away the
time, to make Hanna forget, to ease memory. For everything she sees
or hears, everything silent or moving around the tentative
settlement – casually shaped huts of rush and straw mats or skins
laid on a latticework of bent branches – there is a story;
sometimes various stories about the same object or event, stone or
thorn tree, birth or death. No koppie or rock or aloe or
quiver-tree or dried-up river bed or dust devil or erosion ditch or
limestone ridge is without its divinity, benevolent or evil; all of
it gathered in an eternal battle between the good god Tsui-Goab who
lives in the red sky, and the devilish Gaunab who lives in the
black sky.
    When Hanna raises her hands to question what it all means, old
Taras smiles and answers with a question of her own, “How is your
pain?” And Hanna nods, to indicate that she is feeling better. And
Taras says, “That is what stories are for.”
    Sometimes she forgets to listen to the words and submits herself
only to the flow of the language, the rhythms and repetitions and
cadences, even in the old