Free The Other Side of Silence by André Brink Page A

woman’s halting and garbled German – Dann liefen sie, dann liefen sie. Sie treckten, treckten,
treckten: Then they walked and they walked, then they trekked,
trekked, trekked …– the pure and intricate music of the
stories.
    Or she listens to the Namas talking among themselves in their
own tongue. All those complicated clicks. Sometimes she opens her
silent mouth to imitate the movements of theirs, but gives it up.
How can she ever converse with them? It is not just the loss of her
tongue which forces her into silence, but knowing that there is
nothing in the language she has brought with her which could
conceivably say what she would so urgently wish to articulate. The
things of this place, this space, in words not yet contaminated by
others, or by other places. But that is impossible. Words bring
their own past and their own dark geography with them, she thinks.
Theirs are different. She listens intently when Taras patiently
repeats them, as to a dull-witted child. Khanous, the evening star; sobo khoin , people of the shadows, ghosts; sam-sam ,
peace; torob , war. The names of animals: t’kanna, kbmob,
t’kaoop, nawas, t’kwu . Words that shut her out and turn their
backs on her.
    When at last Hanna is persuaded to take a few hesitant steps
outside – first supported on the arms of women, later by herself –
she is almost scared to set down her feet, for fear that it will
not be the earth she feels under her soles but stories, live and
hidden beings, natural and supernatural in turn, or at the same
time.

∨ The Other Side of Silence ∧
Thirteen
    T he whole Nama tribe
– fifty or sixty of them, men, women and children – accompany Hanna
X when at last she is ready to be taken to Frauenstein. And they
walk, walk, walk, they trek and trek through a landscape of
stories, until the strange unworldly edifice rises up from the
horizon.
    On their approach they pass sprawling vegetable gardens,
surprising in this desert; and what appears like a desiccated patch
of the garden, some distance apart, but which must be a graveyard.
It is surrounded by a low wall, irregularly stacked. However, there
are no headstones. Each of the graves, of which there may be a good
fifty or so, in straight rows, has a crude wooden cross at one end,
but these bear no inscription. There are no flowers either, no sign
that anyone has bothered to tend the place and keep it in some
order. The last row is not completed, but the remaining three or
four graves in it have already been dug and are loosely covered
with old weathered planks, with mounds of earth heaped up beside
them, patiently waiting to receive whoever may be coming their
way.
    The small band of Namas hesitate for a while to inspect the site
which seems so much less permanent than the burial cairns their
people have raised across the barren land to commemorate their own
dead and the many deaths of their hunter-god Heiseb – on the way
here they have passed no fewer than three. After some time they
press on towards the towering structure of stone.
    A woman in a drab dress opens the huge front door to their
knocking. She takes a step back when she sees the black people
massed outside, but as she prepares to shut it in their faces she
notices the white woman among them – blistered from the sun,
haggard, her face mutilated – and hesitates.
    “What do you want?” she asks.
    “We brought a woman we found in the desert,” says the leader of
the tribe, whose name is Xareb.
    “Why did you come here? Why didn’t you take her to Windhoek?”
asks the woman.
    “They tell us this is a place for women,” says the man.
    The woman turns to Hanna X in horror. “What have they done to
you?”
    Hanna merely shrugs, a hopeless gesture.
    It is Xareb who turns to her and motions her to open her mouth.
When she hesitates he does it for her, his sharp fingers pressing
into her hollow cheeks. She moans with pain; the wound through
which her teeth are visible has not quite healed yet. An