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

and somewhat to the right.) You see? says Susan, yours is
quite different. I suppose it’s because you’re not Catholic. Just
then, from far away, where the other children are, Hanna hears Frau
Agathe calling her name. Oh dear Jesus, I’ll be in trouble, she
says, breathless with fear. And they run back together, the small
shell-gift still clutched tightly in her sweaty hand. You are not,
says Frau Agathe, do you hear me? you are not, not ever again, to
talk to strange children on the beach. They are Catholics, and that
is worse than heathens. And on Sunday she has to report it to
Pastor Ulrich who as always tells her to approach so he can feel
with his fat finger if she has sinned, only it is not her
non-Catholic navel he insists on probing. She is instructed again
to pray, to be vigilant, and to repent of her evil nine-year-old
ways, and he reads to her from the Bible, terrible things about
hell and sulphur and damnation, but the sounds of the words are
beautiful, whatever they may mean, words stored in her small magic
shell with all the other sounds. This side of the shell there is
only silence; if you look at it at arm’s length, you will never
guess what is enclosed in it, a sea, a whole world of sound, past
and present and who knows future, and if you listen very carefully,
holding it close to your ear, you can hear it all. Not just from
the other side of the world, but the other side of everything, the
other side of silence itself.
    It is a silence which she carries deep within her, from the lost
time before she ever arrived at the orphanage, a time before the
real time of hours and bells and loud voices began, the time of the
invisible sea, a time when the silence surrounded her and her three
friends, the friends no one but she could see but who were as real
as her feet or her belly-button or her narrow face in a mirror,
their names were Trixie, Spixie and Finny, but when she was brought
to the Little Children of Jesus they got lost along the way and she
has never found them again. She cried for days, until Frau Agathe
put an end to it with her strap, maintaining that such creatures
could only be manifestations of the Devil. Even so Hanna continued
to run away, albeit at increasingly long intervals, in search of
them, only to be found and brought back and beaten every time by
Frau Agathe and probed by Pastor Ulrich.
    Beatings happen all the time in the Little Children of Jesus
because it is a Christian place where evil will not be tolerated.
You get beaten if you’re late at prayers or for school, or for not
being able to recite the names of the books from the Old Testament
in the proper order, or for forgetting to bring in the washing, or
for soiling your clothes or scuffing your shoes, or for talking in
the dark after the candles have been put out, or for wetting your
bed, or for having lice in your hair, and most certainly if you run
away to the big cathedral on the Domplatz and hide behind a pillar
to listen to the organist practising Bach. Sometimes a beating is
not enough and has to be accompanied by other forms of punishment
like being sent to bed without supper, or locked up in the linen
cupboard for an afternoon or overnight or for a night and a day, or
being forced to sit for a given time in a cold bath, or to stand on
two bricks in the corner until you faint, or to learn long passages
from the Bible by heart (never the easy or interesting ones, but
the genealogies) and if you don’t get it right you get a stroke for
every mistake, on your hands or your legs or the soles of your feet
or on your bare buttocks with everybody assembled to watch. But
this hasn’t happened for quite some time now, for she no longer
needs to run off in search of her lost friends, she now has this
new friend Susan from her distant Ireland, and one day they will
run away together and live happily ever after, the way it happens
in stories.
    Her favourite story is about the musicians who run away, the
donkey and the dog and the