A History of Silence Read Online Free Page A

remember ever being told. It was one of those things one absorbs, like knowing the sky is filled with stars, without the need of someone pointing it out.
    For several weeks I mulled over going down to Christchurch to pitch in, but then I heard about a ‘student army of ten thousand’ conscripted over Facebook and felt discouraged. Ten thousand pairs of youthful hands, each with a spade to shovel up the silted streets and driveways. And there they appeared, onscreen and in newspaper photographs. They were magnificent. And I felt done out of a job.
    Then I thought, I should go anyway. At the very least I could help pick up things that had been broken. Or maybe I could take a shovel down with me and join the student army, but the idea of a twenty-year-old on the end of a shovel held me back. My father, it occurred to me, had been about the same age as the students when he pedalled all the way up to Napier.
    Within months of the Christchurch earthquake, the old buildings in the run-down and slightly louche but lively Cuba Street precinct around the shoe factory in Wellington were red-stickered—they had been judged unsafe to inhabit because their structural robustness fell below the required standard to survive a severe earthquake. House-buyers now avoided brick dwellings, and were anxious more than ever to know how well their prospective purchase would stand up to a Christchurch-sized quake in Wellington.
    This transference of anxiety was understandable in a city repeatedly told that an earthquake of apocalyptic proportion is overdue. Since I was in primary school we have been in rehearsal. I remember in earthquake drill waiting for my imminent demise with breath held and eyes wide. I didn’t want to miss any of it, especially not the signal from the teacher that my world was about to change. At a clap of his hands we dropped beneath our desks. After one minute, which always felt longer, there was another clap of the hands and we climbed back up and glanced around at one another: happy survivors.
    My anxieties prompted by the quake in Christchurch were old ones from another time and place.
    And as emotion swept the country between those who had first-hand experience of the event and those of us who might be described as witnesses, we found ourselves in an overlapping realm similar to the effect geologists describe as an echoing between soft and hard surfaces.
    I decided to go to Christchurch five weeks after the quake.

    Like William Hodges glimpsing the staggering sight of the icebergs at latitudes further south than Cook had ever sailed before, I was drawn and compelled by a sense of awe—in my case, however, for the scenes of devastation.
    I had flown into Christchurch airport many times before, and usually went directly to a hotel in the city. I never bothered to look out the side window, at least not until the taxi joined the traffic on the sweep around Hagley Park, and then I would sit up and look properly at the enormous oak trees and the stately space they commanded.
    This time was different. It was strangely, electrifyingly different. Within minutes of leaving the airport I saw a tank rumbling along Memorial Avenue. Its tall aerial radiated an urgency that made the houses it passed appear small and needy. And then the randomness of the violence became clear. On the approach to Hagley Park I saw trees stuck at odd angles, like arrows dropped out of the sky from an archer’s bow, and a vast armada of rescue and aid-worker tents and motor campers.
    A short way on the traffic slowed; the road was ripped and torn, and through the open window I could smell the liquefied earth. Holes, subsidence everywhere. Rubble of every kind and so many surprising sights—the not quite right and at the same time not wholly inappropriate sight of the sky pouring in through the shattered roof of a church. Roads sagged and fell away into fissures and cracks. At the intersection of streets leading into the CBD, young