Philida Read online

  The sun is almost down by the time we get to the Oranje Street, to a huge house where one can see that a lot of rooms have been added on over the years.

  This is where we must ask, I tell Ouma Nella, because I think I remember the place from earlier days. These people must have lots of family, just look at all the rooms. Surely they must need a knitting girl.

  They’re not our kind of people, Philida, say Ouma Nella, taking my hand very firmly in hers. They breed like mice.

  But they must be rich to have a house like that, Ouma. And look there at the side, that must be the slave quarters. I’m sure people like that will have place for me too. I don’t take up much space.

  I don’t want you to work in a house like that, she say. They don’t have proper manners.

  How can Ouma say that? Do you know them then?

  I know them. That is all she say, but from her voice I can tell she know more than she will talk about.

  That make me go on nagging, like a fly that don’t know when to stop. Until she get impatient and snap at me: Philida, I know what I’m saying. And it’s not something I want you to hear.

  Why mustn’t I know, Ouma?

  Because I say so.

  That’s not good enough for me, Ouma. I’m the one who got to find work. This is my life, Ouma Nella, not yours.

  What make you think it isn’t my life too? Her voice is getting angry. But then she put her hand on my shoulder and squeeze it so tight I can feel pee running down my knees. And through tight lips she say: All right. I shall tell you what I know. But not now. Later. This is not the right time.

  How will I know when it is the right time, Ouma?

  You will know. I’ll tell you.

  And that is that. The day grow old around us. And by the time the night come there is still nothing. It just feel as if I been walking a long uphill road, a road longer than the one that goes over the mountains to Stellenbosch, longer than to the Caab, a road as long as the whole world, longer than my life, and it feel as if I have now come to the last bend. But all the way there has been nothing. Just nothing. All the time, nothing. And now still nothing.

  But I know it is not for nothing that this nothing look like nothing. Below all this nothing lies another world that you cannot see, but you know it is there. And it is full of the dead of years and years. All the children that died even before they were born, or when they were born, or after they were born, with crooked legs or no legs at all. With squinting eyes or blind eyes or bulging eyes, with holes in their palates, with bent-around arms or sideways necks, with hollow backs, with missing toes or fingers, all those that drowned, or died of measles or whooping cough or pocks or croup or fever, those that just died because they didn’t feel like living in this place. All the slave children, all the children that were not born white and were a shame on their parents, the Baas people who won’t live with that shame, a whole brood of ghost people that live just below the skin of the earth and now lie there waiting, or sit around quietly, or crawl about, waiting for the last trumpet that the Oldman always talk about, waiting to push the living aside to let them out, so that they are the only ones that are still there, a land and a world of the crippled and the maimed, the sick and the half-dead, the lame and the deaf, waiting for the Judgement. Why and for what? For what?

  All Ouma Nella keep on saying is: It’s the time that’s wrong for us, Philida. And if the time is wrong, then everything will be wrong all the way to hell.

  How can it be wrong for us, Ouma Nella?

  It’s because of all this talk about freeing the slaves, say Ouma Nella. Now nobody can pay for a slave and then be stuck with him, and all your money gone. Nowadays it’s enough money for a whole farm.

  All the way back to Zandvliet that is all we can talk about. The endless stories through so many years, spreading from farm to farm, about how we slaves will be freed. Yet nothing ever happens.

  Remember what happened in ’25? ask Ouma Nella. When some slaves far away in the Cold Bokkeveld got so sick and tired of all the stories of being freed that they rose up against their Baas? It was on a farm the people called Houd-den-Bek, which means Shut-Your-Trap, below the Skurweberge. There was a man with the name of Galant and his story is still living among our people. Nobody who is a slave will ever forget him. One day there was this story of the slaves going to be free, on a New Year’s Day, I remember, and when that day came and went and nothing happened, Galant took his Baas’s gun and shot the man dead. The farmer was called Nicolaas van der Merwe. And some of the slaves went with Galant. After they killed this Nicolaas and a few other people, the three gangleaders were caught and their heads were put up on poles in the Bokkeveld, and there came a kind of stormy silence to the land. I tell you it was a troubled time for the Bokkeveld, and everywhere. Many people remained angry and scared for a long while. But the one thing we all learned was never to believe these stories about freedom again. From then on we just stay put and keep our ears and eyes open, and wait for whatever may happen. It’s the same today, my child. No use people get all worked up. What must happen will happen, and it’s not for us to question the ways of the Lord or of all the old gods and things that live in this place.

  I just sit there on the wagon beside Ouma Nella, and I listen to her stories. Not that I pay much attention, for my heart is heavy, as if there is a dead body I carry inside me. All the way home from the Caab to Zandvliet is like going to a funeral. I keep remembering how eager we all are about going to the Caab. Then everything is still alive in front of me, I am mos going to find a new baas, a new place to work, the whole world is going to become new. And now it is all closing up around me again. There is no more hope for me and Frans. They going to take me upcountry and sell me in the deep interior, that I know. Me and my children. Lena and Willempie. A place we don’t know, in a land we don’t know and don’t want to know. Something is now gone for ever. Like Ouma Nella said. Gone to hell.

  XII

  About Origins and other philosophical Questions

  SITTING ON THE slowly moving wagon like that and looking around at everything you used to think you know, it sometimes feels as if you don’t know anything at all, and the whole world has become a strange place. You look at a flower, or a bee, or a butterfly, you see a small lizard scurrying over a rock, all of them born yesterday and dead tomorrow. And you think: I am no different from them. All of life caught in the sun of an afternoon. Flower, woman, butterfly, bee, lizard. And all of this because of Philida.

  I went with her all the way to the Caab, on the wine wagon. And now coming back. And after this? On the road to the Caab she sat knitting most of the time, the way she usually does, with those clever, thin fingers she has, knitting and knitting. But on the way back she didn’t knit any more. She just sat. With the stillness of a stone, a stone that tells you: it simply is there. It doesn’t stir, but it isn’t dead, deep inside it is a life you know nothing about, a thing like ice or fire, and which can burn you until there is nothing left of you at all.

  I’ve known this child for ever. Philida who since her earliest days used to ask questions about everything in order to find out: Why is this like this? Why is that like this? Why is everything the way it is? Until she ended up by saying, It cannot always be like this, Ouma Nella. There must be something more. Something that is not like this.

  And then she’d go on and on until I started wondering myself: Why is it like this?

  From there it got more and more difficult. I remember the many many times she asked, when she was barely two hands high: Ouma Nella, where’s my ma?

  All I could say was: I don’t know where she is. Nobody know.

  And then: Where’s my father?

  I don’t know, my child. Nobody know.

  Why don’t nobody know?

  Because there are some people nobody know about.

  There must be somebody who know. Ouma Nella must know because there is nothing she do not know.

  There’s nothing about this business that I know, I
tell you.

  And then, out of the blue, she would ask: Ouma Nella, where am I not?

  I ask you.

  Ouma Nella, where am I not?

  But you’re right here with me, Philida. So there’s many places where you’re not.

  Tell me where those places are. I got to know. So I can go and look for myself.

  Makes one feel quite upside down and inside out about not knowing the answer. Ouma Nella, where am I not?

  Deep inside me I knew was the question I feared most of all, and I knew that Philida’s questions would bring her back to this one: Ouma Nella, where do I come from?

  I never wanted to go near that question. It’s like a fruit. Like a peach or an apricot or a plum that is still green and that you must not try to press ripe. That just brings stomach ache and the squitters. I always managed to steer past it, but on that ride back to Zandvliet, after the emptiness of the Caab, I know the time for that question has come. I cannot dodge it any more.

  So that is exactly what she asks: Ouma Nella got to tell me today, I got to know. Where do I come from?

  For a long time I never told you, my child. Not because I did not know, but because you or I can do nothing about it. It just is what it is, and that’s all.

  So tell me, Ouma Nella.

  For a while I just sit there, doing nothing, saying nothing.

  She presses me on: Do I also come from a far place like Ouma Nella or Oompie Geert or Aia Kandas?

  No, Philida. You come from the Caab. You were made right here.

  I got to know, Ouma Nella.

  That house we came past yesterday, in the Oranje Street, the one with the many rooms, where the Berrangés live. That is where you come from.

  Is that where Frans wants to live, with a white wife?

  It’s not that he wants to live there, but his family is telling him so.

  And is that the place, Ouma Nella? That big house?

  That is the place, Philida. And that is why I don’t want you to work there.

  But now I got to know everything, Ouma Nella. I can’t go on without knowing.

  So it came that I told her. From very far back. Twenty-five years back. When I got to know the young girl Farieda that used to work for those people. A girl-woman, but not quite a woman yet. Just getting ripe, like a quince. I told you, man. Just a child still. Her mother came from Malabar, the people said. Came out on the ship, like I did from Java. It’s not something I like to talk about. That time on the ship, all the rows of us in the stomach of the ship, with chains on our arms and legs, so you could never stand up, and barely sit or lie down, all those rows of people in the dark, stinking and smelling from all sides, vomit and shit and piss and sweat, day and night, but it all feels like night, just now and then a small bowl of soup, more water than soup, that you throw up again, almost immediately. And the ship that keeps on going up and down, up and down, sometimes slowly and softly, but on other times badly, terribly, awfully, up like mountains, down like deep holes, so there’s no more guts and stomach and stuff left inside you. No end to it, not ever, up and down all the time, all the time, in that night-time darkness, in that stink. Once a week or so, or less, or more, how can one tell?, it was only afterwards, when we could talk again, that we tried to figure it out, men came down to us with long whips and chased us up the smelly narrow stairs, not one of us could walk properly any more, we just struggled up the stairs, stumbled and struggled and fell and tried again, on all fours, and all the way the men laughed at us and beat us, until we got to the top where we nearly got blinded by the sun, where they upended buckets and buckets full of salt water over you until you thought you’d drown, and after some time, a timeless kind of time, they beat you back and chase you back and kick you back, down those stairs again, and back into the chains and then the night close down over you again. Until there no longer is anything like day or night left, just darkness and stinking, and then it is over.

  So now they tell you we are at the place they call the Caab. The rest you know. About the auction, and the men who come to buy you and who first want to feel you and pinch you and poke at you, until someone buys you like a sheep or a goat or an iron hoop or a wine barrel or a pisspot or whatever. So, just as I came here, your mother Farieda also came. Somebody bought her, then somebody else bought her, then somebody else again, and that somebody else was called Daniel Fredrik, he was from the Berrangé family, and it’s with one of his big brood of daughters, Maria Magdalena, that they say your itchy-arse Frans will now have to marry.

  I could see that Philida wanted to say something, but I didn’t give her a chance. I told her about Daniel Fredrik’s brother, a man who was a dominee, that is a man of the spirit. But all that was needed was one look, and you could see he was a man of the flesh. Such big, sweaty hands and a face that said only one thing: Come here, little sister, and lie down, and let your bridegroom enter you with singing psalms and lots of prayers. It didn’t take long before Farieda was swollen with child, even though our man of God was already a father of five children by that time, three of them slaves. Everybody said that with the help of the Lord he was going to turn the Caab into a white man’s land. I had nothing to say about that, I don’t move in between a man and the flies of his breeches. But Farieda was still a child like I said, and she just wanted to drown that baby in the shit bucket. So it was I who stopped her and took the little thing away from their house and gave her to a slave woman in the Bo-Caab whose little boy had just died after her Baas had beaten him to death for dropping a basket of figs in the dust. An eye for an eye and a child for a basket of figs.

  And then, Ouma Nella?

  That baby was you, Philida. I helped to bring you up and later I took you in with me. So that is where you come from and how and why.

  But what about my own mother, Ouma Nella? What about that Farieda?

  Now she wants to know. This is her chance, isn’t it? All these years I stayed away from that question, but now it can no longer wait. It’s waited long enough and it is cooked and ready to serve up. Even so I still tried to duck away, talking about anything that came into my mind, blue almonds and everything. But in the end she cornered me and no longer allowed me to get away and said straight out: Ouma Nella, it is time to tell me.

  Why go on asking, my child? All those things have been buried away far and deep and long ago.

  I still got to know about my ma, Ouma Nella.

  Ai, man. Is it really necessary?

  I want to know and I got to know.

  There came a silence that did not want to go away easily.

  So tell me, Ouma Nella. About the woman that was my ma.

  And so, at long last, yes, I told her.

  She didn’t live much longer, my child. You see, she tried to run away, sommer up into the mountain. In those days there were many slaves hiding away up there. The Berrangés sent a commando after her, they were already rich and important people and they could pay anybody to do what they asked. So Farieda was brought back. All I can tell you is that they didn’t handle her softly. They knew a man who was a peeler.

  What is a peeler, Ouma Nella?

  Well, that’s a man that peels off the foot soles of a runaway slave.

  How do you mean ‘peel’, Ouma Nella?

  Peel is peel, man. All you need is a nice sharp knife, then it peel away a foot sole as easy as any peach. Once you do that to a slave he is in no hurry to run away again.

  But Farieda, Ouma?

  Well, no matter how bad it was, I can tell you that Farieda tried again. But she was bleeding too much. So to those rich people she wasn’t worth anything any more. They just let her bleed and so she died. I think it was better like that for her too. So you moved in with me and I brought you up. Later, when Cornelis bought me my freedom, you came with me and here we are still together.

  This time Philida is silent for a hell of a long time, which is strange, for usually when we are together she never stops talking. She just sat there, staring out in front of her. Me
too.

  We rode on and on, through an empty world. No matter how many times in my life I came that way, on the wagon or on foot, there has always been a lot to see, but this time it is empty, there is nothing. There’s nothing that looks as if it has anything to say to me. We come past places that do not have a name yet. We move through empty stretches where nothing grows, not even words. Even the sky is still. There’s no clouds or birds coming past, no nothing. The land is holding its breath.

  And so, I think, it may go on for ever.

  But no matter what, we still have to go on, to get home. Cornelis is in too much of a hurry to get home. He drives the oxen until you can hear the breath whistling in their tight throats. It sounds like a death rattle. We must get home. Get home. Get home. But how can one say that home is what is waiting for us? Even if I have my own room, what does that mean? And for Philida it means even less. For all we know she may be gone one of these days, and no one will ever know where she ends up. And what will become of me then? All I have in this world is that small room. So many years and years. Before we came to Zandvliet there was only me at first. Then Philida and I together, far away from everybody else and the darkness of the world. Yet not so far away either. There are always people that come to knock on the outside door. Just to talk for a while, because I like company. Or to buy some wine, for Cornelis makes sure that I always have a small supply. It was part of the agreement when he bought my freedom and the room became mine.

  Otherwise there are people who come to ask for help. They know I have a remedy for every complaint, so they come to look for that. When there’s a knock deep in the night we know it must be one of those. Usually a man, for women don’t walk about in the dark when the ghosts are loose in the yard. You can always be sure that if I open that door there’s a man outside in the dark asking to come in. Summer or winter. Standing there with a thick blanket over his shoulders, white with frost or snow in the cold months. Sometimes not even a blanket. He’ll be standing there with his clothes in shreds and tatters, and all he carries on his shoulders is the dark. He brings with him the glow of moonlight and the stars and the chirping of crickets and the squeaking of bats, he brings with him the cackling and the howls of jackals and the coughing of a leopard and the screech of a night owl and the moaning and chattering of ghosts, all of this he carries on his shoulders when he comes across the doorstep to ask for a whisper of ginger or camphor or dried garlic or burnt peach stones or man-root or nightshade or ground tortoiseshell or musk-cat skin or a pinch of filed tooth off a warthog, all the things you may need in the night when a child is dying or a woman goes into labour or a man is in need of love or a girl wants to make her man come back after he’s run away with someone else or when a child has stomach ache or croup or fever or a burning this or an itchy that or anything we people have inherited since the beginning of the world. I am mos supposed to have a remedy for everything, and sometimes it seems to me I must be an ouma to the whole damn world.