Philida Read online

  That is the place I want to get back to. That is where my thoughts are holed up. It is the place where I belong.

  And so we all come home again, in Zandvliet’s farmyard, I with my load of half-breeds. There’s my own child, Cornelis Brink, and then Philida, the daughter of Dominee Berrangé, and then the wagon drivers, Jannewarie and Apools, the offspring of one of the Boschendal de Villierses and two of his slave women, and the little wagon leader, who is the child of a Conradie with a Khoe woman from the Tanqua Karoo. I am the only one that wasn’t kicked up from under a bush, although I must say that no one, not even I myself, will ever know what happened to my ma in Batavia before I landed on that ship. But why should I bother my head over that? I am me, Petronella, and I don’t mess around with whatever lies on the other side of my thinking and my wondering. Although I do ask myself, when I look at this lot: What on earth will become of us in this godforsaken land? It is not just a matter of mothers and fathers. It starts with us, with those who don’t want to know where they come from and where they fit in and who they are. Each one goes on looking for his own shadow that lies trampled into the dust and left to lie there. We have more than enough lost shadows among us.

  The whole farmyard stands waiting for us when the wagon arrives. Not just the people – from the Ounooi Janna, as much of a misery and a turd as always, as thick as a badly stuffed sausage, down to everybody that works here, man and woman and child – but even the animals, the horses and mules and donkeys, the sheep and the few stuck-up cattle chewing their cuds, the muttering pigs, all except the filthy old fat sow Hamboud wallowing in her mud hole against the ring wall in a cloud of flies, grunting like Cornelis in the old days when he had his way with the Ounooi of an afternoon. There’s the rowdy pack of dogs, and well out of the way, high on the wall, the cats, with Philida’s Kleinkat, head up in the air, eyes half closed, looking sideways at the others and too proud to be reckoned with them. The poultry too, geese and ducks, the two turkeys. And somewhere out of the way, the noisy hen Zelda always cackling and gossiping about an egg laid by someone else. It’s time somebody cut that good-for-nothing’s sinewy throat. But I don’t think anyone really cares, her meat must be too tough and stringy even for a hawk to be interested. And anyway, she smells too much of chickenshit and dishwater.

  Behind all the animals and people in the yard I can make out other creatures too, among the trees, behind the bushes, in the kitchen garden, shadows moving behind windows and shutters or half-open doors, just to remind me that the ghosts are there too, we are closely watched all the time, and everybody is forever trying to find out: What now? What next?

  XIII

  In which a worried Man concerns himself with Dogs and Elephants

  SO EVERYTHING HAS now been arranged and decided. And still there is a restlessness in me, precisely because there is no turning back any longer. The day after tomorrow, well before the sun comes out, we must set out to reach Worcester in the district of Tulbagh in time for Wednesday. That, I learned in the Caab, is when the next slave auction will be held. God alone knows how it will go, because who in his right mind will still want to buy slaves at a time like this? Who still has money to spend on such a doubtful proposition? Here I’ve just been to the Caab, and what did I get for my wine? Thirty-six rix-dollars a leaguer. A bloody shame. Just more than half, I tell you, of what I got almost ten years ago when I started farming on Zandvliet. In those days we could reckon on fifty rix-dollars, give or take. Perhaps a week earlier or later the price might have been better. But it could also have been worse, because every time it’s different and you can never calculate in advance. The one thing you can count on is that everything you buy is getting more expensive. To transport that leaguer of wine from the farm to the Caab costs almost twice of what it did when I came here. How are we supposed to keep up? Unless somebody can assure us that we’ll make a profit by the compensation the British government is supposed to pay out next year when it’s time for emancipation, as they call it. But how can one trust the English? Up to now everything has just been covered by a bloody blanket of nice words and promises and lies.

  You mustn’t worry so much, Janna keeps telling me. But I tell her, I must worry, I’m a Brink. If I don’t worry, what will happen to the world? She believes it will all work out for us. She comes from a family of de Wets where people always believed things will go right in the end, and if they don’t then you beat or kick them right. I remember the warm feeling it gave me the very first time I saw her, she was still married to Wouter de Vos, but he didn’t last long. Nobody could, with her. That body she had. Young. Eager. Solid. She could easily carry a muid bag of wheat on her shoulders to the barn. She could have smothered one between those two bosoms if you got so irresponsible as to push your face in between them. Long before we got married I already thought that would be the kind of death a man could wish for. She was a handful, everybody warned me. But I thought, what the hell, she was two handfuls. And for years I thought myself a happy man. Until the eating took over completely. I’ve never seen a human being that could polish a big plateful of food the way Janna could. What do I talk about a plateful? Bowls and buckets of the stuff. For a few years I could take it. It’s true what they say about a fat woman: that thing may be narrow, but it’s deep. That was before she grew all out of hand. In the beginning she could still be enjoyed from the side, in instalments. But I started worrying about the future. If that woman were to sit down on you, it occurred to me, she could kill a man in one sitting. There would be nothing left of you, not even a damp spot.

  That was how Janna became a liability, no longer an asset. With all the other loads I already have to carry. And then the wine price jumping up and down all the time too, enough to make one dizzy, let alone bankrupt. And this whole business with the slaves.

  Nobody can say for sure yet what will happen exactly in December of next year when the whole damn lot of them will be let loose on us. If you ask me, it will turn into a flood of vagrants washing over this Colony, worse than in ’28 when that blasted Ordinance 50 gave the Hottentots a licence to roam and steal and kill to their filthy hearts’ content. They say the slaves will remain booked in with us for four more years, but who says it’s going to work out like that? The way I know them they’d rather kill us straight away with clubs and kieries and long stones and guns in our sleep. That’s all they’re used to. And that, after all the years we looked after them and cared for them like children. But now? Everything they’ve got in this world is what we gave them. I ask you: What’s going to happen to us? What is a baas without a slave? Who will still respect us? And what about them, if they no longer have us to feed them and protect them and take care of them? And who will do the work? It was God himself who made them to be hewers of wood and carriers of water for us. That was written word for word in the Bible by God himself and that’s why everything keeps going as it is: there are those who are made to be baas and others made to do the work. And even so it’s still us who got to do most of the work, if you ask me. How would they know about digging and watering and pruning and harvesting and threshing if we were not there to tell them what to do and when to do it? What would that cheeky little slut Philida know about knitting if Janna hadn’t shown her stitch by stitch? But it’s not just about the work that I’m wondering and worrying. What I’d like to know is what will become of them? And what will then become of us? We all need one another. Is it not already too late to start wondering about it? Sometimes in a sleepless night I ask myself if it hasn’t always been too late for us.

  But again I say, it’s not just about us. What will happen to that flood of slaves once they are unleashed on this land? They’ll all die in a heap. It’s us who kept them alive. Can a dog survive if there is no longer a baas to take care of him? And a slave is worse than a dog.

  And is this the time to worry about such things? Are there no other, more important problems threatening us? I cannot allow my thoughts to run on side roads. A man that hunts an elephant cannot st
op to throw stones.

  XIV

  Where Hell breaks loose in the Bamboo Copse

  IT WAS JUST after sunset that Pa came to talk to me where I was rinsing a few half-aum barrels before the next day’s tasting of new wine for some customers expected from the Caab. I had no idea of what he’d got on his mind. All right, by this time we were more or less expecting what was going on in his thoughts, but not so soon. I believed it could wait for later, for a day in the distant future. But now, it seemed to me, everything had simply been decided behind my back and all the rest of us could do was agree.

  The first thing he said, gruffly and quite out of the blue, was: Frans, you and I still have a chicken to pluck.

  And what can that be, Pa?

  That is when he came out with it: I’m off to Worcester tomorrow. There’s an auction.

  What kind of auction, Pa?

  Slaves, of course, he said. What else?

  I could feel everything drawing in around me like when a hoop is tightened round a barrel.

  I still dared to ask: Is it about Philida, Pa?

  Of course it’s about Philida. What else?

  All I could dumbly think of was: But it’s too soon, Pa. The child is still too small.

  Whose child?

  Philida’s child, Pa.

  Why should a slave woman’s child concern you?

  I said nothing.

  He pushed on: You mean your child too?

  I still didn’t answer.

  When I was in the Caab, he said, the people were talking about this auction in Worcester. They even put it in the Gazette.

  This is no time to buy or sell slaves, I told him. The market is gone down a big hole.

  What choice do I have? he asked angrily. If Philida stays here there’ll be no end to the shit. And it’s all because of you. Because you can’t control yourself.

  I’m just following your own example, I told him, and I quickly stepped out of the way. I knew he could not move fast with that lame leg of his. He must have been aware of it too, because he made no attempt to block my way.

  When he spoke again there was a whining tone in his voice: We’re always on the losing side, Frans. Whether it’s the government or God, no difference. He gave one of those deep sighs he seemed to draw from between his backbone and his gut. The people say, he went on, they say one day the LordGod said, Let there be light. And there was light. And then he said, Let there be people. And the whole world crawled with people. And then one day he spoke again and he said: Let there be Brinks. And then there was shit.

  Now Pa is going too far, I said.

  Says who? Have you ever seen the thing that happened to my Bible?

  What thing are you talking about, Pa?

  On the very last page, he said, after Revelations and the Scarlet Woman. On the empty page where I wrote down everything about our family. Ever since Oupa Andries stepped ashore here in the Caab. That was when the LordGod created the world as we know it today. Everything written down very carefully. Except for the bloody slave women that slipped in from time to time, of course, but they don’t count. You know that. But now when I was in the Caab and I opened that last page one evening where I haven’t looked for a long time, I saw with my own eyes that somebody spilled blue-black ink all over that page. As if he tried to cancel us from LordGod’s own Book. Have you seen that?

  That’s not a page I ever look at, Pa.

  Well, go and take a look, then you’ll see for yourself. All of us blotted out from the Book. It’s clear that the LordGod had nothing better to do, so he took it out on our family again.

  He won’t do a thing like that, Pa, I protested. That sounds like a human person did it.

  Whatever, he said. I’m not saying God did it with his own hands. But he’s a sly bastard if he feels like it. Then he gets the Devil or someone else to do his work for him, so nobody knows who to blame for it.

  I could not resist the temptation to ask him: And who’s to blame for Pa selling Philida now?

  It’s her own bloody fault, he hit back. After all the lies she told that man in Stellenbosch! All her doing. And yours. That is why she’s got to be sold upcountry now. You heard all the things she said about us. Your ma cannot stand it any longer. And how do you think you’ll ever get that Berrangé girl to marry you with Philida always underfoot?

  Who says I still want to marry anybody?

  He glared at me. What utter shit are you talking now, Frans?

  Everything we discussed and talked about tells me I got no chance with her, I said.

  You should have thought about all of that long ago. Now it’s time to get it arranged. The Berrangés are important people, we can’t play the fool with them. And today we damn well need them, otherwise we’ve had it, jointly and severally.

  What makes it different this time? I persisted.

  That was when he put his big hand on my shoulder and he said: My son, it was only when I went to the Caab this time that it really hit me how bad it’s going with us. Because of the wine price. Because of this whole slave business. I lie awake at night and behind my closed eyes I can see strangers trampling the house and the farmyard of Zandvliet to dust. Everybody coming here for our bankruptcy auction. That’s a thing I’ll never survive, Frans. It’s just too much.

  If that is how bad it is, I said, how can you stop it?

  First of all we’ve got to get rid of Philida. She’s making the water murky for all of us. That’s why I’ve got to get on the road well before sunrise tomorrow morning so that we can get to Worcester in time. I hear that the prices in that part of the world are still better than in the Caab, but not for long.

  Why can’t we wait a little longer, Pa? I tried to hold him back.

  Who is your we? he asked.

  Pa?

  Don’t look at me like that, he said. You’re not going with me. I won’t allow you to bring even more shame on the family. It’s not games we’re playing, Frans, I tell you it’s life or death.

  But, Pa!

  That’s all I got to say. You have caused us enough trouble. Tomorrow when I take Philida to Worcester you will stay right here. And as soon as we get back, you better see to it that you get married to Maria Berrangé. I hope that is clear?

  With this he stalked out.

  For a long time I just stood there. Feeling as if he’d thrown a bucket full of cold water in my face. Or kicked me in the balls. This was much worse than the day I had to go to Stellenbosch to see the Protector about Philida. For the first time I now fully realised what was coming. That the two of us would never again go down to the bamboo copse together. That Philida would never set foot on Zandvliet again. Never. Not ever. No matter what I said or did, something was gone for ever. Between us, and for me. It was like a kind of dying.

  I no longer even tried to think. All I could do was to get away from where I found myself and go to Old Petronella’s room. I had to get to Philida. We had to talk.

  I hurried straight to the inside door of the room and pushed it open without waiting.

  Old Petronella was cooking at the hearth in the corner. Philida sat on a small red carpet on the smooth dung floor, the shiniest floor in the whole house, with Willempie on her breast and her Kleinkat on her lap. On the big bed Lena was playing with a little green elephant I’d carved for her long ago from a block of camphor wood.

  What are you doing here? Old Petronella asked me straight, putting her hands on her wide hips to block my way. There’s nothing here that belongs to you.

  I’ve got to speak to Philida.

  You got nothing to do with Philida. Let her be.

  This is important business, Petronella.

  Then Philida spoke up from the floor: You and I got nothing to talk about any more, Frans. I told you long ago.

  But you don’t know what is going to happen tomorrow, Philida!

  I don’t want to know nothing. You just get out of here.

  That was when I hear Pa speaking right behind me: What are you doing here, Fr
ans? Get out and move your arse!

  I saw him standing there with a long kierie in his hand and I chose not to keep him waiting any longer.

  Outside in the voorhuis I stopped to look around me, for now I really had no idea of what to do next. All I knew was that I had to speak to Philida before the sun came out in the morning. And just like a little while ago, it went through my mind over and over: Never again. Never again. Never the two of us together in the bamboo copse again.

  That was when the thought formed in my head: No matter what I said, she wouldn’t listen to me. It was over. For her there were only the children left, and the cat. It was useless to try and do anything about the children. But perhaps I could still reach her through Kleinkat. If Philida must leave for Worcester in the morning, she will never see that small cat again. And that was when the thought struck me.

  Before I properly knew where I was going I was out of the longhouse. By that time dusk was already falling and I first stopped to clear my head. Then I turned back to the kitchen where I took a lantern from the shelf above the hearth, because I knew that in the copse it would be quite dark by now. In the first outroom in the backyard I found a small hatchet. Far away to the east the moon was already out. A deep orange yellow, and huge. It drifted up in the sky as if it were floating on dark water, so close that I felt I must duck. I made very sure no one could see me walking down from the longhouse. Once I was in the copse, I could light the lantern, nobody would see it from the house. And where I was walking right now I had no need of a lamp anyway, the moon was giving light enough, so strong that I could see a deep black shadow keeping pace with me to my left. It was both I and not I.