Philida Read online

  Along the road I name everything I come past, as well as the things that do not have names yet, and in this way I get to know everything, and my own name as well. I begin with: Flatstone – Kneebreak Bend – Dead Tree – New Tree – Steep Rock – Round Rock. Then there is Ouma’s Rock – Old Man’s Bend – Frans’s Pissing Place – Ounooi Janna’s Hole – Dead Gert’s Sitting Stone, and so on. I start knitting them together, joining one row to the next, then the panels. And once the jersey is finished the names also come together, until I can tell in advance what is coming next, what will be waiting round the next bend, where I will reach the underarm, everything. Until I know the place as if I made it with my own hands. I can say: I knit my story to the end. Or I can say: I walk all the way to the last stitches of my story. It’s all the same.

  I can also change the stiches along the way, of course. I can add new stitches, or I can knit the panel a bit wider. I can use cross stitch or I can choose plain or purl. I needn’t stick to other people’s patterns. And that is how it happen today that when I get to Klaas’s Quick Turn up on the hillside beyond Poor Man’s Ditch, I decide to turn off to the Dark Blue Mountain that Ouma Nella first showed me and that no one else know about, just the two of us. It’s a long way to go, but it help me to stretch the time so that I can reach Zandvliet later than usual, and I’m really in no hurry to get home. It’s just walking and walking, downhill at first along the narrow footpath, the Cobra road where Ouma Nella and I once saw the big snake, down to the Thin Trees, and from there up along the opposite slope, the steep rise along White Thorns, across the Long Neck, past God’s Stream, and the lovely straight stretch to the Hollow Cliff where the Eye lies staring unblinking at the sky. Because that is where I want to get to.

  This is where Ouma Nella first showed me the overhang of red rocks, and if one bends over to peer under it, because it’s very low down and you almost got to kneel to see: a long line of little people walking along the solid rock, or standing or jumping, small thin men with bows and arrows and knobbly knees and spiky legs and sticklike pricks. One of the men is thinner and longer than the others, with a big round head that always make Ouma Nella burst out laughing when she look at him and I can see why.

  There are three elands too in the row of little men, elands with very big humps and long straight horns, two or three times as big as the little prickmen, and even a few elephants. Those must be some of the elephants that used to cross these mountains in the dawn-days of the world and that was the first storytellers in these parts. If you ask me, they must have been the storytellers that made these mountains happen.

  Many of Ouma Nella’s stories tell about the little men under the overhang. And when on some afternoons all the slave women from the farms gather at the Dwars River to spread the shining clean washing white and wet over the bushes and low branches and the rocks where they stretch out their legs and tell the stories they brought from all the places they come from, then it’s the story of this long thin Prickman Ouma Nella tell most often.

  He is the kind of man, she say, the kind of Godman who once threw all the stars up into the sky and who keep all the winds together until the time is right to set them free. And it’s he, say Ouma Nella, who bring death into the world. The people tell many different stories about this, but the one I get from Ouma Nella is the one where his father tell Prickman to wait until the LordGod’s wife is asleep, and then he must do the thing to her that will make her just as clever as the LordGod himself. So Prickman wait and wait until he see the woman is now fast asleep, so fast that after some time she throw her legs wide open because the sleep is so good, and that is when he softly crawl to her, with that thick round head of his stuck far forward, and he creep between her legs to where it is all dark and moist, and she moan in her sleep and open herself even wider, and Prickman take off the little kaross he use to wear around his hips so that he is now all bare-arsed, and he creep right into her, into the darkness and the moistness of her, until only his two thin little legs stick out between her lips down there. And all the birds in the whole wide world come flying closer to see, because that is a sight one do not see every day. But the LordGod, Prickman’s father, he warn them all very sternly not to make a sound: not a squeak or a peep, not a chirp or a burp, not a hoot or a toot, and most especially not to laugh or to giggle or to snigger or titter or twirp, otherwise there will be shit in the world. So all the birds of heaven sit quiet as death, watching and watching, while Prickman creep higher and higher into her, until he is as smooth and wet and slithery as a long thin fish and he begin to see a glimmer of light ahead and he know he is now very close to her mouth, all he need is a last little crawl, and a skip, and a push, and then he will be right in. And he wiggle his long thin toes down there between the lips of her entrance to help him along the last stretch.

  But just then the bobtail cannot hold it any longer and he give a thin, pinched little laugh, but that is enough. And the wife of the LordGod wake up and she start pinching, all the way from down there to up here, and she pinch and pinch Prickman until he is as long and thin as an intestine and he can’t breathe any more, and that is why he still look the way he look, a prick on the face of the rock. His father, the LordGod himself, pull him out from the woman, with a wet, slurping sound as his thick head break free, but that is too late. Prickman is as dead as a stone. Ouma Nella say that is why a man always feel like dying when he get as far as that, and that is how death come into the world. A real pity, say Ouma Nella. But there is a bit of joy in that dying too.

  That is the story I remember as I lie on my back and look up at the overhang above me, until Willempie start fidgeting so much that I got to move out and give him my breast. But while he is sucking as greedy as a little pig, staring up at me with his two big blue eyes, all the walkers up there on the rock keep haunting me. All of them, Prickman and the long row of little men and the elands and the elephants. It give me a funny feeling, thinking of how long ago they were living around here, and how those of us who still live here know so little about that long-ago and faraway time. It’s the way I feel at Zandvliet when I sometimes lie awake at night and I go outside from Ouma Nella’s warm room to the yard, down to the Dwars River, and I lie down in the thick grass of the bank with my arms under my head so that I can look up at the stars spilled up there against the upended bowl of the sky, all the embers dropped by the dark god Gaunab in the dawn time of the world, the way Ouma Nella tell it in some of her other stories, that time he went to steal fire from Heitsi Eibib and had to run like a mad hare to get away before he got caught.

  There are many creatures about on the earth and in the sky when on a night like that I lie on my back staring up at the teeming sky, and down here among the black bushes I hear the ghosts rustling as they go about their business, and I get so scared I can pee myself and yet I am not dead scared, because if you really think about it you know that they actually belong here, it is more their place than mine, I only been here for a while, but they been already here when the very first people was walking in these mountains. Now they all gone and only their shadows still rustle and fidget in the dry grass; it actually feel good to know you’re never quite alone, not really, there’s always the ghosts and the stars and the wind around you. And everything that is here come from a time on the other side of time.

  I can sprinkle salt to scare off the ghosts. But I usually don’t do it. I prefer to be here with the ghosts, otherwise the world feel too empty So here I am with all my ghost friends. My shadow and I. He come with me wherever I go, usually when the sun shine, but even in the moonlight. Always and everywhere. How many times have I tried to run away from him. But he always stay with me. He copy everything I do. Sometimes I laugh at him. But he don’t listen. He just go on, day and night. In a way it feel good, because then we are not so alone. But when you think of how far away he come from, it must be from the time of the people-before-people. And darknesses he bring with him, they bring with them a fear that move right up in your legs, right into
the inside of your thighs and it paralyse you. There is a darkness inside a shadow like this that I know nothing about, and I don’t want to know, a darkness like the one that live inside an old fountain that come from God-knows-where deep inside the earth. How can I get away from him? He won’t be chased away like a bad dog. He make sure I know about him the way he know about me. And if I die one day I’m sure he will go into the earth with me.

  Perhaps that is what Frans is trying to do with me now, to get me away from Zandvliet. He want to cut me loose from my shadow. But that I shall never allow him to do. That shadow can scare me, or threaten me, or make me blarry mad, but he is still mine. If I go away he will go with me. To heaven or to hell, just too bad. Your shadow, as Ouma Nella will say, is like your story, he go all the way with you, night or day, all the way to the grave.

  * * *

  Deep in me I know that all the stories playing and tumbling inside me tonight are just to help me forget what happen in Stellenbosch, and what we speak there. What Frans say. That thing he say that really make me know for the first time what he is and what I am. I am a slave. He is not. And that’s all. Nothing else matter, not ever. A slave. That is not because of the beatings or the work, it is not being hungry or cold when the snow lie white on the earth, or to feel myself dying in the heat of the summer sun when I cannot lie down in the shadow of the Baas’s longhouse, it isn’t the pain or the tiredness or having to lie down when Frans – Baas Frans – want to naai me. It isn’t any of this that make me a slave. No. Being a slave, like I was today in that white office in the Drostdy, with all the papers and the buzzing flies around me, mean always going back to the place they tell me to go back to. Not because I want to be there, but because they tell me to. I am never the one to decide where to go and when to go. It’s always they, it’s always somebody else. Never I.

  Willempie is finish drinking, but he is still lying with his small face against my breast, swallowing greedily. I am in no hurry to get up. Tonight I want to sleep right here on the mountainside, I can move on in the morning. Above me are the stickmen and the elephants and the elands, and Ouma Nella’s stories. This place isn’t mine, yet I belong here. Here I know: there is a silence of the night and a silence of the day, and they are both mine. I can hear them both when I am here. It is like my shadow and my stories. They stay with me all the way.

  Yes, I know this old Elephant Trail. It draw a line between the mountains, with the sky above. The sky that in the daytime is crossed by clouds and birds and at night by moon and stars and the hooting of an owl. I know this way so well, running past Zandvliet to the Franschhoek and then on, to the farm Radyn, people say. And from there across the plains to the far town of Worcester. And on this side of the mountains he follow the line of the cliffs above, cliffs where the LordGod never came past and people only rarely. Where the stars hang so low in the night sky that you can smell them. I know that smell. They smell clean, like new washing, or like soap, like blue soap. And a bit like nutmeg. And like bruised grass. All that is left in me is a kind of dull sadness, like an old wound that is beginning to heal.

  It is a strange feeling to be walking here among the high mountains, day or night. It feel all the time that there are live things around you, moving very close to you, but you never quite see them, they always stay just out of reach. It’s like tokoloshes keeping out of sight, but never far away, like mountain people, it’s like rocks turning into people and stalking you. But they don’t really scare you, it is also a good feeling to know they’re there, and that they move very quickly from one place to another when you’re not looking, like shadows of clouds or the wind. Out of the corner of your eye you can see them running or floating past, but the moment you stop to stare, they suddenly go very still, as if they never ever moved. Perhaps you think it is a man or a woman, then it suddenly become a tuft of grass or an anthill. Or a Mountain Woman change into a stone or a rock, nothing ever just stay the same, they all keep changing their shape and they keep moving like grass or bushes in the wind, even if there is no wind.

  Very close to me is the black water of the Eye where that long-haired woman live. Here you dare not stop to drink, or she will come out and drag you into the depths. Because it is a black hole without end, a fountain that bubble up from the deepest depth of the earth. The water is smooth and clean, you can see right through it all the way to the bottom, even if there is no bottom, because down there it keep all the midnight darkness that will always remain a secret. And it is always ready to reflect the heavens, the moon and the stars and the clouds and the sun. The water been there for ever, the water of today and yesterday and many years before, and yet the water will never see my face again. I am there, right inside it, and yet, if I look again, it is as if I never been here. It is as if even now, at this moment, as I sit here on my knees and look at myself down there, even now I am not here, as if I never been here at all and never will be here again. Because the water stay still right where it is, pitch black and filled with the lightest light, yet in a strange way it keep moving, as if something keep stirring it, without ever stopping, ever since the first sun looked down into it until the last moon will rise over it and still will not rise.

  And I know that everything around me here, the fountain with its black water filled with secrets, and the shadows that stir and come and go when I’m not looking, and the overhang with the little prickmen, and the moon and the stars, and tomorrow’s sun and yesterday’s wind, and the tokoloshes and the water maidens, everything will go with me from here, all the way to Zandvliet, to look after me.

  Back at the farm down there I shall first go to the Dwars River and make a little hollow for Willempie on the bank, and then walk into the cool water to wash the hot day from me. Washing and washing and scrubbing, so that I’ll be ready to start again. Taking my time, time to think carefully about everything, about what Grootbaas Lindenberg said, and about Frans, about myself, all of it. I know that if we ever have time to talk about it again, he will talk differently. I know he will. Because this is our child, that we made with so much love, like Lena who will be waiting for me with Ouma Nella. And like Mamie who would have waited if she was still with us. And of course like KleinFrans who would also have waited, but I do not speak about him.

  Then, once I have washed the long walk from me, I shall go to Ouma Nella’s room. Past the chicken run where that mad hen keep on cackling all day long without a single egg to show for it, and past the stupid donkeys, past the old black sow. And when I get to Ouma Nella’s room, my Kleinkat will come to me as she always come to greet me. Purring around my legs, over and over, then upside down with her small head resting on one of my feet, with her eyes closed, rubbing the back of her head along my toes, to say: See, you are mine and I am yours, now rub my tummy and around my ears. I shall squat down beside her and start caressing her. I shall press my face against her and sniff in the smell of warm grass and buchu on her small feet. Then I will know I am really home. When the day is ready to be cast off like a good piece of knitting and the night cup its hand over the longhouse, I can crawl in under the bulsak with Ouma Nella, cuddling up next to her, her body warm as a loaf of bread, I can slide and sink into the deepest of all sleeps. Except that today I know for the first time ever that even this place, where I live, is no longer mine as I always thought. I no longer belong here. I belong nowhere. What happen to me will always be what others want to happen. I am a piece of knitting that is knitted by somebody else.

  VIII

  On the Altars of Lechery and Power

  WE HAVE BEEN sitting here since early morning, even though we did not really expect to see her for a while, as we knew only too well how fond she was of dawdling and how much her mind could wander off to whatever attracted her attention from one moment to the next.

  Perched on the stoep we sit and wait. I am leaning against the thick, whitewashed side wall on the right. Next to me Janna fills a space into which three other persons of ordinary size could fit quite comfortably. Three years
older than me, she was married previously to the wealthy wheat farmer Wouter de Vos, but he couldn’t quite live up to her considerable demands. People say that it was not so much her family, or their connections, that accounts for her standing in the community, but the fact that by anybody’s standards she was a handsome woman. That was before she had doubled, if not tripled, in size and suitors tended to become more circumspect. Some people ascribed her increased girth to her excessive mourning of the stupendously rich Wouter’s death, on the estate near Tulbagh where they had been farming with fruit and a herd of stud cattle, and even a few flocks of merino sheep after Governor Lord Charles Somerset had begun to develop his interest in that direction; others regarded it as an equally excessive celebration of the stingy bastard’s demise which left his widow with all his earthly possessions. Whatever it was, after a surprisingly short mourning period, Janna began to expand at an alarming pace, but I succumbed to her charms anyway and started exploring the considerable appeal of her matrimonial bed with regular additions to the family’s prosperity – usually one child every ten or twelve months when times were good, or every other year in times of less prosperity. And there were of course also her children with Wouter to take care of.

  For one reason or another, several of our own additions lasted for only a few months or a couple of years at most. But between the two of us Janna and I flourished according to the commandment of the Lord to prosper and increase, as a result of which the third generation of Brinks at the southern tip of Africa dutifully began to fulfil the hopes of the Lords Seventeen in Holland, and subsequently of the incipient British Empire.