Philida Read online

  You’re all out of sorts today, Ma Petronella, I snarl at her.

  I’m just telling you so you can be warned, she continues. Very quietly, her voice pulls in, the way a cat draws in its nails. I’m going to press out your balls. I’m your mother. Do we two understand each other?

  After a long time I say very quietly: I understand, Ma Petronella.

  But this is something she has spoken about before, and I know she will do so again. In the daytime one can shake off these things like blackjacks from corduroy breeches. But in the night they come back to haunt me. Then I can see the people from those old graves rise up, struggling their way out of the ground, each one of them still covered with grass and dead ants and God knows what else in their hair and on their eyebrows and in their nostrils, and I see them coming on over mountains and dales, not in twos or threes or handfuls, but in their hundreds and thousands, from all the mountains and cliffs and across all the dusty plains and thickets and kloofs of the vast land, all the dead who can never lie still in their graves, but who go on living invisible among us, people who were born here and who died here and who will never leave us in peace. I don’t want to know about them but I cannot ever shake them off or pretend they’re not there. They throng around me and whisper to me and press against me until I cannot breathe any more. I no longer know what is happening inside my head.

  Before I came to live at Zandvliet everything was going so well. Life seemed so ordered and predictable. I was a prosperous man. I had married well. My children were growing up to take my place after me. The wine trade flourished. I had twelve, fourteen, eighteen slaves, later thirty, forty, as the farm began to flourish. But today? The only thing that is accumulating is my debt. Ever since we came here, the price of wine started coming down, now it’s falling every month. There’s nothing one can rely on any more. I’ve had to start borrowing from neighbours and family and friends. Even from Old Petronella I had to borrow money. Three hundred and fifty rix-dollars. Twenty-five pounds in today’s money. If it goes on like this I won’t have a shard of pottery left to scratch my arse. And then? A few weeks ago I went to Kobus Coetzee’s auction at Klapmuts. I saw the bailiff going from room to room with his papers in one hand, selling one thing after the other, with the crowd at his heels like a pack of hyenas or vultures around a carcass. Cupboards. Beds. Milk cans. Carpets. Wine barrels. Horses. Sheep. Tanned skins and thongs. My God, everything. I watch as they carried all of it out and put it into the rain, to be auctioned and sold and carted off. The poor old shit. And that evening I saw something like a vision – it wasn’t a dream, I was wide awake, I saw it as in broad daylight – saw the vultures coming towards me, here at Zandvliet. Until there was nothing left to be scavenged. A stranger among strangers, as the Bible says. Is this what Grandpa Andries came here for, on that long sea journey from Woerden on the ship? To be buried here among dust and stones? Even in the cemetery those dark strangers are taking over everything. All one is left with in the end is one’s own hole, the grave I dug to receive my bones one day. Among strangers. It is like a Last Judgement drawing closer. We try to keep it away, to forget about it. But all our efforts are just farts against the thunder.

  I’m not growing any younger. Let us be totally frank: I’m getting old. One cannot see it in what one does but in what one can no longer do. Even something like bending over to tie your shoelaces when you get up in the morning. It’s in your back, it’s in your bones. I used to watch Pa Johannes as he grew older and I thought: No, the hell with it, I won’t ever grow old like that. I dare not say this to anyone. Not even to Janna. Most especially not to Janna. She may be the only one who’d enjoy it. Then she needn’t roll over in the night or the early morning if I feel the urge coming. There was a time when I never stopped feeling desire. Got it from the ancestors. Grandpa Andries with his thirteen children. Took whatever came his way, except for a wild hare – and that was only because the bloody thing was too quick for him. But I? Today? Slower and slower all the way.

  Worst of all is to want to but no longer to be able to. There are nights when I lie panting with lust, but then I cannot. God is a bloody perverse kind of man. The desire he pours into one is the worst of all. He rides you bareback. And then he gives you this thing between your arsehole and your balls. An old man’s gland, as Petronella calls it. I could understand if it gets you when you’re old and decrepit. But not when you’ve still got a wildness inside you, if you can still feel desire. The only time when it works for me is when I see a young girl like Philida. Janna is useless when it comes to that. She’s become an old dried-up cow that kicks you in the balls when you try to get some milk out of her. And she’s the very last person I can talk to about it. All she would say is: Good. It’s just what you deserve. It’s the hand of God. And then I used to go to Old Petronella for help. There’s nothing she doesn’t know. Pity she is no longer as strong as in her younger days. But she can at least offer some remedies. Garlic cloves drawn on white dulcis was what she made me drink. Otherwise, honey and a pinch of saltpetre and some alum. It is useless for things like hanging or standing, but at least it eases the peeing, and that’s already something. What does help to coax the old pole into a half-hearted standing, never for long, but in my state anything is better than nothing, is baking an ostrich egg on an anthill until it turns brown, then to grind it and pour boiling water on it. Or unburnt coffee beans drawn on boiling water. It’s enough to help the old thing wriggle around a bit in the damp. Nothing like the grunting pleasure old Hamboud gets from her mud hole, but at least it stirs up a faint memory of what it used to be in its heyday. In the long run, I suppose, one simply has to learn to live with dry desire.

  Those were the times when I understood Pa Johannes best. He often spoke to me when he felt the need to unburden. And in later years when his conscience gave him hell, then he would tell me about the weeks when Ma Magdalena was said to be ill, which meant that she denied him a place in her bed when he felt the need. Long periods, months, sometimes years. The only remedy, for he was a God-fearing man, was to ask for guidance from the Lord and to follow the example of other devout men from the Bible, like Father Abraham: so if his wife couldn’t or wouldn’t – and how can one ever know? – Pa Johannes availed himself of the services of a handmaid to assuage his need. Very special among them was Petronella, who in her youth had been a delight to behold and a woman who’d known all the secrets of the heart and the flesh. If I understood him correctly he would always begin by bidding Petronella to lie down, and then kneel between her legs to ask the Lord’s blessing on what was about to happen, before lunging forward to end the prayer by adding the deed to the word. That may well be how I had also been made, like a couple of my brothers and sisters. We never even knew who they were, because his offspring with Petronella were always immediately claimed by the family and brought up by Ma Magdalena as her own. Petronella continued to nurse them all, she was blessed with abundant milk, but in the eyes of the world Ma Magdalena was the mother. That is how it was also entered into the books of the government as well as in Pa’s Book. And to show my appreciation I arranged for Petronella’s manumission in due course. A man must learn how and when to demonstrate his gratitude.

  Compared to Pa Johannes, things went easier for me, because in the early years I never took no for an answer from Janna. But in later years she became more and more difficult, which was how I also discovered the meaning of futile desire. That’s what the Lord gets for planting us in a fertile land like this, you might say in a garden rank with the fruits of good and evil, so it’s no use for him to complain after the event. He ought to take his responsibility like a man.

  All I’m asking is how I could be expected to keep my eyes and hands off a desirable young meid like Philida when I became smitten with dry desire? At such moments there is – sometimes – still a hint of something upstanding in my old body. When I can grab her or hurt her, when I can hit her and make her squirm or moan. A breath of dull life still glimmering in the burning, flac
cid flesh. And that’s about all it amounts to, except sometimes in my sleep. But even when I then wake up, it is usually too late, and I’m in time only to feel it shrink away from my grasp. It has really lost the ability to stand up properly. But it remembers. Oh my God, how it remembers. Old One-Eye forgets nothing. In its blue head memory lies embedded.

  And that is when I need a remedy. What a terrifying, sordid, carnal creature a man is! In the fullness of his manhood he can do anything and everything, but he ends up sadly useless. And this, they say, is what it means to be created in the image of God. The same God who ordered Abraham to cut the throat of his own son. Perhaps, I sometimes imagine, that was the remedy that helped him stand up, right across the altar on which the child lay exposed.

  And it just gets worse with all the worries I have to bear. About the wine and the vineyards, about the government that decides how much it will pay us for our harvest, less money every year. What will become of us? A Day of Judgement is already upon us. When I lie awake in the night, I can already imagine the worst happening. How I might be forced to look on – I with my dried-up member – to watch strangers trampling my home to grab everything I have accumulated in my life and carry it off from here, cart it away, all gone. Leaving only me and my naked desire before the eyes of a vengeful God. Cast out and outlawed, and filled with pain and drought and suffering.

  And this is the time my own son, Frans, chooses to lie with Philida and engender a brood of children with her. What we need, I keep telling him, is money, not children. But does he pay any attention? He deserves to be punished. And today I felt the urge to go in unto her like the sons of God with the daughters of men in Genesis. For the first time in God knows how long I managed to get it standing. With the girl brought up by Petronella. The way Johannes Brink did earlier with my mother. Because they’re slaves. The only thing we still have to cling to, is God. But he has also started to falter. He has turned his face away from us. All that will remain for us to trust, I think, is the land itself. And it is bound to find its own way of punishing us. Don’t make a mistake. Ever since we arrived here everything has begun to go wrong. Perhaps it would have been better for us never to have been here. But if I no longer have that to believe in, what remains?

  X

  About a Gallows Rope and an Auction in the Bamboo Copse

  WHO STILL CARE about listening to the Ouman? It is my turn to speak. Because it is terrible things that happen from the day I go to Stellenbosch from Zandvliet until I come home again and the randy old goat try to force me down on my knees in that bamboo copse. As I stand there in the thick shade, I think: JesusGod, this must be the very worst that can happen to a woman. It may be even worse than getting hanged. I cannot help thinking of the day he make those two slave boys come from L’Ormarins to make them lie with me on the flogging bench and he standing there with his sjambok. On that day I want to die. And I with Frans’s child already inside me. Is there anything that can be as terrible as that? And yet if you think of it, it is just part of the world he live in. All those stories the old goat read us from his damn Book, because he say it will do us good. But if you ask me it is just to get him worked up so he can give it to the Ounooi. That Bible is an evil book. Starting with Adam in the Garden, baas and giver of names to every living and creeping thing. But then Adam is not good enough for God, so he send him Eve to make life easier. All he want is a woman he could put his thing into, and it is the LordGod who make her lie down and open her legs for him. And look what happen afterwards. Lot and his two daughters. Not one of them been with a man before, but think of their father. He throw them out so that all the men outside can take them in the street. And later those same daughters make him drunk so they can lie with him. And so it go on, with the woman Tamar and the man Juda, and the one called Onan who lie with his sister-in-law but then spill out his seed on the ground because he don’t want to give her a child. All the way down to the good king David who get another man killed so he can have a go at his wife. A bloody heathen lot, which make me think twice about this LordGod himself. That’s what the old goat make us listen to every night at prayers. And almost every time it is a woman who get it in her sticky parts.

  So it go on, and now it look like my turn. There is no way I can get out of this. All I’m good for is to knit, but where does that take me? Everybody always say, You not just a farmyard girl, man, you a knitting girl. That’s something. So I ask you: What is something? Can it help me when I get big with Frans’s children inside me? Can it help me right in the beginning when I keep on telling Frans: All right, I lie with you, but then you must promise to buy my freedom? Can it help me the other day when the old goat want me to go down on my knees so he can get his snot sjambok into me?

  I remember when Ouma Nella first teach me to knit. She just cast on the first row of stitches and show me in-over-through-and-off. That piece of knitting grow longer and longer, like a tongue, while Ouma Nella is busy somewhere else on the farm, so I just go on. The tongue get so long, after a while it push its way right over the doorstep, but still I keep on. Until Ouma Nella come back in the late afternoon and start laughing. I cannot see anything funny about it. Nobody ever show me how to cast off, only the in-over-through-and-off, and once I start on something I don’t give up easily. But Ouma Nella is laughing so much she later start crying.

  Why you laughing? I ask her.

  Ooohoo! she laughing. My child, I can see you ending up on the gallows one day, I tell you. It looks like a gallows rope you’re knitting there.

  I nearly stop knitting right there. But after some time I start again, and after that Ouma Nella show me about casting off. I get fond of knitting. To make something with my own two hands and see it grow and take shape and turn into something that’s different from what it was before. A length of wool that is teased out and spun and wound up into a ball. At first it’s just wool, but then it change between your fingers and turn into something that can keep you warm in winter. It’s like when you talking and you take a lot of words and put them together like loose stitches on a needle, and suddenly you find you saying something that wasn’t there before. It’s some sort of magic that happen in your mouth, just like between your fingers. You can say cat, or you can say dog, and then you can make the cat sit down or catch a butterfly, or you can make the dog bite, and then to stop biting, whatever. And you can say: Look, there’s a butterfly, and suddenly the butterfly is there, even if there is no butterfly you can see anywhere. You just make it be there. You can make yourself butterflies in the longhouse, or in Ouma Nella’s bedroom, or in the night, anywhere, any time. Or when the Ounooi is giving you hell, you can say, There’s a tick, and then you can make that tick bite her just where and how and when you want to, and she won’t even know why you laughing. She only itch. Or when the old goat thrash you, you can say: Eina, it’s sore! But you can also choose to say: No it don’t hurt at all. Or you can say: I won’t cry, even if he kill me. And today I can say: That blarry Oldman cannot hurt me and he won’t ever try to lie with me again. And I won’t ever call him Oubaas again.

  To tell the truth, I already forget about the day I knit the long wool tongue. Only remember it again on the day the old goat take us to the Caab to make us see how they hang that poor man Abraham and I pee myself. Not only because it is so terrible to see, although it is bad enough, but because I suddenly remember what Ouma Nella tell me about my knitting myself a rope for the gallows. Something I never-ever forget again. To carry my own death with me all the time and wherever I go. That must be why I keep knitting. Not to make that gallows story come true but to keep it out of the way.

  This knitting been with me all the time. It start when Ouma Nella first tell me how to cast on the stitches, all the way to casting them off again. Then measuring to make sure the cardigan or the coat or whatever will fit properly. From the shoulder down to the starting row. Making sure it will fit properly – not too loose, not too tight. Getting to know all the different kinds of stitches. First garter stitch.
Then cross stitch and blanket stitch and stem stitch. The whole lot of them. And not just one at a time. You learn to mix them together. Like you do with stocking stitch. Or with ribbing. Or with plain and purl. There’s a time and a place for every kind. And you learn to knit them by turns, which I do most of the time. Until you reach the edge of the ribbing for the neck, to make sure it will fit properly. After some more time you learn about cables. One row of stitches folding over another, it can be up-and-down cables or thisway-and-thatway cables. For that, it’s better to use thinner needles, it give you a tighter fit. You always use bamboo for needles, it work so much better. And there’s lots of bamboo on the farm. I love going down to the bamboo copse to pick them. After a while Ouma Nella show me about binding and facing. Choosing the right stitches, usually with thinner wool. And, of course, all the time she teach me about correcting mistakes. In the beginning, when my fingers are still dumb, there are mistakes all the time, all the way, JesusGod! Dropped stitches, crooked or uneven rows, rows knitted too tightly or too loose. Picking up the dropped stitches. Knitting up where it start unravelling. It’s like sleep, Ouma Nella always say. If you get too tired, your head unravel just like knitting. Then you need sleep to pick up the stitches and knit them up properly. After that, you learn about plaiting, and seams, and of course buttonholes. About gathering and ending off. So it go on, you always get new things to learn.

  There come a time when I getting bored by knitting the same lot of stitches all the time. I begin to wonder what it will be like to try something totally new. Say a few stitches plain, then a few purl, a stocking stitch or two, a few garter stitches or something even more different, then knitting together a few, followed by crossing over some of the earlier ones, and repeating all of this for a few rows before moving on to something else again. Of course it mean planning very carefully and thinking ahead, otherwise it will all be a mess. You got to know how each row will go with the others around it, so each row got to be planned, then each group of rows, together and separate. In the beginning it make my head ache and my eyes burn, particularly in the evenings in the light of our lard candle. But I slowly find my way. Especially after I tell Ouma Nella about what I trying to do and she give me advice. First the two of us together, she and I, and later all by myself, I work and work to make my own patterns. A lot of trouble in the beginning. Even Ouma Nella keep saying I wasting my time and everybody else’s, but I go on and on. For days, for weeks, even for months. Making plans, lying awake, thinking ahead, and then following my night-time thoughts in the daytime. Then my first jersey get done. Just a small one, to see what it can look like. And it look really pretty, if I say so myself. Ouma Nella say the same.