Philida

by Andre Brink

  And I think that is why, when we are together and he move into me, that he keep saying, Philida, I shall care for you, I promise you, I shall make it worth your while, I shall make sure that you’re made free, I’ll talk to Pa, and to the Landdrost, and to everybody in the whole wide world, from Zandvliet all the way to the Caab, I promise and I promise and I promise, from now on you are mine, for ever, for us there will never be a slave and a baas any more, just you and me, I promise and promise and promise, from now on we shall both wear shoes, for ever and ever, amen.

  And every time Frans start telling me these things, I have questions that must be answered: How can such a thing ever happen? All these things you promise me, how can they come true? You are white, I’m a slave and a meid.

  That is when he start explaining, over and over, how those Englishmen that are baas in the Caab, they may be bad, but they are not just bad. Remember, they brought their law with them, he tell me over and over, and what that law say is what must happen, not just in the Caab but in Stellenbosch and Paarl and Worcester and everywhere in this land and even over the sea. And what that law say is that this thing about baas and slave is wrong and it must stop, and soon there will be a day when everything will be different.

  And will we all wear shoes then? I ask him.

  Then Frans say, Yes, that is how it will be. Shoes on our feet so that we can go where we please, we can walk all the way to England if we wish. I shall go and talk to the Landdrost in Stellenbosch, he say, and to the Council of Justice and to the Govment. The world will be a very different place from today, you’ll see, we must just be patient and bide our time, you and I and everybody.

  And Kleinkat too?

  Yes, Kleinkat too, he say.

  III

  Francois remembers his Childhood with Philida and the Stories about the early Days of Zandvliet before MaJanna married into the Brink Family

  YES. TO PHILIDA I would promise anything, ever since we were children. She was the first person I really wanted to be with. By the time I was about eight, so she must have been eleven or thereabouts, I already had the habit of filling a wooden barrel in the kitchen with hot water from the hearth so that she could take a bath while I kept watch at the outside door, because I didn’t want anybody to see her without clothes. As if that could make much difference! Her poor little dresses were just rags and tatters. Philida with the cut and bruised feet, barely a toe or nail unscathed, covered in dust and dirt and chickenshit and cowshit, but I still remember how carefully I used to hold them in my hands and rub lard on them and how much she liked it. Such small, thin feet, but she could run like a steenbokkie if she wanted to. What I wished above all else, and what I kept promising her for years and years, was to give her a pair of shoes. I’d have loved to make her a pair with my own hands, it’s a skill Pa taught me, one of the few things I can really do properly. I’m not big and strong like some of my brothers – KleinCornelis or Lodewyk, who are like tree trunks in the dusty yard. I myself always prefer to be indoors rather than out, and from the time I was only a couple of hands tall Philida taught me to crochet and make quilts. But then Pa decided that was too girlish and it was time to move outside. I learned to manage the fields and the orchards and especially the vineyards with their hermitage and hanepoot and steen grapes and muscadel and a bit of shy cabernet. I have to attend to all of this while my pious brother Johannes Jacobus spends his Friday evenings at an address on the Kreupelsteeg in Amsterdam where he habitually drains a borrel before spending a sedate hour with a plump prostitute whom he casually mentions in private letters to me, not sparing me any details, such as his insistence on wearing his bladdy home-made socks knitted by Philida to ward off the cold. To our parents he presumably pretends to be gathering information which may be of use in future sermons to his congregation once he is back home.

  In those early days, before I was forced to work outdoors, I saw Philida the most, because she was the knitting girl. But we never got as far as shoes. For she was a slave child and slaves and shoes had nothing to do with one another. That was why I kept on promising to buy her freedom one day, so she could get those shoes she wanted so badly. I’m sure she never cared as much for freedom as for shoes. And I swear – I really swear – that was what I wanted for her. How could I know that PaCornelis would once again put his foot down? He set Petronella free so many years ago already, the old woman in whose room Philida still sleeps. So why couldn’t he do the same for Philida?

  Or perhaps I should have known it all along, he’s my father after all. Still, I never thought that he’d find it so bloody difficult to agree to buy the freedom of a slave girl. She was always so small, with those narrow little feet, what difference could that really make to Pa, one skinny girl less on the farm, there have always been such a lot of them around, always under one’s feet.

  But the real problem wasn’t the shoes or the work. The problem was MaJanna. When she met Pa, she was the widow of Oom Wouter de Vos, who was an important man at the Caab, and MaJanna always reckoned that Pa could never stand in the shoes of such a man. He was a Brink and everybody knew, she said, that the Brinks were rather ordinary people. All we have is money. Not class. Which is why MaJanna decided right from the beginning that her children should marry well one day. If MaJanna hadn’t been in such haste to get her children’s future settled, I might still have stood a chance of putting in a word for Philida. But then she set her sights on a white girl for me and all I could do was to say Yes and Amen to everything. And now Philida is stuck with Lena and Willempie, our children, my slave children, apart from the two who died early, little Mamie and the one she does not want to talk about, the baby, my four children and hers, so what can I do now?

  It will bring shame on the family, and MaJanna would like for our farm to be counted among the best in the Drakenstein. Look at how it began. Conceived and born in sin, to say it outright. For in about 1690, when the farm was first handed out by the Governor, there were stories doing the rounds. It had been given to two young men, a Hans Silberbach and a Callas Louw. Silberbach had fourteen cattle and more than two hundred sheep and a blunderbuss, and Louw had no more than a blunderbuss to his name. Both had to make their way through the world weighed down by shadows. Silberbach got married to a freed slave woman, Ansela, who’d been deported from Java after murdering her white lover. On the neighbouring farm someone called Arij Lekkerwijn moved in with a young Frenchwoman, Marie de Lanoy. But somehow things between the neighbours turned sour and for some dark reason Silberbach bashed in Lekkerwijn’s skull with a piece of firewood and he was forced to run off into the deep interior with a price on his head. A stain of blood on the farm, right from the start. Which is why I said it was conceived and born in sin. And it may be that this event kept hanging over Zandvliet like a black cloud. But in all that darkness Kleinkat was here like a small ray of sunlight.

  IV

  In this Chapter Philida’s Thoughts continue to dwell on Zandvliet and the House of Ghosts and Cats in which she lives with her Ouma Petronella

  IT IS BECAUSE Kleinkat is with us that I know something is still good on the farm. Whether I’m alone in the longhouse or with Ouma Nella in her room, or when Frans is with me, I know that there’s always something special, something different about her. Sometimes I think she must be one of the greyfeet that go about in the dark, for often when I hold her in my arms, I can see her lifting her little head to stare over my shoulder, and then I know she can see things that no one else can see. Or while she’s lying quietly on the bed, half asleep, she would suddenly sit up and start playing. Not the way other cats play, jumping and charging and grabbing at things, but as if she’s really playing with another cat, like one of the little ones Frans was supposed to drown. I tell you, she can play like that for hours on end, with something that isn’t there, that little striped thing. She will wriggle herself into my arms until she fall asleep. Otherwise she’ll suddenly run away, her back straight, her tail all stiff and stretched out, walking about in circles
on long, straight legs as if she don’t recognise anybody and don’t belong here, and her eyes – that start off a deep blue, then turn yellow, then green, then greener, then grass-green – they look as if they come from somewhere else, somewhere very far from here, further than all the farms of Drakenstein, on the far side of the world itself, the other side of England, the other side of the whole world.

  Sometimes when I’m working, knitting or something, she go outside, and when she come back I can smell the garden on her. She smell of green grass, and of the sun, she smell of birds and their feathers, and of the young wind, her little feet smell of buchu. Then she come to lie against me, or she get hold of a piece of knitting and unravel it, and many times it lead to a quarrel with the Ounooi, a bloody awful quarrel that leave me with my tail on fire and make me feel I can murder the cat, but the moment I pick her up and I see her staring right into me with those grass-green eyes and I smell her little buchu feet, I forget all about the trouble; as long as Kleinkat is here with me the world is the best of all places to be in. One day, I know I’ll no longer be here, I’ll be far away in a place of my own, a place like Zandvliet but different, with Frans and Kleinkat, and our children, just us, free for always and always, and with shoes on our feet.

  Of course Zandvliet will still belong to Oubaas Cornelis Brink, it’s a white man’s farm, and we are only the hands that work here, the feet that tread the grapes in the big vat, or churn up dust on the wide yard around the longhouse, we are the backs that bend until they feel like breaking, we are the necks that get throttled, the stomachs that get hollow from hunger, and mine are the hands that keep on knitting and knitting and honest-to-God never stop knitting, and then stop for a moment to unravel a piece that went wrong, or to pick up a fallen stitch, morning and noon and night. Knitting and knitting and knitting, longstitch and plainstitch and purlstich and tacking stitch, and unravelling everything when you drop one or make a mistake with your in-and-over-and-through-and-off, and doing it all once more from the beginning if there is one wrong stitch in it, even if the day burn out into night and your fingers get numb in the dark yellow light of the candle that get smothered in its own wax and your eyes feel as if someone throw a handful of sand into them, and every time, every single bladdy time, it ends with Ounooi Janna’s riem on your shoulders or your backside, and nothing for supper before you go to bed.

  So Zandvliet is where it all begin, and from there you go past Lekkerwijn, and L’Ormarins, past Boschendal, then Rhône and Languedoc and Goede Hoop, and Bethlehem, which must be the Bethlehem of the Bible where the Lord Jesus was born, all the white people’s farms, all those strange and pretty names that come from faraway places that no one can ever reach, and open spaces in between, void and something as the Bible say, and up and up along the Helshoogde from where I can look back to see the whole world open up behind me like a piece of knitting that is not yet sewn up, all the colours and colours, with bits and pieces of wool and twine and fringes and trimming and buttonholes and loose flaps, up to the very top, and then slowly down into the valley until I get to Stellenbosch where I am now waiting in the dirty cell for Frans to come.

  So many things you pass along the way. Near the end of the first heights, below the blue mountains of Great Drakenstein on the left, there’s the fountain that lie waiting for the girls to come and fetch water so they can watch their own faces in the bright deepness. Some of the girls stare so hard that something at the bottom slip loose and begin to stare back at them, and then a Water Woman with very long hair come up to the surface and grab one of them and drag her down and never let her go again. For a little while the water keep bubbling and then it is over. From time to time it spill over the edges and then I can hear dark things moving about on the bottom. But sooner or later it draw back, like a story that get lost along the way, and that you may never find again. And the fountain keep on unmoving above the darkness of its own depths and that will remain a secret forever. And all it can do is to keep reflecting the sky up above, and all the clouds and the stars and the sun and moon. The water from yesterday, the water from all time – water that may never see my face again.

  From there I walk on. Always further and further. Until I can no longer move and simply lie down just where I am and fall asleep, a sleep as deep as an old fountain that is dried up and can no longer remember anything. When I wake up again in the early dawn I see something moving far below me, something that may be a man: and if it is a man, it must be someone that learned to live alone with his thoughts, with his will and his wishes, all his desires and his suffering, all the power he got inside him, however little that may be, and his sadness about the world and everything that happen inside it; a man that once upon a time was a baby, like the one in the abbadoek on my back, and later become a child, a child that got to learn to live with hunger and thirst for food and water, but also with the thirst and hunger to know and to understand. The thirst and hunger to taste and to see, to know about what is waiting round the next bend in the road or the next peak on the mountain, someone who is no more than a little sliver of skin that remain of everything he once know and understood, loose from everything that bring him to this place and everything he became, just someone, a man, And there he’s walking now, and here I am walking, where is he going, where am I going?

  I am used to walking. When we first came from the Caab to Zandvliet, I had to walk beside the wagon all the way, and it was a bladdy long way, until my feet were bleeding. But this time, when I came to Stellenbosch, it was different of course. This time it was my own choice, and I noticed every little thing along the Elephant Trail. Now and then I can see a springbok or a ribbok or a civet cat in the distance, but I don’t care about them, they move away like shadows as I come closer, they’re like the ghosts that come and go wherever I move, some of them are there to look after me, others to try and scare me. I sometimes wish one of them would come to help me carry the baby in the abbadoek, he may be barely a month old, but he keep drinking all the way. My breasts are full.

  Every step take me further away from Zandvliet. It’s like a sharp pain in my chest, because I’m moving further and further from everything that was never mine. What else can I do? Where else can I go to? That was why I keep following the Elephant Trail that bring me to this tall Drostdy where I must now keep waiting in this cell.

  So far from Zandvliet, from the farm. The house, the longhouse behind the thin row of palm trees. How well I know that place, every furrow and every stone I know, every bit of field and vineyard, the reeds and the bluegums, the deep shade of the bamboo copse, the small whitewashed cemetery between the longhouse and the bamboos, where the dead lie buried. The copse where Frans take me that first time we go there on our own. Before that, it is only fun and games, like when the boys taking us girls with them to the peach orchard. To climb the trees, they say. But it is always the girls who got to climb up first, followed by the boys, so they can stay behind us and below us, then we cannot run away, they stay between us and the ground. And always, from the time we are small, there is Frans right behind me, his head between my feet, his head between my knees. Just for fun. But that day in the bamboo copse it was not for fun, and it was just him and me. And because of that I got to come all the way along the road with its many bends today, further and further away from the farm and the longhouse.

  How well I know that house. The long low stoep and the heavy front door made of coffin planks, and the wide passage, always cool in summer when the cicadas are shrilling outside. The small table in the passage, yellowwood and stinkwood, and the mirrors. Mirrors everywhere inside, one can never get away from them. Which is why the ghosts never go away, they come for the mirrors.

  Almost every room got its ghost, some rooms got two, some four or five. In the early days I am too scared to sleep in that house, but Ouma Nella soon teach me not to be afraid. They’re our people, she told me, the greyfeet, and they’re of all kinds. There’s the white woman that drown herself in the Dwars River right next to the
bamboo copse, in the very early days of the farm, because her husband beat her so badly. And the slave woman who run away just after she arrive on the ship from Boegies. But the Baas of the farm go after her, it was long before Oubaas Cornelis, and he catch her and chop off her feet. She die soon after that. And now she only walk when the moon is full, round and round the farm, but she cannot find the way back to Boegies. There’s a slave man too, they say he lay with the white Nooi of the farm when the Baas was gone to the Caab with two vats of wine. When he got caught, the people say, his Baas took him back to the Fiscal and he had to run all the way there behind the horse, and there they made him sit on a long rod stuck up his backside, nine days before he died, without food or water. Ghosts, ghosts everywhere, there are nights when they’re moving and swarming and moaning and screeching so much that nobody can sleep a wink. Worst of all is the dead baby that cry and cry all the time and never stop, no matter how deep you try to hide under the karosses, and that one I know very well, he just cry and cry, it’s the ghost of my own Little Frans. He’s so small and thin, you can look right through him, but he’s there.

  It’s from the cats that I always know when the ghosts are out and about. A cat know all about ghosts, they say. It can see and hear them when they just beginning to stir in the distance, and then it start growling and hissing and puffing up its hair like feathers. Then you sommer know there’s ghosts about. Go away, I tell them, move off, voertsek, but they don’t listen. And some of them can get very difficult, you got to keep your eyes wide open.