Philida (16 page)

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.

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 stop 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.