Philida (32 page)

We’re going to the Drostdy, you and me.

To do what?

There are people we got to see. You can say we got an appointment.

Who you talking about now?

You remember the day the Meester took us into the Bokkeveld and told us about the slaves that killed their Baas a few years ago?

Yes, I remember. But –

He told us about five that were locked up here at the Drostdy for hard labour. Two for fifteen years and another three for life.

The chameleon which now sits almost permanently perched on Philida’s shoulder watching the world with its protruding eyes, she first leaves with Floris where he is making shoes as always; afterwards she goes to put away her knitting in the dark brown painted cupboard in the kitchen. Now I’m ready, she says eagerly. Let’s go. The baby stays behind to play with Lena at Delphina’s feet.

Labyn takes a short cut to the prison that forms the back part of the tall white Drostdy. He carries three bulging flour bags in his hands. In the backyard several prisoners are toiling with picks and heavy hammers and chisels to break large rocks into smaller and smaller ones until they are reduced to gravel. Against the farthest wall is a massive treadmill with steps hollowed by years of wear and rungs covered with dark stains, on which another eight or ten prisoners are chained, treading on and on like mules on a threshing floor, under the supervision of a Khoe guard with a long whip. Their clothes are soiled and hanging from their emaciated bodies in filthy tatters. Presumably they are forced to make do with whatever they were wearing when they arrived here, whether they are serving a sentence of five or ten years or lifelong imprisonment, summer and winter. A
few
of them are completely naked. Some look quite young, others are older, three or four ancient and doddering. Labyn must have arranged the visit with the guard beforehand, because he takes Philida straight to two men working in the farthest corner of the yard. Another Khoe guard, this one armed with an assegai, quickly scrambles to his feet and stares suspiciously at them, but then he recognises Labyn and withdraws again. He doesn’t look much stronger than his prisoners, but at least his biltong body is more or less covered by a dilapidated red-and-white uniform.

Labyn motions Philida in the direction of the nearest prisoner: This one, he says, is Achilles. And then the oldest, who is Ontong. The old man, as rickety as a stick insect, has a wretched look about him, with spidery legs, hollow cheeks, and dull eyes set deeply in their sockets, like two old, extinguished coals. He doesn’t look up when the visitors arrive beside him.

Achilles comes from Macassar, says Labyn. He is a Slams like me. So is Ontong, but he is from Batavia.

They say you come from the Bokkeveld? asks Philida.

Achilles shrugs his bony shoulders.

I heard about your uprising, says Philida.

He gives her a quick glance, then continues with his monotonous chopping-chopping-chopping.

My new Baas went to show me Galant’s head on a pole in the Bokkeveld.

For a moment it seems as if he is going to say something, but then decides against it.

That must have been a really big thing, says Philida.

Another quick glance from Achilles, but he remains silent.

I am a Slams like you, says Philida.

This time there is a hint of fire in the embers of his dull eyes.

Philida stares intently at him, which forces him to look up. She says: I really came to say thank you.

Why? he asks suspiciously.

One of these days, she says, next year, all of us, all the slaves, will be free. As I understand it, it’s really owing to people like you.

It doesn’t help us, he says with unexpected vehemence. We sitting here until we die. But that will not be very long now,
Inshallah
.

Labyn told me, says Philida. The people have not forgotten about you.

Another shrug of the small, thin shoulders. He is so skinny and bent that it looks as if there is a hump between them.

It’s not as if I did such a big thing, he says unexpectedly. The others did most of it. I was just there.

Sometimes it is enough just to be there, says Philida.

Even little Rooij did more than me, he protests. He was only a child, barely fourteen. If you ask me, he just went because he was too small to say no. But when the time came to shoot, he did. And I? I just stood there, out of the way.

Suddenly his tongue seems to loosen.

All my life I know just one thing: I am far away from my land. Nothing that is here is mine. So how could I let them drag me into murder and killing? All I did was to try and make sure it didn’t get too bad. And when the Nooi got hurt, I tried to help. She said she would ask the big Baas people to look after me. But did she? Here I am still. Breaking stones. For fifteen years. So what now? Even if they let me go, even if they free us all, I shall never find the way back to my land and see the
mtili
trees moving in the wind. He remains silent for a long time. Then he looks up with a small, sad smile: I always thought it was those
mtili
trees
that
made the wind blow, but now I know better. The wind doesn’t take orders from anyone. It just blows. And one day when I am dead it will still be blowing. Only I shall not be there to see.

After a while – chop-chop-chop-chop – he resumes: In the early days at Houd-den-Bek I often run away, but every time they bring me back and beat me. He draws his breath in deeply before he concludes: In the end one no longer try to run away. But what does that help? Here they still beat us every day. Look at me.

Without warning he turns round. Around his skinny shoulders and across his bare back they can see the bloody traces of beatings, some old, blackish, bluish stripes stained into the skin, others less old and covered with scabs, still others looking fresh, with red blood and yellow pus oozing from them.

Every day, he says with quiet resignation. But I am not complaining. Who am I to resist the will of Al-lah?

He glances quickly at the guard, who responds with a brief gesture of his head. It must be time to go. Labyn hands one of his small bags to Achilles, who very quickly thrusts it under one of his arms while the guard keeps his head turned away. Now they must move on to old Ontong.

Like Achilles, he is breaking stones, only much more slowly. He is evidently more exhausted than his friend. The hammer is clearly too heavy for his thin arms, his face looks wrinkled and bruised like an old fruit long past ripening, which has rotted and dried out. But when he starts talking, it comes more easily than with Achilles. He, too, has been here for almost ten years. Another five or six to go. It doesn’t sound like so much, but he reacts vehemently when Philida asks about it.

Not so much? he asks, narrowly missing her with a gob
of
spit. Come and sit here or try to walk on that long mill and see how you like it. Then try to think how it will be if you do it for fifteen years or for the rest of your life. Every day is like a year. Just five years, six years, and you are an old man. Death soaks into you like snow into these mountains in the wintertime.

Philida goes down on her haunches to listen as he speaks in a toneless, tireless voice. How he came out on the ship from Batavia to the Caab when he was barely ten years old. About the time on Houd-den-Bek and how he helped to bring up the boy Galant. How he and Nicolaas and the little girl Hester grew up like three small plants in the same vegetable bed. How they began to grow apart. Until the day Nicolaas nearly beat Galant to death after he’d flogged a horse, and how Hester later went to cut the thongs from which he was hanging in the stable, and how she told Ontong to cut down the slave that had been like a brother to him. How Ontong was always the first to stop them when trouble threatened to break out. How he once prevented Galant from setting fire to the house with all the people inside. But what good did it do him? All right, in the end they didn’t hang him like they did Galant and the others. But sometimes he wonders if it wouldn’t have been easier just to be hanged and have done with it, than to sit here for year after year crushing stones or treading the mill.

And yet, he says at last, a kind of weary pride in his voice, I learned to bear it. I lasted. A reed can bend without breaking like a stick, you see. It’s just that I’m getting old so quickly now. Will there be any life left in me by the time I get out? The white people know very well how to wear a man out before he’s dead.

Philida listens with a kind of awe to what he says, because in his voice there is something she has never heard in
anybody
else. It makes her think of what Ouman Cornelis Brink used to read from his Bible about the man Lazarus that rose from the dead and came back to his people and how at the time she always thought of how weird it must be for someone like that to come back among the living. Because Lazarus had been on the Other Side. He’d been dead. And even if he comes back to life, it must always feel to him as if he is looking on from very far away at what is happening on this side. It’s like that with old Ontong. What he has seen, what has happened to him, must make him unlike other people. He must know more. Everything must look different to him. It must feel as if he has been to hell and come back through the flames to be here again. A
here
which can never be quite the same as other people’s
here
. In a way he must look at his world like that Galant’s head stuck on the pole in the Bokkeveld, staring through the empty hollows of his eyes, at everything that happens around him but which is no longer part of him. Fire he has seen, and murder, and killing, the things that people do to people, things that should not be seen or known about but which go on happening all the time. Every bloody day of his life. Every bloody day for which he, Ontong, is still sitting here breaking stones until they turn into gravel and disappear into dust under his blunt chisel, every day they chain him up here on the treadmill where he’s got to tread and tread and tread and tread and tread, day after day until time no longer exists, past the ends of the earth, every day they go on beating and beating and beating him, without ever stopping. Every day – may Al-lah hear him, Al-lah the Compassionate, Al-lah the Merciful – every day he must remember those people, their eyes and their hands, their mouths that go on shouting and shouting in his ears, in every muscle and bone and sinew and drop of blood in his
tired
old body.
Jirre
, Ontong! You must be older than all the other people in the world. Older than Al-lah or the LordGod himself. You know too much. You know more than any living person ought to know. You could have been my grandfather. You could have been my father. I who don’t even have a father to know about.

To Ontong Labyn hands another of his small flour bags with food and rolled tobacco and a cardigan which Philida really meant for Meester de la Bat. For the guard, too, Labyn has brought a
pasella
: a jug of wine, tobacco,
meebos
, dried fruit.

There isn’t much time left, but they must visit another part of the Drostdy yard inside the ring wall, to look from a distance at the other rebels who were with Galant: those sentenced, not to fifteen years of breaking stones, but to life. The three Khoe men. The young Rooij who at the time of the revolt was still a child and only went with the others from curiosity, and then was persuaded to stay with the grown men and to shoot and kill the farmers. Hendrik who arrived from the Karoo with his Baas at the farm only in the late afternoon of the murder, in search of a runaway mare. Klaas, the
mantoor
on the farm, who intervened to save the lives of the women, but who didn’t hesitate at the critical moment to unlock the front door of the homestead for Galant and his co-accused Abel.

It is as if another world is opened to Philida like a strange and terrible book. At the same time it is a world she knows only too well. It may be true that the night of murder and violence stands between them like a wall: but at the same time it does look like her own world. The rhythms of work during the summer or winter days, as precise and orderly as a knitting pattern, the bell that rings in the early morning, the farmyard coming to life, the seasons following one
another,
cold and hot and everything in between, rain and drought, food and beatings, slaves and masters. Then, one day, suddenly, everything is disrupted, a murder happens among them, and nothing is the same – and they discover that this frightening violence has been hovering among them all the time, pretending to be asleep, like a dog on the back stoep, but never really sleeping after all.

And now? Is that dog still lying there, pretending? How tame these men seem today when you look at them, how ordinary, how everyday, how subdued, how torn and tattered. All violence and will drained out of them. And yet –!

Are we all like that? she wonders. Is it lying in wait for all of us? And what will it take to make it break loose again? What do we really know about ourselves?

Labyn is getting agitated. The guard has warned him that they mustn’t stay too long, or he will get into trouble. And soon, too soon for her liking, they must go on their way to the de la Bats’ house in the Church Street. They do not talk much. The day lies heavily on them. Philida already knows that this morning will not readily let her go. Yet something happens upon their arrival which changes the feeling of the day for ever in her mind.

A horseman arrives from the Drostdy in Stellenbosch with a message for Meester de la Bat. Something about the preparations for the first of December, the day the slaves are to become free. Well, not completely free. Everybody knows by now that each will remain indentured with her or his Baas for four more years. But it does mean that something has started happening and that the Caab will never be the same again.