Philida (21 page)

It is time for Ouma Petronella and Cornelis Brink to travel over the mountains and the more distant plains, for their few days on the road back to Zandvliet. But just before they can get the mules moving, Ouma Petronella comes back to Philida for one last time to hug her and her children against her ample body.

You better hurry back home now, Ouma Nella, whispers the young woman. I can see the Ouman’s arse is on fire.

You must watch out and take care of yourself, says Ouma Petronella. Remember, if you don’t do that I shall find out and come and give you hell in your sleep.

Philida shrugs her narrow shoulders. It’s getting late, she says. You got a long way to go.

How will you ever manage on your own? asks Ouma Petronella, suddenly tearful.

You teach me
mos
, Ouma Nella, Philida says quietly. And she smiles, a small and crooked movement of her lips. But then she adds with surprising firmness: Remember one thing, I now learn to say
No
.

Once again Ouma Petronella presses Philida against her. Then she climbs on to the cart and the axles groan under her weight.

XVII

A very short Chapter in which Philida makes the Commissioner an Offer

SOMETHING HAS BEEN
bothering Philida ever since the day of the auction, something she remarked as an undertone to the tumult around the scene at the long table, which remained with her after the disturbance caused by Emcee Botma had subsided and the crestfallen man with his long cane had slunk away. And she realises that it has not been her imagination when three or four days later a well-dressed Khoe man in a tall hat arrives at the home of Meester de la Bat in the Church Street with a message for the slave woman Philida of the Caab from the Commissioner to summon her to the Drostdy without delay.

Shall I go with you? asks Bernabé de la Bat who has just come home from his office. Perhaps it’s something I can help you with.

No, Meester, says Philida. But she can feel a heavy lump in her stomach, as if she’s had too many green apricots to eat.

It turns out that it is the Commissioner himself who wants to speak to her, the man with the long, tanned faced who had been in charge on the day of the auction at the Drostdy. When she arrives, he is seated behind a wide desk covered by a slew of untidy papers.

Without beating around the bush he asks her: What do you know about the commotion we had at the Drostdy on the day you were brought to the auction?

Meester? she asks. She has decided that in future, for safety’s sake, this is how she will address all the important men of the Colony.

That man made a nuisance of himself, she says.

He is a leading farmer in our district, says the Commissioner. You are a slave. I got the impression that you didn’t know your place.

I always know my place, Meester, Philida says quietly. It is a slave’s place. That man was the one who was looking for trouble.

How was he looking for trouble?

He put that stick of his under my dress, Meester, says Philida. Where in that mess of papers and books on your table does it say that he got the right to do such things with me?

You are a slave, the man says again. But this time he makes it sound more like a remark than an accusation.

I know I am a slave, Meester, says Philida. But I am not
his
slave. What do your big books say about that?

She feels the heaviness around her beginning to ease a little bit. And she goes on: If that is what the law say he can do, then the law must be wrong.

To her surprise she sees the hint of a smile in his pale round eyes.

And suppose I tell you that this is how it is?

Philida is quiet for a moment. She lifts her head to look him in the eyes and says: Then I must say No to the Meester and his law.

I see, grunts the Commissioner, and he starts shuffling his papers like a hen trying to make a nest.

So what is the Meester now telling me to do? Philida dares to ask after a few moments.

The tanned man does not look at her. What I say, he says,
is
that it was a public auction. You did not have the right to interfere and step on the man’s fingers. You disturbed the peace and that is against the law. Only now does he look up, and he places his two farmer’s hands on the papers in front of him. Then he adds: But between you and me, I would have done the same if I were you. And if anybody does a thing like that again in my presence, he will rue the day. For much too long have we shown a lack of respect for the law in this land. The Meester gets up behind the big desk and his hands start shuffling and ordering all the papers again. Half raising his head he adds: It goes for that unruly man. A brief silence, before he pulls a straight face and says: And of course it goes for you too.

Thank you, Meester, says Philida with an equally straight face. And if Meester want me to, I can come here one day to put all these messy papers straight on your desk. This is really looking very untidy.

I shall appreciate it, says the Civil Commissioner. Can you start next week?

Philida nods, turns round and quietly walks from the office into the startling white light of the summer’s day.

XVIII

Which informs the Reader about the Changes in Philida’s Lifestyle after her Arrival in Worcester and about Newcomers to her Acquaintance, notably a Man who is set to play a major Role in her Life, and a Ghost from the Past whose Legacy haunts the inland Districts

THE FIRST WEEKS
after she arrives in Worcester, Philida has enough opportunity to study the house and its occupants. It is very different from Zandvliet. After the longhouse she was used to, Master de la Bat’s house is quite squat, although it is bigger than most of the other homes in the little
dorp
. There is no gable. But the walls are high for shade in summer, and the ceilings are made of rushes. There is a
voorhuis
to the right when one enters, two smallish bedrooms left, and a kitchen and pantry at the back. In the backyard are a few barns, a dairy, a wine cellar and three outrooms for servants. At the moment the one in the middle is filled with mealie bags, chests and barrels; to the left there is one for the slave Labyn from Batavia, who does carpentry and sometimes works for other people too; in the third, slightly bigger outroom, the housemaid Delphina sleeps and that is where Philida and her children also move in.

In the beginning she feels constantly ill at ease. She knows exactly why. It is because her shadow has not come with her. Somewhere in the clouds and misty rain on the long road between Zandvliet and this new town on this side of the mountains the sun got lost, and when she arrived here
and
the sun heated up again, there were shadows once more, but not the sun she was used to. Especially in the evenings she felt the need to crawl in with her own shadow, to find a space for it to lie behind her back, but it wasn’t the one she was looking for. There was no chance to fit in properly any more.

She just has to get used to it. But getting used to a place doesn’t mean that you have found the place that is really yours. This was what she felt at the auction: that something had moved in between what she knew and what was foreign to her.

It isn’t that she feels dissatisfied or unhappy. In many ways this is a better place than Zandvliet. Easier, even friendlier. This Nooi isn’t always picking on her, she never orders one to undo a piece of knitting, never comes with a
riem
or a switch. Meester Bernabé de la Bat isn’t moody or difficult. After the pesky Brinks he not only leaves her in peace but tries in his own way to make her feel at home.

Good in his own way, yes. Meester Bernabé de la Bat is not a man of many words, nor a tall man with a short fuse. Actually one never knows what is going on in his head. A long head, his hair combed flat on his scalp, his eyes behind the thick glasses always rather worried, almost apprehensive, as if he never feels sure that someone is going to scold him or find him ridiculous. An important man, Philida heard from Delphina. So important, one may get the idea that he thinks from her knees up a woman’s legs are joined together. The first lawyer this town has ever known, they say. Lawyer? That, says Delphina, a small quick girl, bright as a mouse, means a man who knows the law, to whom you can go if you have problems. But not like a father or an older brother; even to his two children he is always aloof and rather distant, not a man for jokes or games, as serious as a secretary bird,
with
the same stiff steps as if he is always worried that he may tread on shit.

This man is married to one Anna Catherina Hugo, a quiet person, like a duck that got chased from her nest too quickly, but a member of one of the top families at the Caab, as Delphina can tell. At the time Philida arrives, they have two small pale boys, three years and one year old, with another one pushing up a molehill from inside.

From Delphina Philida often asks advice when she is not quite sure what to do. Delphina is a bit older than she, people say that in her young days she had a hard time with a baas at the Caab. Three of them, actually, because the man and his two sons were bothered by their pricks and were always ready with a
riem
if you hesitated to lie down with them, and it was just as well that their seed didn’t take on her, as she always sought timely advice from other slave women to get rid of their leftovers if she began to swell. But Delphina isn’t much of a talker. If she has to sweep a floor, she will sweep; if she has to wash up plates, she washes up plates; and if she is ordered to bathe the two pale boys in the zinc bath she bathes the boys in the zinc bath; nothing can ever upset her routine and she doesn’t like loose talk. Her small tight body warns you at first glance to let her be. Only once she’s learned to trust you, her tongue loosens up.

As a result Labyn is the one Philida usually comes to talk to. He could have been her father, the father she has never known, and with him she feels safe. A peaceful man who takes his time with everything, and is always to be found with his calabash pipe in his mouth. Where he plucks the leaves to smoke, Philida never discovers; and when she asks him, he just looks at her with a small, pursed smile and gives no answer, but they are sweet-smelling leaves and that
is
another reason why she likes to go and sit with him when she has no work to do or when her knitting doesn’t need close attention.

To see him working on a piece of wood gives one a special deep pleasure inside. He must be, she often thinks, like the father of Jesus, the only other carpenter she has heard of. He has a deep kind of
respect
for wood, each piece is different, each one he comes to know intimately. Yellowwood, young and creamy white, or older, a deep yellow like butter, later even darker, like burnt sugar; the heavy stinkwood with its fine grain that comes alive under your fingers, camphor wood that sets free its smell when you saw or shave it; wild olive with its stains and curves;
kiaat
from Batavia, walnut, cedarwood, cherrywood, ironwood, wood for chairs or benches or tables, wood for wagon wheels or yokes or yoke-pins, wood for a
jonkmanskas
or an armoire, wood for hedgepoles, wood you can feel or judge with your fingers or the inside of your wrists or with your cheeks, wood with which you can have long conversations. With wood, she discovers from Labyn, it is like talking to family: Do you by chance know this one or that one? Isn’t he an uncle or a cousin or a grandchild of so-and-so? His mother must have been a de Villiers girl, or a Basson or a de Wet, married to a Pieterse or a Swanepoel, one of the step-aunts must have been a Lamprecht or a van der Merwe, his great-grandfather came from Borneo on a three-master. And then there is wood for coffins. Those are Labyn’s special love, and each coffin becomes a cherished chest in which he himself would love to spend the rest of his days when there are no more days to spend.

One late evening when neither of them can sleep, they lie talking for hours on their palliasses of straw or rags in the heavy dark still fragrant with the early evening’s
candlewax,
Delphina tells her that in his youth Labyn had a young wife, Lavinia, whom he loved very dearly. But she was impossibly beautiful and the white men of the Caab wouldn’t leave her in peace. From the smart houses in the Heerengracht or Oranjezicht, or from the taverns, from the workmen’s houses on Caledon Square or closer to the beach, or from the Rondebosch to the far side of the mountain or at Hout Bay, or even from the deep interior when the men came to the Caab to buy and sell, from high and mighty lords to scruffy looters or ruffians and drunkards. In the Lodge on the Heerengracht, just this side of the old Company Gardens, she always had strings of visitors. She tried her best to ward them off, but for how long could a slave girl say no? What she did was to tell them she was already married, and she didn’t lie with any other man because her husband was a real devil who readily ran amok and he’d already throttled three or four people with his bare hands. If they wanted to know more about this husband or if they threatened to kill her when she refused to talk, she started telling them that the man was Labyn, who’d come with her from Batavia, thinking that this would put an end to it. But what they did then was to round up five or six of their mates to catch Labyn on the Boereplein late one Saturday night and beat him senseless and cut off his balls. The same five or six men who’d attacked Labyn lay in wait for her at the women’s washing place up against the Table Mountain and did terrible things to her and then just left her lying there, where some predator got hold of what was left of her in the night and finished her off.