Philida (9 page)

Very close to me is the black water of the Eye where that long-haired woman live. Here you dare not stop to drink, or she will come out and drag you into the depths. Because it is a black hole without end, a fountain that bubble up from
the
deepest depth of the earth. The water is smooth and clean, you can see right through it all the way to the bottom, even if there is no bottom, because down there it keep all the midnight darkness that will always remain a secret. And it is always ready to reflect the heavens, the moon and the stars and the clouds and the sun. The water been there for ever, the water of today and yesterday and many years before, and yet the water will never see my face again. I am there, right inside it, and yet, if I look again, it is as if I never been here. It is as if even now, at this moment, as I sit here on my knees and look at myself down there, even
now
I am not here, as if I never been here at all and never will be here again. Because the water stay still right where it is, pitch black and filled with the lightest light, yet in a strange way it keep moving, as if something keep stirring it, without ever stopping, ever since the first sun looked down into it until the last moon will rise over it and still will not rise.

And I know that everything around me here, the fountain with its black water filled with secrets, and the shadows that stir and come and go when I’m not looking, and the overhang with the little prickmen, and the moon and the stars, and tomorrow’s sun and yesterday’s wind, and the tokoloshes and the water maidens, everything will go with me from here, all the way to Zandvliet, to look after me.

Back at the farm down there I shall first go to the Dwars River and make a little hollow for Willempie on the bank, and then walk into the cool water to wash the hot day from me. Washing and washing and scrubbing, so that I’ll be ready to start again. Taking my time, time to think carefully about everything, about what Grootbaas Lindenberg said, and about Frans, about myself, all of it. I know that if we ever have time to talk about it again, he will talk differently.
I
know he will. Because this is our child, that we made with so much love, like Lena who will be waiting for me with Ouma Nella. And like Mamie who would have waited if she was still with us. And of course like KleinFrans who would also have waited, but I do not speak about him.

Then, once I have washed the long walk from me, I shall go to Ouma Nella’s room. Past the chicken run where that mad hen keep on cackling all day long without a single egg to show for it, and past the stupid donkeys, past the old black sow. And when I get to Ouma Nella’s room, my Kleinkat will come to me as she always come to greet me. Purring around my legs, over and over, then upside down with her small head resting on one of my feet, with her eyes closed, rubbing the back of her head along my toes, to say: See, you are mine and I am yours, now rub my tummy and around my ears. I shall squat down beside her and start caressing her. I shall press my face against her and sniff in the smell of warm grass and buchu on her small feet. Then I will know I am really home. When the day is ready to be cast off like a good piece of knitting and the night cup its hand over the longhouse, I can crawl in under the
bulsak
with Ouma Nella, cuddling up next to her, her body warm as a loaf of bread, I can slide and sink into the deepest of all sleeps. Except that today I know for the first time ever that even this place, where I live, is no longer mine as I always thought. I no longer belong here. I belong nowhere. What happen to me will always be what others want to happen. I am a piece of knitting that is knitted by somebody else.

VIII

On the Altars of Lechery and Power

WE HAVE BEEN
sitting here since early morning, even though we did not really expect to see her for a while, as we knew only too well how fond she was of dawdling and how much her mind could wander off to whatever attracted her attention from one moment to the next.

Perched on the stoep we sit and wait. I am leaning against the thick, whitewashed side wall on the right. Next to me Janna fills a space into which three other persons of ordinary size could fit quite comfortably. Three years older than me, she was married previously to the wealthy wheat farmer Wouter de Vos, but he couldn’t quite live up to her considerable demands. People say that it was not so much her family, or their connections, that accounts for her standing in the community, but the fact that by anybody’s standards she was a handsome woman. That was before she had doubled, if not tripled, in size and suitors tended to become more circumspect. Some people ascribed her increased girth to her excessive mourning of the stupendously rich Wouter’s death, on the estate near Tulbagh where they had been farming with fruit and a herd of stud cattle, and even a few flocks of merino sheep after Governor Lord Charles Somerset had begun to develop his interest in that direction; others regarded it as an equally excessive celebration of the stingy bastard’s demise which left his widow with all his earthly possessions. Whatever it was, after a surprisingly short
mourning
period, Janna began to expand at an alarming pace, but I succumbed to her charms anyway and started exploring the considerable appeal of her matrimonial bed with regular additions to the family’s prosperity – usually one child every ten or twelve months when times were good, or every other year in times of less prosperity. And there were of course also her children with Wouter to take care of.

For one reason or another, several of our own additions lasted for only a few months or a couple of years at most. But between the two of us Janna and I flourished according to the commandment of the Lord to prosper and increase, as a result of which the third generation of Brinks at the southern tip of Africa dutifully began to fulfil the hopes of the Lords Seventeen in Holland, and subsequently of the incipient British Empire.

Next to Janna, the rest of the family are seated on the long front stoep of the farm – all except Johannes Jacobus, born in the Year of Our Lord 1808 at the first light of day on an autumn afternoon in the lengthening shadow of Table Mountain. An aspiring dominee, he sends regular letters home from the top floor of a canal residence in Amsterdam. He reports how assiduously he attends his lectures in theology, and occasionally mentions something about a set routine which once a week, usually on Fridays, takes him to the Oudezijde quarter, but it has never become quite clear what he does there. He assures us, however, that all the experience he is gathering will later benefit the members of his congregation at the distant Caab.

He was followed on New Year’s Day in 1810 by Francois Gerhard Jacob, absent today because of his need to pace up and down the farmyard at Zandvliet to come to terms with the shocks of the previous day at the Drostdy of Stellenbosch. A year younger than Frans is KleinCornelis, the apple of my
eye,
clearly brought up from his early childhood to stir up trouble with his brothers. After KleinCornelis there are a few hiccups in the row on the front stoep, as the child following him unfortunately died young even before he could be christened. The next member of the family, Daniel, born in 1814, so eighteen years old at this time, already has itchy balls, as far as I can tell, but he is fortunately still too scared of me to do anything about it. After him two more places are empty, the first in memory of Pietertjie, dead at age one month; followed by the late Stefaansie, who made it to the age of two years and seven months. After this blank there is at last another child scalding her little behind on the hot stoep, christened Maria Elisabet, fourteen; followed by Lood, a fat slob of twelve, whose upper lip is permanently disfigured by a fat pale worm of snot; and then two more girls at the far end: Fransien, an unexpectedly pretty child of eleven, with grass-green eyes and long rust-red hair; and lastly, after Woudrien, who has also been laid to rest, the
laatlam
Alida, a cheeky little minx of nine, who is always busy somewhere, cutting small rags into shapes or sorting different colours and lengths of wool into boxes where Philida can pick and choose material for her knitting.

Suddenly, thinking of Philida, I am overcome by a sense of utter disenchantment, my eyes resting on the small band around me. My family, my offspring. What do I know about any of them? And then the unsettling thought: There is so little anyone can ever know. And what does one
do
with what one knows? What the hell does one do with what one
doesn’t
know? This woman here right beside me, this lump of flesh? Out of nowhere, I find myself pitying her – and, dear God, I don’t know
why
. And even worse, there is nothing and nobody to take it out on. I feel like getting up and flogging somebody. Like kicking a dog or slaughtering
the
massive old sow in her sty or wringing a chicken’s neck. I think of taking my gun and shooting whatever gets in the way, or simply firing a shot blindly into the sky. What difference would that make? And to whom?

A wave of unfathomable terror washes over me as I gaze at the people around me, my mind still preoccupied – with what, with whom? With Francois Gerhard Jacob? With the still-missing slave Philida? The turmoil of thoughts keeps on careering inside me.

I even become aware of a most unfamiliar stirring inside my breeches. So unusual, in fact, that it takes me a while to recognise and acknowledge what is going on. I can hear my breath pushing more emphatically through my open mouth. There are dark spots flickering in front of my eyes. For a moment I feel panic-stricken. What if I am going to have a stroke? But the fear lasts only for that first moment. Then a surge of recklessness overrules all other impulses. Some of my predecessors in our line of the family have been known to expire in this way. Who am I to resist? If I die, I think, I die. And hallelujah! Let God’s will be done.

I fumble with the gold watch chain tightly wound between my buttons and my stomach, and readjust the loose pair of thin gold-framed spectacles on my nose. A year ago in the vineyard just when the crystal grapes were ripening, they fell off my nose and I accidentally stepped on them. They broke right in the middle and the left lens splintered like the legs of a nervous spider, after which Frans meticulously tried to fit the two pieces together with a length of thin wire. I swear it was the fault of one of the outdoor slaves whose stares unsettled me that day. He was given a hell of a thrashing. It was high time anyway. Janna had been convinced for a long while that the good-for-nothing was asking for it.

I don’t take no shit from nobody and even less from a slave. They fornicate and multiply like rats on the farm and yet one cannot get along without them. That is where the trouble starts and from there it just gets worse. In my childhood it was easier. They knew their place. All the children had their food together on the back stoep. Got their hidings together, came to prayers together after supper. That was before the bloody English came here and thought they could just take over and started making laws for everything under the sun. So many working hours per day, so many stripes if they need punishment, a Slave Protector to complain to, I ask you. As if a farm, particularly a wine farm like Zandvliet, can keep regular hours. It just doesn’t work like that. When there’s anything to be done, it’s got to be done today. And when a Baas says something it must be obeyed. A child or a slave doesn’t talk back.

But I know exactly when and how it all changed. We were still living in the Caab at the time, next to my wine shop and the cellar. I had an altercation with the yellow slave from Boegies, his name was Januarie. I still remember very clearly, he was looking for trouble right from the start and one day he got cheeky with my sister Geertrui and I confronted him at the churn in the kitchen. He talked back. Then I slapped him. He came at me with the spade that stood in the corner, and hit me right across the head so that like that youngster Joseph in the Bible I saw sun and moon and stars all at the same time. Lights-out, and my left eyebrow dented and the eye watering all the time. And as I fell he stabbed me with the sharp edge of the spade in the left calf causing me to limp until this day. That was when Pa arrived with a hedgepole to help me. Afterwards they had to drag me to a bedroom and call the medicine woman from the Greenmarket Square to bring me round
and
clean and bandage the spade wound and tend to the gash in my head.

Pa ordered Januarie to be brought to the post in the backyard, and had him flogged until the next morning, before they dragged him off to the Fiscal who finished the job. That was before the English came to the Cape, in the early days when a farmer was still the Baas on his own farm. Ever since that day I have no respect for a slave. And that is what I meant to show all my slaves on that miserable day when we all went in to the Caab to see Abraham hanged. What had surprised me then was that the slaves didn’t seem to be bothered at all. Which goes to prove that they don’t have feelings like us. I think I was the only one there to feel upset. Even though I’d seen that a few times before. And when I took a mouthful of wine to settle my stomach, I noticed that no one else’s hands were shaking. True as God. At least I could still taste that the wine was good. The real Zandvliet wine. Not the stuff we sell, diluted with water, fortified with sulphur, but the real thing we keep for our own use and for friends or special buyers. And I needed that on the day in the Caab, I can still see the poor bastard, twisting and turning at the end of his thick rope, his feet dancing just above the ground. Abraham who had to be hanged twice, and who had worked for me for so many years. It was really because of him that I’d bought this farm. Because I’d made a good living from exporting my wines to London and Amsterdam from my cellar in the Caab, but I figured out that it could be more profitable to make my own wine. And Abraham knew about making wine, which was why he cost me such a bladdy lot of money, eight hundred and seventy-five rix-dollars, to buy him from the man who was his Baas at the time, the owner of Nederburg. We got along so well. Why the hell did he then have to
run
away with those other good-for-nothings? And it wasn’t just a matter of absconding: he also stole my good elephant gun, and when the soldiers came to arrest him, he actually shot at them.