by Andre Brink
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.
The way he looked at me from the gallows that d
ay. With those bloodshot eyes which I shall see in front of me for the rest of my life.
On the road back home we never outspanned and only stopped a few times just an hour or so for a short rest; otherwise we drove on, night and day. I had to get home. My farm with its white walls surrounded by so many greens of vineyards and orchards, my farm, my hold on this world, my Zandvliet. I had to get back to the animals that knew me as their Baas. And once we had entered through the wide gate in the ring wall, it was as if the LordGod himself was once again folding his arms around me. He shall cover you with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust: his truth shall be thy shield and buckler. I don’t know what the hell a buckler is, but if it stands in the Bible it must be a good thing, and that was why I so badly wanted to be back on my farm, with my shield and buckler. I felt I could breathe again.
Every evening when we open the Bible and turn to my favourite chapter, that Abraham comes back to me. He had such a way of leaning back against the wall near the front door, closing his eyes to listen more attentively, even though I knew he couldn’t understand a bladdy word. The part where the Prophet talks about Aholah and Aholibah and their paramours whose flesh is as the flesh of asses, and whose issue is like the issue of horses, the Egyptians that bruise thy teats for the paps of thy youth. It is a passage that comes back to me whenever at random moments on an ordinary day I open the Bible. And no matter what I do, sooner or later Abraham’s red eyes return to pester me. All those years of yes Baas, no Baas, and just look at him now. Where did it get him? I really can’t understand any of it. I treated him well, didn’t I? I looked after him. I was always ready to give the shit an extra dop of wine, wasn’t I? I knew he was good at his job, pruning in winter, getting rid of everything we didn’t want or need, and cleaning neat paths in the vineyard, then watching the new growth appearing in the spring, all the colours of twigs and twirls and everything, from green and yellow to lilac and red and purple, through the time of swelling and growing in summer, trimming the bunches that grow too heavy, scaring off the birds with tins and pots and scarecrows, until it is time to harvest in baskets and bags to carry to the cellar, to the big vats where the treading is done, then waiting for the fermentation in the buzzing barrels, opening the scuppers, there’s nothing that makes a farmyard smell of life like new wine and must, with a touch of sourness at the beginning, going on until it’s just right, my God, until everything starts again as if it has never happened before. Not a drop to drink in August, because that is when the wine is weeping in the bottle. Soon it is time for tasting, for running it off into the bottles. Step by step, moment by moment. That, you may well say, is my life.
And all that long time Abraham used to stay with me, he was always the one who just knew what to do and how to do it. Until the time comes to transport the huge vats on the wagon, two by two, like elephants going into Noah’s ark, the oxen straining in their yokes, dragging the freight along the rough road up the narrow Drakenstein valley to Klapmuts, then to Stellenbosch, and across the Cape Flats to the Caab, four days there and back. And it takes fifty loads to transport everything, you can calculate for yourself what a hole that makes in your time. For all of that I could always count on Abraham to help me. Until he went mad and the gallows took him from me.
All of which just confirms why I have always figured that with a slave or a child nothing works as well as a good thrashing. And I speak from long and bitter experience. In Philida’s case the decision was taken very quickly. Frans returned from Stellenbosch in the late afternoon. His horse was exhausted, I thought he was going to collapse. That’s the way I know Frans and I’d told him before that if he ever does that again I’ll kill him with my own two hands. The little shit mustn’t think that because he’s twenty-two he is too old for a thrashing. He was also dead tired and just wanted to go to bed to sleep it off, but I fetched him from the room he shares with his brother KleinCornelis and took him to the voorhuis so that he could tell us everything that had happened in Stellenbosch. I’m his father, I am the Baas of Zandvliet, I got to know. So that was where I heard the full story about what Philida had said against us. Everything, about how Frans had lain with her since he was only fourteen and she some three years older. And about the children they’d made together. That’s Mamie who lived only for a few months before she died. And Lena, who is two. And the little monkey she still has on her breast. Of course I suspected something like that but on this farm it wasn’t anything to be talked about openly. Nothing was ever known officially, and that is how the Caab has always worked.
Frans told the Protector, a man called Lindenberg, about the two slave youths that had been with Philida and that, he said, was how the man recorded it. This is all that matters in the end: that it was recorded. One day in the future, when no one of us is still around, that is all the world will know, and all that needs to be known. We came to this land white, and white we shall be on the Day of Judgement, so help me God. If anybody is still in doubt, I always tell them: Just follow the coast up to the Sandveld, then you will see with your own eyes how we whored the whole West Coast white. God put us here with a purpose, and we keep very strictly to his Word. For ever and bloody ever, amen. Do we understand each other?
But from what Frans told me about what had happened in Stellenbosch, one thing was very clear: that this slave girl had become a threat to us. We Brinks are a boat that has always hugged the coast, no matter what storms have come, but Philida has now cut a hole into it and we may sink if we don’t watch out. That is something we just cannot allow to happen. It’s the whiteness of our boat that proves we are the children of the Lord. We won’t have any truck with Satan’s offspring. If we sink here, then everything will sink. Then everything will have been in vain. And that I’ll damn well not allow. Over my dead body.
This was how I came to my final decision. What used to be a possibility in the past has now been sealed. It won’t be enough just to punish Philida. She has to be removed from among us. The easiest, I’m sure, would be an accident on the farm. A dead person won’t talk and a dead slave even less. But Philida is a grown woman in her twenties, her name has been written in the government’s books, she can’t just be here one day and gone the next. Which means she must be sold, as deep into the interior as possible, so no one can pick up a trace of her again. Books are dangerous things and we must take great care to get past them. Do you understand what I’m saying, Frans?
Yes, Pa, I understand. But –
I don’t want to listen to your Buts. This farm has no place for Buts.
And that same evening, after we’d had our supper, I ordered the whole family and the slaves to stay right where they were. The only one, apart from Philida, who was missing was Old Petronella, but I preferred her not to be there. I know how she feels about Philida. So of the house women only Janna was there. Worse than a fly or an earwig, but that is how the Lord ordered it, so I have no choice. The same with the children around the table. And the empty chairs for the ones who died but who are still with us. The others, I must admit, all look a bit home-made, like one of Janna’s baked puddings that didn’t quite make it, not much to brag about. I ordered them all to stay seated so that I could tell them about Frans’s visit to the Slave Protector’s office in Stellenbosch. What was said, and what it led to. And on this blessed day, I concluded, my right hand still resting on the Bible, on this blessed day it is our will, in the presence of God and all his angels, that the maidservant that is within our gates, Philida of the Caab, should be cast out from our company, to the everlasting glory of God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost in the highest heaven. Is there anyone here present who wishes to rise up against the will of Our Lord?
That was when Frans said: Pa, but shouldn’t we wait until Philida is back to tell us herself what happened?
You were there, Frans, were you not? I told him. You heard everything that was spoken, so we know exactly what happened in that unholy place. Is that so, or isn’t it?
Frans remained sitting w
ithout moving.
After some time his mother cleared her throat.
Frans, I said to him, do you want me to strip off the bladdy skin of your bladdy arse? What I said: was that true, or wasn’t it?
It’s like Pa said.
In that case we are united before the Lord. Let us pray.
I prayed for longer than I usually do. The little ones started fidgeting and after the prayer I had to tell Janna to send them to bed without supper and give each of them a proper hiding to make sure they understood the Word of the LordGod and would pay it proper respect in future.
That Word and I have come a long way together, we know each other’s boundaries and respect each other’s stone walls. I won’t ever do anything without first discussing it with the LordGod. His will be done. Whether it is a year of drought or one of unseasonal rain, I will always ask him first if he thinks the time is right for sowing and planting, for digging furrows, or pulling the husks off the fermenting grapes, for shortening hoops or fitting staves. And I follow his instructions to the letter. Which is why I have always prospered in his eyes.
After finishing the prayer, I knew exactly what passage to read, to make sure Frans fully understood why I try to keep to the Scriptures. It was the passage where God calls Abraham to take his son Isaac, who was his only son after he sent Ishmael into the desert with his mother Hagar, up the mountain of Moriah to bring a sacrifice to the Lord. Together with the boy Isaac and two slave boys they take to the road, and on the third day he leaves the boys and the donkey behind and goes on with Isaac. This is what the Book says: And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering, and laid it upon Isaac his son; and he took the fire in his hand, and a knife; and they went both of them together. And Isaac spoke unto Abraham his father, and said, My father; and he said, Here I am, my son. And he said, Behold the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt offering? And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering: so they went both of them together. And they came to the place where God had told him of; and Abraham built an altar, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood. And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son. And the angel of the Lord called unto Abraham out of heaven, and said, Abraham, Abraham: and he said: Here am I. And he said, Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him; for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son from me.